Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America

Bowman, Matthew

Paperback

UFOs & ExtraterrestrialsReligion General 20th Century United States History

Publisher Price: $22.00

ISBN10: 0300281854
ISBN13: 9780300281859
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Jan 28 2025
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English
A gripping account of an alien abduction and its connections to the breakdown of American society in the 1960s

Excellent and exhaustive.--Colin Dickey, Slate

In the mid-1960s, Betty and Barney Hill became famous as the first Americans to claim that aliens had taken them aboard a spacecraft against their will. Their story--involving a lonely highway late at night, lost memories, and medical examinations by small gray creatures with large eyes--has become the template for nearly every encounter with aliens in American popular culture since.

Historian Matthew Bowman examines the Hills' story not only as a foundational piece of UFO folklore but also as a microcosm of 1960s America. The Hills, an interracial couple who lived in New Hampshire, were civil rights activists, supporters of liberal politics, and Unitarians. But when their story of abduction was repeatedly ignored or discounted by authorities, they lost faith in the scientific establishment, the American government, and the success of the civil rights movement.

Bowman tells the fascinating story of the Hills as an account of the shifting winds in American politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. He exposes the promise and fallout of the idealistic reforms of the 1960s and how the myth of political consensus has given way to the cynicism and conspiratorialism and the paranoia and illusion of American life today.

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