Alienated Histories, Alienating Futures: Raciology and Missing Time in The Interrupted Journey

Abstract

THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY. Two Lost Hours Aboard Flying Saucer, published in 1966, introduced many in United States to now-familiar tropes, structures, and conventions of alien abduction narrative. In this purportedly true account, Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from New Hampshire, began to suffer strange physical, emotional, and psychological symptoms following brief vacation. Their problems seemed to emanate from an encounter with an unidentified flying object and two-hour period of amnesia that followed its sighting. After Barney entered therapy for what he thought were unrelated issues, period of missing became increasingly central to his anxieties. He was referred to Dr Benjamin Simon, Boston-area hypnotherapist. Simon took on both Betty and Barney as patients to determine what happened during their two lost hours but did not expect narrative that was reconstructed from their sessions. Under hypnosis, Hills reported being abducted by extraterrestrials, taken on board flying saucer, and subjected to variety of intrusive medical examinations before being returned to their car. They ultimately decided to go public with their story and contacted John G. Fuller, New England journalist who agreed to compile their narrative from recordings of Hills' therapy sessions and conversations with Hills. The Hills' abduction account, strange amalgam of science fiction tale and captivity narrative, focuses itself on race and, in particular, politics of competing raciologies that organize themselves around body. Barney Hill, described as a strikingly handsome descendent of proud Ethiopian freeman (4), continually tries to categorize his abductors into some racial group. The Hills also recalled their captors' fascination with their racialized bodies; when asked if aliens were in colour of her skin, Betty remembers that, instead, they were interested in of her skin (Fuller 272; emphasis added). In this essay, I will examine The Interrupted Journey's discourse on race. In particular, I examine meaning of Hills' confrontation with futuristic beings who seem to be raceless themselves yet are nevertheless fixated on things like structure of Betty Hill's skin and chromatic differences between Betty and Barney. While number of scholars have remarked upon alien abduction genre's strange obsession with race, (1) Bridget Brown offers perhaps most detailed analysis in They Know Us Better than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction. Brown contends that abduction narratives offer means by which people left out of certain narratives of progress can create their own stories and fashion truths that square with their own experience of world (7). The Hill case, she suggests, fundamentally concerned with theme of retrieving or reconstructing lost time (26). The Hills respond to increasing uncertainty about nature of memory and its relationship to truth, in particular sense that they lack control over their own memories, which are constantly retrieved, inserted, removed, or modified by aliens or Dr Simon. Nevertheless, Brown claims, The Interrupted Journey provides means by which Hills can address the strains of life in present day (60). Later, Brown links Hills' anxieties to technologized management of body, especially reproductive technologies. The pregnancy test administered to Betty Hill, for instance, speaks back to articles in popular magazines that inspired fears surrounding the mass management and manipulation of human creation (73). Like Brown, I will argue that The Interrupted Journey is text that responds to issues surrounding politics of memory and medical technologies. However, I will re-situate Hills' abduction narrative by imagining it as prophetic interlocutor with Paul Gilroy's Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and Allure of Race. …