This book was not what I was expecting- in fact, it was so much better. This is a kind of critical and broad analysis of a famous incident that I have never seen before.
I was a huge UFO enthusiast growing up, and as I got older two things happened.
First, I became more and more skeptical with age and education, and eventually stopped believing in the core conceits of most famous UFO cases like the Hills.
Second, those "classic" cases all kept ascending higher into "mythology" with every passing year. Each retelling takes details for granted, repeating broad strokes from earlier retellings and distilling the event down to a sort of community-accepted canon. Stories like these have been refined down to a simple, consistent campfire story devoid of nuance or humanity. That was a huge loss for the Hills and their story, because the state of the civil rights movement really was deeply intertwined with their experience.
This book throws decades of pop culture away and starts over at the beginning. It is agressively *not* about the UFO experience that defined these two lives- although it certainly covers that in detail. Rather, it is about *who* they were as their lives led to that point, and how that experience affected who they became afterwards. Rather than dwelling on the scientific case for the abduction phenomenon, it talks about the psychology and the context of the experience and the culture they were living in.
The watered down and mass-market version of the story has always shrugged off the striking issue of being an interracial married couple in the 1960s. They were not a typical pair of American citizens by any stretch; they were two people from very different backgrounds living a very stressful life, and they had a lot to lose by becoming a public spectacle. The state of the civil rights movement, especially the split between the "moderate" liberals seeking respectability and the movements assertively demanding equity, was the catalyst behind so many events for Betty and Barney Hill.
This book goes profoundly deep into journals and interviews to find what brought these two together, what views they shared (or did not) regarding the supernatural, and how they both saw their shared UFO experience in wildly different ways. The state of post-war science and intellectualism, especially the hotbed of growing Cold War pop pseudoscience, created many forces of push-and-pull on the Hills, on one hand trying to influence their interpretations and on the other hand trying to leverage them to support other causes. It paints such a complete picture of the perceptions and attitudes of the time that, by the end of the book, you will find yourself of two minds: the common pop culture of today (of aliens and saucers and abductions) and the fresh, untreaded ground of their moment in 1961, where the entire experience was so surreal and unprecedented that there were no assumptions that could apply.
More than anything, this book is a triumph for so deeply re-humanizing Barney Hill, a man whose identity has been stretched, blended, bleached and watered down for sixty years. His relationships, his faith, and his struggles have long been erased from history for sake of a marketable UFO story. He and Betty's history as activists and the burdens they carried being on the forefront of the civil rights revolution cannot be separated from their story. Where Betty's spirituality and optimism made her abduction experience a transformative one, Barney's constant anxiety- that of a life lived on guard from abuse and judgment- made it a deeply tormenting one.
For a work of retrospective nonfiction, it managed to feel deeply personal. When the events reach Barney's relatively early death, it genuinely feels unfair. As the search for meaning consumes Betty, you can feel her spiraling without him.
This book never espouses that their experiences are proof of alien life or anything of the sort: just that their intents were genuine, and what they experienced deeply troubled them. The author, having already done exceptional research, walks an impossibly fine line advocating for these *people* without advocating for any interpretations of the UFO experience. It is a wonderful work of sympathy and curiosity, and I commend him for writing something that has affected me so much.
If I must criticize anything, it is the audio narration: perhaps it bolsters the book's sense of stoic impartiality, but I find the narrator terribly robotic. I was actually annoyed at first that they had gone with a digital text-to-speech for narration, and then I realized this really was a real person! It simply feels like listening to an automated speech generator.
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