Budd Hopkins

American artist, author, ufologist (1931–2011)

Elliot Budd Hopkins (June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter based in Chelsea, New York, and the principal founder of the modern UFO abduction research field. Over more than three decades he personally investigated over 140 alleged abduction cases, pioneered the use of hypnotic regression as an investigative tool in that context, and authored three landmark books — Missing Time (1981), Intruders (1987), and Witnessed (1996) — that shaped public understanding of the phenomenon.

Early life and education

Hopkins was raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he lived with his parents Elliot B. Hopkins and Eleanor A. Hopkins, his brother Stuart, and his sister Eleanor. At age two he contracted polio, and during the long recovery he developed an interest in drawing and watercolors that eventually led him to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in art history in 1953. At Oberlin he attended a lecture by Robert Motherwell that first introduced him to the "automatic, gestural approach" he would pursue as a painter.

From Oberlin, Hopkins moved to New York City, where he met Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and other abstract expressionists. For a time he studied art history at Columbia University and worked a low-level job selling tickets at the Museum of Modern Art.

Art career

Hopkins held his first solo show in New York City in 1956, the same year he married his first wife, Joan Rich. In 1963 his work was featured in the documentary film American Painters, alongside commentary from Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Hess of Art News, gallery director Sidney Janis, and art critic Harold Rosenberg. In 1969 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired his Norbeck Yellow Vertical, describing him as "a leading American painter who has successfully brought together the vocabularies of painterly abstraction and hard edge painting." In 1972 Hopkins was one of five artists commissioned as part of a West Virginia statewide creative-arts program that Governor Arch Moore claimed was "the first project of this kind to be undertaken in the nation." In 1976 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting.

Hopkins exhibited at galleries including Poindexter, Andre Zarre, and Levis Fine Art in New York, and Jan Cicero in Chicago, and at universities across the United States. His paintings and sculptures are in the permanent collections of the Whitney, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the British Museum. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in mid-2017. His studio and residence in Chelsea became a hub for both his artistic work and, from the mid-1970s onward, his UFO investigation activities.

Art style

Hopkins's paintings in the 1960s combined precise, hard-edge geometric shapes with the gestural, atmospheric painting characteristic of second- and later-generation abstract expressionists. He viewed collage as both technique and philosophy, writing in 1997 that "the presence of the collage aesthetic is the sole defining quality of modernism in all the arts." In the 1970s his work shifted toward assembled paintings and sculpture incorporating architectural elements, with pieces such as Gallatin's Drive I, White City Hall, and New York Wall II echoing the New York skyline. His 1980s Temples, Guardians, and Altars series featured "sentinels" which Hopkins described as "participating in a frozen ritual, fixed – absolutely – within a privileged space". Though Hopkins denied any connection, some critics viewed these ritualistic pieces as an extension of his fascination with alien beings.

Entry into UFO research

Hopkins's personal introduction to the subject came in August 1964, when he and two companions reported a daytime sighting of a darkish, elliptical object off Cape Cod in Truro, Massachusetts. Dissatisfied with the response he received from nearby Otis Air National Guard Base, he suspected a possible government cover-up and began reading the UFO literature and collecting accounts from people who claimed contact with alien beings. He described his initial reaction as frank disbelief: "At the time I heard about this, even though I had a UFO sighting myself and was very interested in the subject, I simply said, this can't be, I cannot believe this."

In 1975 Hopkins was approached by George O'Barski, who reportedly witnessed humanoid figures step out of a spacecraft and take soil samples at North Hudson Park in North Bergen, New Jersey. With Ted Bloecher, then director of MUFON's New York State chapter, and Jerry Stoehrer, Hopkins investigated the incident, interviewed the witness, and collected soil samples. His account appeared in The Village Voice in March 1976, after which he began receiving a steady correspondence from other UFO witnesses, including several who reported inexplicable gaps in memory.

Key works

Missing Time (1981)

Missing Time, published in 1981, introduced the term "missing time" into UFO research vocabulary, drawing on cases Hopkins had been collecting since the mid-1970s using hypnotic regression. According to Richard Dolan, the book was a pioneering work that introduced two new ideas — that a period of unexplained missing time was a typical aspect of the abduction experience, and that abductions were far more common than previously thought. Hopkins drew on investigations conducted with Bloecher and psychologist Aphrodite Clamar, who also administered psychological tests to abductees (finding them normal, albeit stressed and perplexed by their experiences).

Intruders (1987)

Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods centered on the case of Kathie Davis (pseudonym for Debbie Tomey of Indianapolis), documenting alleged repeated abductions with physical marks. The book was a New York Times nonfiction bestseller, and spent four weeks on The New York Times Paperback Best Seller list. Together with Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987), Intruders prompted a wave of new abduction reports from people who read the books. It was later adapted as the CBS miniseries Intruders (1992), starring Richard Crenna, with fictionalized characters based on the work of Hopkins and psychiatrist John E. Mack.

Witnessed (1996)

Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions documented the alleged late-1989 Brooklyn Bridge abduction of Linda Cortile, in which the event was reportedly witnessed by the security detail of UN Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar. Hopkins pointed to an X-ray of Cortile's nasal cavity as purported physical evidence of an implant. Cortile had attended Hopkins's support group for five months before her alleged abduction and had read Intruders before contacting him. Critics including Joseph J. Stefula, Richard D. Butler, and George P. Hansen disputed the case in detail.

Later books

Hopkins and his third wife, Carol Rainey, co-wrote Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings (2003), and Hopkins published a memoir, Art, Life and UFOs, in 2009.

Methodology

Main article:

Hypnotic regression

Hopkins systematized the use of hypnotic regression in abduction investigation, working with a panel of psychologists and psychiatrists — among them Robert Naiman, Aphrodite Clamar, and Girard Franklin — who conducted both blind psychological testing of claimants and regression sessions. Although he had no formal psychological training, he watched other professionals over an eight-year period and developed his own techniques. Hopkins deliberately withheld certain case details from his publications so that new cases could be cross-checked against unpublished specifics. His approach was adopted and extended by subsequent researchers including David Jacobs.

By 1995 Hopkins had worked with hundreds of abductees. In his view, the purported similarities among client accounts lent credibility to their stories; critics have countered that in practice the details varied greatly. Dolan records early criticism from D. Scott Rogo and Hilary Evans, who argued that abductions appeared to be a feature of the human mind and could not be coincidentally aligned with the symbolic language of dreams.

Support groups

Hopkins met and encouraged self-described abductees to discuss their experiences by holding free monthly group-therapy sessions. Attendees drew from a range of professions, including attorneys, police officers, teachers, airline pilots, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Many had contacted Hopkins after reading his books or after seeing him on television programs including Sally Jessy Raphael, the Marsha Warfield Show, Charles Grodin, and others. Some critics interpreted these appearances as a recruitment mechanism for prospective abductees. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, appearing on NOVA's Kidnapped by UFOs? (April 1997), identified "subtle but powerful suggestive cues" in a Hopkins hypnosis session with two children; social psychologist Richard Ofshe similarly flagged suggestive influence in Hopkins's support groups.

Intruders Foundation

In 1989 Hopkins founded the Intruders Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit, to support abduction experiencers, fund investigation of alleged cases, and provide a referral network connecting claimants with sympathetic mental health practitioners.

Collaboration with Bruce Maccabee

Hopkins collaborated with Bruce Maccabee, a United States Navy physicist and chairman of the Fund for UFO Research, on photographic and physical evidence connected to UFO reports. The two appeared together at a 1987 Foreign Press Center briefing in Washington, D.C., at which Hopkins presented an overview of the abduction phenomenon to an international press audience.

Medical evidence

Main articles:

Alien implants

and

Alien abductions

Hopkins catalogued physical traces he alleged were left on abductees' bodies, including scoop marks, straight-line surgical cuts, purported alien implants visible on X-rays, and gynecological anomalies — including the reported unexplained disappearance of ovarian tissue in women with abduction histories. He interpreted implants as control or monitoring devices similar to those used by human scientists to tag animals in the wild. Critics including Philip J. Klass pointed out that promised implants — including in the Cortile case — were alluded to but never recovered.

Alien abduction claims

Hopkins is widely credited with popularizing the idea of alien abductions as a program of genetic experimentation, and has been called "father of the abduction movement" by some observers. Working with psychologist Elizabeth Slater, he likened abductees' experiences to rape, allegedly in service of a reproductive program. He described a scheme in which women were reportedly taken aboard spacecraft, impregnated, and later had the hybrid fetus removed, with the alien parents purportedly able to communicate telepathically with their offspring.

Roper poll

In 1991 Hopkins partnered with David M. Jacobs, history professor at Temple University, and John Mack, a psychiatry professor at Harvard University, to design a Roper poll of nearly 6,000 respondents intended to measure how many had experienced symptoms the three associated with alien abduction. Generalized to the population, the survey results were read by the authors as indicating that several million Americans were regularly affected. Critics questioned the validity of the survey questions themselves and the implausibility that an average of 340 Americans could be abducted daily without any recovered physical evidence.

Critical reception and skeptical explanations

Hopkins's use of hypnotic regression drew sustained criticism from memory researchers including Elizabeth Loftus, whose 1980 study Memory argued that human memory is "continually being altered, transformed, and distorted" and that hypnosis can make confabulation worse. Psychologist Robert A. Baker of the University of Kentucky argued that hypnosis can "transform a dream, a hallucination or fantasy into a seemingly-real event". Psychologist Susan Clancy, who attended abductee gatherings as part of her Harvard research, directly pressed Hopkins on the point; he acknowledged he knew hypnosis could make it "relatively easy to confuse imagination with reality" but replied that this was "only if it's not done correctly. I'm very careful."

Sleep paralysis was advanced by many critics as an alternative explanation for bedroom abduction accounts, with its characteristic paralysis, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, and sensory features such as shadowy figures, footsteps, and a sense of pressure on the body. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger of Laurentian University argued that such sensations could spontaneously produce feelings of "tremendous meaningfulness and fear" in abductees given the right circumstances. Hopkins rejected sleep paralysis, calling it "the big explanation du jour" and inadequate for those who reported abductions outside the bedroom. Critics including Carl Sagan and author Jodi Dean questioned whether abductee memories are the product of internal rather than external experiences, and Ronald K. Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles attributed much of the phenomenon to "normal hallucinatory powers of the brain".

Bettyann Kevles of The New York Times, reviewing Intruders, wrote that she was "willing to believe that he believes everything he has written" but was "wary of the accuracy of the information he gathered through hypnosis", noting that "witnesses recall events that never occurred, but that they are later, on being brought out of hypnosis, convinced really happened." Hopkins responded that he had "often frequently invited interested therapists, journalists and academics to observe hypnosis sessions", naming psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and psychiatrist Donald F. Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute among observers who had not reported any suggestive leading of subjects.

His former wife, the filmmaker Carol Rainey, publicly alleged after their divorce that Hopkins had withheld contradictory evidence in the Cortile case and had coached witnesses.

Influence

Hopkins and David Jacobs together established the framework of screen memories in abduction research, which Karla Turner extended in her own work. His referral of experiencers to John Mack initiated Mack's involvement in the field.

Personal life and death

By 1973 Hopkins was married to art historian and curator April Kingsley, with whom he had a daughter, Grace Hopkins. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1991. In 1994 Hopkins met writer and filmmaker Carol Rainey, who became his third wife in 1996; the two were married for ten years and co-wrote Sight Unseen (2003) before divorcing in 2006.

Hopkins died on August 21, 2011, in Manhattan from complications of cancer. At the time of his death he was in a relationship with journalist Leslie Kean.

Legacy

Hopkins's three books established the template for abduction research methodology — hypnotic regression, cross-case pattern matching, and physical-evidence cataloguing — that subsequent investigators adopted and debated.

Books

• Art, Life and UFOs: A Memoir (2009) ISBN 978-1933665412
• Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility, and Transgenic Beings (2003), with Carol Rainey ISBN 978-0743412186
• Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions (1996) ISBN 978-0671569150
• Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (1987) ISBN 978-0394560762
• Sacred Spaces: The Book of Temples/The Book of Guardians/The Book of Altars (1983)
• Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions (1981) ISBN 978-0399901027

See also

• Stanton Friedman
• Betty and Barney Hill abduction
• Extraterrestrials in fiction
• List of alleged extraterrestrial beings
• Grey alien
• Zeta Reticuli
• The Manhattan Alien Abduction

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to

Budd Hopkins

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• www.intrudersfoundation.org — Intruders Foundation: Budd Hopkins' official site (archived)

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