The Return of Betty and Barney Hill
Mention “Betty and Barney” and the average American thinks of the Rubbles –only ufologists think of the Hills. Those who’ve seen my review of “The Interrupted Journey” already know I’m chagrinned at Betty and Barney Hill for derailing ufology’s golden era. Nothing personal, it’s just that their tale of alien abduction inspired decades of copycat hokum, supplanting angelic Venusians with those little zeta-reticulins who routinely traverse interstellar space seeking to pluck unsuspecting earthlings from their cars, beds, campsites, whatever. Everyone knows that the aliens always erase people’s memories of these abductions, but everyone also knows that they aren’t very good at it, so abductees are always plagued by remembrances. These vague recollections always blossom into full-blown detail under hypnosis, usually resulting in books, websites, lecture tours and convention appearances. But the reason the Hills have always particularly irritated me is that their story retains a certain-- dare I say?-- plausibility--- an element of verisimilitude that time has not diminished. So, now we have “Captured” by Kathleen Marden (Betty’s niece) and Stanton T. Friedman, ufology’s perennial nuclear physicist. And my natural inclination is to denounce the whole thing as hogwash and be done with it—-except that “Captured” is actually pretty good, damn it.
Although Friedman gets top billing on the cover, Marden seems to be the primary author. This is fortunate. Her sincere, family-memoir approach proves engagingly readable. Friedman appears to be restricted to writing the nastier portions, like the chapter-long denunciation of the Hills’ critics—-but even this makes for entertaining reading, and, in spots, approaches cogency. The interpolation of Friedman’s beloved MJ-12 documents into the text as though they were indisputably authentic (instead of almost certainly bogus) is bothersome, and of course there is the problem of Betty’s whacky side—-her devolutionary spiral into UFO nuttiness that damaged her credibility in the years after Barney’s death. To her credit, Marden deals with this straightforwardly, but also presents a lot of utterly bizarre material much of which bears only tangentially on the Hills’ case, including a mind-blowing MIB report attributed, uselessly enough, to one “Dr. H,” while a number of additional abduction tales also emanate from unnamed sources. These oddities aside, the case remains irritatingly compelling while Dr. Simon’s psychiatric explanations ring hollow and fail to address the physical aspects of the event --like Barney’s scuffed shoes, Betty’s torn dress, the markings on the family Chevy, and the return of Betty’s earrings---(wait ‘till you read that part!)
All in all, Marden’s book strikes enough sparks to keep the Hills’ legacy tauntingly aglow. As ridiculous as it seems that little humanoids may be kidnapping lumbermen and waitresses when they could be off doing something sensible, it is nearly as difficult to believe that Betty made this whole thing up, engaged Barney in a clinical case of folie à deux, and grew so convinced of her own blarney that she famously passed a polygraph on national TV. So what ought we to believe about the Hills? Well,something befell this star-crossed couple that surpassed their understanding, as well as that of their critics, Ms. Marden, Mr. Friedman and me. Call it little gray aliens if you like. But keep watching the skies. There's a lot more up there than just Zeta Reticuli.Read full review
