TAKE ME TO YOUR HYPNOTIST
The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer – John G Fuller
And so our cosmic hypnotic romp continues; this time with our hapless protagonists actually making it onto the flying saucer, and with their memories recovered courtesy of hypnosis.
Published in 1966, The Interrupted Journey recounts the story of married New Hampshire, USA, couple Betty and Barney Hill, who claimed they were abducted by aliens whilst on a drive home from vacation one evening in September 1961. You can read about the Hills, the abduction, the aftermath, and the account’s veracity here.
In a nutshell, though, the Hills sighted a UFO on a lonely New Hampshire Road late one evening during a very long drive back from their trip to Niagara Falls and Montreal. The pancake-like craft (!) approached and followed them, and they were so spooked when they stopped to get a better look that Barney sped off in fear that “they” were going to take them.
Barney shrugs off the incident, insisting it was an aircraft. Betty, meanwhile, is convinced it was an UFO and finds clues to support her case on their return – strange markings on their car, which was also magnetised; stopped watches; damaged clothing; Barney’s desire to check his genitals... They also realise they can’t account for a couple of hours of time between sighting the UFO and making it back home.
Betty’s search for answers immediately muddies what admittedly sounds like a weird aircraft/lights/weather/etc ‘encounter’. (You’ll see from the Wikipedia article that an aircraft warning beacon was in operation in the vicinity at the time.) She calls her UFO enthusiast sister, who claimed to have seen a UFO some years previously, and who, unsurprisingly, supports the emerging abduction story. Betty then starts swotting up on UFOs and the cosmos, and shares the account with friends, her parsonage community, and official and amateur ufologists, investigators, and military personnel.
Crucially, Betty also starts having vivid dreams about the encounter – which she wrote up in detail. It’s reported that she mentioned these to her husband, but his engagement with, and absorption of, their content is brushed off. What does bother Barney, however, is a stomach ulcer, and worsening stress and anxiety – the latter of which are also shared by Betty, as their quest for ‘the truth’ turned from weeks, to months, to almost two years.
Hypnosis was mooted as a possible means to retrieve their memories and the mysterious missing two hours. So in steps Dr Benjamin Simon, a Boston psychiatrist and neurologist who’d used hypnosis as an adjunct in the treatment of “military psychiatric disorders” during and after World War II. (The book states he used hypnosis interchangeably with narcosynthesis – “truth serum” – but who’s to split hairs here on definitions of ‘hypnosis’!)
This book documents Dr Simon’s treatment of the couple, with the transcripts, and editorial comments on Simon’s methods and observations an interesting glimpse into the hypnotist-hypnotee experience. Simon is agnostic on the ‘reality’ of the abduction, and is more interested in exploring whether this is a co-created fantasy – which he implies, and later concluded, is the case. The author, John G Fuller, strikes an ‘objective’ tone, but packs his conclusion with similar abduction accounts and supportive cosmic titbits (which were later debunked). Given the sensation surrounding the Bridey Murphy book and the national frenzy for UFOs, I’m sure Fuller was cognisant of the advantages of readers believing the encounter was real.
To be fair to the Hills, they didn’t seek publicity: a journalist got wind of their account via a private talk they gave to their church community group and splashed the abduction story, and their treatment via Dr Simon, on the front page of a Boston newspaper. Fuller persuaded the Hills and Simon to cooperate with his subsequent book, with business-savvy Betty negotiating for co-ownership of the copyright – which proved shrewd given the sensation it caused, including a TV movie adaptation.
Analysis of the case has questioned whether Barney and Betty’s interracial marriage (he was Black and she was white) had a bearing on the events they came to perceive to have happened. I certainly enjoyed the psychological insights into them as individuals and as a couple. Barney, for instance, is insistent he is not influenced by his wife’s direct and indirect inputs, and takes pride in being a good, respectable, respected citizen. And Betty strikes me as an intelligent, restless outlier who – tellingly, after Barney died in 1969 just three years after the publication of this book – became a celebrity of the UFO conspiracy scene til her death in 2004.
Perhaps the most likely, and withering, explanation for the experience, however, is that they were severely tired and sleep deprived when they saw some strange lights/phenomena, and that they – and others – then unwittingly concocted false memories to fill the void. The Hills’ belief that they are impenetrable to outside influence comes across as quaint now that we know so much more about memory and suggestion; a particularly damning criticism of their account is that a science fiction TV show bearing remarkable resemblance to Barney’s descriptions of the aliens aired just two weeks prior to his first session. Both denied seeing the show, but, clearly, both believe they’re immune to, eg, catching a glimpse of it while changing channels or listening to someone else who saw the show chat about it.
But if you are inclined to believe that the Little Grey Men are cruising for couples to probe, you will ultimately be disappointed to learn how pedestrian and petty this visit was. Sure, aliens *may* have tinkered with Barney’s todger and harvested Betty’s eggs, but the thing that fascinated them the most was... Barney’s false teeth. These beings simultaneously had no concept of time or ageing, but were au fait with the phrase “wait a minute”. They used physical/paper books and maps despite possessing the technology for interstellar travel, and – most pathetically – only had equipment to test one specimen at a time!
No wonder this embarrassing expedition – led by boringly patriarchal, hierarchical beings dressed suspiciously like Navy-Nazis – was hushed up.
In conclusion: the truth IS out there – but just not in this book.
