IN 1965 Betty Hill and her husband Barney found themselves afflicted by nightmares, and Barney was suffering a rash on his stomach. They sought medical advice and, after hypnosis, conducted by a Boston psychiatrist, Dr Benjamin Simons, it was suggested that the ailments were a consequence of the couple’s having suppressed their memories of being embarked in an alien spaceship, where they conversed with — and were minutely examined by — small, grey beings.

This incident was deemed to have occurred some four years earlier, on September 19, 1961, as Hill and her husband were driving to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after a holiday in Montreal.

The Hills’ experience was one of the first alien-abduction stories to be recorded, publicised and scrutinised by sceptical and sympathetic audiences. The Boston Traveller ran the story for five consecutive days in October 1965. The next year it became the subject of a bestselling book by John Fuller, Interrupted Journey, and in 1975 Universal Studios made a television film, The UFO Incident.

Although Betty Hill condemned much of UFO culture, until her retirement in 1991 she travelled the world lecturing on her experiences and promoting research into the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. She felt that the subject was becoming tainted with commercialism and, though she published her own consideration of UFO and abduction investigation, A Common Sense Approach to UFOs (1995), she declared that it was not written for cultish alien enthusiasts.

Paradoxically, she even came to disparage the validity of hypnosis, asserting that it was based on suggestibility — “when somebody goes in for hypnosis for a UFO abduction,” she said, “they’re going to get it” — and she disagreed with the methods and findings of academics and scientists such as Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack.

She was also sceptical of the proliferation of abduction claims in America, most of which she saw as copycat instances.

“In this country, they say three million people have been abducted,” she said. “Not once, but continuously. That means three or four thousand people every night are being abducted. In this country alone. I don’t know how the planes get through.”

She did, however, claim regularly to see UFOs herself, and had recorded and photographed numerous purported landing sites.

Before the war Hill attended the University of New Hampshire. She became a social worker specialising in adoption and training foster parents.

She was also an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a founding member of Rockingham Community Action. Her marriage to her black husband Barney was highly unusual America in its day. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1969. In the last years of her life Hill became far more interested in tracing her ancestry than in UFOs.

Betty Hill, social worker, was born in 1919. She died on October 17, 2004, aged 85.