rid of anything else. if you think it doesn't make sense, then you don't have to. right. but, um, and i think that's, that's a really way of understanding ending interactions or religious between europeans and native people. there were plenty of times when christian missionaries thought they had made converts and they thought that meant they'd got of their old religion and then found actually, no, that they're had used their own methods of of inclusive, ascetic religion and had, uh, had added christianity to that of parts of christianity to what they already believed practiced. um, and i think that's one of the ways in which native religions been able to survive in various forms and adapt because they're supposed to adapt or they're supposed to change as they add new things. but without, uh, you know, complete giving them up. how did you get interested in?

are you part native american? no, but yeah. so i'm not native at all. i got interested in it because i went to grad school and i wanted to i wanted to study, um, colonial history interactions in early america among various europeans and various native americans. i, um, i knew that's what i wanted to do. i took on a class in, in college that got me interested that but i really thought to be more a little bit more about europeans and the native americans would just be part of the story. but um, i ended writing my first book, my dissertation and my first book on, on arkansas, which is where i'm from. and i knew the french and spanish had had sort of settled there and i thought, well, i can read those documents in french and spanish. and we were talking about and but it turned out those are places where the fa in both case the fa edge of of the french or the spanish empire, arkansas was not where you wanted to be sent. if you worry i officer in the french or spanish empire and so

so this official unofficial would be sent out there with maybe ten soldiers. right because these are empires are very spread out surrounded by thousands and thousands dozens of of oh of cops right there. and then many, many more osage were incredibly and dangerous tribe anybody who crossed them the 18th century and so their documents the letters the reports that these men had to write back are just they're just full of everything that. what was said or that the osage did. and it and as i read those and wrote dissertation, i thought, well, this is this is a place that where native americans are in charge and and europeans are just there writing down. they're not doing much else. they're, um, plenty of other places. europeans were doing terrible things right. but, but in place, it sort of taught me that there were places of places and times across continent where native americans had a lot of power. and that just got me really

interested that, um, and then i, you know, been doing this for several decades now. i got to know just lots of native scholars both within tribes and in the academy and, um, just started realize how connected the present is with the past. um, and sort of, that sort of eventually led me to this, this book and then i think a much richer understanding of native american history than i had, uh, when i wrote my first book, maybe time for one or two more questions. so maybe the last two here. so my question has to, do i'm the sort of person who likes to build my cultural literacy through fiction, wonder stories? so i wondered if whether you as a historian, just as a reader, whether you enjoy native american fiction, indigenous literatures, if so, whose work you might recommend? yeah, yeah, i really do. yeah. though i think we should throw it back to you probably write.

yeah so i'm excited to read tommy orange his new book. i liked his first book a lot. i we were just talking about, about susan in my native american history class, which is a sort of freshman and sophomore level class at usc they read her grass dancer. and i think that's, uh i, i loved all of the things that she's written, but i really like that. um and i mean, there are just so many these days, right i would have to sort of sit down and write a, write a big list and um, yeah, but, uh, yeah. and then and then yeah. so there's little fiction there. i quote some fiction authors in the book and a lot of poetry, um, through joy harjo and, um, and natalie diaz, um. thank you. no, sir. yeah and i will say that, um, maybe last year or the year before they had an author here who wrote a book called calling for a blanket down. and that was, that was really good. yeah. so yeah, was really good.

um, so was wondering, i feel like my education native americans was pretty much a watered down version of what really happened, kind of basically the thanksgiving great we all shared food and it was fun but it wasn't to a college that when i history classes that like oh my gosh is fascinating and horrible all at the same time and i just wonder you know, i feel like my children who are now college age learned similar even though they did incorporate a native american maybe it was that class that my daughter took in high school. however, i'm wondering if you know if changing what children are learning in elementary school about native history. yeah i'm i you know my kids are now teenagers i was really interested in this and.

i, i don't know. i think like so things it completely depends on the individual teacher and some are doing a terrific job and read a lot and bring in speakers or just because i think one of the most like one of the most important things for non-native kid to learn is is is to meet a native person and really okay yeah you really are here today and, and, uh, and then i think in others they aren't, i mean, history is also hard to teach elementary school kids, for sure. it's horrible right. even the good parts are adult content only right, but, but i don't know. we're we're certainly trying the college level at least to, to provide, um, yeah. i don't know, i don't it's hard. i mean, teachers to do so much and then trying fit really in depth native history into a u.s. history class when you're going at breakneck speed anyway. um, yeah i don't know power to them right well. we're almost out of time. is there anything you like to

leave with or else you'd like to say or no. this has been just such a pleasure. i'm so glad to have come to bookmarks where i haven't been before. it's it's such an exciting space to be and and it's great wonderful to have have your questions later. this has been just a delight. well, think everyone would agree we really appreciate you coming sharing your book with us and your knowledge with us. and so i'd like to thank you. and if we do a round of applause

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.