Memory and Alien Abduction
Why The Abduction Betty and Barney Hill by Matthew Bowman is the best book I’ve read this year
My most deep and abiding fear concerns a wall, or a door, and a terrible thing taking place behind it. I stay very quiet so I can listen for what’s happening behind the barrier. I worry about the thinness of the barrier. The wall, or the door, is hardly protective. Mostly it obscures my perception of the terrible thing that’s happening behind it, which only makes it harder for me to gauge the threat it poses. I am certain that the hidden thing is a threat. It terrifies me. This has been a part of my life since I was at least seven, maybe younger; I don't remember where it comes from.
As I was being displaced from New Hampshire, I sought out EMDR treatment to help me reprocess and recall certain traumatic events. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and it is not hypnosis, but it kind of felt like what I’d seen in the movies. Like hypnosis, it involves following a practitioner’s finger left to right with your eyes, which, through a psychological process indistinguishable to me from magic, helps the viewer reprocess traumatic memories. I did these treatments for about two years.
The process was brutally uncomfortable. The facilitator I worked with described it as walking down a hallway with many doors. Each treatment has the potential to throw open a previously locked door. Sometimes it happens without you trying, or even consenting, to the locked door’s opening — it just swings open, as with a strong draft, to show you the hidden thing behind.
Helpful as it was to me, EMDR also proved that the structure of my memory is pliable. There’s a weird kind of artifice in how a brain works not like something grown but rather something built and maintained. Like an old house. It’s uncomfortable to find parts in bad repair, or passageways locked without a key — to come upon stuff in the attic that seems to pre-date your moving in, even though you know there was nothing here before you. The fixtures of the place, though they feel solid and permanent, reveal themselves as more recent constructions than you might have expected. Blueprints are out there, maybe, but not accessible to you.
In 1961, a married couple named Betty and Barney Hill were driving home on a rural New Hampshire highway when they spotted a strange light approaching them in the sky. They were an interracial couple, Barney being a Black man and Betty a white woman, and they lived about ten minutes by foot from where I grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Civil Rights Movement was underway. Their life together was illegal in thirty states and frowned upon by white authority in all fifty. Barney carried a gun in the trunk of the car in case they were stopped on the road.
The couple stopped on the road. They got out of the car and looked up at the sky. What happened next was a traumatizing event that haunted the Hills for the rest of their lives.
To this day, nobody can say with certainty what the Hills saw because both experienced amnesia following the event. Barney Hill’s shoes, usually well kept, were scuffed at the toe; Betty woke up to find a rip in the dress she was wearing and no idea how it got there. She pushed the garment to the back of their closet without knowing why. The real story of their encounter started only then: the morning after, with the Hills struggling to make sense of their lost experience.
My favorite book of the year so far — and easily the most emotionally affecting — is The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill by Matthew Bowman, an intellectual history of how the Hills made sense of their damaged memory in the years after the incident. It follows the slow alienation of a middle-class liberal couple from their city, their faith community, and their nation. But as Bowman charts the couple’s social and intellectual alienation, he also follows the weird and wild ascendance of their story from a half-recollection over breakfast to a legend in US folklore. Turning at the center of it all like an axle is the problem of memory in twentieth-century psychology.
Betty and Barney Hill are, in many ways, the progenitors of the real-life alien abduction narrative. They didn’t make up the connection between aliens and UFOs, but their story is among the first and most popular to feature men and women being taken inside a UFO and studied up close by aliens. If you’ve ever been pulled from the earth into a spacecraft and probed by gray extraterrestrials of a kind of orientalist description, that may have something to do with the Hills’ impact on US culture. Alien abduction is a tricky narrative form to talk about because, as is true with the Hills’ experience, the storytellers of alien abduction tales often form their narrative around nonfictional, genuinely traumatic experiences — while, inextricably, also within a dubious and increasingly unhinged culture of US conspiracism.
If there’s an antagonist in The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, it’s the Hills’ hypnotist and psychologist Dr. Benjamin Simon. Bowman slightly under-cooks his analysis of Simon’s medical racism towards Barney Hill. When Barney arrived at his office for hypnosis, Simon “was ‘stunned to find there was a colored man.’ After all, Simon explained, his was an ‘expensive practice.’” (148) After hypnotizing both husband and wife, Simon concludes that the Hills were confabulating their abduction based on dreams Betty had. In all fairness, Betty’s interpretation of her dreams is, at a minimum, unscientific, though she would argue the scientific validity of her abduction story until her death in Portsmouth in 2004. Beyond simply judging their experience as unscientific, Simon acts towards the couple with obvious paternalism: as Bowman writes, he “believed that the Hills’ lack of understanding of hypnosis made them incapable of fully understanding what their memories represented. It was his role as expert to interpret their psyches for them.” (120)
The thing that scares me so very badly about the Hills’ story has nothing to do with aliens. It’s the horror of trying to convince an uncaring authority that your trauma actually happened. Whether that authority belongs to a state bureaucrat, a psychiatrist, a malicious journalist, or just a white man with the wrong intentions, the uphill battle to determine truth in an asymmetrical relationship is fucking terrifying.
Add that relatable experience to the almost absurd locality of this story for me as a person alienated from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and my relationship to the Hills feels almost like kinship. Their story reflects everything I love about genre literature, whether fiction or nonfiction, horror or sci-fi. They depict the weird, the extreme, the unprovable: things I struggle constantly to capture when I talk about my own life experience. A book like this makes the history/memoir I’m publishing about Portsmouth feel like a humble and incomplete effort. I am, after all, too afraid to litigate the details of my trauma in Portsmouth the way that Betty and Barney Hill did theirs. Because, what will people make of all the parts that don't line up? The inconsistencies in my memories of childhood? The little things in my experience that even I can’t exactly explain?
It’s weird, trying to describe to other people how touched I am by this book about a UFO abduction. And that's not just because Betty Hill was my neighbor when I was a kid. (I never met her.)
For one, there's something almost transcendent for me in reading about the hypnosis tapes of Barney Hill. It's unconscionable voyeurism that we even have access to this information. The publicity of these most activated, vulnerable moments in his post-traumatic experience feels grotesque. Bowman writes that, listening back to the tapes, Barney vomited into a kitchen sink. I struggle to think how I would handle this kind of source material if I were the historian writing this book.
For another, I’m drawn and pulled apart by the cognitive dissonance of the Hills' story. I believe what the Hills struggled with was undeniably real, and probably more than a psychological glitch; I do not believe, in the scientific terms they claimed to speak with, that the Hills saw an alien spaceship. The interplay of these two true things stretches how I imagine historical reality. It makes me aware of the weirdness of memory and humbles me to the wiggle room in all of our recollections. Even the ones we’re most certain about.
The Hills’ story has been in my life since I was a little kid. When my long lost UK boyfriend visited me in 2022, I drove us all the way up to New Hampshire’s North Country. We drove on the same highway where the Hills had their encounter and I told him the story, interspersed with memories of my own alienation in New Hampshire. I don’t visit New Hampshire often anymore. As much as I love the woods, the people there often leave me on edge. We ended up stopping for gas at a combination gas station/curiosity museum dedicated to the abduction, where permanent homemade exhibitions loomed on posterboards over the beer aisle and potato chips. Paul loved it — they don’t have shit like this in England — and honestly, so did I. But as long as I’ve known the Hills’ story it has struck me a little incongruent to see it rendered like this: strange, kooky, and fun. I appreciate that it is all of those things in the public imagination. It just drives me a little crazy when I hold it against the light.
Bowman’s 2023 history is the only serious deep dive I can recommend to people with an interest in the abduction. His book recognizes the encounter as a living story. More than that, it recognizes the personhood of the storytellers more effectively than any other retelling I’ve seen. I will always be uncomfortable with podcasts and TV specials that play the story for laughs or straight-down-the-middle conspiracy thinking. Barney Hill was a respected member of Portsmouth’s NAACP; his name came up frequently when I was researching civil rights-era Black Portsmouth three years ago, most often for reasons entirely separate from the abduction. When I read Bowman’s history, I see that version of Barney. Not just an extraterrestrial contactee or a man in a hypnotically-induced traumatic episode, but also a dedicated community member and political advocate who fought against discriminatory disbelief long before his alleged encounter, up until his death in 1969.
I would like to write more seriously about the Hills and my relationship to their story sometime. In the meantime, it will probably permeate everything I write at least a little, fiction or nonfiction, without me noticing.
Like memory itself, the frameworks we use to understand it always turn out alarmingly incomplete. I won't say that the truth of it is up to each individual to determine because, as the Hills’ abduction shows, the truth of memory and its interpretation is inextricably a question of power. It’s a question of personal feeling, yes, but equally or more so it’s one of the storyteller’s relationship with dominant frameworks of truth and authority, situated in time and place. Bowman’s Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill doesn't pretend to hover over that question of truth in memory, but rather plants itself in the dirt and examines what limited evidence it can find. It does so without claim of singular authority.
It’s the sort of humility I respect in a historian. I would reject the authority of any expert who approaches a great mystery of the human experience — whether concerning the mind, or its place in the universe — with anything but perfect humility. Regardless of if you believe their memory was true or false, a fair stab at the Betty and Barney Hill abduction demands at least perfect humility, if not outright fear.
thanks for reading. the history/memoir i wrote about displacement in New Hampshire is called The Tears of Other People and it's out this summer. also check out the short story i just published if you wanna see me write about politics and memory through a fictional medium instead of a rambly essay. sub the newsletter. follow @everzines at Bluesky, IG, and Substack. get in touch with me via email at eviewrites@duck.com.
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