The UFO Incident

Lore & Background

The film introduces Barney and Betty Hill, two ordinary people who have had the most extraordinary experience. Barney is a postman and Betty is a social worker. They are an interracial couple who are very happy with each other, but they are perplexed by a traumatic experience of which they have no memory. Two years later, they are still tormented by what happened during a trip where they have a mysterious lapse of memory after seeing a UFO hover over their car. They wake up from a strange daze after hearing an odd beeping sound further down the road.

Reader's Guide

The UFO Incident aired on October 20, 1975, about two weeks before the Travis Walton UFO incident of November 5, 1975. Cognitive psychologist Susan Clancy argued that this film influenced Travis Walton to present his own alleged abduction story. The film did not have an official home video release until June 21, 2022, when Kino Lorber Studio Classics released a 2K remaster on Blu-ray. In 2011, The Huffington Post reported that a more developed film based on the book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience (2007) by Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden was being pursued as a possible project.

Did You Know?

• The film stars James Earl Jones as Barney Hill and Estelle Parsons as Betty Hill.
• Cognitive psychologist Susan Clancy argued that the film influenced Travis Walton's alleged abduction story.