Twenty years after co-creating the short lived alien invasion television series DARK SKIES (which was not related to the 2013 alien invasion movie DARK SKIES), Bryce Zabel is set to write a film based on the story of
Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from Portsmouth, N.H., who said they were captured by a UFO on Sept. 19, 1961. The Hills — a black postal clerk and a white social worker — claimed they had been studied by extraterrestrials and then returned to Earth with missing memories that were later retrieved under hypnosis.
Zabel's screenplay will be an adaptation of the 2007 non-fiction book CAPTURED! THE BETTY AND BARNEY HILL UFO EXPERIENCE: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD'S FIRST DOCUMENTED ALIEN ABDUCTION, which was written by nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and Betty Hill's niece Kathleen Marden. The title is being shortened to CAPTURED for the film version.
CAPTURED won't be the first time the Hills' story has been told on screen. Television shows COSMOS, MONSTERS AND MYSTERIES IN AMERICA, and MYSTERIES AT THE MUSEUM have all dedicated segments to the Hills' claims, a 1975 TV movie called THE UFO INCIDENT (pictured below) starred James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons as the couple, an episode of THE X-FILES was inspired by their alien encounter, and the Hills were even portrayed by Basil Wallace and Lee Garlington on Zabel's DARK SKIES. They were also mentioned in the 2002 Steven Spielberg alien abduction mini-series TAKEN, which Zabel worked on.
Bryce and Jackie Zabel's Stellar Prods. will be co-producing CAPTURED with Gotham/Principal. The plan is to tell the alien abduction story within the context of the Cold War paranoia and civil rights issues of the time.
Jackie Zabel had this to say about the Hills:
"They were an interracial couple in a country that still had segregation laws, and they lived in a city that was next door to a bomber base bristling with nuclear weapons. What they knew and why they were targeted will make for a phenomenal film."
Despite how popular the abduction the Hills appears to have been over the last fifty-four years, I had somehow managed to be unaware of it until this project was announced. Having no prior knowledge of their story, I'm interested in seeing how this telling of it turns out.