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nhmagazine.com/shop 8 New Hampshire Magazine | September 2022
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” said the newspaper editor, Maxwell Scott, in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Those words took on new meaning for me as this issue, with a focus on UFOs, came into existence.
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And, as a result of so many years of downryce Zabel, investigative journalist play, dismissal and outright mockery aimed and Hollywood producer, takes at those who study the UFO phenomenon, exception to that Wild West editor’s it’s easy to see why respectable scientists and contention, and with it, potentially, much of journalists (and politicians) have steered what appears in our cover story this month. clear of the topic entirely. I know because he told me so in a recent What prompted my call to Zabel was his interview for a sidebar to our cover story (it attempt to correct the official record for one appears on page 73). of New Hampshire’s (and the world’s) most I can’t disagree with his concern. Once a famous UFO cases: the Interrupted Journey story has been publicly told, however badly, of Betty and Barney Hill — two Portsmouth that version becomes a foundation and a refresidents who got pulled over by a flying sauerence point. Our history is so full of embedcer on Route 3 near Lincoln while returning ded inaccuracies, many dating back to source from a honeymoon in Canada. That “official” documents from decades and centuries past, record was not carved in stone, but it was that it’s reasonable to say anything you think cast in metal as a New Hampshire Historiyou know about the past is probably wrong — cal Highway Marker. It’s hard to accurately at least in the details. capture a moment of history in just 92 words, My goal in pulling together another story but Zabel thought he could do better and on the UFO phenomenon was to simply offered a rewrite. refresh memories in such a heady time for He explained that his main motive was all lovers of the unknown, all gazers at the to remove any suggestion that the original night sky, and all fans of “The X-Files” and story of the Hills’ abduction was somehow its spinoffs. This year, the Twittersphere and “leaked,” when, in fact, it was the tenacious, Redditiverse are abuzz with hints and rumors shoe-leather investigation of reporter John suggesting that 75 years of official brush-offs, Luttrell that confirmed the Hills’ accounts psyops, ridicule and cursory investigations and revealed a story unlike any told before. (since the Roswell, New Mexico, “crash”) are Saturday Review columnist John G. Fuller about to end. Disclosure of what the government knows (or what it can admit) is at hand. swept in later and wrote what has become the definitive account of that episode. (He also, Indeed, it won’t take much to turn this coincidentally, penned “The Incident at Exeter,” story into the biggest news in human history. a book on our state’s other world-famous UFO Just one irrefutable item of evidence — say a encounter.) But in Fuller’s reporting, there piece of advanced technology made by somewere factual errors imposed, says Zabel, by one (or something) nonhuman — would editorial choice. The words “anal probe” hadn’t open the floodgates for every discipline of yet become acceptable party talk in those days, science, politics, religion and philosophy. so they were omitted, and the image of Barney The term “extraterrestrials” that’s usually grabbing a gun from his car (Fuller substitutapplied to whoever is piloting the UFOs is ed a tire iron) may have seemed untoward for morphing into a much more flexible and a Black man in the 1960s. provocative title, “ultraterrestrials.” Corrections to the marker are underway, But something about the study of UFOs so wherever the UFO story takes us in the (I know, the goverment calls them UAPs coming months and years, it will be good now, but so what?) seems to always lead into to look back on all the misinformation and twisty-turny passages or into dark, uncharted outright deception it’s endured and say, well, waters or simply off into the shifting maze at least we got one thing right. of government bureaucracy where the point gets lost and the players all start to feel a little foolish, or deceived.
PHOTO BY LYNN CROW PHOTOGRAPHY
The UFO Legend Lives On
