Q. and A. With Budd Hopkins

By Sean Casteel

It is generally acknowledged that Budd Hopkins is the world’s foremost expert on UFO abduction. In his previous three books, Missing Time (1981), Intruders (1987), and Witnessed (1996), Hopkins set unsurpassable high standards for the integrity of abduction research and blazed a trail to aspects of the phenomenon that continue to be rediscovered and replicated repeatedly by the many investigators who came after.

Hopkins was, for example, the researcher who coined the term “screen memory” to describe the aliens’ method of superimposing a less threatening false memory over the possibly traumatic events the abductee has actually endured. It was Hopkins who first took seriously and documented reports from abductees who recalled under hypnosis the medical procedures involved in creating the hybrid alien/human children that continue to be regarded by the UFO community at large as the primary focus of the overall abduction program.

Hopkins recently published his fourth book, Sight Unseen, Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings (Atria Books, 2003), co-authored with his wife, Carol Rainey. Rainey has a distinguished background as a documentary filmmaker and contributes some enlightening chapters on recent discoveries in mainstream science that point to the idea that things we used to think of as apparent UFO “magic” may in fact be nearly within the reach of our own technological capabilities.

In the following interview, Hopkins discusses Sight Unseen and some of the case histories presented therein, as well as grappling with the many genuinely frightening implications of what the latest evidence implies. Yet, in spite of the grim possibilities ahead, there is as always an unflinching optimism in what Hopkins has to say about both the UFO occupants and the many human lives they have so mysteriously touched.

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Q. You once said that you never begin a new book unless the data demands it. So what led you to write Sight Unseen?

Hopkins: There were two basic issues that needed to be explored. The first is the idea that—and it’s a radical idea—that during abductions, UFOs, the occupants inside the UFO doing the abduction, and the abductees themselves are somehow rendered unseeable or invisible, if you want to call it that. It’s the only way that abductions can be taking place in the daytime, in big cities, around the world, with nobody reporting them happening. And the very fact of the Linda Cortile case, which was deliberately made seeable, and the fact that it had so many witnesses—and we have new witnesses on the case--is a kind of “control” that shows what would happen if abductions were seeable.

Invisibility is a very heavy-duty issue to bring up, because it seems so off-the-wall, so paranormal, that people don’t want to deal with it, and yet I just felt it had to be dealt with in-depth in the book.

And of course there were so many cases that supported it in terms of physical evidence, anecdotal evidence, witness evidence of one sort or another that we’ve accumulated over the years. There were just an enormous number of cases that had to be brought forward. I adduced about six separate cases at some length to support the idea of invisibility during abductions.

The second point is that we have known ever since I published Intruders that the UFO occupants have been interested quite centrally in producing a kind of “hybrid” mix of themselves and ourselves. What we have found over the years—and this doesn’t just mean the so-called “Men-In-Black” cases—but cases where there seem to be very strange, not-quite-human individuals operating in the real world. Driving cars, apparently having jobs, going into restaurants, into stores, whatever you want to mention. We have had many cases along those lines suggesting that some of these, what we call in the book, “transgenic beings,” meaning genes have been engineered from alien genetic makeup to human and vice versa, to create these beings, that these beings actually are, at least some of them at least some of the time, operating in the real world. Not in UFOs, but in everyday quotidian existence.

So there were so many cases there that needed to be brought to light that I felt these were the two major new points that we have to now attach to the UFO abduction phenomenon in general as aspects of it.

Q. Would you please discuss your wife Carol Rainey and her contributions to the book?

Hopkins: Carol is someone who has a lot of experience in doing scientific and medical films for the New England Research Institute, where she worked for many years in charge of their video department. She has also worked on films for PBS. She worked on a “Nova” special on the subject of menopause. So she has a background in science. She studied futurism, future studies, when she was in college. She’s always had a scientific interest.

So what she did in this book was to research areas in contemporary earthly science that seemed to parallel areas of what we might call “alien science.” In other words, what she did in this book was to narrow the gap between what we as human beings seem able to do and what the aliens have long since been able to do. Essentially you can say the book has a goal to take the “para” out of paranormal, because instead of regarding things as near magic, which was the original attitude toward UFOs—nothing could go that fast, you can’t make these right angle turns without decelerating and so forth. All of those things now seem possible, and our science is approaching them. This was the area that Carol was documenting.

Carol is currently working on a documentary on the Linda Cortile case. It’s not in shape yet, but she has many, many hours of filmed interviews and documentary pieces which will be finally a very fascinating whole.

Q. As you were saying before, the new book concentrates on subjects only touched on by researchers before, invisibility and transgenic beings. Can you summarize some of the invisibility cases that most stand out in your mind?

Hopkins: There are many fascinating cases that I deal with in the book. One, which is extremely striking to me, involves a family in Australia. I interviewed the husband and wife, who, a number of years ago, took their very young children to a park on a Saturday afternoon. A nearby park and playground. Certainly the husband in the family had felt that he had been having abduction experiences, and it also seemed to be something that was being experienced by the other members of the family, too. But at any rate, he was very aware of his experiences.

At some point, he and his wife began photographing each other posing with the two children, and all the while feeling very, very strange. They left the park feeling very uneasy. And the children, who loved to go there, never wanted to return to the park again. But afterwards, when they developed their photographs, they were not in any of the photographs even though they had been taking pictures of each other posing against the water and so forth. They could not understand this.

Well, when we looked into this using hypnosis, first the wife and then the husband, doing them quite separately, it turns out that as he was photographing his wife and the two children, she and the children suddenly lifted off the ground—this was at a playground with a lot of people around—and went straight up in some kind of light, even though this was the middle of the afternoon. They went up into a craft. She was put on a table and the children were taken from her. She was extraordinarily upset.

And to shorten the story, when they were returned by the same method they went up, lowered down by a beam of light, there was her husband standing on the ground holding the camera in place, just as it had been before, half an hour or an hour or so before. No one had approached him. And he felt, when I did hypnosis with him, that nobody could actually see him. But the fact remains that when they took pictures of each other they were literally invisible. It’s quite an incredible story.

Another case that I went in to has to do with Katharina Wilson.

Q. I was going to ask you about her.

Hopkins: She had this bizarre experience of arriving in Chicago at O’Hara Airport, walking into the ladies room, again feeling very strange. She’d had an odd encounter on the plane with a woman, which is something that has not been explored. There’s been no hypnosis in this case, at her request. At any rate, she went to the ladies room and when she put soap on her hands, and put her hands under the automatic faucets with a sensor, the water wouldn’t go on. And she kept moving her hands from faucet to faucet and nothing was working. When a woman would step away from the sink with water still running, Katharina would pop her hands underneath and it would stop.

At some point, she became aware that people weren’t able to see her and that she was not registering on the faucets. She even asked a young woman who was in the restroom, “Can you see me?” And received no response whatsoever. She finally found a—because she still had soap on her hands—a diaper changing table with a little sink and an actual faucet, which she could turn. She turned the water on and washed her hands.

More or less, the next thing she knows—there was a phone call to her husband that registered the idea that there had been missing time from her getting off the plane—but the next thing she knows, she sort of appeared as it were magically at the luggage return area. All of the luggage but hers had been picked up, and quite some time had passed. And the people who were there to meet her said that she virtually appeared out of thin air.

So these are cases where you have testimony of various kinds. The mechanical aspects in both of them, one, the sensors didn’t work and the other, the camera didn’t register, the film didn’t register human beings. Those are quite similar physical details. But this all seems totally crazy and off-the-wall, and yet it seems to be an essential part of the abduction phenomenon.

Q. It’s obvious that invisibility is a crucial aspect of the abduction phenomenon, and in fact as you were saying before, abductions could not be carried out in the numbers that they are without it.

Hopkins: Absolutely. No way possible.

Q. So why has it taken so long to call the “invisibility” spade a spade?

Hopkins: Well, that’s an interesting thing. As I mention in the book, the bravest among us, in terms of UFO abduction researchers, has been David Jacobs in so many ways. He was the first one to bring this to public attention, although at a very modest conference in Santa Barbara a number of years ago. But he addressed it head on. I spoke about it also at a MUFON conference a few years after that. But essentially, it is so much the province of science fiction and fantasy and so forth that I think UFO researchers have been aware of it but have not wanted to bring it into public view.

In the same way, when I was writing Missing Time, I was aware that during abductions, people were passed through closed surfaces, windows or doors or walls or whatever. Yet I did not mention that in the book because I felt that I wanted to present the strongest evidence first, and an element that would be harder for people to accept would actually give them a reason to say, “I’m not going to bother with this because this is impossible.” I think in a similar way researchers have treated the issue of invisibility very carefully for exactly the same reason—to bring it up is to, as it were, weaken the case to a lot of people.

Q. Can we go back and discuss the transgenic beings again?

Hopkins: When I wrote in Intruders in 1987 that the alien agenda seemed focused on the creation of a kind of “mixed breed,” one might say, with alien and human characteristics, and that the reproductive focus of all this seemed to point in that direction, and that ova and sperm samples and flesh samples and skin samples were being taken regularly, I was attacked very roundly by biologists who said that that isn’t possible. You can’t make hybrid beings. Genetics do not allow that. That’s just impossible.

And of course we’re now at a point where we’re doing far wilder things. If I had suggested back in 1987, sixteen years ago, that we would be able to put a gene from a jellyfish into a monkey so that it would glow under a black light and be phosphorescent, people would have laughed me right out of the bookstores or whatever. And yet this is what has actually happened.

So the lesson here is that the more we stick with the data, regardless of what the contemporary theories are about the possibilities of any particular thing happening, if we stick with the data we’re safe. Because all along, actually through the whole history of the UFO phenomenon and its investigation, it has been our data versus their theories. They don’t have data that refutes this. They just say, “Such and such can’t be because it’s impossible.”

So once we deal with the reality, certainly the plausibility, of creating these beings, which our science seems able to do, in terms of crossbreeding different species of animals, then I certainly think what we have to say is that some of these beings may be on Earth. They may be on Earth some of the time, a long time, we don’t really know. They may be learning our ways. It’s very, very hard to know the purpose of this, and of course it can fuel a range of paranoid terrors.

But I have just run into too many cases. I think the whole phenomenon of the so-called Men-In-Black, which is really a group of individuals who don’t seem fully human, and that’s been the way this has appeared from the beginning, would suggest that we have people who can drive up in a car and get out and talk to you and also paralyze you and pass through a wall and read your mind, etc. So whether this is some slow, gradual infiltration or whether this is something more benign than that, we don’t really know. But in fact it seems to be what this whole thing is about actually.

Q. Well, can you describe some of what I found to be truly chilling encounters with transgenic beings detailed in the book?

Hopkins: One case that I went into is a case with a woman I call Terry in the book. It’s a very interesting case. I had been working with her looking into her abduction experiences later on in life, and at one point she mentioned that she had had a funny thing happen when she was sixteen, when she went to this strange job interview with a strange man. I of course wanted to find out about what that was, and the very fact that she had remembered this and brought it up in the context of other experiences of hers would suggest that unconsciously at least she connected this with the UFO phenomenon.

So what happened was, she was approached by a man, a normal looking person, in a pizza parlor and asked if she wanted a summer job. And she said yes and she thinks she gave him her address. He picked her up the next afternoon in a car, without getting out of the car. Her mother, for some reason, totally unlike her, found out nothing about the man or where her daughter was going—a sixteen-year-old, a very pretty little girl. Her mother just said, “Oh, fine. Good luck.”

And the moment the young girl got in the car with the man, she began to feel extremely strange, almost a kind of altered state. This man began speaking to her about elements in her life, going all the way back to her early childhood. Knowing everything about her, including things that were very, very secret, even the fact that she had been abused by a stepfather, something she’d never told anyone, including her mother.

This man seemed to have total knowledge of her and total control over her. Well, one thing led to another. There didn’t seem to be any kind of a job. The man made a sort of a tentative suggestion that they have sex, but in the strangest way, something guaranteed not be effective, and yet she was still so much under his power that when she left after turning him down, she got right back in the car with him and he drove her to the country. She remembered all of this part consciously, everything that I’ve just described. But when they drove into the country, this is the part that emerged under hypnosis, he drove into a field and there was in fact a landed UFO. And he turned her over to the UFO occupants, as if he was some kind of an agent or go-between. We’re not certain exactly what happened at that point. That has not been very well explored. She was very upset.

Then she got back in the car and the man drove her home. The UFO part of it was forgotten for the rest of her life until we looked into this experience. But there are a number of cases where we seem to have a normal human operating totally in conjunction with the small gray aliens, as if his alliances are totally with them, even though he may look relatively human.

Q. Do you have another story like that?

Hopkins: One of the most interesting is a case involving a farmer. This is a man I worked with a number of times, and a very solid person. He’s no longer living, unfortunately. But he had met near his farm this strange person who looked almost exactly like his son, except different and rather strange. This man, this strange person who looked like his son, seemed to have some unusual powers. The farmer was out cutting hay in a field with his wife, and she took a rest. He was on his tractor, and his conscious memory was of seeing two helicopters overhead. They landed where his wife was sunbathing in the nude on this wagon on some bales of hay. He doesn’t remember exactly what happened consciously, but his wife began having all kinds of emotional problems and was committed to a mental hospital. She became almost suicidal, afraid to go outside, and was subjected to electric shock and all kinds of treatment. When I met her, she was in pretty bad shape.

But under hypnosis, the helicopters turned out to be UFOs. When they landed and he rushed towards where his wife was lying, this odd, semi-human figure approached, the one who looked like their son, and told them to calm down, everything was fine and he shouldn’t be angry. They just wanted him to see what was happening. They made him witness some procedures they were doing to his wife in broad daylight as she lay on these bales of hay, which included some kind of vaginal instrument, and some instrument inserted in her naval, and a great deal of pain. And this poor farmer, the husband, was unable to move. He was cursing and weeping and the transgenic being who looked like his son was telling him, “Don’t you see? Everything’s fine. We’re not hurting her.” As if there was a profound inability to understand what this man was going through. As if the range of human emotions was absolutely outside the ken [sp?] of this strange being.

It’s a very touching story and I think it’s one of the most important stories in the book, actually.

Q. Well, it’s certainly a dramatic thing to realize that there are aliens who can easily pass as human beings walking among us. What are some of the most basic implications of that aspect of things?

Hopkins: Well, of course, at the more paranoid end, the implications are of a sort of systematic infiltration of earthly society. That could mean an ultimate kind of takeover. We have no way of knowing. It could also mean somehow a way of becoming used to earthly ways and perhaps enriching their own emotional range and their own knowledge of other beings. The most pleasant possible scenario is that they could just perhaps learn what they needed to know about the way our kind of civilization develops, and then leave and go somewhere else and populate another unpopulated planet. Something of that sort. There are a thousand implications.

But, as I always say, I’m much better as a reporter than I am as a prognosticator. So I don’t really know what this is going to lead to, but certainly there is nothing about it at all that should make us feel in any sense complacent or comfortable.

Q. Well, David Jacobs says something similar in “The Threat.” He says he’s become very depressed contemplating our future under alien guidance or whatever, and he says it’s a simple matter of colonization.

Hopkins: See, that’s certainly a completely logical interpretation of the information. I just think that Dave Jacobs is braver than I in that he is willing to follow the implications of the data he has been gathering, which is very, very close to what I’ve been gathering. It’s the same data. I am perhaps more hopeful that somehow or other the world will go on in the way that I have known it all my life for a little while longer. I have a thirty-year-old daughter and a little step grandson who’s eight, and I would like that little boy to grow up in the world that I grew up in, as far as possible. And for my daughter to have a future that is the kind of future I had when I was thirty, and therefore I would rather hope and believe that we do have time and that perhaps the worst will not occur and that there might be some other circumstances or some other aspects of the alien agenda that we’re not yet aware of that might make this somehow less dire.

Q. This is a question that might make you a little uncomfortable, but how much is human anger a factor in all this? I’ve talked to some abductees who are very angry about what’s happened to them, and I’ve talked to researchers and therapists who are angry for the sake of the abductees they work with. What are your feelings about the anger response?

Hopkins: Well, I certainly feel a great deal of anger myself at what people are being put through and I feel a great deal of sorrow. There is absolutely no doubt that the abduction experience, in an individual’s life, is extremely harmful. No doubt about it. The post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, the damage to self-esteem, the damage to the idea of trust, and human relationships—all of these things have been demonstrated by psychological testing. These are people who’ve had a very, very difficult time.

And so there is plenty to be furious about. As I’ve said many times, I don’t believe that the aliens are coming down here with some kind of malevolent attitude and now let’s see how many lives we can disturb and damage by scaring these people and paralyzing them and putting them through some extraordinarily upsetting experiences. I don’t think that’s it. I think this is what we used to call collateral damage. The alien idea of collateral damage, that this is just what goes along with the work that they’re doing with human beings on their agenda. And it’s extraordinarily damaging to people.

I think that anger is one of the healthiest emotions that people can have about their experiences, because at the time they’re having experiences, very often they can’t express the anger. They’re frightened to death. They’re in a kind of altered state. They can’t move. And very often, when I do hypnosis with somebody, as a matter of a fact, almost every time, at a certain point, when a person’s feeling some degree of calm, they’re on a table or whatever’s happening, I will often say, “Well, maybe you couldn’t say anything to the people, the occupants who’ve taken you here, or maybe you couldn’t ask them any questions. But let’s say right now, if you could ask them anything you want to ask them, or say anything to them, let’s have you say it or ask it.” And very often they will shout out, “Leave me alone!” With this fury. “You have no right to do this!” Things that they possibly could not express at the time. And so I think anger and trying to let that anger flow is a very worthwhile aspect of the sort of de facto therapy that’s part of what we do.

Q. Is there anything you wish to add? Is there some question I haven’t asked or some kind of final comment you’d care to make?

Hopkins: I think that over the years, in my three previous books, I have stayed in as cautious a frame of mind as I possibly could about what I would claim. It was only when I received a great deal of evidence backing up a particular assertion that I would ever make that assertion. And in this case, I have more case material than in any of my earlier books. The last two books have just focused on a single case, more or less. But here, there are many, many cases, which are adduced in support of these two extremely radical aspects of the phenomenon. I don’t think I’ve ever written as radical a book as this, or as daring a book, but I think I’ve assembled enough evidence to make these new issues certainly seem plausible. It’s a bit of a daring trip for me, but if people trust me based on the earlier books, I hope they’ll trust me on this one, too.

[Sean Casteel has covered UFOs, alien abduction and other paranormal topics since 1989. He is the author most recently of a book called UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time. Visit his “UFO Journalist” website at: www.seancasteel.com]

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