Umm...isn’t it kinda weird their names are Betty and Barney?
Kidnapped by the Great Gazoo?
Betty Hill, 85, Figure in Alien Abduction Case, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: October 23, 2004
Betty Hill, whose assertion that she was carried off by otherworldly beings in 1961 inspired a national obsession with alien abduction that remains a staple of American popular culture, died on Sunday at her home in Portsmouth, N.H. She was 85.
The cause was lung cancer, her niece Kathleen Marden said.
Mrs. Hill was not the first person to tell of an alien encounter. But her account was the first to capture the public imagination on a grand scale, defining a narrative subgenre that has flourished in the decades since.
Mrs. Hill's account was the subject of a book by John G. Fuller, "The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours 'Aboard a Flying Saucer' " (Dial, 1966). In 1975 it became a television movie, "The UFO Incident." The film starred Estelle Parsons as Mrs. Hill and James Earl Jones as her husband, Barney, who also said he was abducted.
The incident, the Hills said, occurred on the night of Sept. 19, 1961. Driving in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, they saw a light that seemed to grow larger and larger. Back home, they found what appeared to be shiny spots on the car's exterior. They could not account for a two-hour segment of their trip.
The Hills later saw a psychiatrist, who put them under hypnosis. Gradually, a narrative of the couple's lost hours emerged. They recounted many times that a group of short gray-skinned beings stopped their car and took them aboard a waiting spaceship. There, the Hills said, they were subjected to rigorous medical examinations that included inserting a long needle into Mrs. Hill's navel.
The account fit squarely in the Western narrative tradition. With a dark night, ghostly apparitions and sexual undercurrent, it had many Victorian gothic hallmarks, and it shared the common Western folklore theme of being spirited off and ravished by an otherworldly creature.
In the Hills' account, these traditional elements were transplanted to a modern but no less anxious time, the height of the cold war, when many people gazed nervously skyward.
"It's not unlike the Leda and the swan myth," said Terry Matheson, a professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan and the author of "Alien Abductions: Creating a Modern Phenomenon" (Prometheus, 1998). "The alien comes in, probes women in a distinctly sexual way for purposes that are equally inscrutable, but which may, we're told, make sense down the road."
Mrs. Hill was born Eunice Elizabeth Barrett on June 28, 1919, in Newton, N.H. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, she was a social worker for many years. Besides her niece, survivors include three sisters, two children and three grandchildren. Mr. Hill died in 1969.
The Hills' cultural legacy includes films ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind"), television programs ("Roswell") and books, like those by Whitley Strieber and John Mack, that treat alien abduction as a plausible phenomenon.
Slightly off topic perhaps, but Betty Rubble is one of those cartoon characters who has always been on my "anywhere, anytime" list.
She and Judy Jetson.
And the Flying Nun too, though I realize she's not a cartoon.
My aunt and uncle had friends named Bert and Ernie, the woman’s name was Bert. I forgot what it was short for.
bump for later