“He's Making Me Feel Things in My Body That I Don't Feel”: The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction

Abstract

In September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, a Ne1W Hampshire couple under heavy pressure for their interracial marriage, decided to visit Montreal, Canada, for a short holiday. On their return, they found themselves suffering from unexplained physical pain, anxiety, and nightmares. They were particularly disturbed because they could not account for two hours of their return drive, so they consulted a psychiatrist, Benjamin Simon. After undergoing repeated sessions of hypnosis with Simon, they recalled a truly incredible experience: they claimed that while driving south on US Highway 3 through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, just south of Indian Point, they were taken from their car by a group of small, gray, large-eyed aliens, led into an UFO, and subjected to a series of physical examinations and medical procedures, including the taking of skin, nail, and hair samples. The aliens gave Betty what they called a pregnancy test by inserting a long needle into her abdomen, and they took a sperm sample from Barney by attaching a circular device to his groin. The Hills also reported that the aliens, who communicated telepathically with them, seemed fascinated by the differences between the couple, especially by Barney's dark skin. After being told by the aliens to forget what had happened to them, the Hills were allowed out of the UFO and watched it depart. Published in 1966 as Interrupted Journey, the Hill narrative is one of the earliest published accounts of alien abduction and a blueprint for the veritable avalanche of narratives that has been published since. Indeed, the outpouring of books and articles about alien abduction and UFO sightings reached a peak during the 1990s, when they seemed to literally saturate the literary marketplace. They ranged from highbrow (Time, New Yorker) and scholarly works (historian David M. Jacobs's secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions [1992] and Harvard professor John E. Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens [1994]) to tabloid shockers. Almost daily radio and television programs, as well as made-for-television movies and Hollywood blockbusters-for example, Independence Day (1996), the seventh highest grossing film of all time (Handy 65) -also identified the alien and the UFO as particularly popular and profitable sites in contemporary culture. Even more striking than the ubiquity of the alien image during this period, however, was the uniformity of the experiences recounted in accounts of alien abduction. As in the Hills' case, most abductees recalled traumatic alien investigations of their bodies -and in particular, their body's reproductive processes, from the taking of sperm samples, to the harvesting of eggs, and even, at times, embryos - all conducted, ostensibly, for the purposes of advancing what the aliens consistently present as an intergalactic interbreeding program. In fact, these narratives are absolutely seething with anxieties about the body, reproduction, and even more specifically, miscegenation. Moreover, the central role of the body in these accounts is also evident m the heated debates about their reality status, which often hinge on the availability (or lack thereof) of physical evidence, and more generally, draw on the truthvalue of the abductee's sensory and emotional experience. What, then, is the significance of this literal outpouring, at the end of the twentieth century, of narratives detailing the traumas of procreation and miscegenation? And why does this anxiety manifest itself in such a literally outlandish-yet at the same time strangely familiar-form, one that had, by the end of the 1990s, achieved the status of a highly stylized and predicable genre? This article analyzes the significance of the overwhelming anxieties about the body as a source of meaning, identity, and truth evidenced in accounts of alien abduction by first considering the way these accounts, for all their outlandishness, are actually shaped by extremely potent and enduring conventions regulating the conceptualization and articulation of racial difference in the United States. …