By KEN KORCZAK
A distinguished professor of religious history focuses on the iconic Betty & Barney Hill Abduction Case in a Heroic Effort to Provide Context, Meaning and Understanding
Just minutes after I finished the last chapter of The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill by the noted historian and academic Matthew Bowman, Ph.D., I came across a stunning news video showing a world-renowned scientist briefing members of Congress on UFO issues.
Dr. Eric Davis sat next to Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, Missouri Congressman Eric Burlison and their staffers. What he told the stoney-faced lawmakers at the May 1 meeting was off-the-charts amazing.
The astrophysicist, AI engineer and data specialist informed the members of the Congressional House Oversight and Accountability Committee that the United States has been in possession of “crashed UAP retrieval materials” — including fully intact UFOs — since at least the 1940s. One of these was retrieved near the village of Magenta, Italy, where it crashed in 1933.
But Dr. Davis wasn’t done. He went on to inform Luna, Burlison and staff that U.S. officials have also identified “four species of alien races.” He named these as the “Insectoids,” “Reptilians,” “Nordics,” and the “Grays.”
Dr. Eric Davis recently joined DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as a Senior Program Manager for its Strategic Technology Office. It’s just his latest job in a decades-long career as the quintessential government scientist with high-level security clearances as a Department of Defense contractor.
The latter makes him a bona fide “insider,” and he is now playing the role of whistleblower. Note: Eric Davis is the primary author of the infamous “Wilson Davis Memo.” See my story here: UFO “LEAK OF THE CENTURY”
Also addressing Congressmembers at this remarkable briefing — sponsored by the nonprofit UAP Disclosure Fund — was Dr. Anna Brady-Estevez. She holds a Ph.D. in chemical and environmental engineering from Yale University. She is a former program director with the U.S. National Science Foundation. She is currently a partner (and co-founder) of American DeepTech, a just recently founded “leading-edge technology” venture capital firm.
Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Brady-Estevez openly admits that she is “an experiencer” — meaning she has had personal interaction with UFO-related phenomena. Furthermore, she told the Congressional committee that she worked extensively on research and technology development projects based on “UAP-inspired” and “UAP-adjacent” technologies. Dr. Brady-Estevez said at the Congressional meeting:
“… I funded companies working on what the entrepreneurs later described as UAP-adjacent or UAP-inspired technologies. However, these investors were forbidden to give away too much detail about their technology due to the research’s classified nature.”
Significantly, sitting next to Dr. Brady-Estevez was a man nodding his head, indicating his support for her contentions about UFO technology. That man was none other than Mike Gold, the former NASA Associate Administrator for the Office of International and Interagency Relations. Gold is currently the Executive Vice President for Civil Space and External Affairs at Redwire Space.
This May 1 Congressional briefing follows eight years of a steady drip-drip-dripping of revelations about the reality of UFOs. That faucet began to leak in earnest on Dec. 17, 2017. On that day, the New York Times published its front page “Tic Tac” article — the story of how Navy fighter pilots confronted UFO-like craft, engaged them in games of cat-and-mouse, caught them on gun-camera video along with an array of high-tech sensors beyond radar.
was just two years ago that another top U.S Airforce intelligence insider, David Grusch, appeared before a publicly aired June 2023 Congressional hearing in which he related to lawmakers information similar to what Dr. Davis just revealed to Reps Luna and Burlison — including that our government has been “reverse engineering” captured alien UFO craft for decades.
Grusch rounded out his bombshell testimony by stating “biologics” had also been recovered from the captured crafts — “biologics” meaning most likely “alien bodies” or even living aliens!
Furthermore, a significant cadre of highly accomplished Ph.D. level mainstream scientists have been breaking their silence on what they know about UFOs. They are sharing their personal encounters with “The Phenomenon.” That includes one of the most accomplished scientists in the world — Dr. Gary Nolan. He holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He proclaims to be a UFO witness and experiencer.
Dr. Nolan has published over 350 peer-reviewed research articles. He holds 50 US patents. He was recently cited as among the top 25 inventors in Stanford University history. As to the reality of UFOs and aliens from other realms, Dr. Nolan is all in. Yes, he says, they’re here, that they are operating on Earth, and the powerful people in the U.S. Government and private defense contract industry have known it for decades.
WHAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW INFORMS OUR VIEW OF HISTORY
I’ve gone to some length to provide context for the book I am reviewing today, which is a marvelous contribution to American history. The author selected a much-hashed-out 64-year-old UFO encounter to build his case — the 1961 encounter of Betty and Barney Hill — widely regarded as the first UFO abduction case.
A problem for me is that Bowman’s conclusions fail to incorporate the events I outlined in the first part of my article — the groundbreaking developments in the UFO/UAP field that have rolled out over the past eight years. It is said that “the past is prologue” and that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
However, an equally important concept is that “history is interpreted through the lens of the present.” I suggest that what has happened since Dec. 17, 2017, should motivate readers to inform them about what Bowman has written about in his book.
More on this in a bit, but first, about Bowman’s latest work:
AN ICONIC UFO CASE PLACED IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Abduction of Barney and Betty Hill is a painstaking and sterling work of scholarship written by a bona fide academic, Matthew Bowman, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University in 2011. He specializes in American history, religious movements and religion writ large with an emphasis on Mormonism.
His current position is that of historian at Claremont Graduate University, where he was appointed as the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies in 2019. CGU is a private, all-graduate research university located in Claremont, California.
His most recent book before this current offering is Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Another example of his excellent published works is The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
When I reviewed Bowman’s background and bona fides, I wondered: “How did this staid and esteemed scholar decide to write a UFO book?”
Well, the short answer might be that this is not “a UFO book,” per se. Rather, the author selected one of the most emblematic cases in ufology because of what it can teach us about the American Experience, the American Experiment, and the prevailing zeitgeist at a formative time in U.S. history.
Through the eyes of a professor of religious history, the Hill case provides a useful framework to illuminate a piece of American popular culture while also positioning it in historical, political, sociological and theological contexts. Bowman focuses on key elements to cobble together his premise:
- The social and political climate as it existed in 1961.
- The military and National Defense mindset of American post-World War II culture.
- The general mindset of the scientific community and its belief that a majority of the American public was woefully ignorant of science and how it works.
- The state of mainstream religious beliefs, practices and ethos of the early 1960s.
- The advent of the “New Age Movement” (which Bowman discerningly defines as “The New Age Milieu”) that was beginning to blossom in the early 1960s.
- The influence and trends of mainstream psychology that held sway in that time frame.
- The state of race relations in the United States and theories on the origins of race.
Betty and Barney Hill represent an almost archetypal “base sample” of the American Experience by the very nature of their identities and lifestyles. Consider:
–> The Hills were an interracial couple, a black man married to a white woman, at a time when such unions were rare and fraught with controversy (to say the least) in 1950s-1960s America. As a kicker, Betty and Barney were both already divorcees before they remarried to each other — divorce had a significantly stronger taint of scandal back then than it does today.
–>The Hills were devoted members of a “liberal” religious organization — The Unitarian Universalist Church.
–>Barney and Betty were regionally and nationally recognized influential leaders in the fight for Civil Rights and the overarching effort to “liberalize” and desegregate society.
–> Their UFO encounter brought them into contact with other key institutions, including the U.S. Military apparatus, the scientific community and the field of psychology, especially where the latter intersects with hypnotism — but also (in my view) a lot of hoary Freudian baggage.
Matthew Bowman takes it all apart — like an expert mechanic painstakingly overhauling an exhausted car engine — and provides his reader with marvelous insights about military institutions, religious practices, along with the psychological, sociological, cultural and ontological evolutions of society beliefs.
Bowman then methodically puts “the engine” back together so that we can see more clearly why so many aspects of the American Experiment played out the way they did since the tumultuous 1960s.
However, for those of us who eat, sleep and breathe the UFO issue, does Bowman’s intense analysis of the context of the Hill abduction resolve whether it was a bona fide extraterrestrial encounter — or was it an artifact of delusions and complex psychological aberrations that formulated in the minds of Betty and Barney?
As for Bowman himself, in the book’s epilogue, he opts for the latter explanation. He lands there by leaning heavily on the conclusions of the hardened skeptic, Dr. Benjamin Simon, who conducted the hypnotic regression sessions with the Hills. Bowman writes:
“Of course, this text is an adaptation as well. As did other interpreters, I am using the story Betty and Barney told in ways that they might not have appreciated. I largely concur with Benjamin Simon’s conclusions, if not his reasoning. I believe the Hills saw a strange object in the sky that was not readily identifiable, and I am skeptical of explanations that posit the elaborate and strange appearance of the sighting was simply a planet.
At the same time, the story of the abduction seems to me to lack proof beyond the Hills’ own hypnotically recovered memories, a genre well-known to be fraught and malleable. And the story of medical examination and interstellar travel seems too simple for the reality the Hills claimed to glimpse.” (Bowman, M. The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. Yale University Press. 2023)
BUT NOW CONSIDER THIS
THE STATE OF HYPNOSIS
Matthew Bowman seizes upon the conclusions of the psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon to serve as the lynchpin to formulate a conclusion — that Betty and Barney did not, in fact, encounter extraterrestrials after all. But just as I began this article with a brief update of UFO happenings in recent history, it’s now informative to provide an update on the issue of hypnosis.
The reality is that, while hypnosis persists as an element of the UFO conversation today, I contend that the hypnotic regression has de-evolved to now stand as little more than a red herring.
That’s because a significant volume of all UFO abduction cases does not rely upon data recalled via hypnotic regression. Many of the most startling abduction cases are reported and described in detail by people who never underwent hypnosis. Rather, they tell their stories wholly from a state of conscious, waking recall.
It bears repeating — these subjects were fully awake when they encountered an anomalous craft, they were fully conscious throughout the duration of their interactions with “The Others,” and they relate their stories from what can be agreed upon as normal recall from memory — as imperfect as the latter may also be.
Thus, even if we tossed the Hill story, and all other such UFO abduction cases extracted from hypnotic regression, we would still have an enormous volume of data that report abduction experiences based on the same manner conventional memory that is used every day in our courts to resolve legal matters and sometimes decide life and death outcomes.
No doubt, conscious memory UFO accounts are easily batted away by skeptics. If they can’t go after the “low-hanging fruit” — the follies of hypnotic regression to drive an abduction report — skeptics simply assert that fully awake and conscious recall experiencers are liars, hoaxers or “confused” or “trying to make money selling books.”
They also cite artifacts, such as “False Memory Syndrome” — the latter is, in and of itself, a small cottage industry within the field of psychology. There was once even a False Memory Syndrome foundation championed by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D. The organization has since disbanded.
Whatever the case, thousands of UFO abduction cases are strikingly different than that of the Hills. One of the biggest differences is that the stories are recalled directly and without hypnosis or even dream memories.
Thus, UFO hypnotic regression can now be relegated to the sidelines. Yes, we can still properly debate the merits of recall based on regression, but the reality is that UFO abductions no longer rely exclusively or even primarily upon hypnotism.
Furthermore, notice that Dr. Benjamin Simon did the precise opposite of what the skeptics complain about most concerning hypnotic regression. The skeptics claim that hypnotists are always — wittingly or unwittingly — “leading the witness” when they regress a subject.
In other words, skeptics claim that “biased” hypnotherapists are already “UFO believers” and that they subtly “prompt” or “steer” their subjects with suggestive and leading questions that cause them to “invent” or “imagine” aliens & UFO story scenarios.
At their most generous, skeptics suggest that most of the hypnotists are not doing this purposefully and with conscious intent — but they are unwittingly “injecting artificial ideas” into the memories of people subtly and subconsciously. They may even do so with their body language if not verbally, skeptics claim.
Okay, but what if a hypnotherapist has a 180-degree opposite bias vis-à-vis UFOs? That is, what if the therapist is a dyed-in-the-wool, hardened skeptic, as was Dr. Simon, the man who regressed Barney and Betty Hill?
The fact is, when you read Simon’s transcripts of the Hill abduction sessions, we find a man who is doing everything in his power to shake loose Barney and Betty from “their fantasies” about encountering a flying saucer populated with extraterrestrials. Simon even urges Barney to “admit” that his belief in an alien abduction scenario is “a fantasy.”
Try as he might, Dr. Simon could not budge Betty or Barney from their contention that they had been onboard an alien spacecraft and experimented upon by strange beings.
It begs the question: If the skeptics believe that abduction cases are being wittingly or unwittingly manufactured by biased UFO-believing hypnotherapists — why then do they not also decry the very same when the opposite clearly happens — as when the therapist is a hardened scientific materialist and UFO denier, as was Dr. Simon?
If skeptics are going to throw out all UFO information gleaned from hypnotic regression, then, at the very least, they should also reject the conclusions of the likes of Dr. Simon, who was deeply and fundamentally biased against the notion of UFOs.
THE ISSUE OF WITNESSES
For skeptics, a marvelously convenient aspect of the Betty and Barney Hill case is that no outside witnesses were nearby to offer added legitimacy to the event.
Just imagine how differently the story would be viewed if, for example, there happened to be another motorist — or two or three — driving by the location where the abduction took place, and that these other motorists also recall seeing a UFO at about the same time and location.
Indeed, this is one of the reasons that Harvard Psychiatrist John Mack said (in his book, Abduction) that the unreliability of hypnotic regression in UFO reports “cannot be supported.” Mack pointed out that, in several of his hypnotic regression cases, other witnesses reported seeing a “classic flying saucer UFO” hovering over the house of an abductee experiencer regressed via hypnosis.
Mack also states that much more than additional witness testimony supports some cases, such as physical evidence left behind by a UFO. These include landing traces in the soil, alien footprints, burned grass, ambient radiation and electromagnetic effects, and yes, “anomalous implants” surgically extracted from the bodies of experiencers.
Sometimes UFOs even drop, eject or leave behind chunks of metal and sundry “exotic materials” in relation to “alien encounter” events.
In the case of Minnesota’s Julie Ohlson, a gigantic lime green UFO hovered just outside her home in the winter of 1982 and dropped or ejected about a half-dozen chunks of metal into the snow just a few yards from her house. These objects were collected by Ohlsen and her mother the next morning, and she retains possession of some of them to this very day in her home.
At least a dozen other witnesses in Ohlsen’s neighborhood reported sighting the same UFO at the same time Ohlsen, her mother and stepfather were staring with wonderment out the windows of their home at the spectacular disk-shaped, brightly green-glowing object. See my story: JULIE OHLSON UFO
Indeed, the recovery of “meta materials” from UFO encounter events represents a significant sub-genre of The Phenomenon itself. The point is, there are cases where meta materials have been collected in relation to regression-obtained UFO testimony that feature abduction scenarios.
But back to extraneous witnesses — I’ll note just one more (out of thousands) of cases of an alien abduction case wherein witnesses recalled what happened to them without the aid of hypnosis.
The Berkshire UFO — 1969
OnSept. 1, 1969, in Barrington County, Massachusetts, about 250 people witnessed the dazzling apparition of extremely bright UFO-like objects that ranged from classic “flying disks” to large orbs of light and other light phenomena. The witnesses were from several small towns within Barrington County.
The most noted figure in the Berkshire UFO event is Thomas Reed, who was 10 years old at the time. He reports being abducted and spending time inside a UFO where he encountered “insect-like aliens” who interacted with him and subjected him to medical-like exams.
The event was so widely experienced by multiple witnesses that the Great Barrington Historical Society, including Massachusetts professional and academic historians, declared it “a significantly historic and true event.”
Thomas Reed recalled 90% of his memories of what happened to him on board the UFO without the aid of hypnotic regression. Years later, he agreed to be regressed, but the sessions added only minor ancillary details.
Skeptics, including an article in The Skeptical Inquirer, ludicrously claim that “no one saw a UFO in Barrington County that night.” The skeptics are comfortable in drawing this conclusion because no one captured any photographs, and they also note that no one filed a police report about a UFO sighting that night, even though the latter is not technically true. Tom Jay, a local DJ at WSBS radio, was fielding dozens of calls from residents during that wild night of September 1, as dozens were reporting their UFO sightings. Tom Jay reported it to the police.
The police chief of nearby Sheffield, Massachusetts, Mr. Shanti Gulotta, spent “many hours investigating” the Berkshire sightings, according to his son, Eddie Gulotta.
Even to this day, anyone can visit the various small communities in Berkshire County and find, in short order, residents still living there who vividly recall and eagerly talk about sighting the brilliant UFO and other objects that invaded their skies on that Labor Day weekend.
For specific examples, I encourage readers to review the testimony of Berkshire County residents Jane Green, Tom Warner, Thom Reed, his mother Nancy Reed, Jane Shaw and Melanie Kirchdorfer. They tell of their accounts in a 2024 episode of Unexplained Mysteries, which can be streamed on Netflix.
CONCLUSION
My review and analysis here of Matthew Bowman’s book is already way longer than I want it to be — and yet — I find myself frustrated by the many additional arguments I must leave on the “cutting room floor.”
However, since the author is an academic, I will end by issuing a standard “A through F” grade for this book. While I would love to offer Bowman an “A” for his rigorous scholarship and the fresh insights and perspectives he imparted to his readers — I opt to grade this work an “I” for “Incomplete.”
That’s because this book fails to provide the context of what’s been happening in the past 10 years of UFO/UAP developments, not to mention where the subject has gone in the 60-plus years since Betty and Barney Hill returned from a lonely New Hampshire highway with an amazing story to tell.
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