Kathleen Marden is an American author and UFO abduction researcher and the niece of Betty Hill and Barney Hill, the New Hampshire couple whose 1961 account became the first widely known alien-abduction story. A trustee of Betty Hill's estate, she has spent more than three decades documenting and defending the Betty and Barney Hill abduction and writing about contact experiences more broadly.

Marden was 13 in September 1961, and she told Inverse in 2016 that Betty's first call after the couple's drive home went to Marden's mother. She knew her aunt well and spoke with her at length about the encounter over the years. Marden worked as a social worker and then in schools before turning to research on people who report contact, a shift Inverse dated to about 1990. She has said she was angered by the way the Hills were treated after they went public, and she told Inverse, "I knew this was real. I saw the evidence."

Her research has been closely tied to the Mutual UFO Network, where she sat on the board for 10 years and became director of its Experiencer Research Team, which studies people who report encounters. Describing the network's closed workshops for experiencers in 2016, she stressed their limits: "We are not doing psychotherapy. We can make referrals, but we are non-judgmental listeners." She has also become a regular on-camera commentator and an international lecturer on abduction cases.

Her best-known book, Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, written with nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman and published by New Page Books in 2007, revisited the case that John G. Fuller's 1966 book The Interrupted Journey had made famous; a 60th-anniversary edition with a foreword by Bruce Maccabee followed in 2021. Marden and Friedman also wrote Science Was Wrong (2010) and Fact, Fiction, and Flying Saucers (2016) before Friedman passed away in 2019. Her other books include The Alien Abduction Files (2013), Extraterrestrial Contact (2019) and the independently published Forbidden Knowledge (2022).

Marden continues to lecture on her aunt and uncle's account. She spoke on the Hill story at the Exeter UFO Festival in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 2018, discussed the case in interviews with Kevin Randle and Rob McConnell that were posted in January 2026, and returned to the Exeter festival in September 2026 with a presentation marking the 65th anniversary of the encounter. Six decades after that night in the White Mountains, she is the principal family custodian of the Hills' story and its most persistent advocate.