Book Review: Captured: The True Story of the Betty & Barney Hill Abduction Case
By Nick Blake
Kathleen Marden’s “Captured: The True Story of the Betty and Barney Hill Abduction Case” is a fun book, written by one of Betty's nieces and based on the Hills’ original 1960s book. The book was supplemented with further research by Marden as well as Betty's life-long quest to understand and document their abduction encounter in 1961.
The first half of the book talks in circles about the abduction encounter, detailing the encounter over and over relying on different testimonies including the Hill's initial report to Pease Air Force Base in NH, and later hypnotherapy sessions which were conducted by a reliable therapist who ended up having a crisis of faith because, prior to his work with the Hills, he didn't believe in UFOs but after working with them was baffled to find explanations for their experience and ended up agreeing that something highly strange did indeed happen.
The second half of the book gets really interesting, and increasingly strange. Betty Hill is a bad-ass, and much time is given to the hypnotically-recalled conversations she had with various beings during the abduction.
There's a great chapter on one of the Navy's Rear Admirals in Elliot, Maine who befriended the Hills and not only believed them but also connected them with a psychic friend of his in Elliot, an otherwise unassuming older lady who had the habit of channeling not one but TWO different intergalactic civilizations, daily, for hours at a time, with extensive written and spoken transmissions that included details well beyond the knowledge of the unassuming older lady receiving the transmissions.
There's a fascinating Men in Black encounter. On Sept 11, 1976, A MIB met with a doctor who was working with another abductee Betty was connected with from Oxford, Maine. The man is richly described:
The man was described as about 5 feet, 6 inches tall. He was dressed as a funeral director -- black suit, tie, shoes, white shirt, derby hat, and wearing dark gray kidskin gloves. He removed his hat, and his head was completely bald. His eyes were normal, although the doctor could not tell the color of them. He had no eyelashes or eyebrows and no facial hair. His skin color was a pasty white -- very pale. His ears were small and were set lower on his head than ours. His mouth was a thin slit and he was wearing red lipstick. At one time, he rubbed his glove across his mouth and the lipstick came off on his glove. His nose was a small bubble type -- no ridge or bone. His body structure seemed different. His clothing hung on him -- his pants had a razor-sharp crease, and his legs did not fill them out when he sat down. His shoes were the same as we wear. He did not remove his gloves.
The encounter is creepy and scared the doctor so much that he refused to work on alien cases ever again and burned his old data.
In Betty's later years (long after Barney passed away from a sudden stroke in his late 40s), she became frustrated with the official run-arounds and hostile skeptics and started actively roaming New Hampshire with a video camera, capturing footage of hundreds if not thousands of different craft & lights. Some of the videos are just blurry lights and things, but some apparently vividly captured some vehicles -- including one that has "wheels within wheels" like Ezekiel described thousands of years ago.
For a long time Marden is really confused and concerned at the treatment and ridicule Betty and Barney received by scientists such as Carl Sagan, until years later she tracks down notes in the Philadelphia Philosophical Society's library that document how Sagan and a number of other prominent scientists worked as a cabal to shut down inquiry into this field and instead assert the SETI project, a relatively worthless enterprise (sorry, SETI lovers, no offense intended, just ripping the band-aid off) that was concocted specifically to deflect interest and funnel activity in the UFO area into a benign project that was designed to not produce results in the first place.
The book was so exciting and interesting and weird that I kept saying to my wife, “This is more interesting and crazier than Tiger King!” I'd love to produce a series specific to the Betty and Barney Hill case and just let it unfold more or less like it does in the book.
On that note, we’ll end with a juicy tidbit from the final chapter, just after a paragraph about Robert Bigelow (Bigelow Aerospace) and a case from his files where a rancher hunted a wolf 3x as large as any he had ever seen whose tracks suddenly vanished in wet soil.
I investigated a similar case at an airport in the Southwest. The primary witness, "Matt", lived at the airport that was located on former tribal land. He had been a commercial pilot for 29 years before he purchased his new small business. He observed hovering and landed UFOs, three-and-a-half-foot tall and six-foot-tall non-human entities, ghostly appearances, mammoths grazing on a grassy savannah, floating orbs, and light beings. Family members and a former state law enforcement officer were witnesses to some of the activity.
If you are interested in the UFO subject and have not yet read Marden’s book, I strongly recommend it!
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ABOUT NICK BLAKE:
A Founding Member of The Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, Nick Blake is also a writer, musician, and producer whose first indie video game, Dragon Battle, continues to sell and attract new audiences, years after its release. Additionally, Nick’s research project into the Bigfoot phenomenon has resulted in a 400-page manuscript with a 20+ page bibliography that includes chapters on high strangeness phenomenon and possible extraterrestrial connections.
CONTACT:
Nick Blake
