![]() ![]() Bowman describes how Betty Hill was born in the New Deal era and showed an early commitment to labor unions and liberalism, and how Barney Hill, whose family had moved during the Great Migration, became active in the civil rights movement. Still, the text provides carefully researched details of how the stories evolved and how the Hills themselves changed along with their retellings. The approach produces a Rashomon effect, in which the same events are told and retold from different perspectives, with details added or removed.īowman uses his skills as a historian to painstakingly relate the plurality of narratives without impugning the Hills, as many have, although the effect for the reader can, at times, be stultifying. Under hypnosis they claimed, years later, that creatures from the craft had kidnapped them and performed medical experiments. Using the Hills’ own writings, largely unpublished, alongside transcripts of interviews about their sighting, an investigation by a local newspaper, and a published account by journalist John Fuller from 1966, Bowman meticulously relays the differing versions of the story.Īccounts from interviews under hypnosis provide much more detail and elaboration than earlier versions in which they see a strange light and flee in terror. The text is largely focused on recounting the narrative of the Hills’ lives through multiple accounts. Where Bowman’s work differs is that he roots the personal history of Betty and Barney Hill in the context of postwar social and political change and finds correspondence with the historical shift from state support of welfare policies and economic regulation to neoliberalism that occurred alongside diminishing trust in authority and increasing belief in conspiracy theories. In reading UFOs as symbols of cultural turmoil, something quintessentially American, Bowman follows the same approach as can be found in existing works by Jodi Dean, Bridget Brown, and Susan Lepselter. As far as academic scholarship on UFO stories goes, this is the normative approach. Indeed, stories of flying saucers do tell us something about America. Cynicism grew as the New Deal broke down and the civil rights movement foundered, and conspiracy theories thrived in these tears in the social contract. These recent developments suggest a ripe time to turn back to the Hills.īowman reads the material as a story of how Americans lost trust in institutions like the military, science, and government. It has also been revealed that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, part of the Pentagon, received $22 million in funding to track and investigate UAPs. Bowman connects the Hills’ to more recent sightings, such as the Tic Tac-shaped craft spotted by navy pilots in 2004, since which time the government office tracking UAPs has recorded more than 500 sightings. UAPs are big news again with recent congressional hearings in which a whistleblower testified that that non-human life exists, craft have crashed on Earth, and the military is involved in a vast cover up of their existence. military designated such sightings unidentified flying objects-a more scientific and precise term intended to create distance from flying saucer rhetoric-and now calls them unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), another distancing maneuver. ![]() The Hills’ sighting came during the period when ‘flying saucers’ were crystallizing in the public imagination as a form of technology created and flown by advanced beings from other planets. The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in AmericaĪug, 2023 An interracial couple, liberal, Unitarian, active in the civil rights movement, he writes that this is “more than a story about the couple themselves and their strange experiences.” To Bowman, the Hills’ story is about “what they believed it was to be an American in the middle decades of the twentieth century.” In framing it this way, he follows the prevailing trend of interpreting UFO and extraterrestrial stories as a mirror that tells us something about America.
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