SCARRED BY THE MEMORY
Missing Time – Budd Hopkins
In 1981, when this book was first published, its author Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) was best and only known in his native USA as a successful abstract watercolour artist.
Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions marks Hopkins’ transition into the world of ‘ufology’ – a world where he soon became a prominent figure in both alien abduction phenomena and the ‘recovery’ of abduction memories via hypnosis.
Hopkins comes across as an amiable and earnest narrator for the most part. Sure, he’s been interested in UFOs since the 60s when he saw something weird in the sky, which he later believed was covered up by the government. And, yeah, maybe that same thing happened to a friend of his… well, a few friends… because weird sky shit is rampant in their neck/s of the wood/s. And, well, heck, he loved The Interrupted Journey, a best-selling 1966 book about a couple’s alien abduction story recovered via hypnotic regression. (And, oh, hey, maybe he forgot to tell us about his formative childhood experience with Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play, The War of the Worlds, because..?) The point is: Hopkins is A Sceptic, which means none of the above matters and that we’re in safe, objective hands here.
Budd, you see, has an uncanny knack for attracting people – upstanding, sane citizens reluctant to share their stories, we’re assured – who have had suspected alien abduction experiences that are fully or mostly ‘forgotten’. The ‘study’ in the first half of this book is Hopkins going Scooby Doo on initial accounts, confirming that, yes, someone else saw something weird that night that his pal saw something weird, too. Hopkins is so enamoured with the cosmic importance of his mission that he spares us no details in the tedious tracking down of an ex-apartment-building-concierge to corroborate the details of an unprovable story.
It's little wonder, then, that he quickly resorts to hypnotic ‘regression’ – openly inspired by the 1960s couple’s abduction story (which I’ve previously written about here). Psychiatrist Dr Robert Naiman and, later, the excellently named Aphrodite Clamar, a woman psychologist, extract strikingly similar accounts from various hypnotised people who claim to simply be ‘missing time’. That no one notices, or cares to notice, that the first hypnotee’s reported experience is perfectly and easily explained by sleep paralysis sets the uncritical and unethical pace for the rest of the hypnotic accounts in the book.
The people drawn to Hopkins agree to be hypnotised, albeit with his agenda and bias looming larger than the flying saucers all over our skies. Budd paints a quaint yet sinister picture of little grey/green men conducting long-term biological and anthropological studies on humanity. These (once again disappointingly patriarchal and bureaucratic) beings telepathically ‘speak’ to then-child or -teen ‘abductees’ of the wonders of biodiversity, and even invite one girl to a weird office party. Mysterious childhood cuts and scars, and feelings of paralysis and lost time predictably build to support Budd’s theory over more mundane explanations, such as the clumsiness of children, or hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucination, or daydreaming on long car journeys, or a secret and deep belief that you’re different/special somehow.
These regressions are obtained over hours and hours and hours of hypnosis sessions. I’ll spare you a scathing sidebar on the discreditation and dangers of hypnotic ‘regression’, and hypnotists’ noble contributions to false memory syndrome. But, irrespective of where you stand, the transcripts and summaries are sad and disturbing. The ‘memories’ are full of fear, pain, questions, and confusions, and bring little or no peace for ‘abductees’. And yet they had a rapt audience in Hopkins, his various witnesses, and his (presumably personally bankrolled) hypnotists – hardly the best social dynamic for extracting anything other than what Budd is seeking.
The penultimate chapter of the book takes a dark and alarmist tone. Hopkins alluded to the collection of human eggs and sperm via his and other cited accounts, and so now he drops the truth bomb he’s been too afraid to til now: aliens are conducting some grand, long-term, global genetic experiment on humans... and maybe aren’t coming here in peace! Of course the US government has to cover up the evidence that aliens exist and are regular visitors because of the mass pandemonium this revelation would cause! Aarrgghh!
(It was at this point I learned, thrillingly, that I’ve been abducted by aliens! Two women Budd writes about have small, straight, forgotten/unnoticed scars on the backs of their ankles. I, too, bear this mark of a classic – according to Hopkins – alien incision. That, or it was all those cheap, torturous high-heeled shoes I attempted to wear in my teens and 20s that ripped my feet apart and which I’d simply forgotten about...)
Despite writing a final chapter entitled ‘What Can Be Done?’, Hopkins only pledges to continue his cosmically important mission – and, boy, did he! After eight years watching other hypnotists at work, he developed his own approach and, according to Wikipedia, had hypnotically regressed hundreds of ‘abductees’ by 1995. Just the slightest whiff of lost time or any strange sense of unease was sufficient for Hopkins to suspect aliens were to blame, and thus many people drawn to his free group therapy sessions and such willingly obliged him in confirming this theory.
[Do check your body for cuts, nicks, and unnoticed scars after reading this blog as I’m pretty sure there was something else you were supposed to be doing before you lost track of time and instead got lost in this hypnotic black hole of vague unease..? THAT’S ALL IT TAKES, EARTHLINGS! MWAHAHA!]
Ultimately, Budd became known as ‘the father of the abduction movement’ and popularised the alien genetic experiment rumour. So, on the downside, he likely psychologically scarred numerous individuals by indulging and amplifying false and unhelpful memories. But, on the upside, The X-Files wouldn’t be the same without his mad fear-mongering.
