The Interrupted Journey
By John G. Fuller
Vintage, 2022

At 10:30 at night on September 19, 1961 on a dark New Hampshire road, a married couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed they saw a strange light in the night sky. The Hills later claimed the lights were coming from an extraterrestrial spacecraft that soon swooped down on them. They claimed they were abducted, examined, and released with stopped watches and memory losses. In 1966, New England writer John Fuller wrote up their story, complete with transcripts from their hypnosis sessions, in his book The Interrupted Journey, which caused a stir and constituted the publishing season’s foremost guilty pleasure.

Somebody in the Vintage offices must have fond memories of that long-gone season; they’ve decided to re-issue the book for a new generation of readers who are both alarmingly fact-challenged and stubbornly, vindictively delicate, the latter indicated by the pre-emptive apology appended to the book: 

This book was published in 1966 and reflects the attitudes of its times. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.

This now-standard “your parents and grandparents were horrible people” disclaimer out of the way, readers can get to Fuller’s book, which, to give it its due, makes every bit as good guilty pleasure reading now as it did when it first appeared. 

“I feel like I am dreaming,” says Barney during several of those hypnosis sessions, echoing the actual dream-accounts put forward by Betty in increasingly elaborate detail as the couple’s fame grew in crackpot circles. Then as now, the book gives the impression that Betty was a far more forceful personality than Barney, the driving force behind their shared narrative. And indeed after Barney’s death, Betty’s additions to that narrative consistently expanded to almost space opera dimensions.

But the core of the story remains so familiar as to be archetypal: the couple was abducted by aliens, probed and examined by them, and then deposited back into their lives, traumatized and sporadically amnesiatic (their adorable dog, who was with them on that dark New Hampshire road, doesn’t seem to have been consulted about anything). 

And the reading reaction to the book likewise remains familiar: instant, complete, and almost casually comprehensive dismissal. The details the Hills provide, details that swoop and swerve and change over time, are never at any point believable on their face. These two were not abducted by aliens; they were not examined by aliens; they saw no alien spacecraft (or, as Betty would later elaborate, a fleet of spacecraft). All the things they spent the rest of their lives saying are clear, obvious fabrications followed by broader conceptual rearguard actions of the type that Betty was already starting even in Fuller’s book:

I was brought up to believe in what I suppose is called the scientific method: You don’t believe in anything unless it can be dissected or put in a box. I don’t believe in ghost stories. Before this experience, my attitude was that anybody who believed in anything I don’t understand, anyone who seemed too far-out, I considered a sort of kook. Now I think I have more tolerance toward new ideas, even if I can’t accept them myself.

Frauds always eventually zero in on the scientific method, and they almost always do what Betty does here: conflate “scientific method” with “new ideas.” The Hills didn’t offer “new ideas,” they offered wild science fiction claims without a shred of evidence. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific method. 

But although their story is clearly false, re-reading Fuller’s book reinforces the suspicion that the Hills might have experienced something other than mistaking a nighttime airplane flight for an alien spaceship. Their initial report of their incident drew a suspiciously non-casual amount of attention from the leadership of Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. This reprint of The Interrupted Journey actually rekindles a bit of curiosity about an untold story we’ll probably never know. 

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.