There is the sound of fear in a voice: a sudden gasp, a stutter or a suppressed scream. And then there is the sound of stark terror: an adult losing all control, blubbering and gasping for breath like a kid facing their worst nightmare.
That sound of unimaginable terror is what a psychiatrist recorded when he put a man named Barney Hill under hypnosis in his office one day in 1964. Hill was a World War II vet, a big guy with a Darth Vader baritone voice and an IQ of 140.
But when the psychiatrist asked him to relive a fateful night three years earlier, he broke down in hysterical sobbing. He said he and his wife, Betty, were tracked by a mysterious light on an isolated highway in the New Hampshire mountains one night and abducted by humanoid creatures in a UFO who forced them to undergo medical examinations.
The story Hill told would become arguably the most famous UFO abductee story ever. One historian said the Hills were the “Adam and Eve of alien abduction” stories. The couple’s tale was turned into a best-selling book and a movie starring James Earl Jones, and it has provided the template for nearly every depiction of an alien encounter in pop culture since.
A new book, however, claims that the story isn’t so much about aliens as it is about race. The Hills, an interracial couple who were also civil rights activists, told a story that reflected their growing disenchantment with the slow progress of the civil rights movement, says the historian Matthew Bowman in “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America.”
As America prepares to celebrate Halloween, Bowman’s book offers an unexpected racial dimension to the famous story. He, and others, have recast it as one of the spookiest stories about racism in American history.
Hellbound and Down 