Art, Life and UFOs: Budd Hopkins Remembers

Q and A With Budd Hopkins

By Sean Casteel

            Budd Hopkins has pioneered so much of what we take for granted nowadays about the alien abduction phenomenon that it is difficult to know where to begin when listing the contributions he has made. For instance, it was Hopkins who first discovered that the abduction phenomenon was a widespread occurrence that followed family bloodlines and could happen to nearly anybody without the abductee remembering much about the experience consciously at all. The hybrid human/alien fetuses that were first inserted into and later removed from impregnated female abductees have come to be seen as the primary reason for the overriding interest that the aliens have in our genetic and medical makeup. We first learned this important fact through Hopkins and his second book, the “New York Times” bestseller “Intruders,” in 1987.  In every case, Hopkins ’ discoveries would later be replicated many times over by the other researchers following in his wake.

            Hopkins ’ interest in UFOs began after a sighting experience near Cape Cod in Massachusetts in 1964. He was surprised to learn that many of his friends and acquaintances had also seen flying saucers and were just as mystified as he was about them. In 1975, he researched the sighting experience of a Manhattan liquor store owner named George O’Barski, who had thought the world was ending as he watched diminutive aliens take soil samples in a park located a mile from Broadway. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

            Beginning in the mid-1950s, Hopkins quickly became an established Abstract Expressionist painter, joining the New York artists’ community at a very young age. He had numerous one-man shows, received glowing reviews, and his work was acquired by such respected art museums as the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art , to name just a few, as well as by prestigious private collections. He managed to balance his work as an artist with his later efforts as a UFO researcher and continues to work assiduously in both of those fields today.

            Hopkins is now 78 years old, and feels the time has come for some serious reflection. He has recently released a memoir, called “Art, Life and UFOs” (Anomalist Books, 2009) which begins with his childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia and his awakening to the beauty and power of Abstract Expressionist Art.  Next came the years he’s spent unraveling patterns within the abduction phenomenon, which has troubled the lives of many people who came to him, trying to make sense of the unbelievable events that had so terrified them. 

            His new book is surprisingly frank and Hopkins withholds very little in the way of personal information. He seems unafraid to put some of his warts on display, and the resulting mix of autobiography and social history is fascinating in the extreme. What follows is an in-depth interview with Hopkins that surveys the three components of the book’s title as he unflinchingly faces the past even while he continues to search – optimistically, he says – for the ultimate truth of the alien abduction mystery.

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Casteel: You say you’ve been working on the new book for a long time.

Hopkins : The idea for the project began because my daughter Grace, as a teenager, said to me one day, to my surprise, “I don’t know very much about you, Dad.”  She might have been referring to the fact that she didn’t know much about my family since many members were scattered or had passed away. So I decided to write a kind of history of the family and my early life but ultimately I began to take it more seriously and finally I decided that I wanted to make this a book that people would enjoy reading whether they knew me or not. 

            I had to shift toward things that other people would recognize - the kinds of emotions and experiences that they’d gone through, too. When I began to reform the book I found it difficult to remember a lot of things that I had not thought about for years, such as the experience with listening as a little child to the Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast.  One of the things I’ve really wanted to do with this book is to make it interesting for people to read, even amusing at points, so here and there there is some humor.

Casteel: How do you feel about revealing some of the deeper, more personal parts of your life?   

Hopkins: Well, I just reached a point where I decided I should be direct and honest, so  instead of skimming over certain things that are very personal, or even things I regret,  I’ll just put it all down.  A couple of people have told me that the honesty of the book is one of the things that they found most appealing.  I didn’t want to make it lurid, to dwell on situations where I might have had some bad experiences with certain people, so there’s very little in the book, I think, that seems deliberately negative about anybody I’ve dealt with in my life.  Maybe one or two cases.

Casteel: I guess the operative truism is that you came from humble beginnings. Can you talk a little about your early life in Wheeling , West Virginia ?

Hopkins : Well, a subtext of the whole book, which I’ve called “Art, Life and UFOs,” is the “Life” section which is, of course, a kind of a raw autobiography.  But this is not really an autobiography because I don’t say, you know, in such and such a year, such and such happened and we moved from here to there.  I don’t do that. I skip to incidents which contain some kind of interesting event or difficulty, or in the UFO field, a particular discovery which turned out to be very important to research.

            So in the “Life” part, I’m dealing with let’s say two aspects:  the biographical - the way in which things unfolded in my life, where I came from, my family, my moving to New York and so on, and on the other side there is a kind of social history.  I was very interested in letting the reader see what it was like, as I could best describe it, to be, say, an intellectually aware teenage boy during World War II when my father was away in the Army in Europe. And what it felt like to be surrounded by the glamour and paraphernalia and danger of World War II.  I wanted to show again, in the sense of social history, how attitudes toward race were changing and how I became aware of the endemic racism that was around me as I was growing up.  My father had very bigoted views about African-Americans and Jews and I wanted to show how I began to understand that this was an evil thing, a bad thing.  I describe how I had to deal with that, with my father whom I loved, because that was really his only central fault. 

Casteel: You came down with polio as a child, and you say the way your parents nurtured you through the illness gave you a strong foundation of familial love. Yet it also left you with issues about trust. I remember at one point you told me that having polio made you distrust your own body.

Hopkins : The issue of polio: first there’s the social history aspect. I wrote about what it was like in those years, in the 30s, when polio was a terrible, incurable epidemic. It was called “infantile paralysis” then, and families were wracked with fear lest their children be paralyzed for life or even die.  I wanted to make that time in history vivid while at the same time describing my own experience with the disease, being paralyzed and unable to walk, and what the aftermath of the polio experience was like for me.   The first thing was that obviously I came out of it not trusting my body.   My body had let me down, so that I couldn’t walk.  I had to slowly build up trust that I was competent physically to move around and to do things as a little boy.

    But the other thing is, as I pointed out in the book, and it’s very important to me, is that as a child who was incapacitated, I was able to use my mind and imagination and develop my creativity, such as it was in a child.  I really feel that it was this which led me to become an artist.  Instead of running and playing tag and tossing the ball around with other kids, for several crucial years I was restricted to just the immediate space around me.  That’s the area where I learned how to operate, to draw and paint.  

Casteel: Could you please talk about how you came to work in Art with a capital “A,” as you say? You were sort of a late bloomer in those terms, but you very quickly brought yourself up to speed.

Hopkins: The interesting thing was that, by the time I actually went to college at the age of eighteen or so, I had spent many, many years drawing and making little paintings and little sculptural objects…drawing members of the family, and during World War II, drawing bombers and fighter planes and so forth.  I was used to making art, but I didn’t know what art was in the classical sense, as I pointed out, capital “A” art, until I went to Oberlin.  And that’s when I first heard the names of, for instance, Cezanne or Picasso or whomever.  It’s there, when I sat in on an art history course that I thought was just going to be a snap thing, because you sat in the dark and looked at pretty pictures, that I suddenly became astonished at what I was looking at.  I described it in the book as falling in love, literally, falling in love with someone or something that I’d known casually all my life.

Casteel: What led you to throw yourself into the Abstract Expressionist movement?

Hopkins : Historically, this again brings up the situation in my book of dealing with my personal life while also trying to convey the social history of the times. At the time, in the art world, historically, the new avant garde was Abstract Expressionist painting. Jackson Pollock, William DeKooning, Franz Kline, etc.  When the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell came to Oberlin to give a series of lectures and have an exhibition I was just totally bowled over. Immediately I knew I had to get out of Oberlin and out of Wheeling and go to New York . And that’s exactly what I did. At that point, I began making abstract paintings and drawings.   Up until that point, of course, most everything I’d been doing was representational. But when I saw all these new abstract expressionist things, I was extremely moved and excited, so I came to New York . What’s interesting, again, is that, thanks to “Life Magazine’s” Jackson Pollock article, a lot of people knew something about the existence of Abstract Expressionism but were not at all interested in it. Amazingly, when I came to New York , I met these artists because everyone hung out at the same bar. The art world was small, and you went to everyone’s opening that you knew…your friends’.  I had expected there was this very large, rich, complex, art world made up of very successful people, but I found that nobody had much money, and there was only a tiny percentage of people, even among those who were interested in art, who were interested in Abstract Expressionism. It was astonishing how tenuous the artists’ existence was at that early time in the Abstract Expressionist movement. When I got involved in it and began showing my work – I began showing things in ‘54 and ‘55 and had my first one-man show in ‘56 – I was a kid starting out amongst these other artists who were all in their 40s and 50s, with extensive careers, and who were quite well known. Yet as I put it in the book, financially we were paddling around in the same leaky boat.  Nobody had any money, or not much, and very little was selling.  Looking back, there were days of camaraderie which were quite wonderful, even though in many ways it was a difficult time.

Casteel: Just to fast forward a little bit, can you talk about some of the museums and galleries that feature your work?

Hopkins : Well, when I had my first one man show, in ‘56 – it’s hard to believe that 53 years ago was my first one man show – I received a very good review in the “New York Times,” and began to sell some things.  Within two years, a painting of mine was selected for the Whitney Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York …a very prestigious thing.  Within another three years I had a painting acquired by the Whitney Museum , and actually the whole process was gradually speeding up.  Gradually my work was being acquired by museums. So at the present time the Guggenheim has one large sculpture and three large paintings of mine in its collection, and the Whitney probably has five works of mine. I have single works, small works, in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum . But as time went on, and my work became more familiar to more people, it was in greater demand and also entered some very important private collections.

Casteel: Well, starting in the 1950s, also, you had an interesting social life in New York , and you met many important figures in the worlds of art and literature. People like Saul Bellow and Carson McCullers. So looking back, which of those sorts of encounters do you remember most fondly?

Hopkins : The literary world was separate from the art world in those years in the 50s, but there were inevitably some overlaps because socially both groups were fairly small. I think the literary world was bigger, but the point is that eventually you would go to a party and there would be people there who were prominent novelists or poets or whatever. So I had some very interesting experiences with quite a few people, and some I got to know pretty well.  Grace Paley, the short story writer, a really marvelous writer, and I became good friends. But what’s interesting, too, is that a few weeks ago I came from a gathering in Newport with some friends and people who are involved with the UFO subject, and a friend of the hostess just dropped in, the composer and musician David Amram. I had known David Amram casually – we were never really friends – many years ago. He was a very well known crossover musician. A lot of jazz and other things were involved in his composing, and he was a great French horn player and a great musician in general. But we compared notes and it was amazing. I hadn’t seen him in 50 years, but we knew so many people in common. One of the stories I told in my book was about when I was at a party at David Amran’s with my young wife Joan in the later 50s, and the hotshot novelist Jack Kerouac began “hitting” on her, as they say. When I tried to intervene, a fight was brewing because Kerouac apparently thought that as a newly famous writer he was entitled to whatever woman he wanted. But David Amram, believe it or not, was the one who sort of broke up the approaching fight and let me and my wife escape from his apartment, because I was about to be attacked by or beaten up by Kerouac, who, as I said in the book, was big, tough and drunk and I was none of the three.  But I managed to escape. I talked about that incident just a week ago with David Amram, at whose apartment it took place.

Casteel: Do you think your series of “Guardian” paintings might have anything to do with an unconscious sense of an alien presence?             

Hopkins :  I don’t think there’s really anything really to that idea.  I think the way the Guardians came about was very logical, granted the way I was painting and the kinds of work I was admiring at the time.   I think, however, that the UFO sighting that I had in ‘64 actually did affect the way I was composing pictures because suddenly I became very interested in a calmer and more hierarchical sense of imagery.  I began bringing black circles with active areas piercing them, into the very center of the paintings so that the black circle could be read two ways: as if it were a giant hole in the painting, as if you were looking out into the night sky, so to speak, but it also looked like a round object which lay on top of the rest of the forms in the painting.  Illusionistically, it was operating two different ways, perhaps an unconscious metaphor for the complex reality of UFOs.

     But I think the Guardian image had its source in the kinds of visual art I was responding to. David Smith’s sculpture, all kinds of things.  Leger’s paintings and other things I’d become enamored with along the way.

Casteel: Well, let’s go ahead and talk about your 1964 sighting then and the way you mentally processed it at the time. Can you just retell that?

Hopkins : In 1964, my wife and I and a friend were driving to Provincetown and we had this sighting in the daytime. Five o’clock roughly; it was in the afternoon. And we saw this object, which, when we were seeing it from high ground, looked lens-shaped. It had no details, no lights, and no whistles and bells or wings or anything.  But as we got onto the lower road, which we did very quickly, down almost to sea level, we were looking up at it a little more steeply and it was circular from underneath. 

            This sighting lasted between two and three minutes, because I’ve since retraced the drive. We were going very slowly, staring up at this thing, but suddenly it zoomed off.  I hit the brakes and we watched it go, and at that point someone said do you think this is one of those flying saucers you used to hear about? None of us had any prior interest in the subject. Of course when we went on to the party we were headed to, in Provincetown, we told friends what we’d seen, and several people began saying they’d seen a similar thing at a different time or a different place. I began to realize that this whole phenomenon seemed somehow real. People were seeing these things but I hadn’t been hearing about it. But when I tried to think about it the next day, my image was that this was some sort of – maybe because we were close to the water – I was thinking it was like a sort of a diving bell, something that had been used in underwater exploration and came down on the end of a cable, looked around and had then been yanked back up, or in this case, pulled away horizontally. I didn’t think that there were beings in there. It seemed to me to be some sort of observational device. I didn’t know what it was, but my assumption was that it was very possibly extraterrestrial. I’d never seen anything remotely like it. It’s ability to hover – I didn’t hear any sound – and then the ability it had to fly off so fast, let me know that this was an extraordinary machine, whatever it was. But I didn’t have any doubt it was a machine.

Casteel: Well, do you feel like seeing that with your wife and your friend, do you think that was a random moment? That you just happened to see a UFO?

Hopkins : When you say “random,” what’s the alternative?

Casteel: As opposed to random, something that was intended to happen?

Hopkins : Oh, whether it was choreographed or something. Well, I certainly didn’t think that at the time. Obviously I think that anyone who has a sighting or gets involved in some way with UFO research – most of these people probably wonder at least at some point, “Was this deliberate? Was this choreographed? Was I supposed to do what I’m doing here?” That thought has in later years passed my mind.  But at the time of the sighting I didn’t think anything like that. I just thought I was driving along Route Six and there it was. Route Six is a four-lane road and very well traveled in August when this happened. I didn’t think anything except that it was an accident that we saw this very strange object.

Casteel: Could you tell the story of how you learned about George O’Barski’s sighting?

Hopkins : Well, after I had the UFO sighting in ‘64, I began avidly reading about the phenomenon. It was fascinating. I thought what the hell is going on here?  So I was reading everything I could about it but I was not in any way active - doing anything about it other than reading books and watching an occasional TV documentary. But it so happened that eleven years after my original sighting, in 1975, I went to the liquor store across the street, a seedy little place, to buy a bottle of wine for supper from the grouchy old man who ran the store, George O’Barski - a real  New York type.  As I said in the book, he’s the kind of man who had seen it all and disliked most of it.   He was marching around behind the counter and muttering, and at one point he said, “You know, I don’t know what the world is coming to. Something can come down out of the sky and scare you half to death.” And I said, “What’s that, George?” It got my attention.

            He started telling me about this incident that had happened actually ten months earlier in January of 1975. He was driving home late at night because he always kept the store open until midnight and did some business afterwards, some shelf stocking and money work.  He was driving through North Hudson Park , which is on the New Jersey Palisades cliffs, directly across from about 86^th Street in Manhattan . This park is literally a mile from Broadway.   He said his radio started to sound tinny and he was fiddling with the dial, and he said something went past his car on the left side, pretty low. It landed ahead of him in the middle of a playing field. To give you an idea of it, it was literally, at its closest, about 60 feet away from his car.  Small figures came out as the thing hovered and he said they looked like kids in snowsuits. They came down from this thing, he said, very efficiently, like people coming down a fire escape. They hit the ground and started digging soil, spooning it into little bags.  George was sitting in his car, absolutely terrified. He never actually came to a stop, he said; he continued just going very slowly. The little figures went back into the craft, the whole thing taking, oh, a couple of minutes, I suppose. It took off and he said it was as if it was made of metal and there was a huge magnet in the sky, and it off it went, pppffft, just like that, and was gone.

            He was totally amazed. When he came home, he was scared to death. He said he   thought the world was coming to an end. Anyway, he was telling me this story after I had gone back to get my tape recorder so I could record it. Of all my hundreds and hundreds of audiotapes, all of which I have indexed and numbered, this is tape number one, the very first one I ever got.

            I went with him later to look into it, to see what was left. We found what were, in effect, the traces of the holes. They’d been filled up by a park maintenance man who, since this was a playing field, had to make sure there weren’t any holes that people could trip on and break an ankle and, I suppose, sue the park. Along the way, I had gone to a big apartment building which was facing - well, one side of it was facing New York and the other side was facing the park. I knew there was an all night doorman there since I had been to that building a number of times in 1968 because a collector of mine who lived in that building had commissioned a big painting.  I had had to go up and check the walls and measure things, and so forth.

     But when I checked the building in 1975 and asked if anyone remembered seeing anything unusual in the park the previous January, the doorman said that the man who would have been on duty ten months before when the incident happened was no longer working there.   I didn’t tell the doorman anything about the incident, just that there was something unusual in the park, and he gave me the former doorman’s name and the town he had moved to.  I had to track him down, and when I got him on the phone I asked if he remembered anything unusual in the park that happened that previous January.

            He said, “Yes, and I’ll never forget it. This flying saucer came down in the park.” He described the way it hovered, the number of its windows, roughly, its approximate size and so forth in the same way that George O’Barski had described it.  I was astonished because of lots of other evidence that came to light.  Eventually I was dealing with the North Hudson police department, several different park employees, the glass company that had replaced the front window because it had been damaged the night of the incident.  A long, complicated story.   One piece of evidence after another kept coming in.

            I wrote a piece about the incident for “The Village Voice,” the first thing I’d ever written on a subject like this. I had written a few pieces on art that were published in art magazines, but never anything like this – on UFOs!  It attracted a great deal of attention in New York , and was then purchased by “Cosmopolitan” to reprint it. So it eventually had a national hearing. Pretty soon I was getting phone calls from people describing things that they had seen that were similar. I was also being asked to be on radio programs and do interviews about it.  And there I was, somehow doing both investigations and media work, enmeshed in the whole business.

Casteel: At this point, I’d like to go over each of your books in turn. We’ll go through the list of your four books and you can tell me what you think is most significant about each one of them. We’ll start with “Missing Time.”

Hopkins: Well, as I began looking into abduction reports, which I didn’t know anything much about, really, except what I’d read about Betty and Barney Hill – I began finding lots and lots of possible abduction reports in the New York area.  These were people who were calling in from radio programs or writing to me after the “Village Voice” piece appeared. So as I began looking into these with the help of a psychologist and a psychiatrist - two of the different people who were doing hypnosis for me in these cases - I started discovering things about abductions that were startling.

            The first thing was that back in ‘75 and ‘76, the general assumption among researchers was that abduction was a one-time experience, in which somebody just happened to be in the wrong spot, like the Hills were in the White Mountains; that they were unlucky to be there; and that this was an extremely rare business.  Another assumption of those times that was held was that a person having an abduction, like the Hills or the Pascagoula case with Hickson and Parker, would remember consciously seeing the UFO, as the Hills did, seeing the aliens, as they both remembered, and would be aware of the sense of missing time, and so forth. Well, as I was looking into these new cases, the first thing I discovered was that instead of it being this extremely rare business of the wrong person is in the wrong place at the wrong time, I was finding that these experiences seemed far more widespread. And the second thing I discovered is that a person could have been abducted without having consciously remembered seeing the 

aliens. Many of them remembered the aliens only under hypnosis.  I began to realize that almost anybody could have been abducted with little conscious memory. So the things I discovered and had written about in “Missing Time” were, first of all, the widespread nature of the phenomenon. It wasn’t a rarity at all. The second thing was that a person could have been abducted without consciously remembering very much about the incident. They might remember the circumstances – that they were in a car and suddenly the car stops or something – and that’s all they remember, except that maybe they come to and the car is in the middle of a field or on a different road or whatever. But they might not remember the UFO or the onboard experience without hypnosis.

            The next thing is that I discovered that these things didn’t just happen once to somebody but they seemed to be happening to people from time to time across their lives, as if they were being tracked.  This was a really startling thing to have learned. And the next thing I discovered was that this was a generational thing, that people had been abducted and then it seemed that their children were having abduction experiences too, as if a certain bloodline is being followed.  And the next thing I discovered – these were all new patterns in the field – was the idea of “screen memories,” that a person could be made to recollect a different image than was actually there. In the Virginia Horton case, she thought - she was a teenager at the time – that she was talking to a beautiful deer in the woods with big black eyes, that it was looking very intently at her, but seemed to be talking to her telepathically. Of course after a thorough investigation it turned out not to be a telepathic, black-eyed deer at all. It was an alien.

            Also, I learned that often there were scars and cuts that resulted from abductions. So all of those patterns were completely new to the field of abduction research and in a way revolutionized our thinking about the phenomenon. All of this was discussed in “Missing Time,” my first book.

Casteel: So, “Intruders,” then?

Hopkins : My second book, “Intruders.” “Missing Time” was 1981, and “Intruders” was six years later, 1987. At that point, the Kathie Davis case, the name I used for Debbie Jordan, who’s now gone public, was what I’ve come to call the Rosetta Stone of the UFO phenomenon. What I learned first was that Kathie had been abducted a number of times. Then one day she told me she had had an unusual pregnancy and that the pregnancy had disappeared without any sign of a miscarriage.  And these situations, finding herself unusually pregnant and then finding herself un-pregnant, these incidents, were connected with moments of suspected abductions and missing time. As we looked into this, what emerged was that she had been abducted and somehow artificially inseminated. We don’t know exactly how it’s done.

    But she was carrying a fetus for the first trimester and then was re-abducted and apparently it was removed. She was bereft when she found herself no longer pregnant, but a couple of years later she remembered being shown – at first she thought it was the most realistic dream she’d ever had but then decided it wasn’t a dream – she was shown an odd little girl who she was made to think was hers. She was the putative mother. The child’s “presentation” was a very moving scene, and all of it was conscious memory. And of course, all of it seemed outrageous and unbelievable. Kathie was describing this child as seeming to have human physical traits and alien physical traits sort of mixed in. The child’s head was overly large. The eyes were very large, the nose tiny, and so on. The hair was very sparse. But at any rate, what happened was I began to inquire into other cases of women who had had abductions and I asked casually, when we were dealing with medical issues, if they’d ever had any problems with a pregnancy. And out came one story after another, exactly like the story I had heard from Debbie.

            So when I had nine or ten of these extraordinary cases that were matching exactly, I put them together in my second book. “Intruders” is essentially about this alien production of a kind of apparent hybrid mix. What’s very interesting about that to me is that at the time I was being attacked by biologists, even biologists who were in the field of UFO research and took the subject seriously, who said that you cannot produce a hybrid being that way. You can’t mix a male cell from one species with a female cell from another and get a viable child. They were using that theory to refute my data, which consisted of all these similar accounts that had to be explained some way. Of course, what ultimately happened over the years is that when the human genome was decoded, what we discovered is that there’s the possibility of gene splicing, of removing a gene here and a gene there and inserting them into the ovum so that the DNA is being carried largely from one species but there are insertions from another. That’s how science came up with the idea of splicing a gene from a salmon into the genetic makeup of tomatoes so that the tomatoes can withstand the cold as the salmon can.

            So suddenly science moved around, rejecting the old theory of the impossibility of this sort of mix. At that point, of course, having stuck by my data, I was feeling pretty good because my data were finally supported by science instead of being attacked.

Casteel: What about “Witnessed”?

Hopkins : “Witnessed” was the third book, published in 1996, nine years after “Intruders.” Incidentally, it’s very important that I make clear I never had an intention of writing any book unless and until I had discovered some new aspect of the abduction phenomenon, a new pattern that had never been written about or documented publicly.  I only wrote because I felt it was necessary for the public and UFO researchers to know about significant new discoveries.

            The important thing about “Witnessed” was that, for the very first time, we had an example of what seems to be a deliberate showing off by the aliens of their capabilities. Instead of concealing abductions, this one was, as it were, “announced” to a group of important political figures in a motorcade at three in the morning, who suddenly found their cars all simultaneously stopping. This was in New York City , down near the Brooklyn Bridge . When all the cars were stopped, the UFO’s lights went on, and the witnesses saw a huge hovering craft with its lights beaming down - and a woman and three small aliens floating out of a twelfth story window in full view of everybody. They came from a building very close to the street where the important political figures were waiting in their stopped cars. As a matter of fact, other people who saw this from a distance thought that they were looking at a sci-fi movie being made. It was totally real to them.  To me, it seemed in retrospect as if the aliens were, for the very first time, showing off deliberately to political figures what they could do.  It seems like the closest thing to a mythical landing on the White House lawn that we’ve ever had. So that was an extraordinarily important new development with lots of witnesses.

            The next thing I discovered and wrote about in that book was that the central figure, Linda Cortile, and one of the security agents guarding an important figure in the motorcade – this is such a complicated story…. it’s almost impossible to retell in just a few words.  But what Linda and the security man both realized, ultimately, is that they had known each other as children in a strange environment where, it would seem, they had both repeatedly been taken and brought together, as if the aliens were using them as a way of learning how humans interact. We don’t know what their real motivation is. But Linda and her friend had had nicknames for each other, Mickey and Baby Ann, which they both recognized many years later, even though they’d never consciously seen each other since they were teenagers.

            I tentatively called this “The Mickey and Baby Ann Scenario.” But I found a number of other cases along the way where the same thing had happened to other abductees who recognized each other in adulthood as having known each other as teenagers or children. So those were two aspects of the book that were new. There were other things, too, but these were more central.

Casteel: And what about “Sight Unseen”?

Hopkins : “Sight Unseen” was a different kind of book. It was co-written by my then wife, Carol Rainey, and it contained a sequence of other, relatively strange aspects of the abduction phenomenon that I had found and documented.  Carol was doing research about advances in earthly science which seemed to be getting rather close to what the aliens seemed to be able to do, as demonstrated by the cases I was presenting.  There were two central things that I dealt with at length in the book, and the first was the technology of invisibility. Somehow or other, the UFO occupants are able to mask these abductions so that they’re virtually never seen even though they’re going on on a regular basis in big cities around the world. The idea of invisibility is, of course, so science fictionish and off the wall that it’s very hard for anyone to accept. Not that any of this is easy to accept. But invisibility was the “Unseen” part of the title. And the “Sight” part was that I dealt with what seemed to be sightings of hybrid, part alien, part human beings operating in the real world, in our world. On the street, driving cars and so forth.

This whole concept is also pretty outrageous. David Jacobs has written much more extensively on that particular part of the phenomenon, but I never had written about it in specific cases. So those two things are really the new concepts in “Sight Unseen.” Of course, the origin of these hybrid, or transgenic, beings was what I was getting at when I wrote “Intruders.”

Casteel: You speak very highly of Dr. Jacobs. He’s one of your closest friends and colleagues. You’ve worked together and separately to learn a great deal about the abduction phenomenon. Yet you say you’re both depressed by what you’ve uncovered. Why is that? Why do you think alien abduction is such a sad phenomenon?

Hopkins : Well, the first thing that should be said by anyone who’s very active working with abductees is that we constantly see in them a great deal of emotional scarring and psychological damage. Not that this seems to be intended by the aliens. This is a point I’ve tried to make over and over again but people seem to miss it. The UFO occupants are not viewed by those who are taken as malevolent, evil, bad, or whatever.  But abductees don’t regard them as good, nice, wonderful or helpful, either. They feel instead that there’s a kind of neutrality about their behavior, and that neutrality is a very disturbing thing to abductees because they don’t understand how to regard these experiences or how to deal with them properly. It’s a terribly complicated issue, obviously.

            But the damage that’s done psychologically is very real, and there’s no doubt that there have been people who, as a result, have had psychological breakdowns. There are even several cases I know about where within a family there was a suicide. Thank goodness there aren’t many cases that I know about like that, but there are a few, where the abductee was so terrified that he just couldn’t handle these experiences and ended up taking his own life, or at least trying to. Everyone who works with abductees on a regular basis has learned to face the obvious psychological damage that abductions have caused.

            Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a very common outcome for people who have had these experiences. On the other hand, it would be wonderful if, instead, these people could announce, “They cured my cancer and told me they’re going to end war on Earth, etc. etc.” But none of that ever happens. What we have here is a very neutral, essentially cold and objective phenomenon that creates a lot of psychological trouble.

Casteel: Many researchers, like Jacques Vallee, for example, doubt the efficacy of regressive hypnosis to retrieve lost memories. What do you have to say in defense of hypnosis as a research tool?

Hopkins : I think it’s absolutely proved its worth. If there’s an attack on it now, after all these years, I would regard it as a species of “know-nothing” ignorance. Obviously, hypnosis, like any process, medical or therapeutic or whatever, has to be handled well.  And hypnosis, handled well, has certainly proved its worth.

            It’s not possible in this conversation to get into a lengthy defense of hypnosis; it’s not really necessary and I don’t even want to attempt it. I have written a long, rather scholarly piece on hypnosis which was published in a book for which David Jacobs collected articles about the abduction phenomenon and that was published by the University of Kansas Press . I’m very proud of that piece. But one of the things that should be said is that we have many ways of checking the veracity of what comes out under hypnotic recall.  It should also be said that many people remember a great deal, or almost all, of their abductions, without any kind of hypnotic regression being involved.  This is all Abductions 101 and shouldn’t have to be repeated here to anyone familiar with the extensive literature.

Casteel: Please discuss how you ended up becoming a de facto therapist.

Hopkins : De facto therapy is just a huge, broad, catch-all term. When a little child falls and skins his knee and is crying, Mommy comes over and soothes him and takes the hurt away.  She’s doing the most natural kind of de facto therapy.  So when we’re working with people who are going through traumatic recollections, our ability to calm them down, to refocus them on the real world and on the good things in their lives, we’re finding ourselves doing a kind of natural therapy, stabilizing them and assuring them of their sanity. It becomes absolutely essential to have calming systems to get the person through a traumatic event.

Casteel: What is your life like nowadays? You continue to work on your art and with abductees?

Hopkins : Well, just to get back to the new book, it’s interesting that when I wrote the UFO books, they had a very, very different quality, because I was writing about something “out there,” something that happened in the lives of other people.  I was dealing with a phenomenon which was, in a certain sense, distant from me. But when I wrote my memoir and had seen it reviewed and had received messages about it from other people, I found myself having a completely different attitude. I feel far more concerned about this book than any of the other four simply because I’m really presenting my life. This is me. This is what I’ve been through in my 78 years. The importance to me of how this affects people is much stronger than the importance I felt in how readers dealt with the earlier books. If they rejected the earlier books or ignored them, that’s their business.  But in this case, in presenting my life, I want the book to have an effect on readers in a much more intimate way.

Casteel: Where do you see where the UFO and abduction phenomena will lead? Do you agree with David Jacobs that we may be going through a simple process of colonization? Do you foresee any kind of scenario at all with abduction that might result in some kind of benefit for mankind collectively?

Hopkins : Well, we would be trying to guess the future of something that is absolutely, innately alien. This is not us. It’s not about people from Paris or Siberia . It’s a completely alien phenomenon, and therefore trying to predict what an unknown phenomenon is going to do ultimately is something that I just don’t attempt.

            David Jacobs is a trained historian, and he’s very, very good at analyzing the evidence.  I don’t see any faults in the hypothesis he’s presented. It seems perfectly logical to me - except that we still don’t know because the end has not occurred yet. We must remember that the UFO incursions have been going on for a long time. They occurred during World War II, yet we have no record of the aliens saving even one Jewish child from the Nazis. We have no evidence that they intervened to prevent the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki . And as you go through the new diseases that have arisen, such as AIDS, we have no evidence that the UFO occupants have done anything about those things to make life healthier and more pleasant.

            So far they’ve had a hands-off attitude and a kind of coldness about life on earth. We know that they have medical technologies which are certainly far in excess of ours. The fact that they can take deep layers of flesh in these scoop marks, and the victim never sees any blood, suggests that the wounds have been instantly cauterized in some way or other. If we had this technique, millions of lives would have been saved. So there’s no record of anything positive that I can see that would tend to say, “Well, that’s just an indication that the aliens are coming here to help us.” So if we don’t see anything like that, the picture gets kind of gloomy.

            My personally optimistic attitude is to avoid looking at such a possibly gloomy future. In facing it directly, David Jacobs is the brave one and I’m the cowardly one.

The only way of going on is simply to go on, and to allow the future to arrive in its own good time.

[Sean Casteel has a website located at www.seancasteel.com. Casteel is the author of “UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time,” “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming,” and “The Excluded Books of the Bible,” all of which are available at his website, Amazon.com or Filament Books.]

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