New Hampshire is known for its beautiful night skies. Residents and visitors alike love looking up at the night sky and dreaming of distant galaxies. But on September 19, 1961, those sky supposedly brought something other worldly right here to New Hampshire.

That is the night that husband and wife Barney and Betty Hill claimed that they were abducted by aliens, in what would become one of the most well-known cases of alien encounters in the 20th century.

The Hills were an inter-racial married couple living in Portsmouth. As they were driving home from a vacation in upstate New York the unthinkable happened.

As they drove through picturesque Lancaster, Betty saw what she initially thought was a falling star.

However, when the star began moving upward, she grew concerned, and asked Barney to pull over so she could have a closer look. The Hills watched the light moving erratically around the sky. While Betty believed she may be seeing a UFO, Barney tried to assure her it was a plane flying to Montreal. However, when the movements became even stranger he concluded, "this object that was a plane was NOT a plane." The two hurriedly got in the car and continued toward home, driving through Franconia Notch.

As the two drove through the notch the UFO followed them, bouncing from the top of Cannon Mountain toward the face of the Old Man in the Mountain. Finally, it came to rest in front of their car.

At this point, Barney stopped in the middle of Interstate 93. He claimed to see between 8 and 11 aliens looking at him, as he stared at the UFO with binoculars. When he frantically ran back to his car, he and Betty heard rhythmic tapping and buzzing. The Hills lost all memory of the incident, until they came too, about 35 miles from where they last remembered being. They went home to sleep, but Betty noticed that her clothes were town and covered in pink dust, and the car had marks on it that had not previously been there.

After the incident, The Hills contacted Pease Air Force Base. Air force officials took their statements, and concluded that the Hills were likely telling the truth.

After the incident, Betty Hill had a series of five dreams, during which she was being examined by the aliens. Later, Betty and Barney recounted similar experiences under hypnosis.

The Hills experience gained wide-spread fame with a newspaper article and subsequent book, "The Interrupted Journey." While skeptics claim that the event was caused by sleep deprivations or the stress of being an inter-racial couple in the 1960s, the Hills always stuck by their story.