Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) - Pioneering UFO Abductionist

The famous UFO Abductionist Budd Hopkins succumbed to cancer in New York City on August 21, at the age of eighty (http://www.intrudersfoundation.org/inside.html ). The "UFO abduction" scenario changed significantly after the publication of Hopkin's book Missing Time in 1981. Prior to that time, UFO abductions were supposed to occur only when people ventured out to lonely, deserted places late at night, and encountered aliens (Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton). Hopkins' contribution was to entirely sever the connection between UFO sightings and UFO abductions. Hopkins wrote of a new "abduction scenario that is, if anything, even more disturbing to contemplate. Many people have simply been taken from their homes while they were either asleep, or engaged in some quotidian activity, like watching television or reading" (Missing Time, p. 79). Often the aliens, and their helpless prey, simply float through closed windows, or even walls. In such cases, the Law of Gravity and all of Newton's Laws of Motion seem to have been repealed. To explain why nobody ever sees or photographs somebody else being abducted, Hopkins suggested that the aliens have the ability to make themselves, and their abductees, invisible during this process.



Just watch the first part of this lecture, and you'll learn all you need to know about Budd Hopkins.

Hopkins was a member of the famous Troika of UFO Abductionists during Abductology's heyday in the early 1990s, along with Dr. John Mack, M.D., and Dr. David Jacobs (Jacobs is now the only survivor of the three). Hopkins was the founder and Executive Director of the Intruders Foundation, taking its name from his 1987 best-selling book Intruders, which in 1992 was made into a prime-time miniseries on CBS-TV. Hopkins was one of the organizers of the 1992 Abduction Study Conference at MIT, sponsored by physicist David Pritchard, which I attended.

I met Hopkins several times, and attempted to engage him in a substantive discussion. He would have none of it, and his attitude toward me was always hostile (just like David Jacobs, Walt Andrus, and many others). Hopkins was not one to discuss or debate. He was right, you were wrong, and you were probably stupid as well - it was that simple. His ex-wife Carol Rainey became disillusioned with his carelessness and duplicity, concealing flaws he knew about in cases he was proclaiming to the world as ironclad proof. She turned into one of his most severe critics. For more about Rainey  contra Hopkins, especially the Brooklyn Bridge Abduction ("Levitated Linda"), see my "Abductology Implodes" (Blog posting of Jan 19, 2011, expanded as "Psychic Vibrations" in the Skeptical Inquirer, May/June, 2011). "Levitated Linda" is in my "Psychic Vibrations" column of Spring, 1993, reprinted in the new book Psychic Vibrations (click on book icon, above).