Benjamin Simon

Benjamin Simon (1903-1981) was a Boston psychiatrist and a leading medical hypnotist of his era, famed for treating traumatic amnesia in World War II veterans. In 1964 he treated Betty and Barney Hill, and the sessions he recorded became the founding documents of abduction research.

Simon's reputation rested on clinical work far from ufology: hypnotherapy for war neuroses, prominently featured in the documentary Let There Be Light. The Hills were referred to him for Barney's anxiety and hypertension.

Across months of separate weekly sessions, Simon regressed each Hill through the missing hours of September 19-20, 1961, recording the abduction narratives that John Fuller's The Interrupted Journey (1966) made famous. Crucially, Simon did not believe the events were literal: his clinical conclusion was that Betty's vivid dreams, recounted at home, had been absorbed by Barney, and the hypnosis retrieved a shared fantasy experienced as memory. He said so in the book's pages and afterward.

Simon's contribution is double-edged by design: the tapes that launched a phenomenon, and the earliest expert warning that hypnotic recall manufactures conviction, not truth, decades before memory science formalized it.

Believers note Simon lacked any framework for evaluating a real abduction and that the Hills' physical evidence lay outside his couch. Skeptics canonize his verdict. Later abduction researchers' abandonment of his caution, using regression as a truth serum, is now the standard criticism of the whole literature, making Simon the road not taken.

Simon died in 1981. His session tapes, partially available through archives and documentaries, remain primary sources both camps mine.