Demi Moore and Coleman Domingo are starring in a new movie about Betty and Barney Hill, the first two Americans to claim they were abducted by aliens. The Hills, an interracial couple at a time, 1961, when there were very few such relationships, saw a strange light in the sky on a highway in New Hampshire. Small gray beings with big black eyes surrounded their car and took them onto their ship, they said, where they performed medical procedures upon them that implied harvesting sperm from Barney and implanting something in Betty.
Little in their story, which included an alien sticking a large needle into Betty’s navel and telling her it was a pregnancy test, made much sense. “The psychologist, Benjamin Simon, the person who put them under hypnosis and under whose care they produced this story, thought it was a confabulation,” explains Matthew Bowman, associate professor of religion and history at Claremont Graduate University, who authored a fascinating scholarly account of the case in 2023, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill (Yale University Press). (You can listen to my podcast with Bowman above.)
Simon believed the Hills experienced racial suspicion and hostility on a trip, which had “led them to generate a sense of being persecuted. They thus generated this story based in part on a series of nightmares that Betty had after the trip,” explained Bowman. Others have pointed out that sci-fi TV shows contained aliens similar to the ones the Hills described. And, in recent decades, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others have demonstrated that memory can be altered or influenced through suggestion and questioning, not just hypnosis.
Bowman builds on Simon’s work and points out that the Hills, like many other Americans during the period, became more skeptical of the establishment. “By the mid-1970s, Barney Hill is dead, and Betty Hill has moved largely into what many people today would call conspiracy belief and into the new age movement.”
At the same time, Bowman is quick to point out that the Hills saw something unusual in the sky. “They were telling people about that as early as the next day or two days later,” said Bowman. “So you might be able to explain the abduction through hypnosis… but you cannot then explain the strange craft that they saw in the sky with appeals to hypnosis’s ability to generate these sorts of memories.”
