BUDD HOPKINS

Opening

Budd Hopkins was a New York abstract painter who became the best-known investigator of alien abduction claims in the United States. In 1964 he saw a dark, elliptical object off Truro, Massachusetts, was unhappy with the response from the nearby Air National Guard base, and began to suspect a cover-up. By the late 1970s he was working with people who said they had been taken, and in 1981 he published Missing Time, the first of his books on the subject.

His second book, Intruders, spent four weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list in 1987 and helped to make abduction a topic that millions of people knew about. He ran free support groups for self-described abductees and used hypnosis to recover memories. His methods and the results divided the field, and critics said he was producing the stories he thought he was investigating. He died in 2011.

Timeline

1931Hopkins is born in Wheeling, West Virginia. He studies art history at Oberlin College, graduating in 1953, and moves to New York, where he is associated with the abstract expressionists.

August 1964He sees a daytime object off Truro, Massachusetts.

1969The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquires one of his paintings.

1975He investigates the George O'Barski claim in North Bergen, New Jersey, and writes about it in The Village Voice the next year.

1976He receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.

1981Missing Time is published.

1987Intruders is published.

1989He founds the Intruders Foundation. On 30 November, at about 3 a.m., the alleged Brooklyn Bridge abduction of a woman he calls Linda Cortile takes place, according to the case's account.

1991He joins David Jacobs and John Mack in commissioning a Roper poll.

1992He presents the Cortile case in the MUFON UFO Journal in September and December, and at the MUFON symposium.

1996Witnessed, his book on the Cortile case, is published.

2003He co-writes Sight Unseen with his then wife, Carol Rainey.

21 August 2011Hopkins dies of complications of cancer in New York.

Key figures

Hopkins worked with Ted Bloecher, a UFO researcher, and the psychologist Aphrodite Clamar on Missing Time. David Jacobs, a historian, and John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, were colleagues in the abduction field. The Cortile case centres on a woman he called Linda Cortile, now known to be Linda Napolitano.

His critics included Elizabeth Loftus and Richard Ofshe, who studied false memories; Robert Baker, who argued that hypnosis could create them; Ronald Siegel, who pointed to hallucination; and Carl Sagan, who argued that Hopkins was generating the phenomenon, not investigating it. Michael Persinger offered a neuroscientific account. The sceptic Joseph Stefula and colleagues published a 1993 critique of the Cortile investigation.

Hopkins's later partner was the journalist Leslie Kean.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: his books, the case files of the Intruders Foundation, the Roper poll, and a body of recorded hypnosis sessions. Hopkins pointed to scars, marks and what he said were implants in his subjects. The proof he promised, such as hybrid DNA and the implants in the Cortile case, was never produced.

The Cortile case is the clearest example. It was dated to about 3 a.m. on 30 November 1989, when witnesses were said to have seen a woman and three small humanoid beings float out of a twelfth-floor apartment in Manhattan and into a craft near the Brooklyn Bridge. Three witnesses in a car two blocks away and a woman on the Brooklyn Bridge were reported, and the case was said to involve the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, as another witness. Hopkins called it his best case. He never published a full written report, only two five-page articles and a presentation, and critics have argued that the account rests on his own interviews.

The 1991 Roper poll was used to argue that millions of Americans might be affected. Critics challenged the questions it asked and the implausibility of the numbers.

Things you might not know

• He was a successful painter. His work is in museums, and a retrospective was shown at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2017.
• He used hypnosis, and defended it. He said visiting professionals had observed his sessions without seeing leading questions.
• He admitted media could contaminate cases. He said coverage could "contaminate the pool" of subjects, but argued he could tell real cases from delusional ones.
• He ran free support groups. The monthly meetings were for people who described themselves as abductees.
• A Guggenheim Fellow. He won the award in 1976, five years before Missing Time.
• The bridge case had a UN link. The claim that the Secretary General was a witness is the most remarkable part, and the least documented.

Competing explanations

Real abductions. Hopkins and his followers held that the accounts matched each other in detail, came from ordinary people, and were not explained by hypnosis. The weakness is that the physical proof was never produced and the accounts were gathered from people who already believed.

Suggestion and false memory. The strongest sceptical reading. Hypnosis can produce vivid false memories, support groups and media coverage shape what people recall, and critics argue that Hopkins's methods encouraged that. Hopkins disputed this.

Sleep paralysis and hallucination. Siegel and others point to sleep paralysis and other states as the source of many experiences. Hopkins rejected sleep paralysis as an explanation.

Later life of the case

Hopkins's work set the pattern for abduction research in the 1980s and 1990s, which Mack and Jacobs continued. See also the Hill abduction and John Mack. His books remain in print.

Finding

Hopkins was sincere, and he was influential. He made abduction a subject that the public took seriously and helped many people who felt they had no one to talk to. His methods, though, were open to the criticisms of suggestion and false memory, and the physical evidence he promised never appeared. The Cortile case, his best, rests on his own account.

What still will not resolve: whether a full written report on the Brooklyn Bridge case, with the witnesses named and interviewed by someone independent, was ever possible.