CAPE Coo GENESIS
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Barney Hill abduction, from John Fuller's book-length study of this first widely publicized kidnapping by UFO occupants.1 Ridi culous, I thought. Who can believe such foolishness? My logic remained unexamined. I accepted the possibility that what I saw over Route 6 might be some kind of spacecraft. some kind of extraterrestrial probe of our environment-after all, most scien tists accept the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence as probable, so such eventual explorations would seem to be at least possible. I even vaguely admitted the possibility that there might have been some sort of living beings inside this possible spacecraft. But that they landecf. and stopped a car, and kidnapped two people, and administered some sort of physical examination, and took skin and blood samples, and so on? Ridiculous! I continued to follow the UFO reports through newspaper articles and occasional paperback books, my interest stabilized on what I thought was a somewhat casual level. The painter's life does not easily allow for multiple obsessions. The actor Maximil ian Schell acquired a 1968 painting of mine, Genesis I, which con tained, as most of my work did in those years, a huge, ambiguous black circle. He remarked that there was something unearthly about the painting and suggested that I should go see Stanley Kub rick's film 2001, because he felt some kind of resonance between the two works. I disagreed with him after I saw the movie, but in retrospect I may have underestimated at the time the degree of my absorption in the UFO phenomenon. The subconscious is a busy place. It took three or four years for me slowly to admit to myself the possibility that the Betty and Barney Hill abduction just might have happened exactly as the Hills recalled through hypnosis. They had not; after all, initially claimed anything about an abduc tion. They had had a nighttime UFO sighting in 1961 on a remote highway in New Hampshire, and sensed that there were about two hours they could not account for on their drive home. Barney Hill began to have nightmares and to suffer from a recurrent ul cer. He went to a psychiatrist for help, and since some kind of hidden trauma seemed to be part of the problem, he entered into hypnosis. Out came a traumatic abduction by UFO occupants! Bet ty Hill also underwent regressive hypnosis without knowing any of the content of her husband's sessions; Dr. Benjamin Simon, the Hills' psychiatrist, gave both of his patients post-hynotic sugges tions that they would not remember what had transpired during