Wheels: Close encounters

As the picture fades in, read in your best Rod Serling voice and don’t forget to tuck up your upper lip: Picture if you will, a clear September evening, 1961. Betty and Barney Hill are driving back from their Montreal vacation. The clock reads 10:30 p.m. as the road approaches Franconia Notch, and Betty, a social worker and Barney, a postal worker, are heading home to Portsmouth. The cool granite slides by in the dark of night as the Old Man of the Mountain gazes over their progress. The intrepid couple make their way south but before they reach their destination, fate will take them on a detour through the Twilight Zone. Cue the music.

This may have been a good beginning for an episode of the classic mind-twisting television series but instead, it was an actual event and the first widely publicized alien abduction in U.S. history. What’s this have to do with cars? Betty and Barney were driving a 1957 Chevy. I know, it’s a tenuous tie-in at best but I’m going with it because it’s also pretty local and “fascinating” (I realize I’m mixing my sci-fi shows by quoting Spock here). It also involves traveling, perhaps to another dimension.