Budd Hopkins

Budd Hopkins was a prominent New York abstract expressionist painter whose own 1964 sighting in Cape Cod led him to become the most influential abduction researcher of the late twentieth century. His approach was direct: he used hypnotic regression to recover memories of contact events, and he published the accounts in detail.

His first book, Missing Time (1981), introduced the concept that had given it its title: people with UFO encounters often reported periods of lost time, sometimes hours, that they could not account for. Under regression, many described being taken aboard craft and subjected to medical procedures. Intruders (1987) went further, describing a programme of apparent hybridisation that shocked readers and divided the research community.

Hopkins founded the Intruders Foundation in 1989 to provide support for abduction experiencers and to conduct systematic research. He developed standardised interview protocols and accumulated a case file of over 700 abduction reports. His work drew both admiration for its empathy toward experiencers and criticism for its reliance on hypnotic regression, a method whose reliability is disputed.

The 1992 Roper Poll, which Hopkins co-sponsored, suggested that millions of Americans might have had abduction experiences, a finding that generated intense debate. His later work on the Linda Cortile case, published as Witnessed (1996), described a purported abduction from a Manhattan high-rise observed by multiple witnesses.