FIGURE 3. A slave coffle. From David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (Harper & Brothers, 1866).
The Abductions Begin
AT ABOUT 8:00 A.M. ON SATURDAY, December 14, 1963, a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill arrived at the office of Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon for their first scheduled appointment. They’d come for treatment of Betty’s nightmares, apprehension, persistent anxiety and of Barney’s anxiety and insomnia, ulcers and high blood pressure. Along with these worrisome symptoms, Barney had one other that was trivial but distinctly weird. A ring of warts had appeared in a perfect circle around his groin and needed to be surgically removed.
In all but two respects, the Hills were ordinary middle-class New Englanders in early middle age. Betty was a social worker for the State of New Hampshire. Barney worked night shift in a Boston post office; these hours, and a sixty-mile commute, took a further toll on his already shaky health. The couple was active in their Unitarian Universalist church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They were also active in the civil rights movement, at a time when Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was in the very recent past and civil rights were less than respectable in many quarters. Their life together was an embodiment of King’s dream. Betty was white; Barney was black.
That was one unusual thing about the Hills. The other was that they came into Simon’s office with a vague but emphatic sense that their troubles were rooted in an encounter with a UFO on a lonely mountain road more than two years earlier. What they remembered of the encounter was dramatic enough. But for the past two years Betty, in particular, had had the nagging conviction there was more to it than could be recalled, which surfaced only in strange dreams. That amnesia, they suspected, was at the root of all their other symptoms. They’d been told that hypnosis could help retrieve lost memories. Dr. Benjamin Simon was an acknowledged expert in therapeutic hypnosis; he’d used it extensively to treat military psychiatric disorders during World War II, when he was chief of neuropsychiatry and executive officer at Mason General Hospital on Long Island. That was why the Hills turned to him.
Dr. Benjamin Simon didn’t believe in UFOs, didn’t care about UFOs. He had only one commitment: to help his patients. He must at some time or other have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, where the principle is laid down that “in analysing a dream I insist that the whole scale of estimates of certainty shall be abandoned and that the faintest possibility that something of this or that sort may have occurred in the dream shall be treated as complete certainty.” For the therapist, doubt is the enemy, the agent of resistance. Doubt must be cast aside.
Simon spent his first few sessions with the Hills bringing them in and out of trance, familiarizing them with the process. Then, on February 22, 1964, he brought Barney into his office while Betty stayed in the waiting room. He loaded the tape cartridges into his recording machine, and he and Barney set to work.
It’s not often in the study of mythology that you can pinpoint a specific date when this or that mythic theme sprang into existence. Still more rarely can you name the person or persons who brought it into being. Normally myth is an anonymous, collective creation. By the time it’s noticed, it’s been part of people’s awareness so long it seems to have been around forever. It becomes what in the collective unconscious it’s always been: timeless, ahistorical.
The UFO mythology breaks this mold. Again and again, the birthing of a mythic theme related to UFOs can be traced back to a specific time, a specific place, a specific person. The theme spreads, diffuses, hidden and silent at first like the mustard seed of the parable. The creation of one person’s psyche—or of two or three persons, acting in unwitting collusion—it evokes resonances in thousands, then millions of others. Decades after its initial emergence, the theme has become a common cultural property. Allusions to it are instantly intelligible, even to people who know little or nothing of its details. Alien abduction is one of those UFO mythic themes—and in Dr. Simon’s office on Bay State Road in Boston, on that Saturday morning in February 1964, it was about to be born.
UFO INCIDENT
Over two years earlier, in mid-September 1961, the Hills had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take a short driving vacation. They’d see Niagara Falls, circle through Canada to Montreal, and then head back home to Portsmouth. In their spontaneous enthusiasm they didn’t plan as carefully as they might. By September 19, the last day of their trip, money had run low. They couldn’t afford one more night in a motel. They decided to drive all night until they reached home.
Sometime in the middle of that night, as they drove south from Colebrook through the White Mountains of New Hampshire on the nearly deserted Route 3, they became aware of a light in the sky that seemed to be following them.
It couldn’t be a star; it couldn’t be a planet. It was moving against the background of the heavenly bodies. Barney insisted it had to be a plane, even though it made no sound that they could hear. Betty thought it was something more unusual.
“We stopped our car and got out to observe it more closely with our binoculars,” Betty wrote a week later to Major Donald E. Keyhoe. Retired from the Marine Corps, Keyhoe was director of a private organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), which was at the time the gold standard for “objective” UFOlogy. For a while the Hills drove and stopped, drove and stopped, Betty wrote Keyhoe. Then the object seemed to approach their car.
We stopped again. As it hovered in the air in front of us, it appeared to be pancake in shape, ringed with windows in the front through which we could see bright blue-white lights. Suddenly, two red lights appeared on each side. By this time my husband was standing in the road, watching closely. He saw wings protrude on each side and the red lights were on the wing tips.
As it glided closer he was able to see inside the object, but not too closely. [Barney was using his binoculars at the time.] He did see several figures scurrying about as though they were making some hurried type of preparation. One figure was observing us from the windows. From the distance this was seen, the figures appeared to be about the size of a pencil, and seemed to be dressed in some type of shiny black uniform.
At this point, my husband became shocked and got back in the car, in a hysterical condition, laughing and repeating they were going to capture us. He started driving the car—the motor had been left running. As we started to move, we heard several buzzing or beeping sounds which seemed to be striking the trunk of our car.
The Hills remembered little of what happened next. There was a second series of beeps and a vague impression of something like the moon sitting in the road. They reached their home a little after 5:00 a.m., a couple of hours later than anticipated. Peculiar shiny circles, which Betty was convinced were radioactive, had appeared on the trunk of their car. Ten days later Betty began having strange dreams in which she and Barney were stopped at a roadblock and taken aboard an alien craft. The dreams went on for five nights, then stopped.
Barney pooh-poohed it all. There were no such things as flying saucers; end of discussion. Yet as 1961 passed into 1962, he went along with Betty on a string of compulsive, futile trips back to Route 3, hunting for the site of their experience, hoping somehow to find the key to whatever was troubling them. His ulcers worsened; the warts appeared in his groin. Conventional psychotherapy didn’t help. At last they turned to Benjamin Simon.
HYPNOTIC REGRESSION
DOCTOR: I want you to tell me in full detail all your experiences, all of your thoughts, and all of your feelings, beginning with the time you left your hotel.
This was Dr. Simon’s charge to Barney on the morning of February 22, 1964. Transcripts of the tape-recorded hypnotic sessions were published two years later by John G. Fuller in his book The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer” and in a two-part article in the October 4 and 18, 1966, issues of Look magazine. Those two issues set new sales records for the magazine.
BARNEY: We arrived at night [September 18, the night before the sighting] at this motel, and I did not notice any name in the motel. . . . The thoughts that were going through my mind were: Would they accept me? Because they might say they were filled up, and I wondered if they were going to do this, because I was prejudiced. . . .
DOCTOR: Because you were prejudiced?
BARNEY: . . . because they were prejudiced.
DOCTOR: Because you were a Negro?
BARNEY: Because I am a Negro.
Again and again Barney returns to his fear of prejudice, of rejection, and we’re reminded that for Barney and Betty daily life was a continual exercise in courage. The motel, in any event, did not turn them away. They spent the night there and drove all the next day, crossing from Canada into the United States. Late that night, they stopped at a restaurant in Colebrook, near the northern border of New Hampshire.
I park—and we go in. There is a dark-skinned woman in there, I think, dark by Caucasian standards, and I wonder—is she a light-skinned Negro, or is she Indian, or is she white?—and she waits on us, and she is not very friendly, and I notice this, and others are there and they are looking at me and Betty, and they seem to be friendly or pleased, but this dark-skinned woman doesn’t. I wonder then more so—is she Negro and wonder if I—if she is wondering if I know she is Negro and is passing for white.
It’s now 10:05 p.m. on September 19; the Hills are about to begin their drive south down Route 3. But before he continues his story, Barney’s thoughts go back to a restaurant they’d earlier visited in Canada. As he and Betty walk to it, “everybody on the street passing us by is looking. And we go in to this restaurant, and all eyes are upon us. And I see what I call the stereotype of the ‘hoodlum.’ The ducktail haircut. And I immediately go on guard against any hostility.”
Barney begins to rebuke himself: “I should get hold of myself, and not think everyone was hostile, or rather suspect hostility, when there was no hostility there. . . . The people were friendly . . . why was I ready to be defensive—just because these boys were wearing this style of haircut.” He holds himself to very high standards not just of conduct but of thought. Why was he so ready to be defensive? In August 1955, a little over six years before the Hills took their drive into Canada, a black teenager from Chicago named Emmett Till had been lynched in Mississippi for supposedly making suggestive remarks to a white woman. Granted, New Hampshire was not Mississippi. But the message of what this country still could do to a black man who took his liberty too seriously had been delivered.
Barney relives for the doctor his and Betty’s experience as they drove southward through the darkness. The light appears. At first he thinks it’s a star, then a satellite. Then he’s sure it’s an airplane. But why won’t it go away?
“Betty!” he exclaims in his trance. “This is not a flying saucer. What are you doing this for? You want to believe in this thing, and I don’t.”
Suddenly he cries out: “I want to wake up!” The doctor reassures him: he’s safe, he can go on. And he does: “It’s right over my right! God! What is it? . . . And I try to maintain control, so Betty cannot tell I am scared. God, I’m scared!”
(Later that morning, after the Hills leave his office, Simon will dictate into his tape recorder that the patient “showed very marked emotional discharge” at this point in his story. “Tears rolled down his cheeks, he would clutch his face, his head, and writhe in considerable agony.” Nearly three years later, Simon will tell UFO debunker Philip Klass that “he had never had a patient become so excited under hypnosis”—so much so that “he feared that Barney might try to jump out of the office window.” He will play for Klass the tape of Barney reliving his UFO experience, and even the skeptical Klass will “agree completely with the doctor that Barney had indeed seen ‘something,’ and it had been a terrifying experience.”)
Barney remembers more: going into the trunk for the tire wrench, which he’ll use to defend himself if he has to. “I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid,” he insists.” I’ll fight it off. I’m not afraid!” He remembers crossing the road toward the thing. He still has his binoculars. He can see the object, now less than a thousand feet away; it’s shaped like a big pancake, with rows of windows. Through a window, a face looks out at him. It’s not the face of an intergalactic alien, however, but something that puts him in mind of “a red-headed Irishman.”
A red-headed Irishman? Barney explains:
I think I know why. Because Irish are usually hostile to Negroes. And when I see a friendly Irish person, I react to him by thinking—I will be friendly. And I think this one that is looking over his shoulder is friendly.
The perpetual tightrope walk that was Barney Hill’s life: be on guard against hostility, but where there’s friendliness, be prepared to reciprocate. This Irishman is smiling, friendly.
But then he’s gone, and suddenly the face is “evil . . . He looks like a German Nazi. He’s a Nazi. . . . He had a black scarf around his neck, dangling over his left shoulder”—and, it later comes out, a “black, black shiny jacket,” which naturally makes Dr. Simon think of the ducktailed teenagers back in the Canadian restaurant. He asks if they had been wearing black shiny coats, as such boys often do, and Barney replies that no, they hadn’t.
How, then, did a “German Nazi” get aboard the UFO? This detail goes back at least to October 1961, when NICAP investigator Walter Webb interviewed the Hills and reported that the figures inside the UFO “reminded the observer [Barney] of the cold precision of German officers.” But now it’s taken on fresh emotional power, and I think we can guess why. Later Barney will note that “somehow, Dr. Simon had become sort of a close friend. He had become more than a close friend. He had become someone I loved, and I didn’t want any harm to come to.” To judge from his name, Benjamin Simon was Jewish. The well-read Barney certainly knew what sort of “harm” a Jew, or a black man for that matter, might expect to experience from a “German Nazi.”
Abruptly Barney exclaims: “I feel like a rabbit. I feel like a rabbit.” “What do you mean by that?” the doctor asks, and Barney thinks back to a scene from his distant past:
I was hunting for rabbits in Virginia. And this cute little bunny went into a bush that was not very big. And my cousin Marge was on one side of the bush, and I was on the other—with a hat. And the poor little bunny thought he was safe. And it tickled me, because he was just hiding behind a little stalk, which meant security to him—when I pounced on him, and threw my hat on him, and captured the poor little bunny who thought he was safe.
Is he also remembering, unconsciously, a scene from a past even more distant?
AFRICAN INTERLUDE
The year: 1763. The place: a fishing village at the mouth of the Formosa River on what’s now the coast of Nigeria, about one hundred miles east-southeast of Lagos, where the river flows into the Gulf of Benin.
An old man, a young man, and a young woman, strangers to the region, are paddling past the village in their canoe. Surely they’ve spotted the alien craft that sits motionless out in the Gulf. They may have made efforts, as futile as Betty’s and Barney’s two hundred years later, to assimilate this unknown phenomenon to their categories of the real and familiar. By the time they realize they’ve been seen as well, that war canoes from the great ship’s vicinity are headed in their direction, it’s too late.
Perhaps they try to resist, to fight back. But whatever weapons they have are as ineffectual as Barney’s tire wrench. Soon they’re prisoners of an African bandit chief and professional kidnapper who prospers by doing business with the white men from across the sea. Brought onto the deck of the slave ship, they’re offered to the captain for sale. The old man is refused and beheaded. The young man and woman are purchased and carried away for resale in the far-off colony of Virginia.
Episodes of this sort were legion in the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. You were abducted, perhaps in a night raid on your village, accompanied by the burning of your and your neighbors’ homes. (Was the thing like the moon, which Betty and Barney remembered sitting in the road, a reminiscence of such fires?) Or you were taken prisoner in war—which, since war in eighteenth-century West Africa tended to be a mechanism for getting human merchandise to sell to the strangers, amounted to the same thing. You were marched to the coast, your destination an alien craft to which, since it had to anchor some distance out, you were carried the last leg by canoe. As you drew near the craft, you might see, in the words of historian Marcus Rediker, “dark faces, framed by small holes in the side of the ship above the waterline, staring intently” at you, while above you “dozens of black women and children and a few red-faced men peered over the rail.”
To the Africans in first contact with them, the slave ships were something altogether fantastic: “houses with wings upon them” that could “walk upon the water” through a technology beyond imagining. How was it possible, the Africans wondered, “by any sort of contrivance, to make so large a body move forwards by the common force of the wind”? In a long epic poem published in 1789 as an exposé of the slave trade, a British ex-slaver described the typical captive’s response to the “vast machine” that was his or her entry to an alien and horrific world:
Torn as his bosom is, still wonder grows,
As o’er the vast machine the victim goes,
Wonder, commix’d with anguish, shakes his frame
At the strange sight his language cannot name.
REENACTMENT
It’s an eye-opener to read the transcripts of Barney’s and afterward Betty’s hypnotic regressions with the historical slave experience in mind.
As their memories surface of the portions of the UFO experience to which they’ve had no conscious access, they speak of being taken prisoner, brought aboard the alien craft. Barney speaks repeatedly of being conveyed onto it by “floating”—an accurate reflex of the captive’s being rowed on a canoe out to the slave ship. He finds himself having to step over what he calls a “bulkhead.” Once on the UFO, he and Betty are separated—as the slaves were, divided by sexes for the duration of the voyage.
They’re subjected to intrusive physical examinations, the details grotesque.16 Betty remembers the UFO beings reaching into her mouth, trying to pull out her teeth. Her captors are surprised: why do Barney’s teeth come out but hers don’t? She has to explain that Barney wears dentures, nearly everybody does as they age. They ask, seemingly baffled, “What’s ‘aging’”? When she says it is something that happens to people with time, they ask, “What’s ‘time’”? This dialogue seems incongruous, so nearly comical that we’re tempted to laugh. Really!—a species advanced enough to conquer space, yet perplexed as children by the mysteries of human dentition. Our laughter will fade when we recall it was standard operating procedure for the slave dealers to give the closest attention to their potential purchases’ teeth.17 These served as a reliable index to whether the merchandise was young enough to be worth paying for.
At one point in Betty’s regression, she describes being shown a star chart, which she’s told is a map of “trade routes.” Trade routes in interstellar space? Shift the context to the eighteenth-century Atlantic and it makes perfect sense.
“There were two dreams, really,” Dr. Simon remarks to Barney about Betty’s abduction dreams in the weeks after the UFO encounter. “One of them was sort of like a moonbeam down on a lake, something like that, or over a body of water.” Barney responds: “Yes, she told me about that.” Barney can’t make anything of that “body of water”—it’s completely out of place in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, in the vicinity of the UFO. He decides to forget about it. But the “body of water” would have been pivotal in the slave’s experience of abduction.
Barney has his binoculars with him, worn on a leather strap around his neck, when he leaves the car to take a closer look at the UFO. At one point he tears them off with such force—he speaks of “the violent thrust of my arms breaking the binocular strap”—that his neck is left bruised. Why should he have tried so desperately to free himself from that strap? Remember that African captives were marched to the coast in “coffles,” lines of men, women and children fastened together at the neck by ropes or chains or lengths of wood—and it falls into place.
Barney Hill was a well-read man. He might have learned from books the details of what his ancestors underwent at the slavers’ hands. But there’s another option. Psychologists and psychotherapists working with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have repeatedly run into the phenomenon of unspoken transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. “The second generation absorbs the unvocalized deep memory from the parent,” Israeli therapist Dina Wardi told an interviewer. “The real stuff is never transmitted through words. . . . I believe that some of the survivors’ children’s nightmares are the result of absorbing the parents’ deep memory.” In Barney’s case, the “deep memory” had at least half a dozen generations to cross before manifesting in his nightmare of UFO abduction. Yet for a trauma as massive and malignant as the slave experience, its wounds refreshed in each generation by a new set of injustices and outrages, is that resurfacing of memory really beyond belief?18
FIGURE 3. A slave coffle. From David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (Harper & Brothers, 1866).
By April 1964, Dr. Simon judged the therapeutic process was advanced enough that the Hills could be allowed to hear the tapes of themselves reliving their experience. After he listened to those tapes, Barney said,
I would look over at Betty. And she has a way of looking at me and being reassuring. It’s sort of a look that she can give, almost to say ‘I’m in love with you, Barney.’ And I felt this reassurance. And it helped. . . . And then, as the tapes went deeper and deeper into the part I had never remembered, there was the feeling as if heavy chains were lifted off my shoulders. I felt that I need no longer suffer the anxieties of wondering what happened.
“Heavy chains lifted off my shoulders.” No accident, that choice of words. Barney, with the woman who loved him, had relived the historic crime in which his ancestors and hers had joined hands—his as victims, hers as perpetrators. (Betty’s family had lived in New England since the seventeenth century, and although there were Quakers and abolitionists among them, it’s a fair guess there were also those who turned a profit off the trade in human flesh.)
Both relived that trauma. The UFO abduction emerged from his psyche and hers, working together in a hidden tandem of which we’re only starting to get an inkling. Their emotional responses weren’t quite the same. Philip Klass, listening to Dr. Simon’s tapes of the hypnotic regressions, was struck by the calmness of Betty’s voice while she spoke of the most harrowing events (“as if she had been describing a trip to the supermarket”) in contrast to Barney’s almost hysterical fear. This impression is contradicted by the doctor’s notes to himself, which speak of considerable agitation on Betty’s part as well as Barney’s. Yet Klass may have hit upon something of the truth.
Betty, child of slavery’s perpetrators, couldn’t enter fully into the abject dread that its victims experienced. She dreamed of the abduction from the first days after the trip through the White Mountains. In giving it the mythic shape it acquired in the course of the hypnotic sessions, she did her share and perhaps more than her share. Her love for Barney gave her the empathy to reexperience with him the ancestral trauma that had defined his life. But empathy could go only so far. The abduction’s raw terror was Barney’s, and his alone.
WHAT WAS THAT LIGHT?
In 2007, some forty-six years after the Hills’ drive south along Route 3, another New Hampshire family—Jim and Doyle Macdonald and their daughter Pip—tried the experiment of retracing, again late at night, the path Betty and Barney had taken. Pip read to her parents from Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey as they drove.
Just south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, the Macdonalds were joined, as the Hills had been, by a mysterious light that seemed to follow them through the mountains. They had some advantages that Betty and Barney didn’t. They’d traveled this route in daylight; they knew what to expect. They knew exactly what that light was.
It wasn’t a star or a satellite or an airplane. It was an electric light on the roof of a thirty-five-foot observation tower at the top of Cannon Mountain (aka Profile Mountain). Naturally it had seemed to the Hills to accompany them, moving against the fixed lights of the starry sky. When the road dipped down, and the Hills (and Macdonalds) with it, it shot upward. As the road twisted through the mountains, it leaped from the right to the left of their car. Then back again, disappearing and reappearing. “Even if you know what it is, it’s weird to watch,” Macdonald later wrote. “It vanishes over here, it reappears over there . . . spooky.”
There were some discrepancies. The tower light didn’t have rows of windows with faces peering out from behind them. This is a recurrent feature of the now-familiar gap between stimulus and perception in UFO sightings—recall the “many windows” seen by witnesses to the Zond IV fragments burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, as described in chapter 2—and it doesn’t bother me. I’m more troubled by the two red lights that the Hills saw on either side of the UFO. These can’t have been a product of the hypnotic regressions, since Betty mentioned them in the letter she wrote to Major Keyhoe a week after the sighting. I don’t know what about the tower light might have given rise to them. So there remain some loose ends.19 But on the whole, Macdonald’s identification is compelling.
The Macdonalds were lucky they performed their experiment when they did. By the fall of 2008 the observation tower had been torn down, its light with it. It was apparently replaced sometime before the fall of 2011. But the new light was far less intense, and it’s doubtful whether the Macdonalds (or the Hills) would have been struck by it. The clue to the identity of the Hills’ mystery light would have been lost. Those who aren’t UFO believers would have had no choice but to stick, for want of anything better, with the standard debunking explanation that they saw the planet Jupiter—which never made much sense, since the light moved against the star field. Let this be a warning to those inclined to think UFOs must be unknown, physically real objects, just because there are cases that remain unsolved. They may be unsolved for precisely this reason: the clue is lost, and there isn’t any way to guess at it.
So far we’ve identified two components of the Hills’ UFO encounter: the stimulus, the light on Cannon Mountain, and the deep collective experience of African enslavement. There are others.
In the hypnotic regression of February 22, Barney described the eyes of one of the UFO beings as “slanted . . . but not like a Chinese.” In a sketch he made under hypnosis, the eyes look indefinably sinister, malevolent: the irises and pupils, not distinguished from each other, are close together, while the whites of the eyes trail away upward, toward the sides of the being’s head. Barney later told John Fuller that “the eyes continued around to the sides of their heads, so that it appeared that they could see several degrees beyond the lateral extent of our vision.”
In 1994, UFO skeptic and pop-culture expert Martin Kottmeyer announced a startling discovery. These “wraparound eyes,” as they’d come to be known in UFO parlance, had been shown to the nation’s television viewers on February 10, 1964—twelve days before Barney’s hypnotic session—in an episode of the science fiction series The Outer Limits. The alien in “The Bellero Shield,” as the episode was called, had eyes of precisely this sort. In other respects as well, the TV alien seemed to resemble the UFO pilots as Barney described them. Then there was the clincher:
DOCTOR: There are men standing in the road?
BARNEY: Yes. They won’t talk to me. Only the eyes are talking to me. I—I—I—I don’t understand that. Oh—the eyes don’t have a body. They’re just eyes.
We’ll see in the next two chapters that the uncanny, terrifying, occasionally disembodied eyes that occur in this and other abduction stories are primal, archaic, long antedating “The Bellero Shield” and the Atlantic slave trade alike. Yet Kottmeyer is on target when he connects their property of speech with what the alien is made to say in “The Bellero Shield”: “In all the universes, in all the unities beyond the universes, all who have eyes have eyes that speak.”
Through most of Betty and Barney’s hypnotic sessions, the UFO pilots come across as men. Their appearance is unfamiliar and frightening, but they’re essentially male human beings. (Only near the end of therapy do they begin to shrink in size, as befits flying saucer entities.) This is precisely how the captive Africans perceived the people to whom they’d been sold: “white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.” How to conceptualize, give concrete reality to those “horrible looks,” that appalling alienness? The space alien of “The Bellero Shield” gave Barney a working model.
FIGURE 4. Drawing of alien head by Barney Hill, done under hypnosis. University of New Hampshire. Used with permission.
More recent African American experience also played a part in shaping his recollections. It influenced Betty’s as well. Of all her hypnotically evoked memories, the most powerful and grisly is of the UFO beings laying her on their examination table and pushing a long needle deep into her navel. They told her it wouldn’t hurt; it was in fact agonizingly painful. A procedure, in other words, that might be imagined to kill the fetus the black man might have implanted within her.
Barney underwent a corresponding ordeal. “I don’t want to be operated on,” he tells the doctor in his second hypnotic regression (February 29) as he describes being brought aboard the UFO. Then a few minutes later: “My groin feels cold.” Later, when the doctor reminds him of this, he says: “I was lying on a table, and I thought someone was putting a cup around my groin. . . . If I keep real quiet and real still, I won’t be harmed. And it will be over.”
Eventually it was over. He and Betty were released; they arrived home in the early light of dawn. Without knowing why, Barney checked his groin, looking for a mark. There was none. That took four more months to appear, in the form of a circle of warts around his groin, the exact same spot where the UFO beings had placed the cup.
It takes no great leap of the imagination to realize what’s going on. He’s been castrated, the time-honored punishment for a black man who’s allowed himself too much liberty with a white woman. Again, think Emmett Till. Although it doesn’t seem that Till actually was castrated before his murder, this became part of the popular version of the story. The killing of the young black man inevitably evoked memories of the gruesome lynchings that became a feature of Southern life after the Civil War, in which genital mutilation played a major role. These memories found their place in the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill.
The warts remained to testify. If, as I’ve stressed over and over, the Hills’ UFO came from deep within, Barney’s warts demonstrate the corollary: the UFO was something real. Psychically rather than physically, yes; but Jung has taught us that psychic reality, though different from the physical, is by no means inferior to it. This particular “psychism,” as Jung would have called it, was solid and tangible enough to leave material evidence of its presence, in an eerily perfect circle on the victim’s skin.
AFTERMATH
Barney Hill died on February 25, 1969, five years almost to the day after hypnotic regression brought him face to face with the enormity of what he’d endured. Cause of death: cerebral hemorrhage resulting from stroke. He was forty-six years old.
Betty Hill, a few years older than her husband, survived him by more than thirty-five years. A few years after her death in October 2004, her niece Kathleen Marden began lobbying for an official commemoration of the heroic pair whose love had transcended, however briefly, the shame and pain of their past. Marden’s efforts paid off. In 2011, shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of the abduction, a historical highway marker was set up near the spot where it was believed to have happened, under the seal of the State of New Hampshire:
BETTY AND BARNEY HILL INCIDENT
On the night of September 19–20, 1961, Portsmouth, NH couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of “lost” time while driving south on Rte 3 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.
Jointly they’d shaped a modern myth that, like all true myths, was also primordial and timeless. They planted it, seedlike, in the collective psyche of their nation. For years it quietly germinated. Near the end of the century it burst into fantastic bloom.
Notes
16. Given the central importance that the physical examination was to take on in the UFO abduction tradition, it’s worth quoting one slave-trade historian’s description of what such an examination might have involved in the eighteenth century:
“They are thoroughly examined, even to the smallest Member, and that naked too both Men and Women, without the least Distinction or Modesty.” . . . In order to avoid purchasing older slaves, captains were advised to check their teeth, examine their hair, and test the firmness of women’s breasts. . . . The Portuguese were especially picky in their examinations of slaves, spending as much as four hours inspecting each African, smelling their throats, making them laugh and sing, and finally licking the chins of the men to find out whether they had beards and thereby gauge their age. . . . “Every joint was made to crack; hips, armpits, and groins were also examined. The mouth was duly inspected, and when a tooth fell short it was noted down as a deduction. The eyesight was minutely observed, the voice and speech was called into request. Nothing was forgotten; even the fingers and toes had to undergo similar inspection.”
17. “My mouth was opened,” Barney remembered under hypnosis, “and I could feel two fingers pulling it back.” His ancestors must have felt exactly the same thing.
18. Could biological, epigenetic processes also have played a role in the echoing of the slave experience down the generations? In October 2007, PBS viewers learned from a NOVA program, appropriately entitled “Ghost in Your Genes,” about an isolated, famine-prone village in northern Sweden named Överkalix. Sifting through the village archive, researchers found clear evidence that experiences of feast or famine in the grandparents’ generation might shape the life expectancy of grandchildren who’d never known a hungry day. Could the trauma of slavery have been epigenetically heritable, like the trauma of hunger? And if so, how long might its effects have persisted? For now, at least, these questions have to lie open and unanswered.
19. Nor do I have the slightest idea what the shiny circles were that appeared on the trunk of the Hills’ car. (I haven’t been able to find out whether they eventually faded, and if so how long this took, or whether anyone but the Hills ever saw them.) These are small mysteries connected with the Hills’ experience, which are unlikely ever to be cleared up. By contrast, Macdonald has shown that the Hills’ “missing time” was no mystery at all. Driving sleep-deprived down a narrow, winding, unfamiliar mountain road in pitch darkness, Barney naturally went a great deal more slowly than he imagined.
