The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America – Matthew Bowman
My family is very literate. I was raised by a lawyer and law librarian, so reading is one of the first things I remember doing. It is customary to sit around the dinning room table and talk about what we are reading. When I told my family about reading this book, my mom was excited because she had heard about Betty and Barney Hill and wanted to read more about their abduction. The first thing my dad asked? “Did they really get abducted?”
My dad likes to ask me questions like that about the books I read. I went through a phase where I read several books on cannibalism and my dad’s first question was always, “Did they really eat people?” And like any good historian, I parroted back that whether or not they really ate people was less important than understanding what historical actors thought about the act of cannibalism, how they folded it into their cultures and let it drive their actions.
To many this approach is not satisfying or might seem disingenuous, but that is how we are trained. Of course we want to know if cannibalism was a real instead of constructed phenomenon, and the answer is probably that in some cases it was a little bit of both. But beyond the actual details of what happened, which we may never know, we can learn so much more about cultures and historical actors than we otherwise could if we simply focused on the action itself.
Keeping that in mind, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill is a great book. As Bowan lays out in the final paragraph of the book, addressing whether or the Hills’ abduction really happened, he says:
…I am taking the Hills’ story and making something new with it, translating it into the language of the historian, making it a story of the American Cold War period, and directing it toward American concerns in the early twenty-first century, a time when conspiracy and distrust roam freely. That I am skeptical of such impulses but sympathetic to their causes might be evident to the reader, but, again, it would not have satisfied Betty and Barney Hill, who remained to their deaths convinced that, in fact, they had made contact with life from another star (223).
I spent a lot of time researching alien encounters in primary sources for my dissertation, and Bowman echoed my sources in describing the Hills’ story as the first one of actual abduction. But none of the authors I read really dwelled on their story. Bowman has curated enough information about the Hills to present a book-length work on their experiences, and what they mean when contextualized in their own historical context. As I emphasized, Bowman is not really interested in determining whether or not the Hills’ abduction story is true. He is more interested in how they reacted to the experience they had and how that reaction fits into the history of UFOs and then how the phenomenon specific to the Hills and as related to Americans can teach us about Cold War America in the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the most important things I learned from this book is that Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states. Their racial difference is something none of my primary sources had ever mentioned (if they did I did not pick up on it), but Bowman makes it one of the central aspects of his book. Betty experienced the abduction as positive, and Barney as negative. Bowman speculates this could have been because of the racial discrimination Barney experienced in his life. He then uses this framework to explore race relations in American in the 1960s and 1970s. He provides biographies of Betty and Barney that situate them in their own historical moment and explains that the racial discrimination Barney experienced throughout his life may have colored his experience with his abductors, a negative and humiliating experience compared to Betty’s positive one. Bowman writes,
The Hills’ turned to psychology and hypnosis to search for the truth behind the abduction, to legitimate an outrageous event with what the Hills believed was science, though most would consider it a soft science. Bowman explains:
“It was in the interests of both [Barney Hill and Walter Webb] to present their ideas and interpretations as something other than what [George] Adamski [who also believe he had communicated with extraterrestrials] was doing. To label their work ‘science’ was to make something respectable (83).”
Benjamin Simon agreed to hypnotize the couple, and carried out several sessions with each of them, during which the Hills corroborated the details they had previously expressed and expanded upon them. Bowman writes,
Bowman writes:
For Barney, the experience was destabilizing and terrifying, a story of haunting persecution and the fear of captivity marked by his self-consciousness as a Black man in America. The emotionally charged reactions to the tapes [of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions] evoked in him testified to that, as did the anger he expressed toward Simon for doubting him (129).
Bowman also provides an interesting examination of the New Age movement in the 1970s, when Betty Hill turned to a disparate new community in which to share her belief in alien and abduction and her own personal stories about it. She gained legitimacy here that the scientific culture and government of the day would not give her.
When you study what appears to be an outrageous idea and try to make it a subject of academic or popular scholarship, people react just as my dad did to this book. Is it real? or could it happen? My dissertation was on space colonies, and I spent years studying space colony proponents writing about a fantastical idea that they believed would happen, and that this inevitably could be proved with hard science. When people learned about my topic they always wanted to know if I thought space colonies could happen. And my answer was always no. At least not as Gerard K. O’Neill and others imagined. Reading so much about the incredible hostility of space to any human life, some of which was detailed by proponents of space colonies, I came to be increasingly convinced that they could not happen. Historians have opinions too.
But the difficulty when writing about such a subject is, how do you remove yourself from your criticism or disbelief and provide a fair examination of the phenomenon you are studying? I suppose this is a fair question to ask of any work of history, no matter the topic. Here Bowman does an admirable job of walking this tightrope. He believes that the Hills believed they had been abducted, and that their experiences related to the abduction were real to them. He examines how their cultural environment helped prime them for how they experienced their abduction, and how it drove their actions afterward. He also describes outsiders who believed the Hills’ story and made their own narratives about it. Even James Earl Jones made a TV movie about the Hills’ experiences. There are reasons to doubt, but that doesn’t mean the first story of alien abduction is not crucial to understanding the people at the heart of the narrative and the historical moment they found themselves in.
This book is short and very readable. I think it would be a perfect book to use in an undergraduate class on the history of the 1960s and 1970s. It has a fascinating hook and seamlessly integrates a boarder historical context. Bowman is one of the first historians to seriously take on this topic in this timeframe. He presents an excellent example of how historians hoping to explore space and more esoteric, tangible, or directly related subjects should be written. I wish I had had this book as a model when I was researching and writing my dissertation. Just because a topic is decisive and may even seem not of this world does not meant it is not a valid topic of historical study.
