A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

underemployed black man in 1960’s America. 254 After the night of September 19-20, 1961,
Betty and Barney would tell a tale that would change both their lives and the landscape of
ufology in profound ways. Their story has been told and retold many times in both the popular
press and within the literature of ufology. The Hill case was the “primordial precedent, the urtext
of alien abduction.” 255
On the evening of September 19th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill set off on a nighttime
journey, driving from just south of Montreal through the White mountains of New Hampshire to
their home in Portsmouth. Along the way they ostensibly sighted a UFO which, in turn, led to
close encounters of the first through third kind and ultimately to abduction. Upon returning home
on the morning of September 20, while they did recall witnessing a UFO, the Hills could not
recall the events that transpired during their abduction. In fact, they could not recall that they had
been abducted at all. The memory of those events, events that occurred over a two-hour-plus
period of lost time, and which would eventually emerge via hypnosis, changed both the face of
ufology and the displaced utopian imaginary itself. We will begin this chapter with a general
discussion of that shift, followed by a discussion of the abduction scenario, the role of hypnosis
in abduction and finally the vision of utopia that emerges from abduction as a mode of contact.
Up to the public revelation of the Hill case, first in a two-part series by John G. Fuller in
Look Magazine (on Oct. 4, 18 1966) and then at more length in Fuller’s book, Interrupted
Journey, published that same year, ufology had been primarily concerned with establishing the
physical presence of unidentified flying craft—a concern well within the confines of positivist
254 Dean.
255 Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFO’s and the Mythic Imagination (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991)
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