Alien Abduction and Racial Anxiety: Barney and Betty Hill Reexamined, Pt. 3
ETs on TV / Repressed Memories
The following is the third and final part of an article I wrote in 2019 for a college class—reflections on the ever-present 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 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 this story, check out the Substack page Nuts & Boltzmann.
III. Cosmic Transmissions: ETs on TV (cont.)
In the pilot episode of the 1996 TV show Dark Skies, (a series on the heels of the then-immensely popular The X-Files,) Barney and Betty make a prominent appearance as the couple that incites the initial story arc of the entire program.1 It is their story that motivates the protagonist Jon Loengard (Eric Close) to investigate the UFO phenomenon more closely, moved by the pair’s honesty about their tragic encounter. Portrayed by Basil Wallace and Lee Garlington, the couple is depicted relatively accurately with their true names intact. The description of the event put forth in Dark Skies is also accurate from Barney and Betty’s original account. Race does not come into play until relatively late in the dialogue, but Barney is immediately skeptical of the government agent in their home, whereas Betty welcomes Jon Loengard in immediately. This may speak to the same anxieties about white authorities that Barney expressed in The UFO Incident. When Loengard tells the couple that they might have to speak before Congress and warns that “people might say things,” Barney responds: “I’m a black man married to a white woman—people already say things.” This is yet another instance of the abduction being related to racial anxieties directly: Loengard was assumedly referring to the fact that people might call the Hills crazy or hoaxers, but Barney immediately connects the same anxieties to his interracial marriage and the burdens that come with it. This is the Hills’ only appearance in Dark Skies, yet the impact of the case is emphasized through the fact that it is what encourages Loengard to continue to investigate UFOs and related phenomena.
The most recent depiction of the Hills in television came in 2019 with the History Channel’s Project Blue Book, a fictional retelling of exploits of the titular USAF government program which intended to investigate the UFO phenomenon. While the Hills did contact the Air Force regarding their sighting, (at the behest of Betty specifically,) Project Blue Book does not portray these events accurately, instead resorting to depicting Barney as unhinged from his traumatic experience and prone to violence. The episode, titled “Abduction”, attempts to remove itself from racial anxieties entirely by removing the interracial component: both the Barney and Betty representatives are Black (portrayed by Malcolm Goodwin and Khalilah Joi, respectively) and the Betty character is not abducted; Barney endures the experience alone. This undoes the possibility of Barney’s stress and trauma being attributed to the anxieties of being in an interracial marriage as was so often the case in skeptical treatments of the case. Project Blue Book instead opts to reposition Barney as a shell-shocked veteran. Despite attempting to remove the racial components of the case from the episode, editorial changes in Barney’s attitude render the character an offensive portrayal. Instead of the mild-mannered and soft-spoken Barney that is seen throughout non-fictional accounts of the case, Project Blue Book depicts Barney as highly disturbed and violent, barging into Blue Book’s offices brandishing a gun. He threatens to shoot the show’s protagonists unless they listen to his story and give him the medical help he requires. Barney was always reluctant to come forward with his story and to depict him threatening investigators so belligerently is out of character and does a disservice to the actual event. The episode further removes the consistent ambiguity between racial anxiety and abduction experience by revealing that Barney has physical traces of the experience implanted in his neck that are causing his physical and mental symptoms. Although the episode removes the racial component from the abduction itself, it does not avoid racial issues in general: The Barney character is shot (non-fatally) as the episode ends. The ultimate point of doing violence to a Black man at the episode’s close is not entirely apparent. The show does not make any moral judgement regarding the matter and, in its ambiguity, Project Blue Book implies the shooting was not entirely undeserved. So ends one of the most recent depictions of Barney and Betty Hill in television: The History Channel program attempted to remove the racial anxiety so bound up in the Hill abduction and instead resorted to inaccurate portrayals and government-sanctioned violence on a Black man.2
Beyond Project Blue Book’s depiction of the Hills, a 2018 VR experience attempted to deal with race and alien abduction more fully than the films and television examined. Angel Manuel Soto’s Dinner Party is a film based on the Hill abduction that wants to address the consistent crossover between racial anxiety and alien abduction. Soto says of his intentions: “I thought this was a cool way to put people in a place to experience ideas about race and privilege. With VR, you can’t look away. You see that many of the experiences of their abduction are influenced by race. I wanted people to understand what it means to be brown in America.”3 (With the recent release of Matthew Bowman’s 2023 book The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, acknowledgement of the racial dynamics in the Hill abduction appears to be coming into vogue, long overdue.)
IV. Repressed Memories: Afterthoughts
After seeking help for their personal traumas, Barney and Betty continued the social work and civil rights work that had occupied much of their time before the incident. Fuller notes that Barney’s “activities on the Board of Directors of the United States Civil Rights Commission, the NAACP, and the Anti-Poverty Program kept him inordinately active and occupied in his spare time.” In fact, “the overwhelming sense of relief and unburdening from the sessions (…) helped him to function better.”4 They avoided publicity for the incident entirely until a local reporter somehow got ahold of Dr. Simon’s hypnosis tapes and printed a story on them. Having no apparent legal recourse in the matter, they decided it would be better for them to tell their story in full so that no details would be sensationalized or omitted.
As with many stories in UFO literature, the Hill abduction tale continued well past the event itself into the experiences of more questionable sources.5 In 1976, a Maine-based physician, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, relayed a story of his encounter with a Man in Black who warned him to delete all files pertaining to a UFO witness with an ominous threat. The MIB requested a coin from Hopkins’ pocket, “as if he were about to perform a magic trick.” Hopkins reports:
It suddenly began to develop a silvery color—and the silver became blue, and then I had trouble focusing. I could focus on my hand perfectly well—that was my reference point—but the coin was simply gone. Not abruptly. It simply slowly dematerialized—it just wasn’t there any more (sic), I didn’t smell anything. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t hear anything.6
The MIB followed up this bizarre display by asking Hopkins if he had ever heard of Barney Hill, “who had recently died and lived nearby.” Hopkins had heard the name but did not know Barney Hill personally. The MIB purportedly gave Hopkins the menacing reply that “just as you do not have a coin, so he no longer has a heart.”7 Hopkins’ nephew would later write that his uncle “was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else.”8 There is no evidence that Barney lacked his heart when he died—he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the premature age of 46, likely fueled by the stress of his experience and the subsequent publicity. Such a report seems to erase the actual strife the event caused Barney, attributing his death not to the compounding stresses in his life but to shadowy forces that wanted to keep him quiet. It seems that even in death, Barney cannot escape the experience he was reluctant to admit in the first place.
Betty, too, was unable to escape her abductee past, as hard as she may have tried. Susan Lepselter notes that after Barney’s death, Betty’s interests shifted to areas other than ufology and her shared experience with her husband. She found herself “growing tired of representing the mystery of UFOs,” and instead “stud(ied) her own genealogy (…) immersed in an old family story” of “one of her Pilgrim ancestors was captured by Indians.”9 Lepselter remarks that “this is what Betty Hill wants to be known for, instead of her alien abduction: the Indian captivity narrative lying dormant in her genealogy of abduction stories.”10 But this attempt at shifting interests indicates that Betty never truly left the realm of racially charged abduction stories—making the turn to her family history more of a continuation of her own abduction experience. Betty died in 2004, never remarrying after Barney’s death and continuing to give occasional talks at UFO conferences.
SF scholar De Witt Douglas Kilgore notes “that the dominant tradition of SF either metaphorizes race as a way of avoiding very real issues or creates endless iterations of colorblind futures.”11 In this sense, the Hill abduction has come to resemble a version of real-life SF. While the contactee narratives that proceeded it envisioned one of these “colorblind futures,” Barney and Betty Hill’s ET encounter has become an event affected by racial anxiety without always expressing it outright. It is a case that fascinatingly both avoids and addresses race—the final conclusions are a vague in-between of racial anxieties and actual fantastic experience. These ambiguities reflect how the case is dealt with in fiction: The television depictions illustrate a broader picture of the variable presence or absence of race in the Hills’ experience. It becomes an inherently difficult effort to separate the story from the cultural context its experiencers found themselves in. The Hills’ interracial marriage serves as “a crucial mark of specificity,” the experience itself is packed with racial allusions, and the very subject of ufology is historically pockmarked by racial interests. Amidst repressed memories, dreams, and actual events, the true nature of the abduction of Barney and Betty Hill is hard to pin down. It could be a combination of these elements—Barney’s racial anxieties, Betty’s lifelike dreams, or a real anomalous encounter between the two of them—but race is omnipresent. Race is a means by which both skeptics and believers distinguish both the abductors and the abductees and explain away the case. Race defines the abduction of Barney and Betty, just as it defined their existence as an interracial couple. More importantly, race continually defines a large swath of ufological narratives. Barney and Betty’s experience was not only an immensely important case in ufology and UFO mythos—the narrative, and its many retellings and adaptations, make the trend of racial concerns within alien abduction literature abundantly clear and pronounced.
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With my current perspective on the Hill abduction, I believe that state-sanctioned violence on an interracial couple or a later military operation explains many unsettling facets of the encounter. It is for this reason that I think these articles have been important, their existence as progressive, civil rights activists, and maybe even pro-Soviet communists is integral to why they would be targeted by these forces at all. Seriously, check out the important work of Boltzmann Booty here.
Idelson, Karen. “VR Storytelling Gets More Democratic.” Variety, 8 May 2018. Page 75.
Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer”. New York: The Dial Press, 1966. Page 286. Available here.
Though it could be more fully articulated in a larger work, UFO stories and other esoteric subject matters are among the most versatile when it comes to utilization of a broad swath of mediums. As indicated by the Hill abduction, although the written word is prominent, it can make its way into fiction, non-fiction, television shows, TV movies, radio, and runs the full gamut of internet mediums.
Randles, Jenny. The Truth Behind Men in Black. New York: St. Martins Press, 1997. Page 172. Available here.
Ibid., page 173.
Hopkins, Howard. “The Truth About a Man in Black.” Dark Bits. 13 January 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20080524015603/http://howardhopkins.blogspot.com/2008/01/truth-about-man-in-black.html.
Lepselter, Susan. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Page 67-68. Available here.
Ibid., page 67.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. “Difference Engine: Aliens, Robots, and Other Racial Matters in the History of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1. March 2011. Page 18. Available here.