Friday, November 04, 2005

Beam Me Up, Godly Being

Beam Me Up, Godly Being
(Slate)
Speculation about extraterrestrial beings is ancient, but “alien abduction” as we know it originated in the 1960s, after a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. Betty was a fan of movies like Invaders From Mars. Her story inspired a best-selling book, a TV movie, and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Many more people began to report abductions, which in turn led to more books and movies, which led to more people claiming to have been abducted—in a sense, it was Hollywood that had abducted them.

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