In October 1961, Betty and Barney Hill sat down with an astronomy lecturer at their home in New Hampshire, and made an extraordinary claim. The previous month, the couple – a social worker and a postal service employee – had been driving along a winding road through the White Mountains, when they were snatched by a group of extraterrestrials, they said. The Hills explained that they had then been subjected to a series of invasive, "probing" examinations by these strange beings aboard a flying saucer-style spacecraft.
The claims gripped the public imagination and are widely credited with pioneering the entire alien abduction genre – it was the first such story to be published, and led to many similar tales from members of the public. But it also contributed to another revolution – via Hollywood. In the Hills' account, the creatures they met had oversized heads with large craniums, wide eyes, greyish skin, small noses and slit-like mouths. The couple had invented the archetypal sci-fi movie alien – with an aesthetic like creepy, distorted human babies. Continue reading from The BBC
Twenty-First Century Afrofuturist Aliens: Shifting to the Space of Third Contact (Literature Resource Center)
The 10 Most Influential UFO-Inspired Books, Movies and TV Shows (Popular Mechanics)
Alien Abduction or “Accidental Awareness”? (Scientific American)
Alien Abduction? Scientists call it Sleep Paralysis (New York Times)
Alien Abduction Story ‘Captured’ in the Works as Movie (Variety)
Holy grail' or epic hoax? Australian Kelly Cahill's UFO abduction story still stirs passions (ABC)
How Betty and Barney Hill's Alien Abduction Story Defined the Genre (History)
Mark Pilkington's top 10 books about UFOs (The Guardian)
Science Fiction: Alien Encounters (Encyclopedia Britannica)
The Surprising Origin of Alien Abduction Stories (Live Science)
