Tony Trigilio has plucked an early incident of ufology from the margins of 20th century cultural history and created from a variety of documentary sources an original and highly resonant work of contemporary poetry. The Hill’s “close encounter” occurred around midnight in the same area where Hawthorne a century earlier, located his ghostly tale of a traveler “encamped in a hunting expedition full forty miles south of the White Mountains, awoke at midnight and beheld the Great Carbuncle gleaming like a meteor, so that the shadows of the trees fall backward from it.” Trigilio has crafted from a wide variety of contemporary source texts including transcriptions of hypnosis therapy sessions a compelling prose poem that carries other local resonances of Native American legends, early 18th century Captivity narrative, even feel the influence of 19th-century Spiritualism. The Hills experience of first contact occurs in the wake of nuclear armament, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and the sweeping social upheaval of the 1960s.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” What comes into question in Proof Something Happened, is how the imagination creates out of pervasive psychological tensions its own inner typology. What are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and psychical research? Employing an open-ended poetics, Trigilio offers a range of angles from which to approach the Hills and their alleged abduction, challenging us to take responsibility for why we yearn to believe, or if not—what to expect