SKIES & SAUCERS
Hill Abduction Still the Yardstick, Final Chapter of Book on Route 3 Case Concludes
The closing episode of Darren Marlar's audio book on Betty and Barney Hill revisits the 1961 encounter, the folklorist who called it the template, and the divide between what was seen and what was recalled.
KINGSTON, N.H. — The last episode of a full-length audio reading on the Betty and Barney Hill abduction has been released by Weird Darkness, closing a book that its author, Darren Marlar, titles "Two Lost Hours on Route 3: The Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction, 65 Years Later." The final installment is headed with the claim that this was the abduction against which every later story was measured.
According to the episode's description, the folklorist Thomas Bullard examined some three hundred abduction accounts in 1987 and concluded that the Hill case defines the typical one. By that time, the description notes, Barney Hill had been dead for nearly eighteen years. The source does not say what Bullard counted as typical, and the reader is left to consult his work for particulars.
The description then turns to the quieter aftermath. Betty Hill died in 2004 and, according to the text, was buried beside her husband in Kingston. Her plaque, it says, carries the same line as his: "of The Interrupted Journey," a reference to the title of the account that made the couple known.
Physical keepsakes also figure in the piece. The dress Betty wore on the night in question, the description states, is kept in a box in Durham alongside the Hills' papers. No further detail about the garment or its condition is offered.
The closing passage draws a line that careful readers of the case will recognise. The light the couple watched above Route 3, the author writes, rests on accounts that the Air Force took down within days of the event. Everything said to have happened aboard the craft, by contrast, rests on memories recovered under hypnosis two and a half years afterward.
The distinction is left to stand without comment, and the description does not say how the author weighs the two kinds of evidence. Listeners are invited to leave a review of the book, which is available through the Weird Darkness website and on Spreaker.