INTERVIEW WITH BUDD HOPKINS—AUTHOR, ABDUCTEE
RESEARCHER
NOVA: Could you tell us briefly about your own personal
introduction to UFO's and what it is that got you believing in
the reality?
HOPKINS: I had a daytime UFO sighting on Cape Cod. It lasted about
three minutes. The object seemed to be able to hover. And then it
zoomed at great speeds straight into the wind. We had thought
perhaps it was some kind of flat balloon or something, but clearly
it wasn't. And when you see something like that and the three of
us jumping out of the car finally to watch it disappear, you
realize that there's some factor in the world that you had
previously been unaware of. And it could be an extraordinarily
important factor.

NOVA: As you know, many people have a hard time believing the
literal truth of abductions. Can you please describe for us how
you overcame your own skepticism and became a believer?
HOPKINS: As I was looking into a few early sighting reports, many
years after I had my own sighting and I began to look into the
cause, I was curious. At that point I thought that an abduction
case was an extremely rare item. And when I first heard of an
abduction, which was in 1966, two years after I'd had my daytime
sighting, I couldn't accept it, I couldn't believe it. And I had a
very simple reason; it's just too hard to believe.
I had no logical reason. If I have seen something flying around in
the sky, there's no reason to think that there might be people
inside the ship—occupants. Although we looked down upon
that, at the time, as ridiculous. And David Jacobs made a
wonderful remark that it took the investigators who took UFOs
seriously, it took them 20 years to accept the idea that a UFO
might have an inside.
And in retrospect, now that I know about the abduction phenomenon,
and I've been looking into it for practically 20 years, I realize
that in those early years before we accepted the idea of
occupants, before we accepted the idea of abductions, and we were
just looking at the objects themselves, that it was as if we were
trying to get the license plate number on the get away car,
without having figured out what the crime was.
But, as these cases began to come my way, where people were
reporting a sighting, a period of missing time, they couldn't
account for a couple of hours. Perhaps they were in a car, the car
ended up on another road aimed in the wrong direction. They were
having nightmares and fears and so on afterwards. You have to
assume that something traumatic had occurred in a number of these
cases. So, I used a couple of friends who were psychiatrists,
psychologists and others to help us with hypnotic regressions to
look into these experiences that the people were unable to recall
all the details of. And one of the interesting things, of course,
is the people who were doing the hypnosis for us were all
skeptics. I don't think they ended up skeptics, but that's the way
they began. But, as the case material mounted up, and case after
case after case replicated the cases before, and these were
totally believable people from all walks of life, and even down to
tiny details in their descriptions of what happened to them, these
tiny details were replicated again and again—you have to
feel you're dealing with a phenomenon that has an absolute core of
reality about it.
NOVA: Assuming that there is a literal truth to the ...
abduction phenomenon, what in your opinion is the real
significance of that? Why is this important?
HOPKINS: Well, if this is true and I have at this point sadly no
doubt that it is true, what that means is on the silliest level
that we're not necessarily the top of the food chain. But, on the
most profound level, it means that an intelligence which is a
controlling intelligence, which can see into our mind, so to
speak, which would mean a total end to the privacy that we each
have inside our heads right now. That that intelligence, which
possesses the technology that is staggering, is bound to
ultimately be in control. Just as the Spanish were bound to
somehow control the Aztecs. That's the way things were slated.
To think that it might be an end to Eden, so to speak, if we can
look at our past as Eden, I'm sure the Aztecs thought of their
past as Eden too before the Spanish arrived. If I can, you know,
just guess what life might be like 20 or 30 or 40 years from now
should this momentum continue, it's a terrifying thought. Even
though I don't see the UFO occupants as evil or conquerors or
anything of that sort—it's nothing that simple. Still,
control would be absolute if this finally comes to making
themselves obvious, ending the covert.
NOVA: You state that the evidence for the reality of these
abductions is overwhelming. Could you please briefly describe
what the nature of that evidence is?
HOPKINS: I think most dramatic are the physical marks on people's
bodies after these experiences. They fall into various types, but
one very common one is what we call a scoop mark, which is a
little round depression about the size of my thumb nail or a
little smaller. As if a little—some sort of object or some
sort of tool has just removed a layer of cells.
Now, a person can be asleep at night and wake up in the morning
with one of these things right on the front of the shin and it's
not bleeding. This can happen, of course, outside or whatever.
But, these things are extremely similar. And they turn up
absolutely overnight or after the experience ended. We don't know
why they're there, but they happen over and over and over again.
Another type is just a straight like surgical cut that can be
anywhere from oh, a small inch or so, but down to maybe three and
a half, four inches long. And there is very rarely any bleeding
that results from these. And, another set of these marks can be
simply large bruises, especially on the insides of the thighs, as
if some kind of gynecological stirrups had been used or something
of that sort. Again, if this happens during the night, the person
goes to bed unmarked and wakes up with these various cuts or
whatever I've described. And some of them are extremely dramatic
in appearance.
When people have gone to doctors—in one case a woman went to
a doctor after one of these things turned up on her back after an
abduction. And the doctor insisted that she'd had surgery because
there were at regular intervals little extensions along the cut.
And she said, "No, this is just what happened when I woke up."
That is one basic, dramatic piece of evidence.
The second thing is, of course, a person will often find in the
house signs that that person has been outside. In a particular
case, for instance, a man woke up in the morning with the
recollection that he had been outside. He remembered there were
figures in the room. He remembered pieces of this experience.
NOVA: David Jacobs has his theories of his meanings of the
abductions, as does John Mack. What does Budd Hopkins think this
all means?
HOPKINS: Trying to speculate as to the ultimate meaning of all
this is always tough. Certain things seem very clear to me. We
know what they're doing, I think, beyond any doubt at this point.
As to why they're doing it, that's speculation. It definitely
seems to me, though, that what they're doing is for their
purposes, not for ours. The hidden religious hopes that I think
everyone has would connect with the idea that they're coming here
to help us. It's certainly nice to think that. Our paranoid fears
that many people have are they're coming here to take us over, I
don't see a sign of either one of those being true. They seem to
be here for their own purposes. Now, they could take what they
need. Our DNA, our genetics, they could create their hybrids to
solve some particular evolutionary problem that they may be
facing. Who knows? And they could just simply leave and then leave
us alone again, which would be quite wonderful.
But, I don't think it's possible to say. I don't have enough to go
by, enough information, to say what they're here for. They're not
here, that's for sure, to help us plug up the ozone layer hole.
They're not here to take over our supermarkets. They're here for
their own reasons. And I'm not sure what those are.
NOVA: There are those who say that the abduction stories are so
similar not because they're real but because we all share the
same cultural images of UFOs and aliens. Why is this, in your
opinion, not enough to explain the many apparent
similarities?
HOPKINS: One of the most important things about these cases, as
they emerge, is that they come from all around the world, even
from essentially illiterate people. Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, New
Guinea, I mean cases have been reported exactly like the cases we
get here from people who were totally illiterate. There is no
possible way that this could have bubbled down. Also, one could do
a simple test. You ask the man on the street to explain what a UFO
abduction is about, and he may get one or two things right. But,
most people really don't have a clear idea of what happens.
NOVA: You had said—and it's been said that the best
evidence for the reality is experience, is the similarity of
these stories. In other words, what do you mean by that
process?
HOPKINS: Well, these accounts, of which we have literally
thousands upon thousands, are so extraordinarily similar. To start
with, in the sequence of events, Robert—Edward Bulwark,
who's a folklorist, has broken down these various accounts into
separate units of what happens, and has found out that not only
are the same things reported again and again, but they're reported
in the same sequence. Which is very, very different, obviously,
from a fantasy or a whatever. And the details are so incredibly
similar. Which I am stunned by every time I interview somebody.
The power of these accounts, or the emotional resources behind
them, where people are really extremely upset and going into
it—which is not the kind of thing one finds behind a
fantasy—the power of that, mixing with the fact that the
accounts are so similar around the world, again, supported by the
evidence in all the cases. You know, if somebody said the UFO came
down in the yard there, where that tree is, you might look at it
and find a broken tree branch, or several of them broken from the
top down. That sort of thing. The background is always supported
there. Which, of course, doesn't happen with a fantasy. It only
happens with reality. And the evidence is absolutely there in
every case. And, of course, you don't get in fantasies or
imaginary experiences this—the fact that everyone is
remembering the same thing the same way. And you have
multiple—many multiple abductions.
NOVA: What is your best response to people who believe
abductees must simply be crazy, that this is just crazy mentally
stuff. Do you think they would feel differently after they got a
chance to meet and hear directly from these people?
HOPKINS: Well, the issue of whether the abductees are
crazy—by the thousands, we're talking about by the
thousands—is, I think, a simple question to answer. I mean
these people can be psychologically tested as they have been. We
instituted a psychological series of psychological tests with a
group of abductees, without informing the psychologists of the
nature of our sample—many years ago. And there was no
psychopathology that emerged from the testing. And this is what
happens again and again.
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