Mini Review of Captured!

It’s taken me a few days, but very early this morning I finished reading Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, by Stanton T. Friedman, and Kathleen Marden.

Wow! What to make of this phenomenal story…

If you’ve never heard about the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction then you haven’t read enough books on UFOs. They and the case gets mentioned fairly frequently. In fact, just about every book on UFOs that I’ve read this year make mention of this interesting case.

Prior to reading Captured!, I hadn’t read a full account. At least, I don’t recall having ever read any; particularly John Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey, which was the book that introduced the public to this case. So, I was keen to read this book, especially considering that Stanton T. Friedman, one of North America’s best known scientific ufologists is a co-author of it. The other co-author, and this really caught my eye, is Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill’s niece.

When I told my partner that I had finished reading Captured!, he naturally asked me whether or not I believed the story. I’ve got to say that I’m still mulling it over, it’s just so incredible. However, at this point I would have to say that I pretty much do believe it.

The whole thing pretty much rings true for me. Discrepancies between Betty and Barney’s version of the events don’t dissuade me because I know from first hand experience in military police investigations that multiple witnesses can see the exact same incident from the exact same vantage point and come up with a multitude of different stories.

There were several things that I really liked about how Captured! was written and presented. One of the things was the sheer amount of detail that was brought together from various sources. These sources included the transcripts of Betty and Barney’s hypnosis sessions, personal details about the initial experience and aftermath throughout the years that were pulled together from Betty’s memoirs, and Kathleen Marden’s interviews of Betty and more. Friedman and Marden looked at everything in-depth and presented everything in-depth so that one gets a very good picture of the whole case, as it developed from beginning to end.

If there was anything about Captured! that I didn’t like or that I feel really skeptical about it would have to be the photo on page 214 that Betty took. On page 214, the caption says, “Betty Hill took a picture of this craft as it hovered silently above her auto. Look to the right of the craft for what has an uncanny resemblance to an alien bust.” And on page 270, it refers to the same picture thus: “The photograph reveals a shadowy figure at the window and a possible stereotypical gray alien emerging from the right side of the disk.” I’ve looked at that photo a dozen times and I still see a black photograph with two specks of white light; that’s it. Perhaps a full size, original photo or slide shows differently but the small reproduction that I see would take a very vivid imagination to come up with that being a photo of a UFO and alien of any sort.

However, I should also mention that the photo in question has nothing to do with the original UFO sighting and abduction that Betty and Barney were involved in. This photo was taken some years later.

However, despite that anomaly, I quite enjoyed reading Captured! and think it’s a great addition to our UFO library.