Jean Hilliard herself has not, in the interviews and accounts available, encouraged the more extreme interpretations of her story.

She has described her experience as remarkable, as something she doesn’t fully understand, and as something whose significance was in some ways more apparent to others than to her.

She remembers driving.

She remembers waking up.

The center of the story — the six hours — belongs to the record, not to her memory.

She has not described a religious or spiritual interpretation of her survival, at least not in the public record.

She has expressed the bemused relationship of a person who survived something extraordinary without quite knowing what to make of it — without the near-death vision that might have given it a personal transcendent meaning, and without the full memory that would allow her to integrate the experience in the way most dramatic events are integrated.