Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer [Hardcover]

John G. Fuller (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Souvenir Press Ltd (September 25, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0285624504
• ISBN-13: 978-0285624504
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #993,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic study of a landmark case from the 1960s, February 27, 2010

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Archer Books "Archer Books" (Dubai UAE) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer (Hardcover)

At the time of first publication in 1966 the story of Betty and Barney Hill's alleged abduction by extraterrestrials whilst driving home from Montreal to Portsmouth through the White Mountains of New Hampshire on the night of 19 September 1961, as told in this book by journalist John Fuller, was highly controversial and remains so to this day due to the unassailable character of the couple and the corroborative evidence which has never been convincingly refuted.

This mixed-race couple were pillars of the community: intelligent, educated, professional, church-going, active in the civil rights movement. The last thing they wanted, or needed, was to court the kind of negative publicity which might reasonably be expected to accompany such an outlandish and improbable tale.

All they initially remembered from the night in question was being pursued by a bright light, later identified as a large disk-shaped craft with strange humanoid figures observable through the windows, as they drove the quiet road south through the mountains (on later reporting the sighting to the local USAF base it transpired that this craft had been reported by many other people in the area the same night). They arrived home two hours later than anticipated with a sense of unease. The car trunk had some unexplained shiny round marks, and when a compass was placed near these marks it unaccountably spun round and round; Barney's shoes were heavily scuffed on the tops of the toes as though he had been dragged over rough ground with his feet dangling, Betty's dress was inexplicably torn and had some very unusual stains and they both remembered hearing a `beeping' sound coinciding with the UFO sighting at two different times during the journey.

Persistent nightmares and the emergence of what we might now term `post-traumatic stress' symptoms led the Hills eventually to seek medical help. The therapeutic hypnotist who treated them, Dr. Benjamin Simon, was a respected physician in Boston who had successfully treated ex-servicemen for combat trauma. He had no interest in the UFO phenomenon, no knowledge of `alien abduction' (there were no reported cases in the public domain at that time) and was astounded to uncover mutually corroborative and supporting accounts of a complex abduction by apparent extraterrestrials from each of the Hills, who were regressed separately and carefully managed so they could not communicate their memories to each other. The Hills themselves, when they heard their taped sessions, had a hard time coming to terms with it all and initially refused to believe their own memories. Simon remained skeptical, even though he could not shake the recovered memories and in fact they explained all the symptoms (there were physical and anatomical symptoms for both the Hills following the incident).

John Fuller's book tells the whole story of this case, simultaneously investigated by the local US Air Force base, by NICAP and other organizations, and later serialised and sensationalised in the national press. The Hills became reluctant celebrities, and this unlooked-for fame brought them many problems. Betty survived Barney by many years, and subsequent paranormal incidents followed on the heels of the landmark White Mountains abduction.

This is not of itself the `best' book ever written on the alien abduction phenomenon, but it's an essential classic and an object lesson in how to carry out an investigation properly whilst not allowing prejudice born of personal beliefs to deny the uncomfortable evidence as it emerges, but to remain skeptical and true to the scientific method. The reader should keep in mind that this was all new in 1966, the first time such a possibility had ever been entertained and no-one has ever been able to `debunk' the accumulated evidence.

A good companion volume to `The Interrupted Journey' for a deeper understanding of this important case is the more recent `Captured!' written by Kathy Marden (Betty Hill's niece) with contributions from Stanton Friedman.