A Heavenly Message with Great Significance?

3,847 words

Matthew Bowman
The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023

The decade of the 1960s began with American society on a high. That high was reflected in the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a presidency which came to be called Camelot. The American social narrative at that time held that all problems, especially “racism,” could be solved through laws, direct action, and technology. Most Americans trusted the United States government to do the right thing, and those same Americans likewise trusted mainstream scientists and technical experts and regularly attended church. Politically, Camelot was made possible by the New Deal coalition, which was carrying on the traditions of the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This coalition was increasingly focused on “civil rights.”

Society had unraveled by the end of the decade. Race relations were at a low point, and church attendance was down. Meanwhile, new religious ideas were becoming accepted and spreading. By 1974, most Americans had also stopped trusting the government, as well as scientists and experts.

Dr. Matthew Bowman, a Religious Studies professor who focuses on Mormonism, examines this massive social change through the peculiar experience of an interracial couple, Betty and Barney Hill. The Hills’ story began on September 19, 1961, when the pair saw a strange light during an overnight drive through the Franconia Notch in rural New Hampshire. The Hills arrived home later than they expected, and then experienced nightmares and anxiety for a long time thereafter. They eventually sought psychiatric help.

While in psychiatric care, the couple underwent hypnosis where both recalled that they had been abducted by aliens from a distant planet, brought aboard their spacecraft, subjected to medical experiments, and then released. Betty further said she had gotten a look at a “star chart” aboard the craft which showed the location of their abductors’ home planet.

Their story became fairly widely-known over the course of the decade. They filed a report with the US Air Force on September 21, 1961, and also gave a presentation to the Two-State UFO Study group in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1963. In 1965, a reporter who specialized in offbeat stories named John Luttrell published a string of exposés about the pair in a paper called the Boston Traveler. As a result, the Hills’ tale spread rapidly through the mainstream media. Betty and Barney decided to get in front of the gossip and told their side of the story in a book written by John G. Fuller called The Interrupted Journey (1966). They also secured a sympathetic article in the then-popular Look magazine in its October 4 issue of that year.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book The Eldritch Evola here.

There is plenty to be skeptical about regarding the story of Betty and Barney Hill. At a minimum, recovered memories from hypnotic sessions are almost always false. Regardless, Bowman doesn’t attempt to prove or disprove the story. Instead, he looks at the issue from the perspective of the religious, racial, and political events of the time. This makes Bowman’s book worth reviewing.

Dr. Bowman’s viewpoint is not “red-pilled.” He puts the integrationist wing of the “civil rights” movement into a larger political wave which he unironically calls the “Black Freedom” movement. This movement included more radical voices such as that of Malcolm X rather than the establishment-approved desegregation activists such as Martin Luther King. Any statements in this review which deal honestly with white concerns or sub-Saharan crime are therefore my own.

The Rise of the “Nones,” New England Folk Magic, and the Flying Saucer Craze

In the early 1960s weekly church attendance, especially in mainline Protestant denominations, was higher than during the nineteenth century, but this would soon change with the rise of what Bowman calls the “Nones.” These are people who tell pollsters that they don’t identify with any religion. Although the “Nones” do not identify with a particular denomination, however, they usually have spiritual practices that appear quite religious. The “Nones” began to appear in the early 1960s.

New England’s founding population came from the English region of East Anglia, and the early colonists brought with them traditional folk magic practices of southeast England. In his book Albion’s Seed (1989), historian David Hackett Fischer writes:

The Puritan Funders of Massachusetts, like most of their Christian contemporaries, lived in a world of wonders. They believed that unicorns lived in the hills beyond the Hudson, that mermaids swam in the waters off Cape Ann, and that tritons played in Casco Bay.[1]

While those supernatural beliefs were not entirely unknown among other Anglo-American types,

[t]he [East Anglian Puritan colonists] carried to New England several forms of magical obsession which, though not unique, were very special in their intensity. One of these beliefs might be called providential magic, for it was closely linked to the Puritans’ faith in the all-powerful rule of God’s Providence.[2]

This combined worldview of wonders and belief in Providence led to a culture which encouraged its members to search for wonders and record them. Fischer writes:

Many such wonders presented themselves to the people of New England. Their diaries tell us that heads without bodies would sometimes appear before them. Animals would appear to change their shapes; dishes would suddenly dance upon the table; doors and windows would mysteriously fly open and shut. They heard God and the Devil speak to them through the mouths of children. Dark warnings were detected in the whisper of the wind and the babbling of streams. Heavenly messages of high significance were thought to be written in the clouds that scudded across the ever-changing New England sky.[3]

New Englanders also used seer stones. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, Jr., practiced a form of folk magic which was very similar to that of the Puritan colonists from whom he descended. He translated The Book of Mormon into English using seer stones and many of his followers used divining rods.

In 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing bright metallic objects in the sky which he called saucers. The media caught wind of the story, and the “flying saucer craze” soon followed. Many prominent people weighed in on the matter, including the psychologist Carl Jung. President Truman was alarmed by this and demanded an investigation after flying saucers were seen over Washington, DC in 1952.

As a result of this investigation, the US Air Force replaced the term “flying saucer” with “unidentified flying object” (UFO). Air Force researchers, ordinary eyewitnesses, and a raft of interested enthusiasts who came to be called Ufologists presumed that the objects must be some form of flying technology. Most did not believe that the objects were supernatural, such as angels or demons. UFOs were also not thought to be living creatures in themselves, like a flying version of Bigfoot, although many thought that some sort of beings might be aboard the objects. There was one Ufologist, George Adamski, who had a spiritual view of UFOs, merging the early saucer sightings with the New Age religion of Theosophy in the late 1940s.

Betty the Yankee, Barney the African Integrator, and the Unitarians

Bowman subscribes to the historical school of thought called the “Long ‘60s,” which holds that the political chaos of the “’60s” actually starts in 1954, with the disastrous Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision — an outcome shaped by the Jew Felix Frankfurter’s unethical methods — and ends with President Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The abduction of Betty and Barney falls into this period, and it can be interpreted as a spiritual expression of the problems and changes which were taking place.

Betty Hill née Barrett (1919-2004) was a Yankee with some Irish ancestry. Most of her ancestors had arrived in New Hampshire around the year 1630. She was not raised in a particularly religious household. When  she asked her parents if fairies were real as a young girl, she was encouraged to investigate for herself. After looking at dew-covered blades of grass, under the leaves of trees, and reading up on the matter, she determined that they were not.

Betty first married a man who had three children of his own, but she herself was unable to conceive. The marriage was troubled, so she left when the youngest child turned 16. In the late 1950s she met Barney Hill, who was also divorced and had two children of his own who were being raised by their mother.

Barney Hill (1922-1969) was a Second World War veteran from a family of Negro sharecroppers who had lived in Virginia. They later migrated to Philadelphia, where he was influenced by an established sub-Saharan community there called the Old Philadelphians. This community believed in racial integration and black respectability. These black activists were also taking advantage of the federal programs that the Roosevelt administration was then offering. The most important programs of the 1940s were the housing projects, which eventually became storage areas for sub-Saharans. These projects started to fall apart before long, but that didn’t become noticeable until the mid-1960s.

Betty and Barney met while both were on vacation in the late 1950s, and they married in 1960. Betty was working as a social worker, while Barney worked for the US Postal Service. They became Unitarians and attended the South Church in Portsmouth. Their minister was John Papandrew, also a veteran. Father Papandrew was a fervent supporter of “civil rights” and was extremely proud to have been arrested alongside  Martin Luther King, Jr. during one of his semi-criminal stunts. King and Papandrew had continued to correspond, and Papandrew was pushing for integration through his ministry.

The Unitarian denomination is a daughter religion of Puritanism. In 1961, it merged with the Universalists, which was also an offshoot of the Puritans’ fervent faith. The Hills were attracted to the Unitarians because of Papandrew’s full-throated “civil rights” activism. Bowman writes:

Throughout [Papandrew’s] ministry he leaned heavily on mid-century theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr. They led the neo-orthodox movement that became popular in postwar American Christianity because it reconciled faith with modern science and the global traumas of the Holocaust and world wars. Neo-orthodox Christians argued that the fundamental realities Christianity taught were less about miracles and heaven than the paradoxes of modern life. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden might not be true, but the reality that human beings were prone to sin was painfully tangible in a world scarred by the atomic bomb and racial segregation.[4]

The Hills were dedicated to “civil rights” and also involved in the Jewish-created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Barney was a sought-after public speaker. Because of his “civil rights” work, he and Betty were even invited to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inauguration in 1965. That same year, Barney was appointed to New Hampshire’s advisory committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. He also worked on an economic committee and was friends with the prominent Kennedy administration official, Sargent Shriver.

Thus, even though the Hills were ordinary people with ordinary jobs, they were personally connected to some of the most powerful liberal activists and “civil rights” pushers in America at the time. They were likewise practicing their faith in a religious denomination whose ethos corresponded to the activism of the New Deal faction of the Democratic Party. Their story was therefore impossible to dismiss.

The Politicization of Science

Betty and Barney reported their abduction to Major Paul Henderson, who worked at nearby Pease Air Force Base, on September 21, 1961. Barney hadn’t wanted to call the Air Force, but Betty was insistent. Both believed in science, but Betty became frustrated with Major Henderson’s rush to complete the report. Henderson also seemed skeptical of their story. Later, the couple’s psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, also expressed skepticism.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book Green Nazis in Space! here.

Betty continued to dig. Within a week of the abduction, she checked out a book from the library called The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955) by one of the most prominent Ufologists, Major Donald Keyhoe. Keyhoe had served in the US Marine Corps as an aviator and had traveled with Charles A. Lindbergh, a prominent aviator, American isolationist, and white advocate, when Lindbergh was on tour. Keyhoe had also written the book The Flying Saucers are Real in 1950. Keyhoe’s books sold well, perhaps in the millions, and he was interviewed by the mainstream media. Keyhoe believed that the US government knew more about the UFOs than it was admitting, and that there was a big coverup.

A woman named Marjorie Fish was inspired by Betty Hill’s drawing of the star chart, and she decided to find out exactly from where her putative abductors could have originated. She turned her living room into a three-dimensional model of the nearby stars and researched astronomy books for several years before settling on a plausible source: Zeta Reticuli. In 1974, Astronomy magazine published Fish’s findings. The astronomy community was predictably divided. Science populizer Carl Sagan rejected the map entirely.

The controversy over the star map and Betty Hill’s frustration with the experts was a microcosm of a much larger phenomenon. Americans were losing faith in the official scientific narrative. She and Barney had seen something, but that something was dismissed by the experts. The Hills were not alone. Many Americans likewise sensed that there was an agenda behind the official scientific narrative. Many of the scientists who were working on nuclear technology were in fact spying for the Soviet Union, for example. In the field of anthropology, Jewish activists were spinning a narrative that denied obvious racial realities. Ultimately, the border between science and pseudoscience is blurry and ill-defined, and there is no such thing as settled science.

The Failure of “Civil Rights”

Betty’s recollection of the aliens under hypnosis was emotionally neutral. She was more interested in the creatures than afraid of them, and speculated that they came from a cold planet because they had “Mongoloid” features. Betty had seen lectures by Carlton Coon, who had spoken about how environmental pressures shape the features of different races.

Barney was quite fearful during his own recollection of the affair under hypnosis, however. He described the aliens in racial terms: as “Irish” and “Nazis.” It turned out that on the night that had found the Hills alone on an isolated mountain road, he had been quite anxious about racial matters. He was certain that the service workers and others whom he met along the way as they were driving were hostile toward him due to his interracial marriage, and he feared “hoodlums” with ducktail haircuts.

In the first years of the “Long ‘60s,” it was possible for the liberal media to frame the young, white Southern men who had the fashionable haircuts of the time as impediments to the utopia being promised by “civil rights.” Barney’s fears of white violence were part of a media-created narrative, although that narrative was about to become unsustainable. Already in 1961, the cities of the North which had seen a large-scale sub-Saharan influx were beginning to experiencing a rise in crime, which made life untenable for whites. This became impossible to ignore by the end of the decade.

In the early 1960s, the Unitarian-Universalist denomination was beginning to notice problems with “civil rights” as well. The denomination sought out sub-Saharans for leadership posts as well as for jobs as “civil rights workers,” but few were responding. Within the ranks, many white Unitarian-Universalists began quietly giving up on the push for “civil rights.”

The Hills’ own minister, Reverend Papandrew, was approached by a delegation of his church’s members in 1962 who implored him to curtail his push for “civil rights.” In response, he contacted the Unitarian Universalist denominational offices in early 1963 and quietly added his name to the pool of available ministers, accepting a new position in Miami in 1964.

By 1965, “civil rights” organizations were rejecting white volunteers due to the influence of increasingly radical black separatists. This soon spread to the liberal churches. Bowman writes:

In October 1967, Dana McLean Greeley, the head of the Unitarian Universalist Association, called to order the Emergency Conference on the Unitarian Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion. More than a hundred delegates, more than a third of them Black [sic], attended. In his opening remarks Greeley called for the denomination to show more commitment to racial equality. And then the Black [sic] delegates withdrew. Four-fifths of them elected to join a new Black Caucus, excluding white delegates, talking among themselves about what it meant to be part of a minority in an overwhelmingly white denomination.[5]

The white liberals at the conference were stunned by this rejection. The denomination soon shed the few black members it had. Barney Hill felt the tensions acutely throughout. He was frustrated by his denomination’s collapse under the pressures that were being caused by integration.

Barney was also disheartened in his job as a “legal redress officer” for the NAACP. The organization had sent sub-Saharans to various Portsmouth barber shops to see if they were refused service. Several shops indeed did so. One of the owners was then charged with violating “civil rights” laws and the owner, Charles Sprague, admitted he had violated the law. He had thought the law was unconstitutional. Barney realized that many solid citizens had rejected the ideology of “civil rights” entirely. What he didn’t realize, however, was that his actions in pushing around barber-shop owners were a form of tyranny in itself.

Betty After Barney

On February 25, 1969, Barney felt a pain in the back of his neck and collapsed. It was a cerebral hemorrhage. He later died in the hospital at the age of 46. After his funeral, Betty saw a UFO similar to the one which had abducted her earlier, and she shouted to it that Barney had died. She continued to see UFOs thereafter and documented her sightings. There is much to be skeptical about in her claims. During one sighting that took place when she was in the company of reporters, it was clear that the mysterious light was coming from a fixture atop a distant barn.

You can buy Tito Perdue’s Materials for All Future Historians here.

Betty continued attending her Unitarian church, but along with her fellow Unitarian, Marjorie Fish, and many others she began to practice what was in effect a new religion that was an offshoot of the New Age movement. The New Age isn’t a structured religion in the usual sense, instead being a classification of several religious movements. One strain includes the idea that UFOs contain “Ascended Masters” who are attempting to communicate a heavenly message to mankind. At the beginning of the 1960s, Betty was a true believer in the idea of technocratic liberal progress which held “civil rights” and integration as worthwhile utopian goals to be pursued by the government. By the end of the 1960s, she had become a mystic who saw visions of visitors from the sky.

Betty also adopted Major Keyhoe’s suspicion that the US government was hiding proof of alien contact. By the 1990s, she was convinced that government agents were reading her mail and monitoring her every move. She was also certain that black unmarked helicopters were being used by shadowy evil forces. In the early 1960s, she and most other Americans believed that the US government usually did the right thing. By the end of the decade, many Americans had come to believed that there were conspirators in government who were seeking to do society harm.

Betty had become a celebrity by the end of the “Long ’60s.” She was invited to Ufology conventions and was interviewed by the media. Her story was repeated in an ever-increasing series of UFO documentaries. She also collaborated in the production of a film about the abduction called The UFO Incident in 1975 which starred James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons. Carl Sagan likewise examined the Hills’ claims, albeit not sympathetically, in one episode of his Cosmos miniseries in 1980-81.

Camelot Was Fool’s Gold

The Hills’ otherworldly kidnapping became the template upon which others described their own abduction assertions. As such, Betty and Barney Hill’s story is the first example of a folk legend whose origins are known and documented. It is impossible to know with certainty what the pair saw on that night in 1961, but they saw something. It is likely that if Betty and Barney had lived two centuries earlier, that something would not have been described as an interplanetary vessel manned by beings from another world. In 1961, the Hills lived in a society that was just starting to reach out into space with technology, leading to a burgeoning interest in both science and science fiction. That society was also infected with Cold War anxieties, racial strife, and soulless progress. It is therefore natural the Hills interpreted the something they saw as an spacecraft.

Betty Hill lived for several decades after Barney’s passing, so she had a larger impact on society. This should be seen in religious terms. Like the East Anglican colonists of New Hampshire in the seventeenth century, Betty lived in a world of wonders, and she came to believe that heavenly messages of great significance were being written in the unidentified lights that flitted across the ever-changing New England sky. Betty was a spiritual woman, indeed.

Many people adapted the Hills’ abduction story for their own purposes. James Earl Jones made the central narrative thrust of The UFO Incident the preservation of their marriage across the racial divide. The Hills’ psychiatrist thought their story was a fantasy that was the result of racial anxieties, thereby implying the couple shouldn’t have wed in the first place. Dr. Bowman admits he adapted the story himself, saying in effect that an abduction by interstellar travelers is too simple an explanation for what was going on in their lives, which included the loss of one faith and the adoption of another, as well as the collapse of the promised “civil rights” utopia.

Betty’s adult beliefs began to take shape with her involvement in an earthly struggle which was seeking to eliminate racial problems. While she was seeking racial harmony, the racial holy war unfortunately went looking for her. No serious interpretation of Betty and Barney Hill’s story can ignore the fact that this interracial couple had willingly jumped into a disastrous relationship that led to incredible stress for them.

Spiritual geniuses can discern where society is headed before anyone else by searching for truth from a theological perspective. Jesus Christ, for example, accurately predicted the destruction of theTemple in Jerusalem during his ministry. Betty Hill, who seems to have been the more spiritual one of the couple, was not a spiritual genius, but she was close to it. The fact that she saw something in the sky in 1961, just before the dream of “civil rights” became a nightmare, is telling. That year was one in which the fundamental problems of the Kennedy administration remained hidden behind the Camelot mythos. Within months, the problems of Camelot — “civil rights,” quagmire wars, and demographic replacement immigration — metastasized.

See also “The Alamo and the Politics of the 1960s”

Notes

[1] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 125.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 126.

[4] Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America, New Haven (Yale University Press, 2023), p. 57.

[5] Ibid., p. 176.