Susan E. Farrell

It was an early fall night in 1961. Barney and Betty Hill, recently married, were driving home in the beautiful, rolling White Mountains of New Hampshire when they were astonished to see a flattened, disc-shaped vessel in their direct path, hovering about 80 feet above them. Stopping and pulling out binoculars, Barney focused in on the craft, observing a group of humanoid figures through a row of windows along the vessel's rim. One of them reminded Barney of a Nazi officer he had seen during his service in World War Two.

In the weeks, months, and years that followed, the Hills would try to understand what happened to them that September night, even undergoing interviews for the Air Force's Project Blue Book, the secretive 18-year U.S. government/military investigation into reported UFO sightings. Believing they had been victims of an alien abduction, the Hills eventually become objects of intense media scrutiny, their story splashed across Newsweek, Time, Playboy, and The New York Times. While sightings of UFOs began to be reported immediately after the end of the second world war, the Hill case is generally considered the first credible, widely publicized alien abduction story in the U.S.

Alien abduction stories reveal social and cultural anxieties of the 1960s. During the Cold War, many Americans feared powerful, inscrutable Soviet forces bent on world domination, not unlike the mysterious alien invaders of fantasy (or, in Billy's and Vonnegut's own experience, the Nazi aggressors of World War Two.) New space-age technology pointed to skies filled with the unknown, while new reproductive technologies threatened bodily autonomy and blurred the line between humans and machines.

As the Hill story broke, Vonnegut was deeply immersed in the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five. But he was still struggling to shape the story to his liking. A long-time resident of nearby Cape Cod and an avid newspaper reader, Vonnegut would surely have known about the case. And manuscripts show that it wasn't until 1967 that the planet Tralfamadore and an alien kidnapping entered into the novel's plot. The Hill's widely published account and similar abduction stories provided Vonnegut a perfect frame on which to hang his Dresden book. Vonnegut decided to have Billy Pilgrim, his weak and damaged anti-hero, re-imagine his wartime capture in terms of the dominant post-war myth of UFOs and alien kidnapping.

Vonnegut's inclusion of space aliens added psychological depth to his portrait of Billy Pilgrim. Billy's imagined story highlights his trauma, but also helps to assuage his wartime anxiety. Claiming that the Tralfamadorians teach him that time is not linear, but that all moments exist at once, Billy comes to believe that death does not matter. A person can be dead one moment and fully alive the next. The alien philosophy comforts Billy, a witness to so many wartime deaths, but it also justifies his life-long passivity—if everything exists at once, nothing can be changed, and there is no need to try. In this way, Vonnegut raises key philosophical questions about free will and determinism and finds a new, non-linear shape for his war novel.