But for the past two years Betty, in particular, had had the nagging conviction there was more to it than could be recalled, which surfaced only in strange dreams. What they remembered of the encounter was dramatic enough. The other was that they came into Simon’s office with a vague but emphatic sense that their troubles were rooted in an encounter with a UFO on a lonely mountain road more than two years earlier. That was one unusual thing about the Hills. Their life together was an embodiment of King’s dream. They were also active in the civil rights movement, at a time when Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was in the very recent past and civil rights were less than respectable in many quarters. The couple was active in their Unitarian Universalist church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Barney worked night shift in a Boston post office these hours, and a 60-mile commute, took a further toll on his already shaky health. Betty was a social worker for the State of New Hampshire. In all but two respects, the Hills were ordinary middle-class New Englanders in early middle age. A ring of warts had appeared in a perfect circle around his groin and needed to be surgically removed. Along with these worrisome symptoms, Barney had one other that was trivial but distinctly weird. They’d come for treatment of Betty’s nightmares, apprehension, persistent anxiety and of Barney’s anxiety and insomnia, ulcers and high blood pressure. on Saturday, December 14th, 1963, a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill arrived at the office of Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon for their first scheduled appointment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |