27 April 2026
Uncanny expert Ciaran O’Keeffe has come up with an explanation to potentially solve a 65-year-old UFO mystery.
Has a long-running UFO mystery been solved?
The panel of the hit BBC radio, TV and podcast series has been examining bizarre stories from the past as part of new series called Uncanny, Cold Cases
and the latest episode looks at the mysterious White Mountains UFO case in which Barney and Betty Hill claimed to have seen an unidentified flying object and been abducted by aliens during a drive through New Hampshire on September 19, 1961.
Now Uncanny’s resident sceptic Ciaran has claimed the sighting could have been a case of “poisoning” linked to bags of fertiliser which were being transported in the couple’s car. He explained: “I think there are other environmental type explanations that we need to consider. And that’s the possibility that we’re dealing with some form of poisoning …
“Betty had in the car nitrates in the form of fertiliser … I wish we had Betty in front of us to ask why she had fertiliser in the car …
“We know that you can have nitrate poisoning and potentially what we’ve got is cross-contamination if they’ve got nitrates in the form of fertiliser but they’ve also got picnic food, cooking equipment.
“If you’ve got that, you know it’s not the sort of thing that over all of their long drive it was inducing hallucinations in of itself but it could be a really strong component.”
Host Danny Robins then pointed out Barney claimed to have seen figures moving about inside the mysterious craft and could even describe their facial expressions but Ciaran remained adamant the sighting was more likely to be a shared hallucination than a real brush with alien life forms.
He said: “Why couldn’t it be a hallucination? We’ve got countless cases and countless examples of people having hallucinations where they are able to provide detail.”
Ciaran also insisted details can often by added after events because memories can often change and shift as the years go by.
He added: “We’re looking at the case after the fact so at the point where it’s reported there will be some of this detail but we’re getting a lot more forensic detail after the fact because there has been time to think about it and time for that memory to evolve.”