Review
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Title: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America
Author: Matthew Bowman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Genre: History
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 278
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780300251388
Price: $30.00
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Readers of The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America hoping for a pulpy, sensational, salacious tale will likely leave somewhat disappointed. What Matthew Bowman offers instead is something far more compelling and human. The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill is structured like a spiral, each chapter moving the narrative forward, offering a new thematic angle that illuminates part of the Hills’ story, and returning to and reinterpreting, like the Hills themselves, the events of 19 September 1961.
Matt’s approach helps the readers identify with Betty and Barney, immersed in how they were transformed, and in some ways consumed, by the UFO sighting that September evening. Throughout the book, Matt demonstrates a generous and compassionate perceptiveness—using the Hills’ experience as a window into changes and shifts happening throughout the United States, always rooted in an effort to understand and explain what motivates people to believe what they believe.
In Matt’s hands, what might initially seem like a strange outlier of an experience is revealed to be a deeply insightful historical anecdote. Matt explores the ways that Betty and Barney Hill’s experience reveals many of the fault lines and points of tension that are part of transforming the country in the 1960s and beyond. In many cases, some of the same tensions and fault lines that are influencing American civic life today.
The book is broken up into fourteen chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue. The chapters tend to be quite brief, ranging from 10 to 26 pages, which makes them accessible and digestible, even as they often include levels of detail that render them a bit dense. The details are essential to the larger narrative Matt is telling and often reveal really interesting pieces of information, particularly about hypnotism, popular ideas about psychology, American religious history, and the shifting approaches to UFOs.
Matt’s perceptiveness and generosity come through particularly in the “Epilogue,” where he notes that like “other interpreters, I am using the story Betty and Barney told in ways that they might not have appreciated” (222). Here, Matt implicates himself in the act of history-making, recognizing that he is present in this meaning-making process. Matt places his own book alongside other ‘adaptations’ of Betty and Barney’s story, implicitly acknowledging that this is only one way of interpreting the story and that as such, it is an interpretation. I love that this move is made explicitly in the book.
The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America is a riveting, engrossing account of one interracial couple’s encounter with something they could not identify in the night sky and their subsequent lifetime of trying to make sense of it. In Matthew Bowman’s hands, this experience is transformed into a window into the pressures and tensions present in American civic life in the 60s and 70s, even setting the stage for our current era of conspiracies and the utter erosion of trust in institutions. In other words, come for the aliens, stay for the insightful observations about the American public.