A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

In addition to the missing time, the Hills found that they could not account for some 35 miles of
their journey. Earlier alien interlocutors—from Spiritualism through the space brothers—were
all centrally concerned with communicating something. But in order for those interlocutors to
communicate, their human counterparts had to remember what had transpired. The recurring
motif of lost time in the abduction narrative, in that it was based on forgetting, pointed not to
communication but its absence or erasure.
How might the Hills recall what occurred during those forgotten hours? How might they
account for the fact that they both were unable to recall that period of time? In March of 1962,
Betty contacted Dr. Patrick Quirke, a local psychiatrist suggested by a friend, in an effort to seek
professional guidance on the advisability and potential effectiveness of hypnosis. At their initial
and sole consultation with Quirke (a consultation which, as if to multiply the unlikely musicality
of Quirke’s name, took place at Baldpate, the private sanatorium at which the doctor was
employed) he advised that at present it would be most prudent to allow their suppressed
memories to surface naturally. The Hills followed Quirke’s prescription and the idea of pursuing
hypnotherapy remained dormant until the fall of 1963, following the public premier of the Hills’
story. The application of psychological models to the abduction experience, specifically in the
form of hypnotic regression, would over time become the norm. What began as a way of
assessing and assuaging trauma would become a mode of communication, a way to articulate the
experience of abduction. What had primarily been used as a way of debunking experience that
defied rational explanation—mediums were hysterics, occultists delusional, witnesses to third
kind encounters deranged—was slowly enlisted as a way to both heal those ostensibly exposed to
the shattering experience of abduction and to add to the pool of knowledge about that experience.
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