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 matthewhi, everyone.

welcome. thank you for joining us tonight in celebration of exurbia. now the battleground for american democracy. my name nyein and i'm a manager at the seminary co-op. as you might know, our was founded in 1961 and in 2019 became the country's first and currently only not for profit

bookstore whose mission is? bookselling. this mission recognizes as a cultural endeavor. booksellers as professionals and bookstores as. a civic institution that supports an informed populace. we invite you to browse, and we also invite you to learn more about the co-op. our sister store, 57th street books and how to support these unique cultural institutions by visiting our website. and of course, speaking to a bookseller after this event, one of the main ways you can support our stores is by buying a book. maybe like the one tonight and we're the author will be happy to be signing books after the event. you can also become a member, the co-op and earn credit back on your purchases if you aren't already become a member when you make purchase this evening. your support us to deliver a very rich and robust of free events. and we hope you'll join for another event soon. there will be time for audience questions at the end of the conversation. should you have any questions? please raise your hand during that time. and with that, i'm thrilled to introduce guest for this evening.

david masciotra masi ultra. got it. is the author of six books a journalist political, analyst and arts critic. he has written for the new republic salon progressive monthly, no depression, the bulwark, crime reads and many other about politics, literature and, music. he and his wife live in indiana where he teaches at indiana university. northwell east. doug swartz, who he's been in conversation with, is the director of the writers program at indiana university northwest. please me and give a warm welcome to david and, doug. they do. good evening, david. good to see you. good evening, doug. yeah, i will have to say that david has actually been my entree. a lot of the a lot of the sites that that show up in the book that that we met at zip's coffeehouse and, sanjay stereo. so david has been my guide to a lot of a lot of the the region that he is that he is writing

about. i might begin by asking you to define terms maybe by doing a sort of, you may be an urbanite sort of routine or something like that and just, you know, you might be an exurbia might not even know it. that's right. yeah. so i would assume that most people are familiar with suburbia and the suburb. it's a town to an urban area such as one in which where we sit chicago. what differentiates an excerpt from a suburb is density and distance. so taking those in reverse and exurb has greater distance from the urban area than a suburb, but fewer people. so less population density and exurbia began to take off, expand and grow and enlarge. within the past couple of decades as a later stage of white flight, which is perhaps something we'll in just a bit, but also exurbia is largely.

so a real developers enter into these area as and they see that it's there's cheap land available they purchase it and they build housing complexes and strip malls and other accouterments necessary to establish something reasonable living a community and people. the diversity or the progressive politics of the city or the densely populated suburb they find themselves in exurbia. and there is a symbol closest that develops between the isolation of the town and the exclusionary and exclusive political beliefs of the inhabitants. well, let me ask you, when i took in to be kind of the the big picture and the big question of the book and the big picture, you seem to be saying, you know, the focus is on escape buddhism and the what you call the coupling of christian nationalists and white flight

and it sort of that the main direction of the book is to discuss the ways in which that escapism no longer has anywhere to escape and. that the estranging it is turning into belligerence, you said. and so i'm kind of what i was wondering and think about that. the subtitle of the book, you know, the battleground and. how, how, how much parallel we in, i guess, you know, in words i couldn't help from going to you know, taking the battleground state has been a metaphor for quite some time in kind of liberalizing it somehow or thinking you know you said that they had they've gone from flight to fight. yes. and what forms that fighting is going to take? you know, you think of trump on january six saying we've got to fight like hell. we're not going to have a country. so that the moment in which we fi