How the First Couple to Claim UFO Abduction Slowly, But Surely, Lost Their Faith in America

The thing is: If aliens are real and have made contact, then nothing else matters. Everything we could possibly know about the world goes out the window. Their existence would instantly obliterate history, politics—all that once mattered would evaporate into the narcissism of small differences. At least, that’s what they represent to believers—a clean slate, a starting over, where all of human history is merely prelude, and things like race and class and creed become irrelevant.

After the modern UFO age began with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine metallic craft flying near Mount Rainier in 1947, there were various individuals who asserted that they had made contact with extraterrestrials. One was George Adamski, whose 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed detailed a meeting in the California deserts with a man from Venus who had long, sandy-brown hair and a brown suit, and who telepathically communicated a concern about mankind’s nuclear weapons. Other contactees quickly followed suit, many of them making the same claim that the Venutians wanted us to stop making nuclear weapons. For a secular atomic age, writers who met such extraterrestrials placed them in the same role as God: bearing an unimpeachable command that transcended politics and nation and had to be obeyed.

But it was Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple living in New Hampshire, whose strange experience on the night of Sept. 19, 1961, would become the first truly credible story of an alien encounter. Driving south on Route 3 through the White Mountains, they saw a light in the sky sometime after 10 p.m. They followed it for a while, stopping to get a better look. They continued driving, getting home around 5 a.m. They shouldn’t—given the trip’s distance—have been home any later than 2:00, but neither could explain the lost time. Though at first reluctant to talk about what happened, Betty slowly began to tell people that they had seen an alien spaceship. Eventually, the Hills underwent hypnosis with the aid of psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, and would come to believe that at some point they had made contact, been taken aboard the alien ship, and had separately been probed and examined by their captors before being released.

Nearly everything we know—or think we know—about alien abductions begins with Betty and Barney Hill. They were the first people to claim that they had been abducted by aliens, the first people to describe aliens as not looking like science fiction’s men in jumpsuits (they were, the Hills reported, short, with gray skin), and the first to be widely believed.

If the Hills’ story is true, then nothing about the two of them really matters—all that matters is that aliens are real. But if the story is not true, then the specifics of their lives—their respective backgrounds, their marriage as an interracial couple in the 1960s, their lives in a state that nominally embraced liberal values while remaining overwhelmingly white and suffused with racist attitudes—are integral to understanding how they came to believe what they did. What led them to describe that night the way they did? Were they cranks? Was the experience a hysterical manifestation of stress? Were they being manipulated by unscrupulous actors eager to use the Hills to further their own beliefs?

Matthew Bowman’s The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America offers the best and most comprehensive attempt yet to answer these and other questions. For Bowman, context is everything, and the Hills’ experience cannot be understood without understanding the era that they lived in, their personal and political beliefs, and how the reaction to their story changed and influenced them. His excellent and exhaustive book ultimately tells the story of how these two perhaps otherwise unremarkable people not only changed American history, but also came to reflect a larger change in American history: the end of a naïve belief that the government and other institutions could be counted on, and the beginning of an era when our shared understanding of the objective facts of reality began to crumble.

Rather than a story of alien abduction, Bowman is more interested in telling the story  of how, “in an environment of growing cynicism about the state and the science that the state sponsored, an inexplicable encounter propelled Betty and Barney Hill toward suspicion of traditional sources of authority and a consequent exploration of more esoteric possibilities.” (Bowman gives no real credence to the possibility an abduction could have occurred, but neither is he particularly invested in debunking UFO belief—he accepts the unlikeliness of the story as a given, and moves quickly to attempting to understand what led to it and what resulted from it.) The Hills moved through various disciplines of authority—the military, the church, psychiatric professionals—always with the goal of finding an established, credible person who would not only take them seriously, but also give shape and meaning to what they had experienced. Their failure to find validation in these traditional institutions offers, in microcosm, a story of the failure of a specific narrative of American progress and success.

For Bowman, understanding the Hills begins with understanding them as a product of New Deal liberalism. Betty was raised by liberals in a nearly all-white New Hampshire; her mother was a union organizer, and after her first marriage ended, she went back to school to become a social worker. Barney grew up in a prosperous Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and from an early age was steeped in the respectability politics of the era. By the time they met, both were firm believers in the idea that the country was on a forward trajectory, and that through work, reason, and sensible policy, a healthier, happy America was possible.

An interracial marriage in 1960 was not unique, but it was by no means common, even among the liberal communities that Betty belonged to (miscegenation laws were still on the books in 30 states at the time). Their courtship and romance further testified to their belief that racial and social equality was possible. Together, they joined the Unitarian Universalist church, which attracted them with its teaching that human beings were essentially rational, and that any specific policy issue could be resolved through reasoned, informed debate.

But beneath this hopeful exterior, minor fissures were already evident. On the trip that would bring them so much fame—long before they got to Route 3—Barney and Betty had split on the question of what was real and what wasn’t. By September of 1960, they had been married over a year, but had never really taken a honeymoon together, so Barney somewhat impetuously asked for a few days off from his post office job and took Betty on a road trip to Montreal. The trip did not go well; Betty was frustrated by the language barrier, while Barney’s anxiety was more acute. Possessed of an “ominous feeling” before leaving, he had packed a pistol, and now in a foreign country, saw threats everywhere: During hypnosis later, he would recall trying to calm himself down and reminding himself that not “everyone is hostile.” Betty, according to Barney, didn’t pick up on any of this.

Nowadays, it’s easy to see in Barney’s attitude an awareness of the various microaggressions that made up his day-to-day life, even in the North (and in Canada), even among seemingly well-meaning whites. But white people of the 1960s didn’t have that term, nor did many of them (including Barney’s own wife, Betty) seem aware of that possibility. When they imagined racism, they thought of Jim Crow laws, of the Klan and violence; they did not seem to be thinking about whether respectable liberal whites in Montreal might act different toward Barney than Betty.

Skeptical commentators have long theorized that Barney’s sense of unease may have played into how he would come to describe their encounter on the journey home. Having described the aliens as having gray skin at one point, he would later state under hypnosis that one made him think of a “red-headed Irishman.” Pressed by Simon under hypnosis, Barney would explain: “I think I know why. Because Irish are usually hostile to Negroes.” Many commentators, including Simon, doubted the encounter had taken place, and believed that the story told under hypnosis was a filtered, oblique attempt to work through unconscious anxieties and racial tensions between the two of them.

But the Hills believed wholeheartedly that the experience was genuine. While Barney wanted to move on, afraid, perhaps, that as a Black man, such a story might damage his credibility and respectability, he eventually gave in, and the two contacted the Air Force—a move that, Bowman writes, was the beginning of series of disillusionments that would come to define the remainder of their lives.

The story that Bowman unfolds is one of two people unable to make sense of events that they nonetheless believed to be real, turning from one institution to another, hoping not just for validation, but for an explanation for what had happened to them. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book (the service’s task force for investigating all unexplained aerial phenomena) sent an officer to listen to their claims, one who ultimately dismissed their story as not being noteworthy. As noted in the report, the Hills did not “possess any technical or scientific training,” a fact which gave the officer license to disregard their report.

Undaunted, the Hills sought out other authorities that might appear both legitimate and respectable, while still affirming their memories. After the military rebuffed them, they turned to psychiatry. Sympathetic believers in the UFO community urged the Hills to try hypnosis, hoping that memories of those missing hours might be recovered this way. In a series of sessions conducted by psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, more details came out: the spaceship had landed, humanoid figures wearing uniforms emerged, then had taken Betty and Barney onto their ship, separating them and performing medical experiments on them.

Simon didn’t put any more credence into this story than the Air Force had. As Bowman explains, because Betty and Barney “would not concede that their lack of expertise meant that they were not capable of judging whether their memories were genuine,” and because they would not bow to his authority in the matter, “Simon came to believe that their conviction that they were really abducted … pointed to a host of unaddressed psychological incapacities.” Simon would at one point suggest that Barney had “latent homosexual” tendencies, and that the racial divide between the two of them was causing unaddressed tension that was manifesting itself in the story the Hills were now telling him.

The one community offering them steadfast support, of course, was the UFO community—and yet, they remained wary of the true believers, afraid of being lumped in with cranks like George Adamski. If they were going to collaborate with the UFO community, they wanted people who, in Betty’s words, were “really professionally trained.” But the professionals turned them away, prompting a crisis of faith in the Hills, particularly Betty, who had been raised to be far more optimistic than Barney. As skeptic after skeptic assailed the Hills’ story, it “seemed catastrophic to them, not only because of their experience but because it implied that the nation was run not by its citizens but by a dominant and trained elite.”

In the Hills’ story, you can see how the generation raised during the New Deal, raised to believe that government was on their side and would protect them, were not entirely prepared for the radical changes of the postwar era. “Though they had not unquestioningly accepted whatever authority set in their way,” Bowman writes, they nonetheless believed “that the state could be a force for benevolence,” and that, fundamentally, “they themselves, as competent citizens, would be its allies.” The odyssey of Betty and Barney Hill was one of repeatedly turning to scientific and government authorities; expecting to find advocates, they instead “were confronted with a stark truth: all those people were holding them at arm’s length.” By insisting on their memories, they found themselves lumped in with Adamski and the fringe, exiled from serious culture.

Having lost faith in mainstream institutions, they turned, increasingly, to cranks. After Barney’s sudden death of stroke in 1969, Betty became more and more involved with conspiracy theorists and New Age hucksters. In an autobiography written in the third person in 1980, Betty described herself as having long been involved not just in UFO research, but also “related areas such as animal mutilations, mystery helicopters, big foot and other strange creatures, the Men in Black.” This move, Bowman argues, was gradual but irrevocable: “she moved towards a world darker and more dangerous than the sunny, harmonious society her Unitarianism had promised because it was one that she could understand, and in a sense, control.”

Conspiracy theories flourish when we lose a shared consensus of reality and events as they happen. When institutions cannot or will not make sense of individuals’ experiences, then even those individuals who believe in authority and crave legitimacy will eventually look elsewhere. The long, slow slide toward where we are now—when people on (and off) social media will dispute basic facts for political gains—had its start in the 1960s, with the JFK assassination and the moon landing, and with the Hills’ abduction, which trained a whole generation to believe that neither the government nor science could be trusted to admit what ordinary people saw with their own eyes.

At least, that’s the common narrative, and one Bowman also advocates here. But, in a sense, things were already coming apart, and for much different reasons then what happened at Dealey Plaza and Tranquility Base.

As Bowman traces the Hills’ lives after the incident, he recounts how Barney became the legal redress officer for Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s NAACP chapter. Seeking to test the strength of a 1961 antidiscrimination law that was largely being ignored, Barney sent Black men to various barbershops in Portsmouth to get haircuts; 4 of 9 places turned the men away. The NAACP first attempted to get the owners to comply voluntarily, but found no success, so they spurred Portsmouth’s city attorney to sue one proprietor, Charles Sprague of Clint’s Barber Shop. Sprague was unrepentant; he told the judge that he willfully violated the law because he did not deem it constitutional. Refusing to mount a defense, he was fined $50 for breaking the law. And while that was a victory for Barney, Bowman notes that “there were ominous signs beneath the triumph. Sprague had simply rejected outright the premise of the Fair Practices Commission. He was not interested in reasonable debate. He did not share Barney’s commitment to respectability. His punishment might be satisfying but his intransigence was worrying; it showed not only the persistence of racism but the fragility of Barney’s trust that reform and law could resolve racism in America.” Which is to say: The lack of consensus in the basic reality of America had always been there, but white Americans were perhaps slower to recognize it than others.

The reality that our shared consensus is gone—was already gone, in the early 1960s—may be one of the reasons why people still cling so tightly to the idea that alien contact is out there, that it’s already happened or is just around the corner. And it helps explain the bizarre legacy of the Hills’ story.

In 1970, a year after Barney’s death, the actor James Earl Jones contacted Betty after reading The Interrupted Journey, and with her permission, eventually adapted it into a film, The UFO Incident. It’s a simple but eloquent piece of filmmaking, and while it follows the events of the book, Jones was clearly less interested in extraterrestrials then he was in using the Hills’ story to talk about race in America. (Largely to Betty’s dismay: “The original [script] had much more of the ufo in it,” she complained to a friend. “I was disappointed that so much was left out.”)

The UFO Incident premiered on NBC on Oct. 20, 1975. Two weeks later, a white Texan named Travis Walton claimed that he, too, was abducted while clearing brush in Arizona. Walton was missing for five days. His story neatly paralleled the NBC film, and became a media sensation (the National Enquirer paid him $5,000 for an interview, after he passed a polygraph test). His story, which was adapted into the film Fire in the Sky, is generally now agreed on to have been a complete hoax.

Jones had taken an experience whose meaning was never fully clear and adapted it into a story about race in America. Walton, in turn, took Jones’ story and repurposed its bones into a story about alien life. In the absence of anything definitive, these remain the two ways we’ve learned to interpret stories of extraterrestrial encounters. For some, they are an occasion to understand ourselves. But others maintain that if we can just somehow remove all the context surrounding such events, and make them about nothing other than aliens, then perhaps all the thorny, difficult discussions about race and everything else will just disappear—as if taken up into the sky, along with all our troubles.