UFOlklore

Sep. 8—Stories about alien abductions have such familiar narrative beats — flying saucers, bizarre medical examinations, quasi-human extraterrestrials with giant eyes — that they can be described by skeptics and believers alike as rote.

But this pattern didn't come out of nowhere, and a new book details the first alleged alien abduction that fascinated the nation and fueled what is decades later still a topic of national obsession.

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights and the New Age in America by Matthew Bowman, released August 29 by Yale University Press, describes the experience of the Hills and how their alleged alien encounter went on to shape the rest of their lives.

On the night of September 19, 1961, the Hills were driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from a vacation in Canada when they saw a strange light in the sky while on U.S. Route 3. The Hills got out of their car and observed what they described as a strange looking aircraft that they couldn't identify, and at one point described seeing humanoid figures walking around inside the craft.

The Hills reported what they had seen to the Air Force but continued to be troubled by their encounter. In 1964, they opted to undergo hypnotic regression therapy from a psychiatrist to get answers about what they had witnessed.

While being hypnotized, they both vividly described being taken into the craft by a group of aliens with unclear intentions, subjected to a bizarre medical inspection, and then released. In 1966, journalist John Fuller published a book about their encounter titled The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer (Dial Press). That, and other media attention, made the Hills famous and put their experience in the national spotlight. The next alleged alien encounter to attract so much attention would be the Roswell crash.

details

NONFICTION THE ABDUCTION OF BETTY AND BARNEY HILL: ALIEN ENCOUNTERS, CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE NEW AGE IN AMERICA by Matthew Bowman, Yale University Press, 288 pages

The Hills were in many ways an ordinary, middle-class Unitarian New England couple with one exception: Barney was Black and Betty was white. They were both New Deal Democrats and NAACP members who believed fervently in scientific progress and the eventuality of racial equality. Bowman describes how their encounter, which they both continued to believe was an alien abduction for the rest of their lives, profoundly changed how they saw the world.

"Betty and Barney Hill in some ways are avatars for what has happened to American society in the last 50 years," Bowman told Pasatiempo.

David Halperin, another scholar of religion, published a book in 2020 called Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (Stanford University Press) analyzing alien encounters through a Jungian lens. Halperin argues that UFOs are, in essence, a religious phenomenon rather than anything extraterrestrial, and people's self-described alien encounters serve as mirrors into their unconscious anxieties.

He argues persuasively that the Hills' description of the abduction, and particularly Barney's, were fueled by racial anxieties and drew parallels between their memories of being kidnapped and inspected by aliens and the historical experiences of Africans being enslaved and taken to the New World.

Bowman agrees that Barney's struggles with racism as a Black man in midcentury America were "a deep part of this encounter" for him and explains why he described it under hypnosis in more negative and fearful terms than his wife.

"When he is hypnotized and recovers all these memories, the language he uses is really, really colored by fear of racial persecution," Bowman says.

After being brushed off by authority figures in both the U.S. military and the medical establishment, the Hills grew disillusioned in their quest to be taken seriously.

"I think you see what happens with Betty and Barney Hill is that they lose trust in government but also in all these other institutions who don't believe them," he says.

Their experience mirrored changing American attitudes throughout the Cold War era, when record-high trust in government devolved following the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, belief in UFOs became widespread and was part of conspiracy theories about the government hiding technology or information from its citizens.

"That conspiracy theory gets some energy because some of it is true," Bowman says. "The Manhattan Project in fact was a top-secret project to develop a new massively destructive weapon. It is absolutely true that the CIA has plotted the assassinations of foreign leaders, and we don't know about it."

UFOs were also part of a debate around who got to control scientific inquiry, which came to a head with concerns about the security regime that rose up around the creation of nuclear weapons. UFOs became a vector by which people pushed for the idea of "citizen science," Bowman says, and the idea that the military industrial complex shouldn't be driving the direction of the nation's scientific research.

"And here you start to hear the language that a lot of conspiracy theorists today use — 'Are we going to let a lot of unelected bureaucrats decide what research should be done and what shouldn't be done?'" he says.

Bowman, a professor of history and religion at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, is the author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012). He says he was drawn to researching the Hill encounter through his interest in religion in the 20th century, and in particular, how religion is shaped by the modern world. He believes that UFOs, which are often dismissed as a fringe topic, can tell us a lot about where we are as a society. The declines in trust in everything from government to organized religion and scientific authority has led us to a place where people "more and more have come to look to themselves as the ultimate arbiters of what truth is," Bowman says.

The difference between the Hills' time and the present is that with the internet and social media, people have the ability not just to believe in their own realities but also to spread beliefs to others. For his part, Bowman doesn't believe the Hills were abducted by aliens but does believe that they saw something strange in the sky that "distressed and disturbed" them. He thinks their description of the UFO encounter was due to the influence of hypnotic regression combined with the nightmares that Betty had shortly after their trip. Whether they truly encountered aliens is almost the least interesting part of Betty and Barney Hill's story.

"It's really easy for people to say it didn't happen or it did happen, and allow that to be the primary issue," Bowman says. "But doing that overlooks the profound ways this experience really shook them and really came to define what it meant to be humans in the world for both of them."