Canada.com article on Flash Forward author, Robert J. Sawyer:
Mississauga writer Robert J. Sawyer will have a flashy new sci-fi drama series on network TV this fall, adapted from his book Flashforward.
All of a sudden, he’s everywhere. These past few weeks he has hosted VisionTV’s self-explanatory Supernatural Investigator, and in tonight’s season finale, the program turns its inquiring mind on the peculiar 1961 alien- abduction case – an alleged alien abduction? – of Barney and Betty Hill in New Hampshire.
The Hills’ account of their close encounter of the third kind was dismissed as so much hooey by officials at the time, but their story galvanized the popular imagination. It was the height of the Cold War; the U.S. military was actively experimenting with new “flying machines;” and science fiction – both written and filmed – was coming off one of its periodic and cyclical golden ages. “The White Mountain Abduction” or “Hill Abduction,” as it came to be known, provided the inspiration for any number of movies and TV shows, from The Outer Limits to the more recent, filmed-in-B.C. miniseries Taken. The Hill abduction also provided a seed of imagination for Steven Spielberg’s epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Imagination is the key word, as Supernatural Investigator shows. There’s the usual silliness inherent in these kinds of programs – the Hills’ niece, Kathleen Marden, is shown reconstructing the events to see if Barney and Betty Hill’s tale was in any way plausible – but science, real science, is also involved. Not the science of unidentified flying objects and little green men from outer space, but brain science.
One updated theory posits that “startle reflex,” a common but little known feature of human vision, may explain why the Hills are so convinced they saw what they did. Seeing is believing, in other words, though not always for the reasons we think.
No moss grows on Sawyer, by the way. As you are reading, he has taken up his new position as writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) physics- research centre in Saskatoon. Imagination is at the heart of both artistic and scientific endeavours, Sawyer commented on his blog, “and the science being done in Canada is world-class.”
