The Andreasson Affair: Betty Andreasson Abduction

The Andreassons lived in a former farmhouse they had renovated themselves, in the village of South Ashburnham, Massachusetts. Betty Andreasson was a devout Christian and a mother of seven. On the evening of Wednesday, January 25, 1967, ten people were in the house. Betty, her seven children, and her parents, Waino and Eva Aho.

At about 6:35 p.m. the house lights went out. A pulsating reddish-orange light shone in through the kitchen window. Waino Aho went to look. In a signed statement he described what he saw through the window. Creatures "just like Halloween freaks." They jumped one after the other. "Just like grasshoppers." Then, secondary accounts say, his mind went blank. Betty remembered only a vague unease. The family's memories were fuzzy.

The rest surfaced a decade later. Under hypnosis in 1977, Betty described the beings entering through the closed wooden kitchen door. "They came in like follow-the-leader . . . right through the wood, one right after the other." Sources disagree on how many. Four, or five. Everyone but Betty was frozen in place. Her eldest daughter, Becky, 11, was briefly released to reassure her mother.

The beings were about 4 feet tall, though sources conflict. Grey skin. Large pear-shaped heads. Wraparound catlike eyes. Three-fingered gloved hands. Their leader called himself Quazgaa. At first Betty thought they must be angels. She picked up the Bible from the end table and passed it to the leader. He gave her a thin blue book in exchange. That book later went missing.

Then she floated out through the closed door to an oval craft resting on legs on the hill beside the backyard. Inside, she was examined with needles and probes. One went up her nose. Another went through her navel. She was shown a huge bird that burned to ashes, and a worm that came out of them. A voice told her she had been chosen to show the world. Before she was returned home, Quazgaa told her the beings loved humanity.

Betty wrote to Dr. J. Allen Hynek at the Center for UFO Studies on August 20, 1975. The letter was passed to MUFON. In January 1977 a team led by Raymond E. Fowler opened the case. Hypnotist Harold J. Edelstein put Betty and Becky into deep trance within minutes. The team added lie detector tests, a psychiatric review, character references, neighbour interviews and a weather check. After twelve months they delivered a 528-page confidential report. Its conclusion was that Betty and her daughter were telling the truth. In his foreword to Fowler's book, Hynek wrote: "Neither is there the slightest evidence of hoax or contrivance."

Fowler published The Andreasson Affair in 1979. Critics were not persuaded. Psychiatrist Ernest H. Taves argued in Skeptical Inquirer that Betty "recalled, or relived, in hypnosis, a dream or fantasy (or a number of them) that had meaning and utility in terms of her life history and her emotional needs." Philip J. Klass called parts of the story "pure fantasy." The main conventional explanation is confabulation under hypnosis, with the angels, the Bible and the Phoenix drawn from a devout witness's own faith. No one has documented an accusation of deliberate fraud.

Betty, later Betty Andreasson Luca, went on to describe a lifetime of contacts in Phase Two, The Watchers and The Andreasson Legacy. Fowler's first book is credited with bringing the idea of alien implants into ufology. Betty died on March 18, 2022. MUFON's Robert Spearing wrote: "No other encounter has ever rivaled the Betty and Barney Hill Abduction like hers."