Alien Abduction and Racial Anxiety: Barney and Betty Hill Reexamined, Pt. 1

Introduction / Screen Memories

To ring in New Year’s with a bang, here is an article I wrote in 2019 for a college class—reflections on the constantly recurring topic of Barney and Betty Hill. While my opinion on the Hill abduction has veered heavily into the idea of it being a complex military operation, this more straightforward and academic cultural analysis of the Hills may still be of interest to Getting Spooked readers. For my more recent writing on this formative alien abduction narrative, read Forbidden Science Dispatches #1. Additionally, for an ongoing series tackling the more parapolitical elements at work in the story, check out the Substack page Nuts & Boltzmann. Due to its length, this piece will be released in several parts over the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy.

There are cases where the same collective cause produces identical or similar effects, i.e., the same visionary images and interpretations in the very people who are least prepared for such phenomena and least inclined to believe in them. This fact gives the eyewitness accounts an air of particular credibility: it is usually emphasized that the witness is above suspicion because he was never distinguished for his lively imagination or credulousness but, on the contrary, for his cool judgment and critical reason.

— C.G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959)

I. Introduction: Taken

In the late hours of September 19^th and the early morning of September 20^th, 1961, an interracial couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Barney and Betty Hill, experienced one of the most bizarre encounters in the annals of ufology. Driving home from a short vacation in Montreal, the pair saw a luminous object in the sky. After observing it for a few miles, they began to feel as though the object was following them. This pursuit continued for several hours with the Hills keeping a constant eye on the object. Barney observed the object through binoculars and saw a disc-shaped craft with portholes and could observe beings looking out. After growing paranoid about the object and its inhabitants following them, the couple tried evasive maneuvers, but it seemed to follow them. Their memory of the event becomes spotty at this point. After a series of beeping noises, the Hills lose most recollection of the night until a second series of beeping noises wakes them from a stupor. They were 35 miles down the road from the point they last recalled. Shaken, they trudged home to Portsmouth. Their behavior after the encounter was comparably strange to the event itself:

“When we arrived at our house,” Barney said later, “and Betty got out and took the dog on her leash to walk her around the yard, I got out of the car and began taking things out. Betty said she wanted me to throw the food from the refrigerator out, and to keep the rest of the things from the car out of the house. I could hardly wait until I was able to get every­ thing from the car to the back porch so that I could go into the bath­room, where I took a mirror and began looking over my body. And I don't know, I didn't know why at the time, but I felt unclean. With a grime different from what usually accumulates on a trip. Somewhat clammy. Betty and I both went to the window, and then I opened the back door, and we both looked skyward. And I went into the bedroom and looked around. I can't describe it—it was a presence. Not that the presence was there with us, but something very puzzling had happened.”¹

Barney was plagued by a consistent PTSD-like response to the incident, feeling that a “mental block” was in place, preventing him from recalling specific details about it. He started drinking heavily and developed worsening ulcers. Betty’s experience was more positive, although she too had nightmares related to the experience. Unlike Barney, she dove deep into UFO literature to attempt to understand their experience better. Eventually, with Betty’s prodding, the couple wound up speaking with Air Force officials, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), and eventually psychologist Benjamin Simon. As the Hills attempted to come to grips with the fantastic events that happened to them, both gave largely consistent stories about the event through hypnosis. Their descriptions of the craft, its occupants, and the details of their capture were similar enough to make their experience a relatively convincing case of human abduction by unknown entities. The event received widespread media attention upon the publication of John G. Fuller’s non-fiction book about the incident, The Interrupted Journey. Since the Hills’ case was first reported, it has widely been considered by ufologists as one of the first and most believable instances of human abduction by flying saucer occupants.² The descriptions of the beings aboard the ship in their encounter also became the ubiquitous description of ETs in several abductions after the encounter and in popular culture: the bulbous-headed, black-eyed grey aliens.

The experience of Barney and Betty Hill has been reproduced in various forms of print and visual media, but the role race played in the event is portrayed in equally varying ways. “The fact of their mixed race (unusual in a married couple at the time) is always a noted point of the story,” anthropology professor Susan Lepselter writes. “It’s not a detail crucial to the UFO abduction itself, but it is a crucial mark of specificity, a particularizing fact. (…) It resonates implicitly with the themes of race and hybridity in captivity narratives of the past, and abduction stories to come.”³ This series of articles is a continued exploration of these themes, examining the non-fiction accounts but reaching beyond them into the realm of fiction, where Barney and Betty have enjoyed an extended stay. Their story is constantly retold, utilized, and embellished for fictional television shows and movies in which race consistently plays a major role.

II. Screen Memories / Peace from Venus: The Non-fiction Texts

As Lepselter notes, race as the “crucial mark of specificity” in the case reappears continually in the non-fiction narrative of the events. Even Fuller’s early account of the incident was a book obsessed with race. “To say that The Interrupted Journey has racial overtones is a bit like saying that Moby-Dick has nautical overtones,” anthropologist Christopher F. Roth writes.⁴ These overtones are constructed through the very establishment of its protagonists, Barney and Betty. Barney is described early-on as a post office employee and active NAACP member. Fuller notes how “all through (Barney’s) family background was a record of interracial relationships.” His paternal great-grandmother was the daughter of a slave born to a white plantation owner and his paternal grandfather was “a proud Ethiopian freeman” who married his fair-skinned grandmother.⁵ Barney had children from a previous marriage and was consistently wracked with guilt about his absence from their lives. Betty was a child welfare worker from “an old Yankee family” that could trace its roots back to the 1600s. Fuller is careful to note Betty’s progressive attitudes, carried on largely from her mother who “helped to organize, led strikes, and became a member of the union's Executive Board.” Her mother also “impressed her by saying that although some people did not like colored people, this was wrong because they were people just like everyone else.”⁶ Betty took these teachings to heart and began combating critics of her interracial neighbors. Fuller further includes the story of how Betty befriended a socially isolated Black student in college. The text reads not so much as Betty overcompensating for white guilt, but rather as Fuller overcompensating on behalf of Betty to eliminate any possibility that there were even hints racial tension in the marriage. “Their problems as an interracial couple (were) minimal,” Fuller writes, noting that Barney showed the most concern “about rejection in public places: hotels, restaurants or meetings” although it rarely ever happened.⁷ The pair was socially and politically active: “Together, they stumped the state of New Hampshire speaking for the cause of Civil Rights.” Barney was “legal redress chairman of the Portsmouth NAACP” and “also a member of the State Advisory Board of the United States Civil Rights Commission.” Betty was “a social worker for the state of New Hampshire” and an “assistant secretary and community coordinator for the NAACP.”⁸

Skeptics contemporary to the event and those in the present insist that Barney’s experience was one of racial anxiety. They find Barney to be “a man under enormous pressure,” variously noting his “long daily commute to his job in Boston, the necessity of sleeping during daylight hours, his physical separation from his sons,” and “the social stigma of a black man in an almost all-white state married to a white woman.” Some skeptics conclude that “all this took a toll on his health,” both physically and mentally.⁹ Others would note the similarities his descriptions of the UFO occupants had to an alien creature in a recently aired episode of The Outer Limits, “The Bolero Shield”. Homing in on the “wraparound eyes” depicted in this episode, critics note that ETs of this type did not appear in the real-life UFO mythos until the Hills’ encounter.¹⁰ Insisting that Barney was unconsciously basing his description of the UFO occupant on an SF movie monster is an interesting move by skeptics given that most movie monsters were racialized others; insisting that Barney was creating an “other” leaves the possibility open that he was effectively othering the white race. This notion lines up with Roth’s interpretation of excerpts from Barney’s hypnosis transcript:

His first glimpse, through binoculars aimed at the saucer’s windows, is of a face like “a red-headed Irishman,” an impression he attributes to the fact that “Irish are usually hostile to Negroes.” Next to the “Irishman,” staring directly at Barney, is a less friendly alien who looks “like a German Nazi” with “a black scarf around his neck.”¹¹

Barney would even say that “it did not seem that they had different faces from white men.”¹² An alternate interpretation of Barney’s experience is that he was experiencing an uncanny doubling—experiencing himself as an “other.” Such a concept aligns with the work of Louis Chude-Sokei, who writes that the “discourse of uncanny doubles and machines” is thoroughly “imbricated (…) with the anxieties of race.”¹³ In uncanny racialized doubling, “the Negro was in fact neither human nor animal, but something or somewhere either in between or incommensurably beyond.”¹⁴ As in Freud’s own description of the concept, Barney’s experience included a bizarre moment with the “eyes” of the beings: “He felt two eyes coming close to his, seemingly pushing into his eyes, and he was helpless to resist. Then his mind went blank, he closed his eyes, and he thought of nothing more.”¹⁵ However, given Barney’s own descriptions of the beings as having noticeable Caucasian traits, this interpretation is less likely. Indeed, because of this description, the abduction lines up partially with previous extraterrestrial encounters with their motives reversed. The obsession of race that consistently inundates the Hills’ experience is consistent in the UFO subculture, a culture that has latched onto racial differentiation since its very first stirrings. The Hills’ abduction experience being so closely connected with the race of its experiencers is nothing new to the realm of ufology.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider supporting the continuation of this newsletter through a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to over a dozen archived articles and a warm feeling inside. I also started a referral program that rewards archive access to those who share the newsletter with others. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Special thanks to The Anomalist for continued coverage of the most recent Forbidden Science Dispatches. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer”. New York: The Dial Press, 1966. Page 19-20. https://archive.org/details/the-interrupted-journey-two-lost-hours-aboard-a-flying-saucer-john-fuller.

2. Brown, Bridget. They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Page 25-26. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/76145.

3. Lepselter, Susan. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Page 65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gk08ms.

4. Roth, Christopher F. “Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult.” E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Ed. Debora Battaglia. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Page 62.

5. Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer”. New York: The Dial Press, 1966. Page 55.

6. Ibid., page 9.

7. Ibid., page 9-10.

8. Ibid., page 16.

9. Sheaffer, Robert. “Over the Hill on UFO Abductions.” The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 31, No. 6. November/December 2007. Page 52. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2007/11/22164518/p52.pdf.

10. Nickell, Joe. “Extraterrestrial Iconography.” The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 21, No. 5. September/October 1997. Page 18. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1997/09/22165003/p18.pdf.

11. Roth, Christopher F. “Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult.” E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Ed. Debora Battaglia. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Page 64.

12. Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer”. New York: The Dial Press, 1966. Page 124.

13. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “The Uncanny History of Minstrels and Machines, 1835-1923” in Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Page 114. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/18830.

14. Ibid., page 116.

15. Friedman, Stanton T. and Kathleen Marden. Captured!: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. Franklin Lakes: New Page Books, 2007. Page 114. https://archive.org/details/capturedbettybar0000mard.