Episode 66: The Alien Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill and the Search For Meaning

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:10]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. Today, we have Matt Bowman here with us. And Matt recently wrote a book called The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, which is about the UFO abduction, one of the earliest ones of Betty and Barney Hill. And I found it to be a fascinating book. It really tries to take a look at not so much the evidence for aliens or something like that, but instead it's a serious look at the cultural impact around the incident that came from the incident, how it mirrors America, things like that. So I found that quite fascinating. So I wanted to invite Matt to the show to talk about his book. And we just recently did a UFO episode where we talked about UFOs because of the government hearings and things like that. So I thought this would kind of fit well with some of the things that we've talked about in the past.

[00:01:03]  Bruce: So Matt, can you give us an introduction to yourself?

[00:01:08]  Matt: Hi, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. I am an associate professor of religion and history at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. My primary areas of interest are the history of religion and especially religion in the United States. I'm also here the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, which means that I teach periodically classes about Mormonism and research and write about it as well. What I'm really interested in and what led me to this topic is the fact that I'm interested in religion in the 20th century, and especially in a series of arguments that have been going on among historians and scholars of religion for a long time about what happened to religion in the 20th century. There's a very long-standing and now largely abandoned theory called the secularization theory, which is the idea that as science advanced, as technology advanced, as modern consumer capitalism advanced, that religion would inevitably fade.

[00:02:15]  Matt: And that's clearly not true. Just look around us, right? Religion is still kind of everywhere in the Western world. But it has taken on new forms, and that is where my work comes in, and especially where this book comes in. What's happening to religion is that traditional institutional forms of religion, that is to say, kind of denominations, that sort of thing, those are fading. But what is happening is people are pursuing different ways of following religious practice and belief. We are into what we now call the New Age Movement, into tarot, into astrology, into really kind of a pick and choose religion, what some people call a cafeteria religion, the idea that you kind of gather practices and beliefs from all sorts of traditions and put them together in different ways. That is where UFOs come in. UFOs are just a kind of fascinating example, I think, of something that really disrupts traditional boundaries of religion and science.

[00:03:19]  Matt: Sometimes they are science, sometimes they are religion, they are ascribed all sorts of different kind of powers and influences and ideas. There are UFO religions out there, things that look a lot like traditional denominational religions, but they're focused around UFOs. There are also people who maintain really staunchly that UFOs are simply technology. There's nothing religious about them. That's what led me to the Hill case, ultimately. I thought that this was a fascinating story that would allow me to explore some of these questions about how UFOs reflect what happened to religion in the mid-20th century, how they reflect the social transformations of religion in the post-World War II period. And also, I think these are kind of broader cultural trends in the United States, generally. A lot happened in America in the 1960s and the Hills, I think, are a perfect example of those processes in microcosm.

[00:04:19]  Peter: That was great. And that is really what I got out of your book is this Search For Meaning, this journey that they were going on. And I really wanted to ask you about that. But first, for our listeners, perhaps we should summarize the case so they kind of know what we're talking about here. Who are the Hills and what happened to them?

[00:04:45]  Matt: Yeah, that's a great question. So Betty and Barney Hill are the first Americans to describe something that looks like a modern abduction. That is a story of being taken aboard a UFO, being examined medically by aliens, then being returned with no memory of what had happened to them. This is a story that has been repeated over and over and over since the Hills first talked about it in the mid-1960s. So they're important for that reason. They lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They were married in 1960. It was a second marriage for both of them. They were both in their later thirties at that point. Barney was black and Betty was white. And I think that's significant as well. About a year and a half after their marriage, they took a short trip to Montreal, Canada, a few hours north of their home in Portsmouth. On their return from that trip on September 19th, 1961, they were driving down in central New Hampshire late at night.

[00:05:57]  Matt: It's a bit unclear about exactly when, but sometime around midnight. And they saw a strange light in the sky. Betty Hill described this light as looking like a star that was falling upward. And the light seemed to be following them down the road. And they got out of their car a couple of times. They looked at it. They had a pair of binoculars, so they looked at it through the binoculars. And the third time they looked at it, they were overcome with terror. Barney, who was standing outside the car, leapt back into the car. They drove home as rapidly as they could. Then, after they woke up the next day, they had this sort of strange sense that something was wrong. Betty Hill began having nightmares, nightmares of being captured by small creatures. Barney Hill developed an ulcer, began drinking more than his doctor thought was wise. And after a couple of years of this sort of anxiety and fear, they went to a psychiatrist, a man named Benjamin Simon, who used hypnosis in his psychiatry and he hypnotized the hills.

[00:07:10]  Matt: And when he hypnotized them, they both told a story of being taken aboard this craft. As they recalled it, the light landed on the road before them. Small creatures got out, took them back into the craft, subjected them to medical experiments, interacted with Betty. She had conversations with these creatures. And then they were returned to their car and told that they would forget about this thing.

[00:07:39]  Peter: And this is all on YouTube, right? This hypnosis session?

[00:07:42]  Matt: Some of it. Yeah, not all of it. In fact, so the Hills family, namely Kathleen Marden, their niece, has the recordings. And they are actually also in the Special Collections of the University of New Hampshire with all the Hills' papers. They would prefer they not be made public, the Hills' family, but I believe there is one recording of one of Barney's sessions on YouTube. So you can go and listen to that if you like.

[00:08:08]  Unidentified speaker: I see.

[00:08:10]  Matt: After that, though, the Hills were convinced that these recovered memories were genuine. And I believe that. I think they actually, they 100% thought this really had happened to them. And they entered into just all sorts of controversy after that, because as you might imagine, this story was controversial. Many people did not believe the Hills. Some people did. And what happened to the Hills after that? I think, well, they really created in many ways the modern UFO narrative. But they also became a flashpoint for all sorts of other debates going on in the United States. Debates about race, debates about religion and culture and politics, and their path, I think, their path towards increasing disillusionment with contemporary conventional authority, be that authority, government or science or religion, really mirrored, I think, what happened to many, many Americans in the 1960s.

[00:09:09]  Peter: That's great. Yeah, like I said, that's really what I got out of the book, which it sounds like was very intentional on your part, was about their search for meaning, kind of the UFO thing in some ways was almost a side issue. They started in the 50s with the Unitarianism and really wanting to trust, I guess, the modern phrase I kept thinking of is trust the science, trust the experts. They really wanted to believe in expertise. Of course, at the time, the expertise was psychiatry and hypnosis and some things that, from our modern perspective, we would consider more pseudoscience, I guess, or at least I would. But hypnosis is probably real, so I don't mean to say

[00:10:12]  Unidentified speaker: whether or not.

[00:10:13]  Matt: But what hypnosis does is an open question, and more than the science, but also the state, right? I mean, one statistic that just blew me away when I discovered it was a series of Gallup polls in the late 1950s and early 1960s that showed that upwards of three-quarters of Americans, around the time John F. Kennedy is elected president, three-quarters of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing, which, of course, compared to today, that's almost boggling, that sounds almost ludicrous because distrust, not just the state, but distrust of experts, distrust of authority of all sorts is now very, very out of fashion. The hills were from a different time in that way.

[00:11:03]  Bruce: What was the percentage that had trusted the government to do the right thing?

[00:11:06]  Matt: It depends on which poll you look at, but it's between 70-75%.

[00:11:12]  Bruce: What would that be today if we were to poll that today?

[00:11:14]  Matt: [Unclear opening] a third of that.

[00:11:17]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:11:18]  Peter: I guess we can see in the course of the book, that really falls apart, that really unravels as they become disenchanted with the government's response to their experience, and then they get into all this new age stuff and the psychic phenomenon, and they were pretty much right there on the vanguard of this stuff in the 60s, right?

[00:11:45]  Matt: Of course, many other people moved down these paths for other reasons. A lot of Americans lost trust in government because of the war in Vietnam, or because of the Watergate scandal, that sort of thing. The Hills are moving down those paths too, but for reasons associated with UFOs. Similarly, with the New Age movement, the New Age movement is a very, very complicated phenomenon. But it had been running, I think, in the subterranean areas of American culture for a long time, but it really explodes in the 1960s, in part because of this emerging distrust of authority, and this sense increasingly that traditional institutional religions with hierarchies, religions with authoritative doctrine, were not to be trusted anymore. And so people began searching for their own sources of authority and their own sources of meaning, and begin combining, creating a bricolage of all sorts of religious practices and beliefs they took from all sorts of places.

[00:12:52]  Matt: From ancient religions to eastern religions to the western esoteric tradition to psychic phenomena and just begin combining and recombining. And the Hills find their way there too, through their UFO encounter, which they find new age believers believe them. New age believers will tell them, yeah, something happened to you. And that was validating at a point when their psychiatrist was telling them, I don't think you are abducted. The government was not interested in their story and so on and so forth.

[00:13:24]  Peter: And people actually believed that these aliens were really delivering some kind of cosmic message to humans, right? Is that what the Hills thought?

[00:13:33]  Matt: They come to believe that. And I think that that's an interesting dynamic, right? And it shows, I think, the evolution of the UFO belief from the 1940s through the 1960s, initially, right? Now, what we call the modern age of the UFO begins in 1947. In 1947, a man named Kenneth Arnold, who was an amateur pilot, was taking his plane out for a little turn near Mount Rainier in Washington. And when he landed that plane, he told the people at the airport where he landed, and then he told reporters that he had seen a series of what he called disc-shaped craft, hovering over the mountains, moving very, very quickly. This was seized upon by reporters, right? And 100 years earlier, 300 years earlier, who knows what people would have interpreted these things as. But because this was 1947, because this was an era of technology, it was an era of the Cold War and of jets and nuclear bombs and V2 missiles and so on, people just assumed they must—craft.

[00:14:46]  Matt: They must be built machines. And reporters called them flying saucers, and that's where we get that term. But over the next five, 10 years, people were seeing these things all over the place. And not simply seeing things, right? They would see strange things in the skies, but they would say, ah, these must be flying saucers, just like what Kenneth Arnold saw. And so you see the development of this narrative, right? And for the most part, the assumption is these are craft, these are spacecraft, they are like our planes, but they're coming from other planets. And that's what many people believe at that point. Now, and that is often called the extraterrestrial hypothesis, right? The idea that UFOs are built machines, not so far unlike, although maybe much more advanced than our own spacecraft and planes are. But by the 1960s, but by the 1960s, you begin to see another theory gain gaining a lot of popularity.

[00:15:47]  Matt: And this other theory is really related to the New Age movement and to a set of occult beliefs that were very popular in in certain circles in American culture, going all the way back to the 19th century, that are influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and Eastern religions. These early American occult movements believed and taught that all creatures, all existence, all human beings exist on a spectrum of advancement and development. And that there are intelligent beings in the universe far more advanced than we are, so advanced and that they may have transcended physical form entirely. And it's our destiny and our duty to progress and to advance ourselves, to become more like these beings that have powers that we would call supernatural, that exists on multiple levels of existence and so on. As I say, this was really generated by a religious movement called theosophy in the late 19th century.

[00:16:54]  Matt: And theosophists read a lot of Hindu and Buddhist writings and kind of adapted those things and combined them with some Christian and Western beliefs. But these ideas really persist. And by the late 1960s, a number of UFO believers begin to depart from the notion that these things are simply machines built on other planets and flown here. Instead, they start to argue that these things are not simply machines, just technology that's more advanced. Rather, they are manifestations from other dimensions. They're manifestations from higher powers. They are representatives of intelligent beings that want to help human beings progress. And while Betty and Barney, I think initially, the first few years, particularly after they have these recovered memories of this abduction, they're pretty firmly in the first camp. They think these things come from another planet.

[00:17:59]  Matt: And they often continue to believe that in certain ways. But by the late 1960s, they are becoming surrounded by people who believe, not simply in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but in this interdimensional hypothesis. This idea that these creatures are from other levels of existence, that they have messages for humanity, they want to help humanity progress, and so on and so on. By the end of the 1960s, the Hills are coming to believe that as well. And you will find, if you go to a UFO convention, you will find representatives of both of these theories there. And sometimes they have very aggressive arguments with each other about which is the correct interpretation of UFOs.

[00:18:45]  Unidentified speaker: That's interesting.

[00:18:46]  Unidentified speaker: Well, it sounds pretty good to me.

[00:18:48]  Peter: I wish I could be convinced almost. I know you want to believe, Bruce, right?

[00:18:54]  Bruce: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I really wish I could believe in probably the extraterrestrial hypothesis would be my choice, but I don't. But I definitely find, you know, as a kid who grew up geeking out over UFO books and things like that, I definitely wish I could believe in them. And I definitely have a desire to believe in them.

[00:19:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:19:16]  Peter: And to go back to the meaning thing about the, I'm sure you guys have read that Man's Search For Meaning book, where he basically defines the primary motivation for humans. Whether you're an atheist or a religious person or whatever, I mean, we all want to live meaningful lives. It's kind of what differentiates us from other animals in a way. I mean, I love my dog, but I'm not really sure if she cares all that much about a meaningful life. I mean, maybe you can make a case.

[00:19:58]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:20:01]  Peter: Would you agree with that, Matt? Is meaning a primary motivation of our lives?

[00:20:07]  Matt: Well, and that is, I think, absolutely what's going on with UFOs. It may well be that all of these different things that people see in the sky, are actually not one category of object, right? Some things we see in the sky might be birds. Some might be meteorites. Some might actually be some strange thing that we don't—have not yet identified through science, right? But we call them all UFOs. Or actually today, the phrase is not UFO, but UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.

[00:20:45]  Bruce: We all know they're UFOs.

[00:20:47]  Unidentified speaker: You can't fool me.

[00:20:48]  Bruce: They are UFOs.

[00:20:49]  Matt: But that's it, right? We call them UFOs because that phrase, a UFO, that word conjures up all sorts of meaning. It tells us all sorts of things about science. It tells us all sorts of things about the universe, about what our place in the universe might be. It actually, I think, teaches us humility in some ways. It tells us we don't actually understand the universe as well as we might. But it also tells us the universe is a meaningful place. There's stuff going on out there. There are other intelligences with plans and ideas. And that can be really powerful, right? And it is, I think, absolutely what the Hills latched onto. The Hills found this story. I think increasingly, as their lives went on, this encounter, this strange thing that happened to them in New Hampshire, became more and more and more a central axis around which their lives rotated, and around which so many other things in their lives were kind of bent to.

[00:21:53]  Matt: It came to explain a great deal for them.

[00:21:57]  Peter: Meaning memes, I guess, is what Bruce

[00:21:59]  Bruce: That's what I call them.

[00:22:00]  Peter: calls the broader category. I guess the downside is that when we do get tied into our beliefs, do get tied into meaning, it becomes very hard for us to be talked out of them.

[00:22:12]  Bruce: Yes, to be rational about them.

[00:22:14]  Unidentified speaker: [Unclear: “It’s not”] possible in some cases.

[00:22:16]  Matt: Yeah, absolutely. This, I think, happens to the Hills. That's precisely what goes on with their hypnotist, and with their experience of hypnosis. It reveals, I think, how complicated this thing is. It's pretty easy to say, well, we should all be rational, but boy, what's rationality and what is rational, what's not rational? The Hills were hypnotized, and under hypnosis, they came out of this hypnosis with memories, very vivid memories that were just really, really powerfully affecting to them. If you do listen to that recording of Barney Hill, and in his hypnosis session, right, where he's talking about these creatures, he is absolutely terrified. It is real, genuine emotion, and after he was taken out of the hypnosis, he still had those memories, right? And he was just so, he and his wife both were just so baffled why it was that people didn't believe them.

[00:23:20]  Matt: And it's a really kind of intractable problem, right? And it shows, I think, how complicated the human mind is, how complicated hypnosis is, certainly, and how difficult it is for us to kind of suss out. Well, you have to suss out what is real and what is true, and what is scientific and what's not scientific, right? You get, when you start talking about UFOs, you pretty quickly get down into really kind of existential questions about the nature of reality and the nature of your own mind.

[00:23:54]  Bruce: So I have a comment and a question on that. So first of all, in a past podcast episode, I mentioned that experience does kind of trump a lot of things. So like if the example I used was that I don't believe in Bigfoot. I believe there's good science that makes Bigfoot a very, very difficult thing to believe in. By the way, I want to believe in Bigfoot too, but you know, I don't. Let's say I was out walking in the woods and Bigfoot comes along and he's roaring in my face. I'm not going to say, oh, science says this is impossible. I must be hallucinating. I'm not. It's not going to happen. I'm going to believe in Bigfoot at that point. Experience would trump any rational knowledge I think I have through science about Bigfoot. I thought about that as I was reading your book. If I actually saw, never mind the hypnosis, that's a separate issue.

[00:24:43]  Bruce: I agree with you on that. But if I actually saw something in the sky and I grab my binoculars and I look at it and I see people on this ship, which Barney apparently saw through binoculars, that's my experience at that point. I'm not going to just assume I hallucinated. I mean, I'm aware hallucinations are possible, but I feel like I can tell the difference between hallucinations and not because when I wake up from a dream, I may not know it's a dream while I'm in the dream, but I can tell afterwards. I can completely understand why they felt the need to be validated in some way over this initial experience that was so overpowering for them. Now, the thing that bothered me though is when they got to the hypnosis. Now, I'm not an expert on hypnosis. I don't know anything about it, but I know of at least two real-life cases of recovered memories through hypnosis.

[00:25:40]  Bruce: In both cases, it split families apart over supposed recovered memories. The memories that were recovered, they would grow increasingly bizarre over time to the point where there's no way they were actually true. Each time they would go into hypnosis, they would remember more and just off-the-wall stuff was starting to come up as accusations over time. And in both cases, the people believed them so strongly that it ripped families apart and no one could talk. And you couldn't even reason with them over these memories that had been quote recovered. So I'm left with this idea that recovered memories from hypnosis are strongly believed, but that they're just simply not real, or at least they don't necessarily have to be real. And again, I don't know anything about this, but you must have researched this. Can you maybe talk about it? Because I know I cringed at the point where Betty and Barney Hill go and decide to get hypnosis.

[00:26:44]  Bruce: It's a legitimate psychiatrist that's helping him. He doesn't believe that the memories that come out of hypnosis are real, and he even tells them that up front. And yet he still puts them into hypnosis, and then they end up believing these memories, just like always seems to happen with the recovered memories in hypnosis. And I was really kind of even bothered by that, that this otherwise legitimate psychiatrist is using hypnosis and is trying to convince them, oh, it's not actually a real memory. And of course, they're going to believe it at this point, that it's a real memory. So help me out with that.

[00:27:19]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, yeah.

[00:27:21]  Bruce: And was that just the way they thought of it back then? Do we still think of it that way? Like, what's happening here?

[00:27:26]  Matt: Yeah, that's a lot of stuff. So I'll back up a little bit and start with where the hills are coming from. I think it's important at this point to say something about the Hills’ religious background. They are Unitarians, and that's significant because in the mid-20th century, Unitarianism is presenting itself as a modern scientific religion. That is, Unitarians argued in favor of science, in favor of empiricism, but also in favor of human capacity. Which is to say, Unitarians said all human beings are rational. All human beings have the capacity to perceive reality, to understand reality, to interpret reality as it actually is. This is why I think many Unitarians are in favor of psychiatry and psychology as medical practices because they are scientific, they are scientific, they are rooted in research, and so on. But they are suspicious of traditional psychoanalysis, that is, Freudianism, because, of course, Freudianism maintains that in fact human beings are not terribly rational.

[00:28:45]  Matt: That we are all buffeted on all sides by our unconscious, by emotions that we don't fully understand and don't fully control, that we do things for reasons that we can't even really explain to ourselves a lot of the time. And Unitarians are pretty wary of that because that's not how they want to understand human nature. And the Hills, I think, one thing that I think is pretty consistent with them all the way through this whole experience is that they say, we know what we saw. And not simply we know what we saw, right, but we can interpret what we saw correctly. So, for instance, right, if you were to run into a Bigfoot in the woods, say you saw this big hairy human-like thing standing on its hind legs in the woods. What you just said, right, was that you would interpret this as Bigfoot. Now Bigfoot as a category is something that you've kind of drawn from American culture and from all sorts of movies and from bumper stickers, and there's all these kind of cultural interpretations that may or may not have anything to do with that big hairy thing that you see in the woods.

[00:29:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:29:57]  Matt: And I think that's also the case with what the Hills saw, right? They brought to what they saw this whole kind of cultural baggage of UFO culture, right? And Betty Hill recalls, right, saying to her husband, this is before the recovered memory, she, when they're, after they see this light in the sky and they're driving home, Betty Hill says to her husband, do you believe in flying saucers now? And that phrase flying saucers, right, points us to this whole kind of cultural movement that had begun with Kenneth Arnold and the reporters who called what he saw flying saucers, right?

[00:30:36]  Bruce: And by the way, Barney's answer was no, I don't believe in them after seeing them.

[00:30:39]  Matt: Yeah, which I think is also very interesting, right? Because Barney Hill, you know, he is associating that phrase flying saucers with all sorts of things that he finds disreputable and not terribly persuasive. So, you know, so that's the first thing I think here, right, is to kind of separate whatever kind of, and this is what I think the psychologist Carl Jung in his book, Flying Saucers, [unclear] Modern Myth of Things in the Sky, this is a point that he makes, which is to say, right, there are absolutely things that people see in the sky that they can't interpret. They don't know what they are. We don't know what they are. But what we tend to do is to project onto those things our cultural baggage and to say, ah, there's a strange, I saw a strange light in the sky. If I'm an American living in the early 1970s and I see a strange light in the sky, the first thing that's going to occur to me is the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

[00:31:40]  Matt: The idea that this must be a spaceship coming from another planet. If I were in a different culture, a different time, a different place, I might project onto that strange light in the sky something else, right? These strange things in the sky aren't self-interpreting. We make of them what we will, and that process is often unconscious. And that's, I think, in part what happens to Betty and Barney. Now, hypnosis, there is a fairly, and there has emerged, I think, in the last 60 years or so, a fairly large and, for me, persuasive body of evidence that human memory, well, human memory is not like a diamond mine. If you think about memory as a diamond mine, how you picture it is that you can go in there, and if you're a hypnotist or a psychiatrist, you can go in there, you can dig up memories, you can excavate them from the dirt where they're buried and bring them back out and that will reproduce the past.

[00:32:45]  Matt: We know now that that's not how memory works. Every time you remember something, if the two of you think back to sixth grade and you're probably maybe thinking about your sixth grade teachers right now, what you're actually doing is regenerating that memory. Now, you are, of course, taking it from neurons that have fired off and all of that, but you are seeing that memory through what is happening in your life right now. You're perceiving that memory anew. You're recreating it in your current context. And that's how memory works, is we recreate our memories every time we go back and access them. And that means, then, that our memories are never a perfect reproduction of the past. And this is what Benjamin Simon tells the Hills, right? And this is what he tells John Fuller, who wrote the first book about the Hill case. He tells them that memories recovered under hypnosis are not necessarily accurate reproductions of the past, but they are accurate productions of culture, or, I'm sorry, of emotional reality.

[00:34:00]  Matt: That is, the stories that we tell under recovered memory, they do access our emotional reality. They access how we're feeling. They access things that might have unnerved us in the past, and they can reproduce those feelings. And that's why Benjamin Simon hypnotized the Hills, because he said clearly, there was something that was going on here that caused you both stress and distress, and I want to bring those feelings of stress and distress to the surface and help you work through them. He tells them before the hypnosis and after. Don't expect that you're going to get a genuine story about what actually happened to you here.

[00:34:40]  Peter: They never doubted it, though, right?

[00:34:42]  Unidentified speaker: They did not.

[00:34:42]  Unidentified speaker: They believed [him?] fully.

[00:34:44]  Matt: Yeah, and I think that had something to do with their unitarianism, right? Their confidence in themselves, their sense that human beings perceive reality, we understand reality, we can be trusted, right? And of course, there's a kind of deep and interesting arguments about democracy here as well, right? Because one of the premises of democracy is that citizens can make rational choices. Citizens can make good, well-informed choices. And that's what unitarians thought about democracy, but it's also what they thought about science and about these things, right? And that's where Benjamin Simon, the psychiatrist [and?] the Hills, come to this disjuncture. They perceive Simon as telling them, you people don't really understand yourselves. And to be fair, you know, Simon was a bit of an elitist. He did, in letters after this case, right? He wrote to other people and he said, frankly, the Hills aren't really capable of having a scientific discussion with me.

[00:35:45]  Matt: So I'm not even going to engage with them in this, right? He is a bit of a snob.

[00:35:50]  Unidentified speaker: But that does not help, right?

[00:35:53]  Matt: The Hills, as he's trying to tell them, you need to think about this story as expressing an emotional truth rather than an experiential truth, because they perceive him as basically being an elitist who's telling them what happened to them. And they bristle against that, I think as many, many people would. So it's a kind of intractable problem here, right? It's two ways of understanding human nature, two ways of understanding reality, butting into each other.

[00:36:22]  Bruce: So what does it mean to be an emotional truth? So you kind of get into this in the book, particularly with Barney, that his encounter with the aliens could be very easily read as the feelings he has as a black man trying to live in a white society where there's always this suspicion of him, and he's always kind of the outsider. It's a little less clear in the case of Betty, what emotional truth would be was being recovered. So what do we mean by recovering an emotional truth? And is that something that's actually true? Or does hypnosis just generate completely made up stuff?

[00:37:00]  Matt: Yeah, what Simon felt, right? And it's important, I think, to point out that Simon does not only ask them about this moment, you saw this strange light in the sky, right? And what happened after you saw the strange light in the sky. He's interested in the context surrounding that. And the context surrounding that was that the Hills had taken this trip to Montreal. Now, it did not go particularly well, in part because they didn't speak French, they had trouble with the language. And Barney Hill, it appears from a couple of different sources, it appears that he was wary the entire trip. We know he took a pistol, and that he took a pistol because he was worried about how, not simply him being a black man, but him being a black man in an interracial relationship with a white woman, how that would be received by people. He is, whenever he remembers going to a hotel, going to a restaurant, all of this is kind of freighted as he's talking about these memories with this worry that are these people going to treat you badly?

[00:38:15]  Matt: Am I going to be threatened? And so what Simon eventually came to believe was that this was a really tense trip. And I should also mention that they had to cut the trip short because a major storm was approaching. And so they were really, they were driving near midnight, right? Because they were trying to get home because of this major storm. We also know that they turned off the main road and they both recalled that. Now, the Hills didn't really explain why they turned off the main road they were on that would take them back to their house. Simon eventually came to believe that they got lost and that they were arguing. Barney was under a lot of stress and he was very annoyed about what was going on. He eventually came to tell this story. Now, with Betty, this is also significant. Betty Hill had nightmares. She had nightmares for a couple weeks after this trip.

[00:39:18]  Matt: In these nightmares, she was captured by small creatures who took her into the ship and did essentially what the memories that she recovered under hypnosis later on. Simon never doubted those nightmares. He said, yeah, these are probably real nightmares. These are nightmares that she actually had. He kept pushing, trying to discover if Betty Hill had told Barney the narrative of these nightmares. Simon eventually came to believe that she had or that if she did not tell them to Barney, that at least she told them in Barney's hearing. She told the story of these dreams. And so Simon thought Barney, under hypnosis, took this story of Betty's nightmares and interwove it with his own worries and fears and anxieties about racial persecution and thus generated this story. Now what is interesting about Betty's stories that she recovered under hypnosis is that they do closely mirror her nightmares.

[00:40:23]  Matt: There are some, I think, key differences, but in many ways they are a kind of reproduction of these dreams that she had in just the first couple of months.

[00:40:33]  Bruce: And that she had written down.

[00:40:35]  Matt: Yes, that is a good point. And she wrote these down. Now I think one thing that she did do while she was writing down these dreams was to put them in a narrative format. And she confesses that. She says, I had a bunch of dreams. They were not a reproduction of this single kind of coherent story. I have kind of turned them into this single coherent story as I wrote them down.

[00:41:00]  Peter: I thought you kind of dropped a bombshell maybe in the last few pages where you also mentioned that their experience was very similar to an episode of The Outer Limits.

[00:41:13]  Matt: Oh, well, in some ways, not exactly, but in some ways. Yeah, it's actually the experience is not at all similar to the plot of the episode. But the creature in the Outer Limits episode has large bony ridges going from the top of its eyes back to the sides of its head. And under hypnosis, although importantly, not in the nightmares, not in Betty's nightmares, but under hypnosis, the hills describe these creatures as having large, slanted, kind of the quintessential alien eyes, right? Now, Betty, I think though, I think what's significant about this is that the story that Betty tells is not like the story that Barney tells. It is in kind of the basic narrative beats. There were creatures in the road, they took them into the craft, they subjected them to medical experimentation, then they took them off. That kind of basic framework is there.

[00:42:12]  Matt: But for Betty, this whole experience is not nearly as terrifying as it is for Barney. Betty is fascinated by it. She's very interested in this. We know that Betty was interested in UFOs before this experience. Her sister had seen a UFO. She knew enough to ask her husband, do you believe in flying saucers now? After that, she was following this. For her, the whole story, I think, seems to be very much a kind of expression of her hunger that she had, all the way back to being a child, about how to learn about the world, how to master the world, how to make a difference, how to really, I think, find ways to change the world for the better. And that, I think, really shines through in the conversations that she says she has with the alien. She's asking them questions about who they are and where they came from and how she can learn more. She wants to introduce them to scientists, right?

[00:43:24]  Matt: She wants to kind of create this sort of relationship between this other civilization and humanity. She doesn't have the same kind of abject terror that Barney does. The story does different things, I think, for the two of them in ways that reflect, I think, their different kind of, their different places in America in 1960 or so.

[00:43:47]  Bruce: So let me read a little bit from your book. It says, Because the state did not respond to their experiences as they hoped it would, they grew increasingly frustrated about the role it should have in their lives. That, in turn, cast doubt upon those scientific authorities and more upon whether or not legally enforced desegregation would bring about the sort of integrated society they hoped for. And so then, that's like in the opening introduction to your book. And then in the book, you detail how UFOs went from being perceived by the Air Force and scientific authorities from being seen as a scientific question to being seen as pseudoscience. How did that happen? What happened that it went from... And it seems like we're coming full circle. We're starting to treat UFOs as a legitimate scientific question again as to what they are and to try to figure it out with the congressional hearings and things like that.

[00:44:51]  Bruce: But what happened that went from starting at that point to treating it as pseudoscience that then created this kind of negative reaction for Betty and Barney Hill? And then how have we come back around on that?

[00:45:04]  Matt: Yeah, boy, there's another book length question. But I will do what I can. Yeah, so initially...

[00:45:14]  Matt: In 1947, of course, we have the Kenneth Arnold sighting. And then that is followed up fairly rapidly with a whole lot of other sightings. And there may be a couple of things going on here, depending on your interpretation of it. One might be that in fact there are a lot more sightings after 1947. Over the five, ten years after that, there are a lot more of these strange things in the sky. Another way of interpreting it might be that people begin to identify strange things they see in the sky as flying saucers, as UFOs, right? And so there are more reports of flying saucers slash UFOs at that point. But there is a legitimate government interest in this early on. We've got records from the military, from the Air Force in particular, saying this is something we need to take a look at. This is something we need to pay attention to. And there are a series of government studies about these things.

[00:46:16]  Matt: They're called Project Sign, Project Grudge, and then most famously, Project Blue Book. What happens is that these various studies and these various government projects conclude repeatedly that there's not much there, that there's not much of interest here. Now, whether or not that's a legitimate conclusion is also open to debate. One of the first major turning points here is in something called the Robertson Panel, which is called 1952, led by a very well respected scientist named Howard Robertson, thus the name. And this panel meets and looks at a series of cases that have been gathered by the Air Force over the previous five years or so. And the panel concludes that there's nothing here. And in fact, the panel concludes that the major threat of UFOs is not that they are machines from another planet or another dimension or whatnot, but rather their major threat is that they're going to make Americans anxious, is that Americans don't need another thing to be worried about in the early 1950s, and that these stories of alien craft and alien invasion and so on are only going to make things worse.

[00:47:43]  Matt: And so the Robertson panel encourages, quite explicitly encourages the government to try to debunk these things and to more or less say, you know, there's nothing to see here, right, everyone move on, move on. And there are indeed actual instances of this kind of thing happening, right? There's a famous story in the Saturday Evening Post in which the Air Force decided to participate in. And overwhelmingly, all the Air Force people say is, you know, rational people won't pay attention to these things, there's nothing here, move along, everybody. Now that, depending on your point of view, where the government comes down here is either simply, you know, following the evidence, right, a series of studies in which people say, you know, we don't really think there's anything here. Or you might, I think also with fairness, say that the Robertson panel, particularly, is a fairly hastily arranged meeting.

[00:48:50]  Matt: They meet for three days. None of the scientists on the panel had been all that involved in the UFO studies before. Allen Hynek, who was a very well-respected astronomer, who had been the primary contractor that the Air Force had, was working with to investigate these things, he felt that the Robertson panel was basically not taking this thing seriously, and that they just were brushing off a lot of reports that Hynek felt had some legitimate teeth to them. So you could go either way on this, right? But it is true, I think, that over the 1960s then, and again, later on in 1968, there was another committee formed by the government called the Condon Committee, chaired by Edward Condon at the University of Colorado, and the Condon Committee concludes the same thing. They say, you know, there's nothing here. The major threat is people paying too much attention to UFOs, and UFOs are going to make Americans anxious, and they're going to freak us all out, and so we shouldn't pay attention to them.

[00:50:02]  Matt: Hynek again is very frustrated with the Condon Committee. He says they're not taking this seriously enough. There's sufficient evidence here for a serious investigation. And critically, Hynek says, both the Condon Committee and the Robertson panel are being condescending to people when they're saying, you know, Americans shouldn't be worrying about UFOs, so let's try to make people stop worrying about them by dismissing and downplaying them. So there's a lot of moving parts here, right? And you can interpret this process in a number of different ways. I personally, I think, tend to think that, generally speaking, the scientific investigation here is probably correct, but I also think that Hynek is correct to say that these different panels and different government reports tend to come off as fairly condescending and paternalistic. That is to say, why are people even bothering with this?

[00:51:05]  Matt: And Hynek said, right, he said the vast majority of these cases can be explained as misidentifications, as perhaps hoaxes, things like that. But he said there's a small minority of these cases that we can't explain. We don't know what they are. And those are the ones we should be paying more attention to. And that actually resonates with me, I think.

[00:51:32]  Peter: I love how sympathetically you portray Betty and Barney Hill in the book. I mean, it seems like you have a lot of... You bend over backwards, it seems to me, to really look at things from their perspective, even though I kind of assume you're not a super big UFO enthusiast. But, you know, Betty, I mean, Betty at least really went kind of, I don't want to say crazy, but she really got out there, right? I mean, there's something on the Wikipedia where they're talking about her at a UFO conference, and she's showing pictures of random airplanes and things, and even the random lights in the sky, and even the UFO enthusiasts are basically booing her at that point.

[00:52:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:52:25]  Unidentified speaker: Is that accurate?

[00:52:27]  Matt: Yeah, you know, by the late 1970s and the 1980s, well, she received some communication, I think, from UFO investigators who were her friends, who were her allies. John Fuller, who I mentioned before, John Fuller is a journalist who wrote the first book-length study of their case, and John Fuller absolutely believed that this had happened to her. Many other of their allies who shared that kind of sympathy did as well. And these people, by the end of Betty's life, John Fuller sends her a letter saying, like, look, you need to be a bit more discerning. You need to be a bit more skeptical. You took us out to this field and showed us UFOs, and they seem to us to be lights on a train and street lights and things like that. Yeah, and I think it's important, though, to contextualize where Betty goes here in the fact that her husband Barney dies quite suddenly in 1969.

[00:53:35]  Matt: He was only in his mid-40s. It was a massive cerebral hemorrhage. In the morning, he was fine and healthy. By bedtime, he was dead. And that was a deep, deep, profound shock to her. And I suspect that a lot of the paths she follows in the 1970s through the 1980s, which is to say she grows increasingly interested in this broader world of the New Age movement. That is to say, not simply believing in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but also dabbling in psychic powers, in past life regression. She consults mediums. She grows interested in the ancient aliens theory, right, which has become very popular over the last 10 years because of the History Channel show, the notion that human civilization has been guided since its very inception by intelligent creatures from other planets and perhaps other dimensions who have kind of shaped and molded us as we've gone.

[00:54:45]  Matt: Betty Hill really becomes plugged into a lot of these things. And I think in part because, well, because she and Barney are told shortly before Barney's death in 1966-67 by a guy named Robert Hohmann, who was a UFO investigator whom they were friends with and had a lot of faith in, Hohmann becomes convinced that the Hills encounter is really meaningful, not simply for the Hills, but for the sort of broader history of humanity. We call the New Age movement the New Age movement because many of its advocates subscribe to this belief that emerged from the Theosophy movement that has roots really far back in interpretations of Eastern religion and so on. And the idea that humanity is approaching a massive psychic, spiritual, transcendent awakening, that human civilization is about to change dramatically, that we're going to have a kind of mass consciousness raising, and our society will never be the same after that.

[00:55:57]  Unidentified speaker: Hohmann thinks this is true.

[00:55:59]  Matt: Hohmann believes in this, and he becomes convinced that the Hills experience is a sign of this, that Betty and Barney have an important role to play in this coming awakening of humanity. And Betty Hill, I think, comes to believe that too. And I think this is a place where she goes after the death of her husband, when she's feeling, I think, kind of lost and adrift. She really seizes on this experience, and very much, I think, comes, you know, holds to it because it is something that gives her life meaning. It is something that, yeah, that allows her, I think, some sort of connection even to her husband and to this thing that happened to them, that came to dominate what was going on, you know, in their life from birth to death.

[00:56:56]  Bruce: So I can, you do a good job of drawing in the point of view of Betty and Barney Hill. So I can imagine after having this weird experience where I see something in the sky that I can't explain, but I'm convinced can't possibly be just a plane or a meteor or something like that because I grabbed my binoculars, I'm looking at it, I can see people on board a ship or whatever, and they're in uniforms and things like that. I mean, it was what Barney claims he saw even prior to the hypnosis is fairly detailed. So they report it to the Air Force. And I can imagine how I might feel, based on reading your book, if the Air Force, who has this attitude that our job is to convince people that they didn't really see anything. Our job is to convince, this is pseudoscience. Science has ruled it out, and the authority of science, the weight of the authority of science has told us that there's just no such thing as UFOs.

[00:57:59]  Bruce: And the guy does his job, he's taking down the report of what they saw, and they're reading the room, and it's obvious that he's just not taking them seriously. And I can imagine how I might feel, you know, if I'm in their shoes at that point. So I can see how that might drive them to go try to find people who seem like scientific authorities, you know, in their minds, but are willing to take them seriously. And this seems like this is what's happened and why they kind of started down this road. Is that correct?

[00:58:36]  Matt: Yeah, I think absolutely. Well, and especially for Betty, I think Barney is a bit more wary. Barney is reluctant to call the Air Force in the first place. And I think that has to do, right, with, well, what historians call the politics of respectability, right? Barney Hill was a black man in a state with very few black people. He and Betty both are quite involved in the Civil Rights Movement and one of the real tenets of the Civil Rights Movement. And when I say Civil Rights Movement, what I mean here is the movement led by folks like Martin Luther King that is trying very hard, right, to gain black people equal access to political authority, to cultural authority, to participate in American life. That's distinct, I think, from other black movements, like, say, the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X who say, essentially, like, we want to be separatist, we want to go off and do our own thing.

[00:59:36]  Matt: But for someone like Martin Luther King, right, part of working for equality and gaining equality was to demonstrate black respectability and to show that black people will wear suits, black people will get educated, they'll participate in all the respectable venues of American life. So for Barney, right, calling the Air Force and saying, I just saw this strange thing in the sky and it terrified me and I think it might be an extraterrestrial craft, that felt to him very [unclear: “disrespectful”/“disrespectable”]. It was not the sort of thing that a respectable human being did. So he was pretty wary about calling the government. Betty, though, was gung-ho for it. Betty was really interested in this. She wanted to dig in further. She had, I think, more confidence than Barney did that when they called the Air Force, they'd be taken seriously.

[01:00:31]  Matt: She's the one who says later that she was expecting representatives from the Air Force to come out and to talk to them and to take down their story, right, and to launch a full investigation. When that didn't happen, Betty Hill was quite annoyed with it.

[01:00:49]  Bruce: So you raise a number of interesting epistemological questions, and this podcast deals in epistemology quite a bit, so I think this would be interesting to our audience. So you quote Thomas Gieryn, did I pronounce that correctly?

[01:01:05]  Matt: Oh, Gieryn, yeah. The historian of science, yep.

[01:01:07]  Bruce: Yeah, so he has this idea that science is something that's identified through consensus and institutional weight. So there is this kind of concept that is becoming common amongst our institutions in the Air Force, and this is what Betty and Barney are bumping into, that there's this idea of a scientific authority, it's the consensus, it's the institutional weight, there's this institution of science that gets to decide what's true and what isn't, or at least that's how some people interpret it. And then from Daniel Thurs and Ronald Numbers, they talk about how science boundaries were determined by quote, the academy, military, and industry. And then Michael Gordin claimed, I don't know if I pronounced that right or not, that the idea of pseudoscience is less useful as a way to identify a body of ideas or a method than as a way to mark where the boundaries of science as a professional discipline are at any moment.

[01:02:11]  Bruce: So there's certain things that are treated as that pseudoscience and certain things that are treated as that science. And UFOs are firmly institutionally in the pseudoscience camp by the time Betty and Barney Hill come and report their incident to the Air Force. I would really like to have you maybe elaborate on this and talk through just historically where were we at? How did they, how is it looked at? How has that maybe changed since then also? And then give me your own feelings. Do you agree or disagree with this view of science?

[01:02:48]  Matt: Yeah, yeah, this is a good question. And again, a very, very large one.

[01:02:53]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, here we go.

[01:02:55]  Matt: So one thing that is happening in America in the 20th century is the professionalization and institutionalization of science. And I want to be clear here, right, when I'm talking about science, what I'm talking about here is what the bulk of people who have power in America call science, right? And what they say is science. And which is a different, I think, question than kind of philosophical debates about how do we define science as a method, an idea. One of the interesting things—

[01:03:32]  Unidentified speaker: Good clarification.

[01:03:33]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[01:03:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:03:34]  Matt: One of the interesting things here that is happening in America in the 20th century is this. A number of different vectors. The first is that we have emerging in American higher education the German model of higher education, which is to say that there are undergraduates and there are graduate students. Graduate students receive degrees. They receive credentials, the PhD degree, for instance, or the MA degree, which are certifications by this university that this person is an expert. Now, American universities begin granting PhDs in the late 19th century, and increasingly they're granting more and more of them and more universities begin to grant PhDs. And this becomes kind of a network of people who are certified by universities as experts in whatever field this is. Now, that increasingly then, these people, these PhDs as credentialed scientists, increasingly begin, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, to marginalize amateurs.

[01:04:48]  Matt: And actually they begin to use that word, amateur, to describe people who are doing science without degrees. Now, this is a real departure from how science, quote unquote, had worked in the Western world since the Scientific Revolution, right? When you had people, you know, I mean, all the way back to Isaac Newton, right? Who are just doing and you can go through the [unclear]. There's nearly almost all major scientific discoveries before the late 19th century are done by people without these degrees who are doing science as an avocation, Benjamin Franklin, right? And to take another example, those people though, those so-called amateurs are increasingly marginalized by the academic elite going into the early 20th century. And it only persists and gets even more and more and more of the case. So by the mid 20th century, right, science becomes largely assumed to be the domain of people with PhDs who work at universities.

[01:05:52]  Matt: Now, beginning in World War I, the government begins to reach out to universities, to these people with PhDs, and to say, we want your advice. We want to consult with you. We want to draw on your expertise. Woodrow Wilson's administration during World War I reaches out to scientists to help coordinate the war effort. He's looking to economists. He's looking also to physical scientists to help develop materials needed for the war. That escalates massively in World War II. In World War II, the government and the military in particular begin to invest very, very heavily in universities. In turn, they begin to draw these people with PhDs into government. Of course, the famous example of this, of course, is the Manhattan Project, which kind of cements and solidifies this real nexus and intersection between the state and these professional PhD university-based scientists.

[01:07:06]  Matt: After the end of World War II, there was a lot of debate about what should happen now. Like, should the state simply step away? Should the state pull all this funding that it's been I mean, we're talking billions of dollars, all this money that it's been dumping into universities and just let universities go back and start doing this all on their own again? And there are a few people who advocate for that, but for the most part, these professional scientists at universities want to keep all this money. That is coming to them from the state. And the state, in its own turn, feels as though these people have proven themselves. They developed the atomic bomb, right? And there's a real worry on the part of the state that should the state step back from this relationship with these scientists, that the Soviet Union will overtake the United States.

[01:08:06]  Matt: Because, of course, there absolutely was. A fair amount of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project and the Soviet Union, they exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, and they were able to do that so quickly, largely because of espionage. So the state has an investment as well in maintaining this relationship. And so you have emerging what one scientist involved in all of this, I mean, Alex Weinberg calls big science and what other people, including Dwight Eisenhower, call the military-industrial complex. And he called, you know, other scholars have said this is really the military-industrial scientific complex. So this creation of a network of really tightly interwoven university scientists, military officials, and also corporations, increasingly military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing and so on and so on. These groups are working very, very closely together and receiving just massive amounts of money from the state.

[01:09:11]  Matt: And so all of this then leads to the question of UFOs, right? An accusation that many advocates for UFOs, people like Donald Keyhoe, who was a former military officer and probably the most visible public advocate for UFOs in the 1950s and 60s, his argument is these people decided that UFOs are not a scientific project, that they are pseudoscience. But Keyhoe says they decided this because they know, they have secret knowledge about UFO technology, that they don't want to be made public. So they're actually, so Keyhoe says, they are actually being unscientific. They are not following the data. In response to that, the Air Force scientists and the people whom the Air Force is consulting with, who disagree, say, no, you're being unscientific. And because this nexus of influence, these universities, the military, these large corporations, all of whom employ scientists, because by that point, the bulk of institutional weight, the bulk of financial weight, the bulk of public prestige, is sitting in that nexus, in that intersection.

[01:10:34]  Matt: It is easy for them, for a government report to be issued stating UFOs are a pseudoscience, and that report is signed by major academics who are working at all of these different universities that are receiving all this federal funding, for them to say UFOs are pseudoscience, and for, then, the bulk of the American public, especially at a point when national trust in the government is quite high, it's easy for that to be believed. And that is what these academics who you quote, who I cite, that is what they're arguing, is that pseudoscience becomes, in the mid 20th century, a boundary that is largely drawn by people with PhDs, people in these large, powerful institutions, and they are able to deem pseudoscience what they want to call pseudoscience. Now, one more thing and then I'm done. My follow-up to that is, this is not necessarily to say, of course, that they are wrong.

[01:11:38]  Matt: When the Air Force says there is no real scientific data behind UFOs, there is, as the Condon Report says, there is nothing really to be gained scientifically by studying UFOs, it's entirely possible that they're right. But it is also true at the same time that when Donald Keyhoe says all of these people decided that this was pseudoscience and they did not do their due diligence, that the Robertson panel only took three days and they just flipped through a bunch of reports and they made a decision, that's true too. This is another conundrum that the Hills are caught between, is that they feel dismissed, they feel as though they are not being paid much attention to, and they're not necessarily wrong about that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are right about what they saw and that they are right about their abduction happening.

[01:12:41]  Matt: Both those things can be true at the same time.

[01:12:43]  Bruce: So, let me see if I can summarize what I kind of understood to be the point of view. It's not your point of view, but the point of view of the establishment at the time was, like, we could have a debate or discussion about what defines science versus pseudoscience philosophically. That's not really what was going on. It really boiled down to that there are certain people who are authorities who get to decide this counts as science and this doesn't. Now, maybe they're doing that right, maybe they're doing that wrong. We could debate whether they have good individual philosophies that they're using by which to make this delineation. But at the end of the day, through a sort of authority-based approach, they're deciding what counts as science and what doesn't.

[01:13:33]  Unidentified speaker: Is that?

[01:13:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:13:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:13:37]  Matt: People in the media follow them. I cite a few of these people in the book, like James Conant Bryant, who was president of Harvard, and who was a chemist, who was a trained scientist. When he writes a book and says, this stuff is science and this stuff is not, because James Conant is the president of Harvard, his voice carries weight. Other people will tend to fall in line with that. I think it is fair to say, that is largely what happens with UFOs, is that when a lot of these elite, powerful people with big megaphones decide, and again, it's a separate question about whether to decide correctly or incorrectly, but when they make this decision that this stuff isn't worth investigating anymore, largely the media falls in line, and Hollywood falls in line, and the students of these people at these universities fall in line and follow the experts.

[01:14:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:14:40]  Bruce: Okay, so from page 61 of your book, finally the Air Force drew a veil of secrecy over UFO investigations in one more effort to prevent the sightings and a credulous public's misinterpretation of them to damage national security. Now, you kind of already hinted at this, but I want to dig into this a little bit. It's one thing for them to decide this is pseudoscience. And in fact, I'm not sure I entirely disagree with that decision. I think that at least the vast majority of UFO sightings and the way it gets treated is more or less pseudoscience, right? But it's another thing altogether to decide that this is going to damage national security if we don't shut people down from having beliefs in these things, right? That struck me as interesting. I won't say positive or negative or anything, but it's interesting that they went that far, right?

[01:15:42]  Bruce: But how might UFO investigations damage national security in the minds of the Air Force at this time?

[01:15:48]  Matt: Yeah, yeah. So this is another place where I think we need to try to put ourselves in the minds of Americans, right, in the high Cold War period, that is the late 40s or the late 60s. There was a real worry, I think, and this comes out in the report of the Robertson panel, it comes out in the report of the Condon Committee, that UFOs are going to cause a national panic and that if Americans believe that our world is being visited by extraterrestrial creatures with powers far beyond ours, that that is going to do a couple of things. First, it might simply cause fear and terror in the streets, right? People not going to work, people shutting down the economy, not leaving their homes, trying to flee, all sorts of kind of national chaos, right? And national chaos, importantly, I think, based on largely nothing, as far as the Air Force was concerned, right?

[01:16:48]  Matt: These sightings were not, there was no science behind them. Nothing worth, nothing of scientific worth in an investigation is what the Condon Committee said.

[01:16:57]  Unidentified speaker: So that's one fear.

[01:16:59]  Matt: Another fear, I think, that they were worried about is a diversion of resources. And that largely because of the Cold War and the sense of national competition with the Soviet Union, which was weighed very, very heavily on Americans' minds. And there was a sense that we need national mobilization, that Americans need to be committed to the defeat of the Soviet Union. We need to be devoting our scientific resources, our economic resources all towards this competition. And UFOs are an irrelevant dead end off of that. They aren't going to help us at all. And so, of course, the Air Force does, and these documents exist. There is an order coming down from the top of the Air Force to local Air Force bases to tell them, don't speak publicly about UFO cases, don't talk to the media about UFO cases, unless you can clearly and convincingly debunk them.

[01:18:03]  Matt: So there is, in some sense, an attempt to control the narrative on the part of UFOs, to dismiss these things, to say this is not something we should even be discussing, because it is such a drain on our national resources and such a threat to our national psyche. This is, and this gets back to our hypnosis conversation from a little while ago, this is a period of American history in which there is what we might call today a fair amount of overconfidence about psychology and psychiatry. We see that with hypnosis. Betty and Barney Hill believe, even before they went in to see Benjamin Simon, that hypnosis would be able to solve their problems, that hypnosis would be able to recover their memories and to help them figure out what had happened to them. It's widely believed in America in the 50s and 60s that hypnosis had near magical powers. That if you hypnotize someone, brainwashing is the term that comes out of this period.

[01:19:09]  Matt: There's all sorts of movies and radio shows and so on about how hypnosis could actually turn you into a communist. There's wide fear about this. When the Air Force begins saying, we can't let a national panic happen, and if we let UFOs continue, if we let research into UFOs continue, it's going to cause a national panic. They were perhaps overstating that, but there was a sense that psychology was powerful enough to accurately predict such a thing. We understood the human psyche well enough that we could foresee some kind of kind of disastrous huge national riot happening because of this.

[01:19:52]  Bruce: So, okay, I got a couple of questions around this. This is, I actually find this part of the story that you brought up particularly interesting. I got a sense, and I don't know that I can point to anywhere specifically in the book to back myself up here, but I got a sense that it wasn't so much always about a fear of a national panic as it was that they really just didn't want the masses, you know, the unwashed masses, to have a different opinion from them on what counted as science. Am I wrong, or is that something that actually is part of the story here?

[01:20:31]  Matt: No, no, I think that is absolutely accurate as well, I think, and there is, this is especially, I think, coming from the American scientific establishment, that is to say, people like Conant, these really kind of highly respected, nationally known, almost scientific celebrities, for lack of a better word. These folks, and again, because of the Cold War, and because of the sense that the Cold War would ultimately hinge on science, that America had the advantage in the Cold War because the Americans developed the atomic bomb first, and that the United States needed to be first to any of these new technologies. We might recall here that there was actually something of a national panic after the Soviets were the first to launch a satellite into orbit, Sputnik. That did cause national terror, and headlines across the country, and state legislatures calling emergency sessions to dump more money into scientific education in their states.

[01:21:35]  Matt: Yeah, there absolutely was worry that if American citizens did not have correct understandings of science, and if American citizens were not going to school and becoming scientists in order to pursue new research into technology that would help us to beat the Soviet Union, we would lose the Cold War. And of course, the UFOs are a dead end off of that. There was nothing there according to the Air Force, and so they wanted to steer American scientific education back in the direction of what they considered to be genuine, real, useful science.

[01:22:13]  Bruce: So now there's this idea that comes up in Hollywood in particular all the time that the government has to protect the public. In the Hollywood version, there are aliens, and the government has to protect the public from the knowledge that there are aliens, because if the public knew that there actually are aliens, by the way, you just mentioned Donald Keyhoe believed this, right? Then it would cause this national terror and society would fall apart. I think I just recently saw a video from Michael Sherman or somebody who he was talking about how they've done tons of studies that have shown that this just isn't the case, that the public isn't going to fly off the hinges just because they found out that there's such a thing as an alien, you know, or something along those lines. And I have to confess, I've always found that story difficult to believe.

[01:23:06]  Bruce: I mean, that there's tons of people around who I think would be ecstatic to find out that there's aliens, right? There probably are some people who would be very bothered by that. And I always wondered where that story came from. And I felt like when I was [reading?] your book, that like this is where the story came from, that Hollywood had bought into this story because it was actually coming from the, quote, scientific authorities, that this is what was going to happen if we were to find out, you know, that if people started to believe that there was aliens. And it was interesting twist because in the Hollywood version, there are aliens, and in this version, there aren't aliens, but it's like the same story other than that.

[01:23:44]  Peter: To be fair, it might cause a lot of people to change their worldviews drastically. I mean, who can say how much how that would affect society as a whole? I mean, I don't think anyone, it's probably impossible to predict, don't you think, whether that would be a positive or a negative for the world?

[01:24:04]  Bruce: So, okay, to be fair, I obviously don't actually know what would happen, right? But the idea that it would cause society to fall apart always seemed like a stretch to me. And again, maybe I'm wrong. Okay, I'm just, my own feeling is that this doesn't feel like it would, for some reason, cause society to fall apart. And yes, it's this story that gets told in movies in Hollywood over and over and over again. It's so, it's one of the tropes that's so well accepted. And I accept it as a trope. I accept it that when they pull out that trope, oh, the government's protecting us from the knowledge of the aliens. I just, I just, for the same reason, I accept that wizards can fly, right? It's, it's, it's just a trope that I accept that when it comes up in a movie, I go, okay, yes. Yes, of course, in this movie world, if the humans were to find out there's aliens, their society would fall apart.

[01:24:58]  Bruce: So that's why they're doing this. And also every single grocery bag has, you know, a little celery stick sticking out of it, because that's just the way it is, you know? And I'm not, I don't translate this into real life. It's just a trope that I accept as part of storytelling in movies, right? But I had never, it didn't seem like a realistic trope to me. And maybe I'm wrong. You're welcome to disagree or argue with me over that. But I always wondered where the trope came from, right?

[01:25:29]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:25:30]  Bruce: Why is it this trope exists? And I think what you're saying is, it's because that was what they believed at the time. It's an inverted version of it.

[01:25:39]  Matt: I think that is accurate, right? I think they did worry about this. And in fact, well, this is an interesting [unclear] side note, but we do know that in the past 10 years, NASA has given money to, well, there's a center at Princeton for religion and society, and NASA gave them, I believe it was a million dollars, for this group to do research into how American religions would respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. So this is something that is still being researched and still being looked at. And it absolutely was the case in the mid-20th century that there was a great deal of fear that this would cause panic in the streets. Now that in part derived from early 20th century psychology. Early 20th century psychologists had a real, well, we would actually today probably call it racist, but there was a lot of worry among early 20th century psychologists about, as you put it, the unwashed masses, right, about what they called crowd psychology, mob psychology, right, and the sense that people who were not sufficiently educated were governed by their emotions and were incapable of rational thought and were maybe always on the brink of panic and always on the brink of turning into a mob.

[01:27:10]  Matt: And of course, many of these experts were white and they said, well, just look at Africa, right? Look at Asia. You see mob mentality at work in all of these places. And we need to protect Americans from that. So yes, this is, I think, a very, very kind of apt connection that you're making.

[01:27:29]  Bruce: All right. I was excited to figure out where the trope came from, just for what it was worth, you know.

[01:27:35]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry.

[01:27:35]  Bruce: Go ahead, Peter.

[01:27:37]  Peter: I do have kind of what could be a good final question if we want to go there.

[01:27:42]  Matt: Yeah, why don't we?

[01:27:43]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:27:44]  Peter: Unless Bruce wants to interject.

[01:27:46]  Unidentified speaker: Go for it.

[01:27:46]  Unidentified speaker: Go for it.

[01:27:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:27:47]  Peter: Well, I thought you've done an excellent job, Matt, of explaining your motivations for writing the book and about your research, your academic research into religion and meaning and how that intersects with Hill's experiences and UFOs in general. I'm curious, though, if you could take us back to that moment that I assume sort of a-ha moment where you heard about this case and you got into it and you were like, this is my next book. This is where I want to go.

[01:28:26]  Matt: Oh, yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for it. So I mentioned at the top, right, the sort of interest I have in how American religion transforms in the 20th century, right? And how we're moving increasingly towards, I think, what is still happening today, a deinstitutionalized, individualized, kind of bricolage, collage of religion. And I was, and I hit on UFOs pretty quickly as a way to get to that, in part because I think UFOs are just kind of a fascinating case study. I've said, I think, before in our conversation that they are a mirror, in a sense. People see in UFOs whatever they want to see. They see themselves, ultimately. They see their own ideas and anxieties and priorities reflected back to them. And that's certainly the case in with UFOs and religion. There are actually there are flying saucer religions that exist in the United States.

[01:29:25]  Matt: And many other religions grapple with this problem in interesting ways, too. I initially actually was thinking I might write about Scientology, which I think is another kind of fascinating example of how religion adapts to science, right? And how these languages and ideas intermingle. But there have been some really good books on Scientology published in the past 10 or 15 years. And I didn't know that I had much to say. And also, you know, I didn't want to get sued. So I was looking for something else. And then I discovered I had known about the Hill case for a while because it is, of course, kind of a classic case in American UFO lore, right? It's one of the founding cases. I'm up there with Kenneth Arnold. And so I was poking around them a bit. And I found this book that the Hill's niece, Kathleen Marden, published 10 or 15 years ago about the case, which was the first full book on the case since the one that John Fuller, who was the journalist and UFO believer, had written about the Hills back in the mid-60s.

[01:30:35]  Matt: So I looked at Marden’s book and I discovered in that book that she had donated the Hills papers to the University of New Hampshire after she herself used them in the writing of her book. And I thought, wow, that's really fascinating, right? I did not know there was a Hill paper collection. I did not know their papers were available. And so I went up to the University of New Hampshire to take a look. And I thought, wow, I found actually what is a really, I think, magnificent collection. There are hundreds of letters to and from the Hills in that collection, letters that the Hills wrote themselves. Betty Hill, it turns out, was sort of a real inveterate diarist and memoir writer. She wrote many, many, many different small accounts of her life and her husband's life. She wrote lots of stories, fragments of memoirs. She didn't eventually publish an autobiography, but a lot of drafts for that autobiography are in this collection as well.

[01:31:37]  Matt: There's just a vast amount of data and stories about the Hills in this collection. And I thought, this is it. This is, I gotta use this collection. there is nothing better for a historian than finding a really rich, new collection that other historians have not gotten into yet. And no other historian other than Kathleen Marden has spent time in this collection before. And so I hope it allowed me to tell a story that really didn't just kind of recap what happened to the Hills, but got into who they were and how they thought and their own, you know, their own kind of personalities.

[01:32:19]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:32:20]  Bruce: Well, I could probably go on for hours, but we'll let you get back to your family.

[01:32:26]  Unidentified speaker: We know you can, Bruce.

[01:32:30]  Matt: Well, thank you. This has been a lot of fun.

[01:32:33]  Bruce: Yes, it has. Thank you for talking with us, Matt.

[01:32:36]  Matt: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:32:37]  Peter: Thank you so much, Matt. This has been a real honor for me.

[01:32:40]  Matt: Have a good day, guys.

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[01:33:56]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.