Betty and barney hill dog8/5/2023 ![]() ![]() All the things they spent the rest of their lives saying are clear, obvious fabrications followed by broader conceptual rearguard actions of the type that Betty was already starting even in Fuller’s book: ![]() These two were not abducted by aliens they were not examined by aliens they saw no alien spacecraft (or, as Betty would later elaborate, a fleet of spacecraft). The details the Hills provide, details that swoop and swerve and change over time, are never at any point believable on their face. ![]() And indeed after Barney’s death, Betty’s additions to that narrative consistently expanded to almost space opera dimensions.īut the core of the story remains so familiar as to be archetypal: the couple was abducted by aliens, probed and examined by them, and then deposited back into their lives, traumatized and sporadically amnesiatic (their adorable dog, who was with them on that dark New Hampshire road, doesn’t seem to have been consulted about anything).Īnd the reading reaction to the book likewise remains familiar: instant, complete, and almost casually comprehensive dismissal. Then as now, the book gives the impression that Betty was a far more forceful personality than Barney, the driving force behind their shared narrative. “I feel like I am dreaming,” says Barney during several of those hypnosis sessions, echoing the actual dream-accounts put forward by Betty in increasingly elaborate detail as the couple’s fame grew in crackpot circles. This now-standard “your parents and grandparents were horrible people” disclaimer out of the way, readers can get to Fuller’s book, which, to give it its due, makes every bit as good guilty pleasure reading now as it did when it first appeared. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein. This book was published in 1966 and reflects the attitudes of its times. Somebody in the Vintage offices must have fond memories of that long-gone season they’ve decided to re-issue the book for a new generation of readers who are both alarmingly fact-challenged and stubbornly, vindictively delicate, the latter indicated by the pre-emptive apology appended to the book: In 1966, New England writer John Fuller wrote up their story, complete with transcripts from their hypnosis sessions, in his book The Interrupted Journey, which caused a stir and constituted the publishing season’s foremost guilty pleasure. They claimed they were abducted, examined, and released with stopped watches and memory losses. The Hills later claimed the lights were coming from an extraterrestrial spacecraft that soon swooped down on them. At 10:30 at night on Septemon a dark New Hampshire road, a married couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed they saw a strange light in the night sky. ![]()
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