Testament for Believers

THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY by John ;. Fuller. 301 pages. Dial. $5.95.

On the night of Sept. 19, 1961, Barney Hill and his wife Betty were driving home to Portsmouth, N.H., after a holiday in Montreal. A brilliant waxing moon sailed through a cloudless and star-fretted sky. As the Hills watched, first idly and then in terrified astonishment, one of the stars detached itself Tom the firmament and came down to earth--so near that the Hills could see it was no star. What happened thereafter forms the narrative of this book.

It is one thing to sight a UFO; it is another to get inside one. And that, say the Hills, is just what happened to them. A few minutes after the sighting, Barney Hill turned the car down a side road, impelled by some extrasensory command. There, half a dozen humanoid creatures with wall eyes, metallic skin, rudimentary mouths and a grasp of English led them aboard a spacecraft and inspected the captives separately. Barney's removable dentures mystified his examiners; so did the dissimilarity between his skin and his wife's--he is a Negro; she.is white. A 6-in. needle was inserted into Betty's navel; she was told it was a pregnancy test. After a while the Hills, dazed and in a state bordering on amnesia, were taken back to their car. They finished their journey, reaching Portsmouth two hours later than they had anticipated.

What makes the Hills's story interesting, if not believable, is that both are reputable citizens. Betty Hill, 46, is a social worker for the state of New Hampshire; her husband, 44, works for the U.S. Post Office in Portsmouth. In credulous themselves, and greatly disturbed by the experience, they preferred for a long time not to talk about it. But one friend who heard about it suggested that the Hills needed psychiatric care. They applied for treatment to Boston Psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, who found them both suffering from "crippling anxiety"; to relieve it, he hypnotized them, and the story came out, along with the Hills's own sketches of what they had seen (see cuts).

Simon accepted the Hills's abduction as fantasy. John Fuller, however, believes in UFOs. He heard about the Hills in 1965 when he was working on his first flying-saucer book, Incident at Exeter (TIME, Sept. 2). From Simon's tapes and from interviews with the Hills, he has stitched together an account that he himself wants to accept as earthshaking. Assuming that all this is true, he writes, "such an event would demand a re-examination of religion, politics, science and even literature." To say nothing of heads.

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