Joe Rogan Experience #2545 - Jesse Michels · Aired Aug 25, 2026
Claim summary · not a verbatim quotation
Betty Hill told a researcher that she had buried pieces of debris in her backyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which she thought came from a plane that exploded in the 1950s, days before her 1961 trip.
The finding
What the evidence shows
Betty Hill did tell a Swedish UFO researcher, Clas Svahn, about buried material, but her account describes debris from an object she first took to be a plane that exploded over Maine in the 1950s, not a UFO crash she witnessed later. She said she threw those pieces into the backyard, not inside the house, about four days before the 1961 trip, and a load of sand later covered them. The podcast's version reverses the timing and places and inflates the story into a crashed-UFO recovery.
Read the supporting source · www.ufo.se ↗Quick answer & review status
Quick answer
Is it true that Betty Hill told a researcher that she had buried pieces of debris in her backyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which she thought came from a plane that exploded in the 1950s, days before her 1961 trip?
Partly. The claim stretches what the evidence shows. Betty Hill did tell a Swedish UFO researcher, Clas Svahn, about buried material, but her account describes debris from an object she first took to be a plane that exploded over Maine in the 1950s, not a UFO crash she witnessed later. Jesse Michels said it (matched by voice) on Joe Rogan Experience #2545 - Jesse Michels, aired Aug 25, 2026, at 40:59. The supporting source is ufo.se, linked below.
The context belongs here.
No separately verified on-air correction is recorded for this check. That is not a claim that nobody corrected it.
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