welcome everyone to the 12th

annual san antonio book festival. and i wish to extend thanks to the central library for helping us to present on this amazing day. thank you. especially to the horn holt family for sponsoring this venue. and i want to thank you for being here. to hear dr. matthew bowman talk about his remarkable book, we encourage you to share your experience today on social media and tag the essay book fest. all events in this venue are being by c-span's book tv. i imagine they will announce one that will be on at some point.

silence or cell phones if you haven't done so already. flash photography. not permitted book sales and signings will take place after the session ends at the nowhere bookshop tent, which is actually somewhere it's located outside in the festival marketplace, which is otherwise the parking for the utsa southwest campus. please support your local economy and. our official bookseller and our authors by buying your books here at the festival. i'd like to say a few words about matthew remarkable career. he is currently an associate professor of religion and history and the howard w hunter, chair of mormon studies at claremont graduate university, claremont graduate university. he writes and about new religious movements in the united states mormon history, evangelical history and the

paranormal. his work has appeared in slate, washington post, the new republic, and many other venues. he lives in claremont with his wife, daughter, lots of houseplants. his latest book is the abduction of betty and barnhill alien encounters civil rights and the new age in america. so, matthew, welcome. let's give a warm welcome to matthew. thank you. take it away. so i want to say a little bit about the book before we get into a conversation and then hopefully some questions from you. i want to introduce you to betty and barney hill and i'll start by saying if you have ever heard a story of somebody perhaps driving alone late at night,

perhaps waking up in their bed, being confronted by a glowing light in the sky by small gray creatures with large heads and slanting black eyes who might have taken this person aboard a vessel and performed medical experiments on them, only to return them to their car, their bed, home, and to lose all memory of that event until recovered through hypnosis. later, you've heard the story of betty and barney hill. and betty and barney hill were the first americans to claim abduction by extraterrestrials. the first to claim to have been subjected to medical experiments by these beings. and the first to recover those memories through hypnosis, story and begin in new hampshire, where they lived in september 1961, while driving home late one night, they saw a strange light in the sky that seemed to

be the end of it. but over the next three years, they had nightmares, they had panic attacks and eventually consulted a psychiatrist who hypnotized them and under hypnosis, recovered memories of this very strange event. and that story became a bestselling book. it was in 1975, turned into a film produced by and starring james earl jones and then was featured on carl sagan's extremely popular cosmos miniseries in the early 1980s. it has become more than a real touchstone in the ufo mythology of the united states. but i want to argue as well, it's much more than that. any and barney hill story for me as a historian, as a of religion, was as much about the age in which it was told and repeated and retold and retold

as it was about their own experience. and i wanted to know who barry and barney hill were, how they in turn, this event when it came to mean to them, they were, in fact, in some ways very typical americans of their time. and they were voters who supported the democratic party for the most part, they supported the liberal policies of franklin roosevelt and john f kennedy of lyndon johnson, and they were activists. hill was white. she grew up in a union family in new hampshire and attended the university of new hampshire and worked as a social worker. abani hill was black. his family had fled the south during the great migration of the 1920s and 1930s. they ended up in philadelphia, where he grew up and attended college and became enmeshed in the national association for advancement of colored people, which was at that point the most

prominent civil rights organization in the country. both them. then, by the time they married in 1960, were passionately committed to civil rights. they were prominent members of the acp in portsmouth, new hampshire, where they lived. they were involved in activism after this experience. then they went to their minister. they were unitarian. it's a denomination with which very much believed in science and in progress. and they were gratified when their minister believed them. they also went to the u.s. military, which was second nature to americans in those period in those years. in 1960, the gallup poll showed that 75% of americans believed that the u.s. government would do the right thing. most or all of the time that's unimagined to us today. but it was very true for betty and barney.

then, of course, they went through the medical establishment and went to sekai interests. this was a period in which psychiatry and hypnosis were widely covered in the u.s. media. and this was the dawning of what was sometimes called the age of therapy. when americans begin to consult psychologists and psychiatrists for problems of anxiety. so when all of these ways, the hills were very typical, but they felt as they went to all of these authorities. they found that almost universally they were rejected. they were told that this could not have happened to them. the psychiatrist hypnotized them, told them not to trust recovered memory, and he told them that the memories they would recover under hypnosis would be maybe emotional. only true, but not literally true. and when did they emerge this process, having very detailed memories of this bizarre encounter? the psychiatrist said, this didn't really happen to you.

it is reflective, perhaps, of your emotional trauma, of your fears and your anxieties, but not of literal truth. when they went to the military, they were politely received and then their report was filed away. so they began to seek out other authority as they found their way into the new age movement. they chandler's visionary eyes on people who told them that their story was only one part of a much spiritual transformation coming to the united states and the world in total. and they were sucked in eventually into conspiracy thinking. and betty hale, by the end of her life, believed that the government was not to be trusted, that the government was hiding things and covering things up. she worried about black helicopters and being followed by the enigmatic men in black, secretive agents who tried to cover up and hide ufo belief in

the country. by the end, then of betty hill's life and by the end of barney's life, they were living in a very different world than they had before, or a world of fear, of paranoia, of belief in strange, supernatural creatures and a world in which the government and other authorities, the very authorities who had rejected them, were not to be trusted. so in this way, then we might think that the story of betty and barney hill is a strange outlier, that ufos are a bizarre fringe belief in our country. but in fact, the story of betty and barney hill is the story of american society in the 1960s and 1970s. it reveals a great deal to us, not only about who betty and barney were, but about who we all are as well. thank you, matthew. i really want to thank you as an author on subject myself or

contextualize and not only the events that they became famous for, but betty and barney themselves. you reveal facts about them that really nobody had written about before. it's fascinating that barney came from a part of philadelphia where african-americans had established respectable lives. and this theme of respectability is something that you touch on time and again. the same also for betty. she was part of a union family and felt that the promises of the new deal were be realized in her times and in her generation. so i'll get back to that in a minute. but i'd like to just start with the most basic question. what was it that inspired you to do this book? that is a great question because as i mentioned a bit ago, betty

and barney hill are widely known and widely covered. they're quite famous in the uofl community and i think their fame generally is declining somewhat. but we're very, very well known of their time. i would say two things. the first is i'm primarily a historian of religion and i'm interested in the ways in which american religious life has changed since the end of world war two, and how traditional religious institutions, churches in particular, are in decline and new ways of being religious are on the rise. and that may cover anything from tarot to faith healing to ufo belief. certainly. and as i was casting about for some way to tell that story, some way to explore how the traditional institutions of american religious life were falling apart and i discovered that kathleen martin, who is the niece of betty and barney hill and who had written their own

book, her own book about the couple had donated a vast trove of their papers, their letters, their diary, their personal writings to the university of new hampshire. and there's nothing a historian likes better than finding an archive that has not been dug through before. so i thought, this is it. this is my story. so i went to new hampshire. i spent several weeks there. i drove the path that betty and barney hill themselves. i drove. i found the spot where they had seen these strange craft in the sky. i went to the archive. i saw the dress that betty hill was wearing that night. it is there in this collection. and that was really the start of this. of course, this was not the only place went. i traveled to roswell, new mexico. i went to chicago. i went to philadelphia many places to track the story down. but the more i dug into it, the more became evident to me that the story about barney hill is the story, the 1960s. it's so i think, in microcosm

what happened in american culture. well, thank you. wow. what a great treasure trove of information you found. and how fortunate you were. i also want to compliment you on the fact that your is extensively documented and you have an extraordinary bibliography and index and and i recall you saying over breakfast that you made a conscious decision to have this published by an academic press rather than the trade press. because you wanted it to be taken seriously. have you had some reception to your book from fellow scholars that you might like to comment on? yeah, you know, i think ufo believe, right? as with many beliefs that have been long kind of fringe in american culture, you know does space. i think some sort of residual worry among the academy. i'm like, do we want to legitimate this thing studying

it or you know, on the flip side to that, the notion that this is simply something fringe, not really worth studying. it's strange and unusual. and is the province only of kooks and weirdos. right. but i do think over the last 20 to 30 years, academics have learned, well, perhaps on one hand, they've simply seen the surveys which indicate the ufo belief is actually quite prevalent in the united states, as are many other seemingly fringe beliefs. and we come to realize, i think, that simply dismissing such things as the province of mental illness or strangeness, weirdness is actually to fundamentally misunderstand our fellow citizens. it's it is to fundamentally understand american culture more generally. the basic premise think of the humanities as a discipline is to seek understanding, to discover

why are the way they are. and certainly i feel the reviews i've gotten so far indicate that to some extent i have succeeded in doing that. well, that's great. and for those of us. well, we texans, some of us know over at rice university in houston that professor, dr. jeffrey j. kripalu started a whole new movement, the archives of the impossible. he calls it, to encourage more such writing. and diana polka, dr. diana university of north carolina is also beginning to write about this in the academy. so to contextualize you, if i may, you seem to be part of a new trend in american scholarship. and i congratulate not so you were touching, betty and barney as representatives of archetypes of social transformations, of the sixties.

do you feel that they were adequately represented in fuller's book, the interrupted journey? you are somewhat critical of that book in your book. give us a little bit of background about not only fuller, but the ways in which they were represented in the media in the course of their life. absolutely. john fuller was journalist. he heard about betty and barney hill's story while on a trip to new hampshire and thought instantly that this would be a bestseller. and he turned out to be correct. and he tracked down betty and barney hill. he tracked down benjamin simon, the psychiatrist who hypnotized them. he performed a number of interviews with all of these people. and then very, very quickly, within only a few months, wrote a book called interrupted journey, which was simply a kind of narrative account of what had happened to them and a narrative of their hypnosis. he included a good portion of

the transfer reports of their hypnosis sessions. however, i think fuller did well. one primary thing. i think that obscure aired the truth about this encounter and what we might understand it today. he went out of his way, and i think it's understandable that he did this because it was the mid 1960s. i mean, he did not want to be controversial to downplay the fact that they were an interracial couple and to downplay. i think the racial anxieties of barney hill in particular felt. he argues in the book that they experienced very little racial prejudice, that it wasn't on their minds at all, but the hypnosis transcripts tell a similar, different story. they very much emphasize the fact that barney hill was quite cognizant of being one of the few black men in new hampshire in the early 1960s and on the journey on which they were interrupted by this strange

craft, which was a vacation in check in. and he throughout the journey and throughout his memories, the journey emphasizes his worry and being, for instance, turned away from a motel, from being attacked on the streets. he packed away a pistol. yes, in the trunk of their car. and fuller actually, he. he edited the interviews to change pistol to tire iron. oh, well, he did not want barney to seem threatened, and he did not want race, i think, to overshadow what fuller thought was the main story, which was the story of this abduction. but i think actually that more fully understanding and the way that this couple thought about race, the way they experienced race, the way they grappled with race is actually key to understanding what was happening, both in their experience but also in the aftermath as they dealt with it themselves. yes, that's a viewpoint that i think will attract a lot of people to the story,

particularly people of color, particularly people of the african american community who may have never heard of this because it's been largely contextualized in the white, predominantly white ufo community, which with which they had their, you know, tussles as well. mm hmm. thank you for bringing that out. yes. i mean, you point out that barney and betty had a lot of free floating anxiety for years about this, which wasn't necessarily improved by their psychiatric treatment. and that this resulted in ulcers, other health disorders for barney in particular, who tragically died very suddenly leaving betty to live for quite some time after him. mm hmm. so you bring some closure to that. but i'm. i'm very interested in your contextual izing them within to of american society.

one their church unitary and universalist church. how were they received there? and how were they received in a mostly white folk community? yeah, which are good questions. they joined the unitarian church in 1960, which was a year before the abduction, and then joined the unitarian church, specifically because the particular minister who was in charge of south church in portsmouth, new hampshire at the time was very much an activist on issues of race. he had come to new hampshire precisely because he wanted to further the cause of the civil rights movement in new hampshire. he organized demonstrations. he organized marches. he took barney hill to washington, d.c., in august 1963 to attend the march on washington with martin luther king. and when the hills came to him and told him that they had had this strange experi ence he

initially was open to it. he was receptive to it, which i think, interestingly enough, was in the 1950s and early 1960s, rather the posture of many unitarians generally now unitarianism at this time presented itself as the denomination of scientific minded people. the denomination of progressive people, a denomination of people who are interested in positive change in the united states. and in the 1950s, ufos were widely seen in the united states as a scientific problem. they become later in the 1960s, much more stigmatized as being the domain of oddity and kooks and stuff like that. but that wasn't necessarily the case when very importantly, hill had their first experience. so they initially found unitarianism welcoming, but over. the 1960s it becomes less so,

and particularly for barney. and by the mid-19th sixties, the unitarians are as many other predominantly white religious denominations in the united states are grappling with this issue of race. and there is a schism in unitarianism in the mid-to-late 1960s as its black members, which were a very, very distinct minority. it became increasingly, i think, restive of what they saw as the white paternalism of of unitarian leadership. so did they seek some kind of affirmation in the ufo community that they were? yes, getting elsewhere. and this is where they go after this point, particularly after their hypnosis. of course, many people had claimed to see strange things in the sky. right. this was this was not necessarily uncommon. but after betty and barney hills have gnosis becomes public in 1965. in 1966 telling this very kind of dramatic story of being taken

aboard, the craft being experimented on, all this, they receive increasing hostility from the mainstay press. a lot of doubt, a lot of skepticism, a lot of a rather offensive and diagnostics being done by reporters. there is one particular article i'm thinking of which suggests that they had this this strange manifestation of the encounter, this illumination, because of the stress they had, because of their race, their difference. but they find increasing weight. the people who are receptive, who are welcome, who listen to them are other ufo believers. and more other of people who are open to ufo. as even a few of us, we're not their primary interest. that is to say, psychics and chandlers and people like this who come to believe that betty

and barney hill's experience is only one part of a much larger coming social transformation of this transformation. they would call the new age and thus this group has come to be called the new age movement. yes. and as i recall, you you go into some detail of and describing the history of the new age as stretching back to the 19 century and theosophy and then the new thought movement and you being in southern california, which was kind of the cradle for a lot of this stuff. you give a very good overview of the syncretism that's involved in the whole new age movement. so they find some reception there, but the whole thing becomes very problematic because then they become witnesses to, they say, visitation not by aliens, but by men in black and, black helicopters and there is this entirely sinister side of

ufo, ufo law in the united states. and they got a friend named marjorie fisher, who is very much involved in all these things and even makes a huge model of betty star map she said she saw. tell us about marjorie fisher and other figures from this new age movement who become influential. yeah, but bernie dies tragically as you mentioned, in 1969. it's a sudden cerebral hemorrhage, quite sudden and unexpected. and this is very much an emotional blow to betty. and she finds some other friends who fill some of that space in her life. and marjorie fish is one of those. it's important, i think, to point out that when we talk about the new age movement and the word movement might be a misnomer or it's not. it's not not at all. as organized as all of that. what it is, is kind of an environment in which people

become open to new ideas as to new practices, see things from all sorts of cultures and many practices that i think remain familiar in the united states today. such as tarot and psychics and astrology. right. all of these are things that internal american culture in the 1960s and 1970s as part of this new age movement. and marjorie fish then becomes someone who introduces betty to many of these ideas. she is, as you say, someone who interested in ufos. when john fuller's book is published, it has a picture of this star map that betty drew where she said she saw this map of the cosmos while in the craft. and marjorie tries to locate. she tries to correlate it to stars in the galaxy to see if she can locate where these creatures might have come from. but along the way, while she is corresponding with betty in

letters and in visits, she introduces betty into all sorts of ideas. she betty tells her strange things have been happening. but you've been hearing sounds and seeing kind of odd lights in the sky. and marjorie fish tells her that the cia might be watching her. she tells her that ghosts are real. she describes a poltergeist investigation that she was involved in. she introduced betty to writers who had for what has now become famous thanks to the history channel of the concept of ancient aliens, that ancient civilizations were actually founded by extraterrestrial laws. and betty absorbs of this and she comes. i think what's so important to betty here is that she comes to see a world and to experience a world that had meaning. a world in which everything is connected, where there are no coincidence, as in a world, i think critically for betty,

where her husband's sudden death might actually have some meaning. at one point betty encounters a channeler who channels her and her husband spiritual. and this is a very meaningful experience to her and one that she discovers while being increasingly embedded in this community. yes. and i recall that you wrote that someone suggested that she got some more channeling. as you said, though, i am satisfied. yeah. yeah. that is very interesting. precisely right. that she got what she needed. she had the peace that she needed. yes. well, betty becomes therefore an entirely different person in her later years than. she was at the time, let's say, when she met mary barney. however, i'm always wondering what she still does. she still care about the civil rights movement? she still care about progress, about, you know, social evolution. what's your thought about that.

she does. and she still think late into her life, mean she lives into her eighties. she is still writing a letter to the local newspapers denouncing conservatives and holding up the new deal as sort of an ideal of american politics. but she does, i think, move away from that activist core that she's been involved in, in the forties, fifties and sixties when she was in political campaigns, she was volunteering for various things. she was attending a acp meetings right. and you mentioned the concept of respectable form, which is really, i think, key to both, betty barney. right. they were presenting themselves in the fifties and sixties as respectable. right. and for barney, that's important. yeah. this is a concept that was very important to activists like martin luther king and rosa parks. right. that they be perceived as mobile, as respectable.

they would be taken seriously. barney initially is very worried about calling the government to report this ufo because he's worried it won't be taken seriously. he is worried about the government. he is worried what if this story gets out, what its impact would be on his political work and betty persuaded him to do? but i think later in her life in particular are barney's fears are manifested. right. but she loses that sense of respectability comes to be seen as someone is fringy someone who is a kook and then does moves away from the center of political life where they had been before. very interestingly and surprisingly to me, you recall that when she learned about the work of america abstract artist, a notable artist, budd hopkins, his work providing support

groups and amateur hypnosis be for people who claim to have abduction experiences. she rejects all of that and wants nothing to do with it and asserted that her experience was unique. this is very interesting to me. would you expand on that? yeah, you can see there, i think also the idea of respectability contingent, right, betty hill was a unitarian and very much believed in science. it's very, i think, significant, betty, that the extraterrestrials encountered. she believed built a spacecraft on another planet in star systems, ada, which actually flew to earth. it was science that might be far, but it was simply science. when then she encountered the abduction boom of the 1980s and 1990 was which leads to tv shows like the x-files and and all the roswell surrounding, you know, 1997 and all of this these

abductions seemed to her unscientific. they are full of stories of people levitating and being transported through walls and extra terrestrials kind of magically appearing in bedrooms and so on and so forth. all of this seems strange to her. and so she begins practicing in a sense her own respectability politics, saying no, no, no. what? ufos are like what i experienced these. things are strange. they are almost magical. they are flawed. before conclude, i think it would be very important for you to please describe the dramatizations of the betty and barney hill stories have been left sort of as the residue of their memory and the mass culture. so please tell us about those. yes, there are two in particular. in 1975, a film is made called the ufo incident. it is produced by james earl jones, who bought the rights to their story for two reasons. one, he wanted to barney hill in

the film. and secondly, he wanted he saw this story being very much about civil rights and indeed very as the story about the anxiety that barney feels. it's about barney feeling kind of trapped in this very white new hampshire town and being increasingly isolated and for very swaths of the film. james earl jones and the actress plays his betty recite the abduction. i'm sorry. you know, it's just transcripts that were preserved by the psychiatry office. and it's a magnificent performance. but the story is quite internal. it's very much about race. seven years later, in his miniseries cosmos, carl sagan spends 15 minutes actually dramatizing body and barney hill's story dramatizing the reduction experience. actually, incorrectly. and then he talks about it a

little bit. and for carl sagan, betty and hill were. he says this story is entirely implausible. this is the wrong way to think about space. he speculates that they were suffering some sort of psychological problems that led to this abduction. and you see that i think these different people kind of reading this of betty and barney in different ways for different purposes and making of it something useful for and it is, i think sagan's, memory of their story that has largely been preserved. yes. and it's unfortunate because, as you say, it was inaccurate and i don't want to overgeneralize, but i would say that every time i have tried to have a conversation about, these matters with an astronomer, either an amateur astronomer or a professional astronomer. i have found similar attitudes. let's just say, well, i see is the ten minute mark. and at this point masculine.

i have agreed that we'd love to take questions from you all. so this is. yes, we have a question right away. we do tap into them and we want to get on the microphone. oh, yes, sorry. protocol. so that we can bring a microphone to the front for this person right here. there we go. thank you. matthew, do you believe that in story, do you believe what happened to them was it was was true? that is the first question i always get. yeah. and it's an obvious one, certainly. i think they saw something strange in this guy. i don't know what it was. i am not persuaded by the abduction, given the controversies around, recovered memory and, the through hypnosis. so, yeah. mm hmm. jonathan, we need a microphone here in the middle. this gentleman to wearing the maroon sweater.

there you go. mm hmm. it's on. haven't a book yet, but will. it? i'm, you know, i'm really. i really like the way you put in the cultural context. and, of course, that culture that line has moved. now to a point where there's the new paradigm, there's the defense department, there's lot of stuff. and i'm not quite sure how many abductions have taken place. there's a sizable community of that. and the fact that roswell and all of this stuff is is now coming out. and so i think it's as a a really a turning point. what you've put in context, what i'm and listening to what you're saying here. it seems like actually now it has moved beyond race. because we're now in an area where we're about a different sense of species. we're all part of the human race on this earth planet. but terms of the non-human intelligence, which appears to

be connecting with humanity or this other than human intelligence, there's something other in a sense. and of course, they get into the whole hybridization programs and all of that which which is documented now as ed mentioned at rice university in the archives of the impossible. there's just so much evidence and i'm. any comment on that in terms of contextualizing this but but i look forward. yeah. yeah. so two things to that. first, is that the question of race and ufo, is it interesting, right, that some scholars have argued that the ufo phenomenon and people i'm describing encounters with as you're saying on human intelligence pushes us, as you say, right towards this sense of a limiting or lessening how we imagine. there are other scholars, however, i think this is true for betty and barney, who argue that the perception of race that we have really marks how humans

perceive alien and perceive the other. so betty argue is as you do her experience in her memories emphasizes the kind of commonality of humanity. she says this makes me feel all the more how important it is to pursue civil rights and to pursue equality. barney, on the other hand, perceives it quite differently. ani consistently described in his memories his underwear. said no. he says he describes these creatures in metaphors. it a racial hostility. he says they look like nazis. he doesn't specify what he means by that. but he says they remind me of notches. he was a world war two veteran. so that was, you know, particularly significant to him. he refers to another saying he looks like an irishman. and i say that because in my experience, irish people are hostile to black people.

right. so he perceives a real of racial divide here, which is fascinating. i think it goes to how many scholars will speak this, which is to say there's maybe a strange phenomenon happening, how we interpret it, how we understand it, is very much marked by our own histories and our own perceptions and we see, in a sense, what we expect to see on how are we doing time? we have 5 minutes. thank you. so any other questions? yes, there's a person right there, please. thank you. go. yes. and i apologize if you touched on this earlier. do you have any personal experience with aliens or a story that kind of pointed you in this direction to to be curious about, betty and barney. you know, in some days i will

say i wish i did. but other days i say i'm glad don't, which is as i know. i know experience like this drove me to i think what made me interested in them was how representative they seem to be. and i think, frankly, how marginal ized many of these sorts of experiences have generally been in the academy. mm hmm. what thank you. any other questions. okay well, since we have a little bit more time, i'd like to ask you a question about what. do you think is the long term cultural impact of this story of betty and barney hill? mm hmm. and let me just add as a parenthesis to that, but as jonathan was saying, we are now in a period of time where it appears that there has been a sea change in american attitudes about all this. there seems be a lot of people

who say they've had experience with ufos or beings. we even have an incredible congressional inquiry into recovered crashed alien craft whistleblowers coming forth, etc. so please give us your concluding thoughts about what the long term impacts this story. mm hmm. yeah, in some ways. as i said before, the betty and barney hill abduction story set the template for how american southeast told and retold and retold this story. betty and barney hill were the first people to describe these creatures as being small, large heads slanted eyes, gray skin. right. and that has become the sort of fundamental motif for this. but i think even more the trajectory that the hill's experienced that is from this

position of having general faith in politics, faith in government faith in the state through suspicion and fear, to embracing other apparently marginalized cultures in the state. right. that is the experience, not simply, i think, of ufo believers from the mid-20th century through the late 20th century, but of many americans. i mean, that period as well as we we came out of the betty and marty hill era with a mass kind of national suspicion and fear, conspiratorial belief and so on and so forth. and that's their in miniature, too. well, thank you for that excellent summary and. all i can say is, as a writer, you've set yourself up to do an interesting sequel. this further investigation into this cultural complex. let's all give a warm round of applause to matthew