Guest Blog - Martin Kottmeyer's musings on Matthew Bowman’s "The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill"

 VS.

 

“FAR MORE LOGICAL THAN A DREAM”

Some critical and personal musings on Matthew Bowman’s The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights and the New Age in America, Yale University Press, 2023, 278pp. 

Bowman’s new version of the Hill abduction is a mostly good book.  He provides considerable amounts of new biographical background about their lives prior to the ufo event that made them celebrities in the ufo culture.  He had access to the papers surrounding the investigation of the primary ufo event and this adds many details and nuances to what was witnessed.  We know from Bowman that Barney saw the ufo entities bathed in a “shadowless blue light,” a lovely evocative phrase that never made it into Interrupted Journey.  He pays more attention than most to Betty’s fears that they had been exposed to radioactivity from the craft, bringing information that five years after the event she was writing scientists about her concerns that her recurrent bouts with pneumonia and how sick Delsey, their dog, was and asking them about “certain radiation dangers connected with ufo sightings.”  She also indicated that the initial call to Pease AFB was prompted by wanting protection over what dangers they had been exposed to.  He considerably fleshes out the story of Betty’s later obsession with ufos and how she claimed to have hundreds of sightings into the 1970s and beyond.  Bowman indicates she also told ghost stories and embraced New Age beliefs which he excuses as valid reactions to their rejection by establishment science and the authorities.

Strange to say though, Bowman himself brackets the book with his own rejections – “I do not believe the Hills were abducted…” (11)  He is skeptical of the explanations given to the ufo event and “the story of the abduction seems to me to lack proof beyond the Hills own hypnotically recovered memories, a genre well known to be fraught and malleable.  And a story of medical examination and interstellar travel seems too simple for the realities the Hills claimed to glimpse.” (223) 

That expression “realities” seems to carry a New Age meaning and it is somewhat eye-opening that in the middle of the book just before recounting the dreams that Betty wrote down in the days after ufo sighting and her realization of possible radiation exposure, he describes them as “a comprehensive narrative, far more logical than a dream.”(89)

And I can only term that a disappointing development for Betty’s dreams very much seem like dreams to me, surreal and quite irrational.  She is thrust in the navel with a large needle and experiences pain.  Her examiner is surprised by this and is able to stop it simply by a wave of the hand.  The leader gives Betty a book, but his crew points out that he shouldn’t have done that and they take it back.  How could the leader forget such a significant policy point that they shouldn’t provide proof of their secret and criminal acts?  And what about the business with showing her the star map and asking Betty if she knew where Earth was on it.  Was this supposed to be sarcasm?  A rational person would make a gesture to show where Earth was on it and their home or simply tell her that they had a policy against that.  The story is not logical at all.

This brings me to a larger disappointment.  In looking through the notes, I saw that at one point he cites Brookesmith and Pflock’s Encounters at Indian Head, but I find it very hard to believe he read it.  His text does not engage with several important criticisms appearing in that book.  Brookesmith’s paper in particular demands attention for the analysis of what Bowman calls the ‘thumbnail arithmetic’ researchers indulged in two months after the drive that led to the claim that there was ‘missing time’ – the “two lost hours” emphasized in Fuller’s subtitle.   Brookesmith points out that their distance estimate was wrong – based on an “as the crow flies” number that ignores the route was extremely winding and even reverses direction at one point.  Let’s also reiterate that the Hills themselves did not notice the discrepancy at the time when they reached home, something that modern depictions almost invariably falsely portray.  Brookesmith’s paper makes other observations that one can hardly believe Bowman would ignore mentioning like the fact he, like others Bowman discusses, thought the interracial marriage was a matter for extended comment.  Brookesmith also points out the genital warts that Barney reported are a common STD.

I have a paper in the Indian Head book that spells out those illogical aspects of the dream I mentioned above.  Though I don’t object to Bowman referring to my earlier work as giving a bad science fiction interpretation to Betty’s dreams, I had expanded my analysis to include showing how some of the odd elements of the examination – the nail clippings (hardly a usual medical procedure), skin scrapings, and the so-called pregnancy test seem to specifically echo matters seen in the investigation of radioactive fallout.  This connects up to Betty’s concern of radiation exposure which lines up to how dreams typically reflect the ongoing anxieties a person is feeling.

That paper also includes my rebuttal to Jerry Clark’s sometimes hallucinated criticisms against “The Eyes That Spoke” which Bowman echoes in describing my rhetoric as having a supposedly triumphant quality.  It is Clark himself who places things in a warring frame – note point 4 in “The Eyes Still Speak” – my own attitude was the proper one of thrilled discovery.

Bowman also recycles Kathleen Marden’s more recent observation that “The Bellero Shield” does not actually have large slanting eyes; instead bony ridges around its eyes extend along the side of its head.”  How this gets rid of the resemblance seems somewhat nebulous to me.  Baker’s sketch includes bone structure around the eyes.   https://www.nicap.org/reports/hillartist2.htm ,
Junior also seems to have that bony ridge:
https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.353/posts/pfbid0ui45Qaf8mPj8g3AizWnj4iFYxfrhFX5SNxg3ZkvAf7UwfQFxdoXWU1WkY1PJSpMAl 

More directly to the point, though, there still remains that the wraparound appearance of the eyes evident in Barney’s sketch in Interrupted Journey and use of the wraparound eyes expression in talking to the Lorenzens are not abandoned.  It was that resemblance that led me to research the matter of the airing of “The Bellero Shield” to see if it was even possible for there to be an influence.

0Had Bowman read Encounters at Indian Head, he should have known that Clark’s remarks had been responded to. Though Bowman elsewhere seems to adhere to a form of journalistic objectivity and balance, not telling both sides here reinforces the sense he simply never read the book. (He never mentions Betty's appearance at this notably significant symposium directly spawned by the Hill's story.)  I feel Bowman also should have remarked on if he thought the radiation fears were as relevant to the dreams as I argued, both here and in Brookesmith & Pflock’s book:
https://ia801007.us.archive.org/.../Magonia_Supplement_No...
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MY BETTY HILL FILE:
Karl Pflock and Peter Brookesmith, eds., Encounters at Indian Head: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Abduction Revisited,  Anomalist Books, 2007, 309pp.
“Betty Hill's Medical Nightmare,”  Magonia Monthly Supplement #12  February 1999  pp. 1-3.
https://ia801007.us.archive.org/.../Magonia_Supplement_No...
“The Eyes Still Speak,” The REALL News, 6, #5  June/July 1998   pp. 1, 6-9.
http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v06/n05/index.html
“Suppressing a Smile,” The REALL News 13, #1; January/February 2005, pp. 1, 3, 13-14.
http://www.reall.org/newsl.../v13/n01/reall-news-v13-n01.pdf
May 15, 2023: Betty Hill’s “Junior”
https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.353/posts/pfbid0ui45Qaf8mPj8g3AizWnj4iFYxfrhFX5SNxg3ZkvAf7UwfQFxdoXWU1WkY1PJSpMAl
August 10, 2020: Inka Dinka Clue
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2666360483606199&set=a.1392021771040083&type=3&theater  
January 28, 2022: Five Errors Made by Betty Hill in a 1998 Interview
https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.3538/posts/3114687135440196
[Roughly the time Jerry asked Betty about “The Bellero Shield.” Her memory was demonstrable fallible.]
February 10, 2017: Betty Hill was not prescient about amniocentesis https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.3538/posts/1848923582016564
Bowman leaves her claim uncontested on page 160 that that big needle is "now in everyday use in big city hospitals."
“Probing Exosemination,” The REALL News, 10, #3, March 2002, pp. 1, 3-5, 7
http://www.reall.org/newsl.../v10/n03/reall-news-v10-n03.pdf
[Barney Hill made the first anal probe claim!  Curiously Bowman, though quoting Webb on the matter, doesn't celebrate his priority status.]
September 12, 2019: Why the Betty and Barney Hill Alien Abduction Experience Does NOT Involve Folie Á Deux
https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.3538/posts/2390097841232466
February 8, 2020: Hocus-Pocus and the Importance of Eye Contact
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2519739104935005&set=a.1392021771040083&type=3&theater
Includes images of the Bellero Shield alien and Barney Hill’s sketch.
Doubtless there are others I am forgetting…