Travis Walton's personal abduction story was revealed only two weeks after this television movie was broadcast. This led cognitive psychologist Susan Clancy to argue that this film had influenced Walton to present his own alleged abduction story, which eventually inspired the feature film, Fire in the Sky (1993).
The alien writing seen in the book aboard the spacecraft is actually Arabic script written vertically.
Writer Martin Kottmeyer noticed similarities between the Hills' account and the Bifrost Man (an alien) from The Outer Limits (1963) episode The Bellero Shield (1964), which was broadcast about two weeks before Barney Hill's first hypnotic session, as well as Invaders from Mars (1953). When a different researcher asked Betty Hill about the series, she insisted that she had "never heard of it."
As the abduction experience ends and the spacecraft lifts into the skies, Betty Hill (played by Estelle Parsons) bids her alien kidnappers an ironic, regretful farewell, almost sad they are leaving. However, three nights after this TV-movie premiered on the NBC network, the real Betty Hill appeared on the same network's The Tomorrow Show (1973) show, where she told host Tom Snyder that she hoped never to encounter her abductors again.