They were socially progressive – meaning not that they supported left-liberal social causes but that they thought history itself was actually, somehow, tending toward betterment. One of the valuable qualities of Matthew Bowman’s The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in Americais that it recreates the intellectual world in which this apparently rather admirable and amiable couple lived, one that is as hard to imagine for many of us as the medieval era is. It’s just one of those odd facts that a rational modern ought to love because it is a fact.īetty and Barney Hill, probably the most famous UFO abductees in history, were excellent citizens of modernity. Rather it’s because the moral values that I see those people exemplifying, at their best – the cosmopolitanism, the civility, the secular awe at what is, the watered-down but real charity – can only really be accounted for in the language of the other place, the older order. If I remain, many years and many changes of outlook later, a bad citizen of modernity, a believer in miracles (at least those Christianity requires) and entertainer of weird possibilities, it’s not because I still hold the people who try to live in modernity in that same ignorant contempt. It was even then for me the sort of thing that William James winningly called a “wild fact.” I believed it because I believed my friends. Without further details, the thing fit neither into a rationalist’s picture of the world, nor, cleanly, into mine. At the same time, my theological system didn’t necessarily dictate that I had to also believe in other people’s stories of UFO encounters. As I knew no scientists personally – and as I was, like, fourteen years old – this seemed reasonable to me and not, say, an unholy piece of intellectual laziness and unearned arrogance. I thought (read: I had been told), for example, that the Earth was pretty young, that dinosaurs and men had walked it together, and that there was probably lots of evidence showing this, which the scientists were suppressing. I was already a bad citizen of modernity at that point, having been raised not only a Christian, but a fundamentalist. Perhaps modernity and the ways of knowing and being that preceded it are best thought of as two realms living side by side, in superposition, like the two cities in China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009), whose residents must pretend not to see each other, though they stand on the same ground. They may at times operate by other rules, and in their deepest selves they may think the world that modernity can know is only one layer of what really exists. They believe that there are institutions and processes and best practices that knowing must submit to, as by social contract, and they regard any infraction of these rules as at best a little antisocial, like slightly exceeding the speed limit, at worst as a kind of treason. They certainly do not believe reports of miracles simply because a lot of people swear to those reports. People who live in modernity, or who commute to it, do not, while they’re inside its city limits, accept UFO stories simply on the testimony of people they trust. It’s not clear who lives in modernity and what its borders are, or even that it truly exists, but we seem to think that it does, and that it has rules, epistemological and political, that we ought to operate by. Over the next several years of my education, and with greatest force during college, I came to understand that my willingness to believe them on their mere say-so made me in some sense a bad citizen of modernity. I have no idea what either of them make of the whole thing now. We rarely discussed the incident afterward. I don’t remember many details, but I remember that they were both fully committed to those details as they told them to me, the next day. Their story was lengthy and involved, with strange and fast-moving lights pursuing them not only in the sky but on the ground. During the summer between middle and high school – the three months or so when you wait to see if a new and more presentable self will arrive in time to be useful – my two best friends told me they had seen a UFO.
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