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The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America
A gripping account of an alien abduction and its connections to the breakdown of American society in the 1960s
“Excellent and exhaustive.”—Colin Dickey, Slate
In the mid-1960s, Betty and Barney Hill became famous as the first Americans to claim that aliens had taken them aboard a spacecraft against their will. Their story—involving a lonely highway late at night, lost memories, and medical examinations by small gray creatures with large eyes—has become the template for nearly every encounter with aliens in American popular culture since.
Historian Matthew Bowman examines the Hills’ story not only as a foundational piece of UFO folklore but also as a microcosm of 1960s America. The Hills, an interracial couple who lived in New Hampshire, were civil rights activists, supporters of liberal politics, and Unitarians. But when their story of abduction was repeatedly ignored or discounted by authorities, they lost faith in the scientific establishment, the American government, and the success of the civil rights movement.
Bowman tells the fascinating story of the Hills as an account of the shifting winds in American politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. He exposes the promise and fallout of the idealistic reforms of the 1960s and how the myth of political consensus has given way to the cynicism and conspiratorialism and the paranoia and illusion of American life today.
“Excellent and exhaustive.”—Colin Dickey, Slate
In the mid-1960s, Betty and Barney Hill became famous as the first Americans to claim that aliens had taken them aboard a spacecraft against their will. Their story—involving a lonely highway late at night, lost memories, and medical examinations by small gray creatures with large eyes—has become the template for nearly every encounter with aliens in American popular culture since.
Historian Matthew Bowman examines the Hills’ story not only as a foundational piece of UFO folklore but also as a microcosm of 1960s America. The Hills, an interracial couple who lived in New Hampshire, were civil rights activists, supporters of liberal politics, and Unitarians. But when their story of abduction was repeatedly ignored or discounted by authorities, they lost faith in the scientific establishment, the American government, and the success of the civil rights movement.
Bowman tells the fascinating story of the Hills as an account of the shifting winds in American politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. He exposes the promise and fallout of the idealistic reforms of the 1960s and how the myth of political consensus has given way to the cynicism and conspiratorialism and the paranoia and illusion of American life today.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2023
23 people are currently reading
244 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Bowman
23 books10 followersMatthew Bowman teaches American religious history at Hampden-Sydney College, and serves as associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon thought. He’s interested in evangelicalism, fundamentalism, religion and American culture and occasionally dabbles in Mormon history, noir, and the movies. He’s published in Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation, The Journal of Mormon History, the John Whitmer Journal, and the Journal of the Early Republic.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 6, 2023
I've been on an alien invasion kick for a few months now, rewatching 50s through 70s alien films and renewing my familiarity with the personalities and quirks of the original saucer mania. I had never seen The UFO Incident, the TV movie based on the encounter of Barney and Betty Hill, but watching it raised my interest considerably. I'd always assumed the film was a low-budget, sensationalized re-enactment and was pleasantly surprised to find it an intelligent teleplay with A-list actors. This new book is the perfect complement, providing a novel window into UFOlogy among many other things. Bowman considers the case as history and sociology, not particularly addressing "did it happen" as much as "what it means." The result is an eye-opening trip through the era as attitudes toward race, government, and religion shift from the Eisenhower era to Watergate, changing the details of the Hills' encounter and the world's reaction to it . The book's intro talks about the inevitable, unfolding change in attitudes that the government's new attitude toward UAPs will likely bring about and provides excellent evidence that responses and reactions are ultimately subjective, shaped to a surprising degree by public expectations . Bowman's style is clear and straightforward, especially given the complexity of some of the concepts he's communicating. An excellent book.
November 29, 2023
What a fun read! Thoughtful analysis, engaging, and expansive.
October 23, 2023
I don't know a whole lot about the history of UFOs or alien conspiracies in American history, and I'm not exactly trying to completely delve into that as an area of topical knowledge, per se, but every now and then when I stumble on especially a university press-published book about aliens I feel the urge and dive in. So far, this has not been a bad practice. Matthew Bowman's rather mercifully slim book picks apart the lives of the authors/experiencers of one specific abduction story, tracing the development of their story, their involvement with the culture of UFOs, and the history of American activism, race, and culture across the decades. It's a tall task, but Bowman does an incisive job winnowing away what could be an overblown cultural history into a manageable engagement with the most important and often poignant elements of the culture and counterculture as they pertained to the story of Betty and Barney Hill. What results is a fascinating look at the strange nexus of forces and attitudes that influenced so much of how the Hills saw themselves and their experiences, and raises questions about exactly what kind of forces and influences are upon us today, and what those forces do to our own tellings and retellings of our memories. Bowman consistently but artfully reminds us again and again throughout this book that UFO narratives as remembrances or even inventions can never be considered apart from the cultural forces that helped shape them and their interpretations, and in focusing in on one couple's story and experiences he paints a curious and always engaging portrait of just why this is so and how it all unfolded. This was a brief book, but a fascinating one.
November 13, 2023
This book was not what I was expecting- in fact, it was so much better. This is a kind of critical and broad analysis of a famous incident that I have never seen before.
I was a huge UFO enthusiast growing up, and as I got older two things happened.
First, I became more and more skeptical with age and education, and eventually stopped believing in the core conceits of most famous UFO cases like the Hills.
Second, those "classic" cases all kept ascending higher into "mythology" with every passing year. Each retelling takes details for granted, repeating broad strokes from earlier retellings and distilling the event down to a sort of community-accepted canon. Stories like these have been refined down to a simple, consistent campfire story devoid of nuance or humanity. That was a huge loss for the Hills and their story, because the state of the civil rights movement really was deeply intertwined with their experience.
This book throws decades of pop culture away and starts over at the beginning. It is agressively *not* about the UFO experience that defined these two lives- although it certainly covers that in detail. Rather, it is about *who* they were as their lives led to that point, and how that experience affected who they became afterwards. Rather than dwelling on the scientific case for the abduction phenomenon, it talks about the psychology and the context of the experience and the culture they were living in.
The watered down and mass-market version of the story has always shrugged off the striking issue of being an interracial married couple in the 1960s. They were not a typical pair of American citizens by any stretch; they were two people from very different backgrounds living a very stressful life, and they had a lot to lose by becoming a public spectacle. The state of the civil rights movement, especially the split between the "moderate" liberals seeking respectability and the movements assertively demanding equity, was the catalyst behind so many events for Betty and Barney Hill.
This book goes profoundly deep into journals and interviews to find what brought these two together, what views they shared (or did not) regarding the supernatural, and how they both saw their shared UFO experience in wildly different ways. The state of post-war science and intellectualism, especially the hotbed of growing Cold War pop pseudoscience, created many forces of push-and-pull on the Hills, on one hand trying to influence their interpretations and on the other hand trying to leverage them to support other causes. It paints such a complete picture of the perceptions and attitudes of the time that, by the end of the book, you will find yourself of two minds: the common pop culture of today (of aliens and saucers and abductions) and the fresh, untreaded ground of their moment in 1961, where the entire experience was so surreal and unprecedented that there were no assumptions that could apply.
More than anything, this book is a triumph for so deeply re-humanizing Barney Hill, a man whose identity has been stretched, blended, bleached and watered down for sixty years. His relationships, his faith, and his struggles have long been erased from history for sake of a marketable UFO story. He and Betty's history as activists and the burdens they carried being on the forefront of the civil rights revolution cannot be separated from their story. Where Betty's spirituality and optimism made her abduction experience a transformative one, Barney's constant anxiety- that of a life lived on guard from abuse and judgment- made it a deeply tormenting one.
For a work of retrospective nonfiction, it managed to feel deeply personal. When the events reach Barney's relatively early death, it genuinely feels unfair. As the search for meaning consumes Betty, you can feel her spiraling without him.
This book never espouses that their experiences are proof of alien life or anything of the sort: just that their intents were genuine, and what they experienced deeply troubled them. The author, having already done exceptional research, walks an impossibly fine line advocating for these *people* without advocating for any interpretations of the UFO experience. It is a wonderful work of sympathy and curiosity, and I commend him for writing something that has affected me so much.
If I must criticize anything, it is the audio narration: perhaps it bolsters the book's sense of stoic impartiality, but I find the narrator terribly robotic. I was actually annoyed at first that they had gone with a digital text-to-speech for narration, and then I realized this really was a real person! It simply feels like listening to an automated speech generator.
I was a huge UFO enthusiast growing up, and as I got older two things happened.
First, I became more and more skeptical with age and education, and eventually stopped believing in the core conceits of most famous UFO cases like the Hills.
Second, those "classic" cases all kept ascending higher into "mythology" with every passing year. Each retelling takes details for granted, repeating broad strokes from earlier retellings and distilling the event down to a sort of community-accepted canon. Stories like these have been refined down to a simple, consistent campfire story devoid of nuance or humanity. That was a huge loss for the Hills and their story, because the state of the civil rights movement really was deeply intertwined with their experience.
This book throws decades of pop culture away and starts over at the beginning. It is agressively *not* about the UFO experience that defined these two lives- although it certainly covers that in detail. Rather, it is about *who* they were as their lives led to that point, and how that experience affected who they became afterwards. Rather than dwelling on the scientific case for the abduction phenomenon, it talks about the psychology and the context of the experience and the culture they were living in.
The watered down and mass-market version of the story has always shrugged off the striking issue of being an interracial married couple in the 1960s. They were not a typical pair of American citizens by any stretch; they were two people from very different backgrounds living a very stressful life, and they had a lot to lose by becoming a public spectacle. The state of the civil rights movement, especially the split between the "moderate" liberals seeking respectability and the movements assertively demanding equity, was the catalyst behind so many events for Betty and Barney Hill.
This book goes profoundly deep into journals and interviews to find what brought these two together, what views they shared (or did not) regarding the supernatural, and how they both saw their shared UFO experience in wildly different ways. The state of post-war science and intellectualism, especially the hotbed of growing Cold War pop pseudoscience, created many forces of push-and-pull on the Hills, on one hand trying to influence their interpretations and on the other hand trying to leverage them to support other causes. It paints such a complete picture of the perceptions and attitudes of the time that, by the end of the book, you will find yourself of two minds: the common pop culture of today (of aliens and saucers and abductions) and the fresh, untreaded ground of their moment in 1961, where the entire experience was so surreal and unprecedented that there were no assumptions that could apply.
More than anything, this book is a triumph for so deeply re-humanizing Barney Hill, a man whose identity has been stretched, blended, bleached and watered down for sixty years. His relationships, his faith, and his struggles have long been erased from history for sake of a marketable UFO story. He and Betty's history as activists and the burdens they carried being on the forefront of the civil rights revolution cannot be separated from their story. Where Betty's spirituality and optimism made her abduction experience a transformative one, Barney's constant anxiety- that of a life lived on guard from abuse and judgment- made it a deeply tormenting one.
For a work of retrospective nonfiction, it managed to feel deeply personal. When the events reach Barney's relatively early death, it genuinely feels unfair. As the search for meaning consumes Betty, you can feel her spiraling without him.
This book never espouses that their experiences are proof of alien life or anything of the sort: just that their intents were genuine, and what they experienced deeply troubled them. The author, having already done exceptional research, walks an impossibly fine line advocating for these *people* without advocating for any interpretations of the UFO experience. It is a wonderful work of sympathy and curiosity, and I commend him for writing something that has affected me so much.
If I must criticize anything, it is the audio narration: perhaps it bolsters the book's sense of stoic impartiality, but I find the narrator terribly robotic. I was actually annoyed at first that they had gone with a digital text-to-speech for narration, and then I realized this really was a real person! It simply feels like listening to an automated speech generator.
May 18, 2024
In September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill saw something they couldn't explain and, as a result, became totemic examples of American disenchantment with traditional sources of authority. This is the story Matt Bowman tells in a fascinating book that combines mini-histories on Unitarianism, race relations, science, psychology, and American politics to show how the Hills – an interracial couple who came of age in the era of New Deal liberalism and integrationist respectability politics – were dismissed by the religious, scientific, and military authorities they had implicitly trusted, and therefore turned to alternative sources of knowledge and authority, including New Age philosophies and conspiracy theories. This journey reflected that of many other Americans who lost faith in midcentury idealism and turned to various expressions of discontent, including Black Power (and, although Bowman doesn't explore this angle, I would argue neo-fundamentalist backlash politics).
The book capably does what Bowman sets out to do; it's fascinating and educational. You will learn a little about a lot of trends in 20th-century America. It perhaps pulls on too many threads, as it's a fairly short book but reads longer than its 223 pages given the density of the information. Surprisingly poor editing on the part of Yale University Press doesn't help matters (lots of missing and/or extraneous commas, a couple of obvious misspellings, and other grammar errors that are inevitable when writing a book of this length but should definitely be caught on the back end).
Overall, this is not only a timely book – given the recent spike in UFO interest, but also the crisis many have identified taking place among traditional authoritative institutions within American life – but an interesting one that's worth reading if you're interested in deepening your knowledge of the UFO controversies, the relationship between religion and science in American culture, or how changing attitudes toward civil rights played out in the lives of two more-or-less ordinary Americans who experienced something extraordinary.
The book capably does what Bowman sets out to do; it's fascinating and educational. You will learn a little about a lot of trends in 20th-century America. It perhaps pulls on too many threads, as it's a fairly short book but reads longer than its 223 pages given the density of the information. Surprisingly poor editing on the part of Yale University Press doesn't help matters (lots of missing and/or extraneous commas, a couple of obvious misspellings, and other grammar errors that are inevitable when writing a book of this length but should definitely be caught on the back end).
Overall, this is not only a timely book – given the recent spike in UFO interest, but also the crisis many have identified taking place among traditional authoritative institutions within American life – but an interesting one that's worth reading if you're interested in deepening your knowledge of the UFO controversies, the relationship between religion and science in American culture, or how changing attitudes toward civil rights played out in the lives of two more-or-less ordinary Americans who experienced something extraordinary.
January 30, 2024
A story cleverly told to tether together key social issues from the past decade through the prism of a once nationally famous UFO abduction story.
On the surface, this book is about a couple from New Hampshire who in 1961 claimed they saw a UFO and were abducted by the aliens onboard. But the driving theme of the book is how this couple is something of a prototype of people shifting to non-established scientific or approved government sources for explanations.
The arc is ideal, they had believed in the government and trusted its institutions. But this shifted into distrust as the established government and scientific authorities could neither explain or resolve what they claimed to have seen. The author cleverly relates this journey, introducing a series of interesting characters who serve as resources. As the government becomes less responsive alternative paranormal experts and UFO enthusiasts who are interested in the couples encounter get involved, they range from a bit odd to bizarre. These people include a few big names like Carl Sagan and James Earl Jones.
Bowman repeatedly points out their motives as being somewhat rational for people who believed they saw an alien craft and the scientific establishment could not offer sufficient explanations.
Though Bowman doesn’t state it directly, there’s many obvious echoes to today for any keen observer. One key difference is all the people in the story met in-person.
On the surface, this book is about a couple from New Hampshire who in 1961 claimed they saw a UFO and were abducted by the aliens onboard. But the driving theme of the book is how this couple is something of a prototype of people shifting to non-established scientific or approved government sources for explanations.
The arc is ideal, they had believed in the government and trusted its institutions. But this shifted into distrust as the established government and scientific authorities could neither explain or resolve what they claimed to have seen. The author cleverly relates this journey, introducing a series of interesting characters who serve as resources. As the government becomes less responsive alternative paranormal experts and UFO enthusiasts who are interested in the couples encounter get involved, they range from a bit odd to bizarre. These people include a few big names like Carl Sagan and James Earl Jones.
Bowman repeatedly points out their motives as being somewhat rational for people who believed they saw an alien craft and the scientific establishment could not offer sufficient explanations.
Though Bowman doesn’t state it directly, there’s many obvious echoes to today for any keen observer. One key difference is all the people in the story met in-person.
August 22, 2025
Even handed dispute of an abduction case.
Liberal democratic values of expertise, authority, and respectability are called into question at unexplainable phenomena. Betty and Barney remain perhaps the most sympathetic abduction case — Bowden looks at their story as an example of the erosion of liberal trust and the breakdown in American consensus. There’s this sense of “how did we get here” among incredulous liberals regarding the CURRENT MOMENT (look around) and I’m not sure that this book is the only explanation for distrust in institutions, yet I appreciate its succinct treatment of the Hill case; the Civil Rights movement, and UFOlogy.
As the author puts it —
“When they began their journey down New Hampshire's Route 3, the Hills' world made sense to them. They had clear ideas about what science was, about the relationship between Americans and their state, about the meaning of race and what good, appropriate religion should be. One way of thinking about what happened to them is not to explore what the light that they saw actually was (an ultimately fruitless quest, I think), but to see the reality of its power in their lives. It upset and blurred the boundaries they had laid down.”
Liberal democratic values of expertise, authority, and respectability are called into question at unexplainable phenomena. Betty and Barney remain perhaps the most sympathetic abduction case — Bowden looks at their story as an example of the erosion of liberal trust and the breakdown in American consensus. There’s this sense of “how did we get here” among incredulous liberals regarding the CURRENT MOMENT (look around) and I’m not sure that this book is the only explanation for distrust in institutions, yet I appreciate its succinct treatment of the Hill case; the Civil Rights movement, and UFOlogy.
As the author puts it —
“When they began their journey down New Hampshire's Route 3, the Hills' world made sense to them. They had clear ideas about what science was, about the relationship between Americans and their state, about the meaning of race and what good, appropriate religion should be. One way of thinking about what happened to them is not to explore what the light that they saw actually was (an ultimately fruitless quest, I think), but to see the reality of its power in their lives. It upset and blurred the boundaries they had laid down.”
February 10, 2025
This was a good read. While I believe in UAPs (UFOs) and aliens, I am a skeptic in actual alien abductions which was why I did not mind Bowman's take on the famed Betty & Barney Hill encounter. He states that he does not believe they were abducted by aliens. Before this book, I never thought to take a closer look at the times. Betty & Barney were a biracial couple (she was white, he was Black) in the 1960s, a time of the Civil Rights, and when biracial marriages were still frowned upon. No one knows what really happened that night but there's no question that they saw something they could not explain. Whether you believe in their story (which the alleged encounter with alien beings was gathered after hypnosis) or are just a general skeptic, it doesn't matter. Betty & Barney believed in their abduction until their deaths.
March 4, 2024
In spite of my long love of the X-Files, I didn’t know anything about the story of Betty and Barney Hill. This is a thoughtful, historical telling of the Hills’s story - one that focuses on Cold War fears, a growing lack of trust of the government, an emerging New Age philosophy, and an interracial couple that was to varying degrees freaked out about the world they lived in. Interesting, though I cannot say with any confidence that I understand what really happened to the Hills.
August 17, 2024
yikes! I borrowed this book from the library, audio book. I actually live near where Betty and Barney Hill saw the aliens. I thought it was going to be a different type of book. Probably towards the end it might have gone into the alien story but I didn't get that far. It was a background story and I was bored by it. DNF - sorry
September 30, 2023
It's a intriguing and fascinating read as it deals with UFO but also with the birth of controculture and the 60s
Easy to read, informative, well researched.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine
Easy to read, informative, well researched.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine
April 9, 2024
Great treatment. Balanced, contextualizes the story in social forces of history, race, religion, etc.
Interesting bits about Jacques Vallee. Looking forward to more reads in the UFO/new religious movements/history nexus!
Interesting bits about Jacques Vallee. Looking forward to more reads in the UFO/new religious movements/history nexus!
March 22, 2025
This book was very interesting and visits every possible explanation as to what Betty and Barney Hill encountered on that lonely New Hampshire road in September of 1961. If you enjoy very detailed reading, you'll enjoy this book.
June 20, 2024
This macabre story may endure as the object of tabloid gawking, but 'The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill' is a sad and fascinating book. One can easily imagine a much lesser book: a potboiler, a freakshow. Instead, Bowman has pitched this tale as a sort of shadow play of collective trauma and an elegy for the nation’s loss of innocence. Not once does he condescend or jeer at the Hills’ ill-starred delusions. They deserve better than that, and they receive it in this patient and scrupulous account of their travails.
Here's a link to my full review: http://review31.co.uk/article/view/90...
Here's a link to my full review: http://review31.co.uk/article/view/90...
December 27, 2025
This book rocks
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