Élisabeth de Demidoff

popular name: Betty Hill

date_of_death: October 23, 2004

age: 85

cause_of_death: Lung cancer

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Betty and Barney Hill lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal worker. The couple were catapulted into the international spotlight when in September 1961 they claimed to have been abducted by aliens in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The two were returning home to Portsmouth from a trip to Montreal, Canada, when as they were driving in the middle of the night, they saw lights approaching from the sky. What followed is said to be the first well-documented, "feasibly legitimate" UFO abduction in history. The couple claimed that they saw bipedal humanoid creatures in the window of a large spacecraft that landed in a field. They claimed they were followed by a spaceship and eventually accosted, kidnapped, examined, and then released by its extraterrestrial crew. The event has since become the best documented and most famous case of alien abduction in the history of UFO-ology. The story of the Hills grew big enough to prompt a best-selling book by John Fuller entitled "The Interrupted Journey", inspire a television movie called "The UFO Incident" starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons. Over time their story was subjected to a brutal debunking by multiple people including the famous intellectual Carl Sagan.

popular name: Diana Mosley

date_of_death: August 11, 2003

age: 93

cause_of_death: Heat Stroke

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Diana Mosley (née Mitford) was a British aristocrat best known for her controversial political views and associations with fascist and Nazi figures. Born into the prominent Mitford family, she became one of the most notorious members due to her far-right ideology. She was initially married to Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and both were part of the Bright Young Things, a social group of young Bohemian socialites in 1920s London. Her marriage ended in divorce as she was pursuing a relationship with Oswald Mosley (leader of the British Union of Fascists). In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of the propaganda minister for Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honor. Diana was a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler, whom she met several times and regarded with great affection—she even honeymooned in Nazi Germany and maintained correspondence with Hitler. Her views included openly racist and anti-Semitic sentiments, and she was a Holocaust denier who downplayed or dismissed the atrocities committed by the Nazis. During World War II, she and her husband were interned by the British government as threats to national security. Despite her privileged background and social status, Diana Mosley remained unapologetic about her extremist beliefs until her death in 2003, making her one of the most unsettling figures of British fascism. She joins her two sisters, Unity and Nancy, at the gravesite of Diana Mosley at St. Mary's Churchyard in Swinbrook, UK.

popular name: Berrien Upshaw

date_of_death: January 12, 1949

age: 47

cause_of_death: Suicide - leaped from building

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Berrien "Red" Upshaw was a mean, nasty, ill-tempered loser and wife beater - and those were some of his good qualities. But he did have one quality that served him well - he was known as a suave and charming man to the ladies. His charm wooed a young Margaret Mitchell and she married Berrien “Red” Kinnard Upshaw, an ex-football player from a prominent Raleigh (North Carolina) family, on September 2nd 1922. But after after 4 months Upshaw took off to the mid-west and engaged in bootlegging and other illegal pursuits. He returned back to Margaret but the family wanted nothing to do with him. The marriage was annulled two years later and Margaret married John Marsh (Red's best man at the wedding). Margaret went on to write the best-selling novel Gone With The Wind while Upshaw continued to drink heavily, was institutionalized briefly in the early 1940s and leaped to his death from the 2nd story of a Salvation Army flop-house in Galveston, Texas in 1949. In the end, Berrien Upshaw was so disliked, even by his own family, that his family in the last line of his brief obituary specifically requested no flowers be sent.