Matthew Bowman is an American historian of religion, professor of religion and history and holder of the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. Best known for his work on Mormonism and American Christianity, he entered UFO history with The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America (Yale University Press, 2023), a biography of the New Hampshire couple whose 1961 report became the first widely known American alien abduction case.

Bowman earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Utah and a doctorate at Georgetown University in 2011. He taught at Hampden-Sydney College and Henderson State University before Claremont appointed him to the Hunter Chair in 2019, with a joint appointment in history and religion. His books include The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012), The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press, 2018), and he co-edited Women and Mormonism (2016). He has written for The Washington Post, Slate and The New Republic.

Published in August 2023, the Hill book treats the abduction as a window on the 1960s. Bowman presents Barney Hill, a Black man, and Betty Hill, a white woman, as civil rights activists, Democrats and members of a Unitarian congregation in Portsmouth who trusted government and science and expected federal agencies to take their report seriously. When the Air Force and their psychiatrists treated the experience as a mental problem, he argues, the couple drifted toward New Age communities and later conspiracy theories, a path he ties to a wider loss of faith in liberal institutions. The story, he wrote, "seemed to me to encapsulate much of what was happening to the United States in those years."

Reviewers largely praised the research. Publishers Weekly called the book "a potent deconstruction of mid-20th-century American politics and culture," Colin Dickey in Slate called it "excellent and exhaustive," and religion scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka, reviewing it in Church History, called his analysis exemplary. The critic Jason Colavito was less convinced, writing that its political background was loosely tied to the Hills and that Bowman treated the abduction as almost certainly not a real encounter with aliens.

In a March 2026 interview with Michael Shellenberger's Public, which the outlet billed as his case that secularists are wrong to dismiss the value of faith, Bowman said the psychiatrist Benjamin Simon had regarded the abduction story as a confabulation, while adding that hypnosis cannot explain the strange craft the Hills reported seeing in the sky. Yale University Press republished an excerpt in April 2025, and podcasts retelling the case have cited the book as a source. By setting the encounter inside the Hills' lives as an interracial, politically active couple in early-1960s New England, the book made Bowman an academic voice sought out in interviews about the first American abduction story.