The UFO Incident (Betty & Barney Hill story)

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alchemy

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This is a 1975 made-for-TV re-enactment of the famous 1961 Betty & Barney Hill abduction case. The case itself is worth reading up on, and not hard to find as nearly every UFO history book recounts the story to some degree or another (Dolan in his UFOs & The National Security State has a brief, 6-page overview).

The reason it was famous is that it was the first recorded case of an alleged UFO abduction. There are numerous interesting details concerning this case, but I will focus on the movie.

The movie is fairly faithful to what Betty & Barney Hill recounted (the screenplay was adapted from John G. Fuller's 1966 book "The Interrupted Journey"), albeit compressed into the necessary 2-hour timeframe. What I found even more interesting was seeing these topics explicitly stated in the film:

* Alice in Wonderland (specifically, the Cheshire Cat)

* Nazis (perhaps the sense of extreme STS emanations?)

James Earl Jones plays Barney Hill and Estelle Parsons is Betty Hill, and considering that this is a made-for-TV movie, they manage to bring a real sense of the horror and shock the Hills must have had to contend with.

If you have a chance to see this film (which BTW, I heartily recommend!), take note of the psychiatric techniques employed by Dr. Simon. You would hope this wasn't actually how he interacted with the Hills in real life, but I have a feeling that he probably did do it that way ... after all, it was the 60's. Very command & control, such that when either of the Hill's is screaming with terror as they finally remember what had occurred that night, he simply tells them, "... you're safe here, just calm down and keep remembering..." Not the most empathetic doctor I have seen depicted on the screen.

This is a hard-to-find movie but worth the effort IMO. It really takes you back to the earlier days of UFO research.
 
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