Bud Hopkins Interview - part 1 of 2 Source: CNI News [During the Roswell UFO Encounter '98 (July 1-5, 1998) in Roswell, New Mexico, leading abduction researcher Budd Hopkins graciously shared his time for this interview. Here he addresses questions about military involvement in abduction, ancient astronauts, out-of-body abductions, childhood abduction and more. Interviewer Deborah Lindemann is a Clinical Hypnotherapist with a private practice in Fort Collins, CO and works with "experiencers".]
Deborah Lindemann (DL): Most of the cases that have come to you are people who are greatly traumatized, frightened and don't know what is going on.
Budd Hopkins (BH): Or confused at the very least.
DL: Would you consider the possibility that there are other kinds of contact going on which may be more benign or perhaps even positive; different kinds of experiences than the traumatic cases which typically come to you?
BH: Well, first of all I have to hold open the possibility for anything here. There was a resident skeptic on a program I was on once and he said, "This can't be; you can't get here from there; they wouldn't do this; and they wouldn't look like that...." And I said: "You call yourself a skeptic; you have a very rigid belief system. I find it beyond me to deny the possibility of any of those things that you're saying you believe cannot happen." So I would never put myself in the position to say no to other kinds of contacts or situations. I remember dealing with an investigator once who said, "Well, there are all these wonderful benign beings who are enriching everyone's life," and so forth. And he said, "They're invisible and you just have to sense their presence and interaction. The ones you can see are the ones who are doing [the bad] things."
[Bud laughs] Well, I mean if you can't see them and you can't... then there isn't much I can do about it. The basic point is that I have always stated from the beginning, we can't say that these are evil beings trying to damage or hurt us, or that they are good beings trying to help. There is no evidence that it's as simple as that, one way or another. And I definitely feel that many abductees can find themselves enriched after these experiences and expanded and enlarged and so forth. I would say on some levels, most have been expanded. The analogy I would make here is that if you had two young men, and they're friends, and one of them went through the Viet Nam War, and saw everything from terror and horror to unbelievable heroism, he comes back from the war a larger person than the young man who stayed behind and worked in his hometown hardware store. I think that there's an expansion of the psyche and human resources that can ideally come in here. I don't attribute that to the aliens, I attribute that to the human spirit.
DL: To how humans adapt to it?
BH: Exactly. It's the eternal human spirit manifesting itself. Somehow triumphing over the bad parts.
DL: You might use the analogy of how people come together and become stronger when they go through natural disasters together. In these cases people find more strength in themselves.
BH: Absolutely. Now the interesting thing about all of this is that there is always a pair of questions which comes out of that, whether it's the natural disaster thing, or let's take the abduction example. Often I ask somebody, "Can you imagine yourself not having had these experience?" or "In the sense of where you are now, do you profoundly wish these experiences had never happened?" Quite a few people say "Yes," they wish they had not happened. But there are many others who say, "I can't imagine myself without having had these experiences," just like the Viet Nam veteran might say.
DL: In other words, "It's who I am."
BH: It's part of the formative range of experiences of who I am in my life. They'll often suggest that it isn't that they hate every single second of this. But on the other hand, the second question is, starting at ground zero here, "Would you want your child to go through this?" I've never met anyone who has ever said yes to this. So it appears that the aliens continue to go along in their implacable way, which involves trying to keep people calm, trying to disrupt people's lives as little as possible. When people ask me if these were negative or positive experiences for this or that person, I have to say the mix is such a complicated thing. Here's an example I use of a man who I've worked with in hypnosis.
During our hypnosis session, in the first part of his experience he's walking home and a UFO passes over him. He starts to feel extremely uneasy during the session, and all of a sudden these three figures appear. They come out from around the corner of a hedge. And he is unbelievably white with terror. And this was just so graphic in hypnosis that he actually brought himself out of hypnosis. I had to calm him down and make sure he stayed in hypnosis. Within forty seconds afterwards he said, "I'm all right, this is fine, no I'm fine. This is just a dream, yes it's a dream, this isn't happening". And he's been told that, I think. So all of a sudden this was Mr. Placid. We've just gone 180 degrees. The next thing in the session, up he goes and he's very excited. He's saying, "I can see the roof of the Greek family's house across the street. I can see the leaves in their gutters." He was very excited, almost like a kid in an amusement park.
DL: But then what's next?
BH: Well, then he's on a table and there's some very painful things. So if you tried to track that as what was positive and what was negative, you're dealing with such a complex mix. The attempts that people make to simplify this... we have a huge desire to believe (every one of us) that ultimately it's all going to be wonderful and fine.
DL: Because when it comes to trying to explain the unexplainable, we're not comfortable with not having answers and not understanding.
BH: Exactly.
DL: I want to switch gears here and ask your opinion about cases which report encounters that seem to involve military or government-type personnel. I have never heard you specifically talk about any cases of yours that included military aspects. Do you get that in any of your cases?
BH: I've gotten some cases where there's some military looking figures and so forth. But we've got so many problems here. For example, one man who I have worked with found himself on a ship, and apparently working with one of the aliens is a soldier with an MP-type arm band and a full uniform. And he's thinking, "Why would the aliens send in a person in a uniform with such identifiable clothing? This doesn't look right, I don't trust this." And the figure changes and now it's a Nazi arm band and uniform. He's dealing with imagery that is being put into his head. These may be images that -- if they can do this, and this is speculation -- are being taken from his memory bank because they're useful.
So we have that problem, which is a major one. We also have the problem that you can have military people abducted along with everyone else. So you could find a cop, a bus driver and a lieutenant colonel all aboard. So that's another problem. And then you have the idea of hybrid life-forms which are working with the aliens wearing some kind of uniform and it gets very complicated to discern. I have never felt or heard any convincing evidence which seems to suggest government cooperation with aliens. Nor have I ever figured out any motive for it. It doesn't make any sense from a human point of view. Why would we do it? The story used to be that we need their technology. But the problem is, when we had the Gulf War for example, if there ever was going to be a time to use alien technology it would have been then, and we didn't seem to have anything that worked that well. I mean even our highly touted Patriot missiles didn't work that well. When I presented that argument to one woman and asked her why they don't use these alleged technologies, she said, "Well, they're saving it!" And I said, "For what?" So I don't see the strong proof of it.
On the other side of that fence, I have dealt with a number of cases where people describe being in ships wearing a sort of blue one piece uniform similar to the aliens. This came out in the Linda Cortile case written about in my book, "Witnessed". They report as if they are operating under some type of control, as though they are an alien.
DL: They seem to be in the capacity of a helper or assistant.
BH: Exactly. One of these cases I took interest in was of a woman who awoke in the morning to find she had vague memories of an event that previous night. She went to work and something someone said at work triggered this immediate recall. A man had injured himself and described how he cut his hand and had been taken to the emergency room and had been put on a table. And she suddenly had this immediate flashback that the night before she had been on a ship. She remembered she was staring into the eyes of someone who was on a table. And as I remember, she may have said she was wearing some kind of blue uniform. She was staring at this man and calming him down... "You're all right, you won't be hurt..." and all this was being done telepathically. And she said at some point, something came through in her mind and she thought, "That man looks very frightened. What is this, what am I doing here, why am I doing this?" And she said that her eyes moved down his body, and she saw this sort of grey hand coming over, doing something -- some being on the other side of her. She was sort of startled. Then all of a sudden... boom!... her eyes locked back to his eyes and she felt the thought: "You stare at him and keep him calm." That subsequently was the only conscious flashback she had. But of course, if you can imagine from his point of view, he might be thinking there's normal humans up there.
So what I'm saying is the evidence is so complicated. I even coined a term, "alien co-option". I first ran into this in the Linda Cortile case, and since then there are many others. This is where the person is sort of co-opted and used, and from the point of view of the abductee and the other abductee, it gets pretty confusing. We've got humans here -- what is this?
DL: So what you're saying is that there are several possibilities here. The first is the abductee's memories might be utilized to simply plant screen memories of familiar uniforms. The second is abductees who just happen to be military personnel. The third possibility is abductees seeing hybrid type beings involved in the encounter who might be dressed in some type of uniform. And the fourth possibility is that an abductee may see another abductee functioning in the "alien co-option" situation you mentioned, perhaps dressed in some specific uniform. And of course, the fifth possibility would be none of the above.
BH: There just doesn't seem to be convincing evidence to me that there is government cooperation with aliens. Now, I would imagine that if some protective branch of the government was doing what it's supposed to do -- that is, protecting the country -- they might be trying to find out everything they can by working with an abductee here and there. For example, I have a case like that with Debbie Jordan. It would seem that she may have been abducted by the military to perhaps remove an implant and for a few other reasons.
DL: Perhaps to check her out and observe her.
BH: Yes. That wouldn't surprise me if that goes on. But that's an adversarial thing, that's the government versus the aliens, not the government and the aliens.
DL: In this case you're saying their involvement would be a secondary one of interest and concern.
BH: Right. They're not allies. In a certain sense one side is trying to find out about the other side. That wouldn't surprise me.
DL: And of course that could also cause confusion in people's minds. In some cases, abductees may blend the separate memories of government observation and alien abduction as some type of cooperative project or singular experience.
BH: I'm one of these people who has very little patience for the "militia state of mind": i.e., the way to protect democracy is to blow up a building and kill a bunch of innocent people. As far as I'm concerned, the government is us. I don't see it as "them." I don't care if we're dealing with the local police department, the mayor or senator or the CIA. It's still us on some level. Therefore, the government is going to be made up of different morals and different ways of doing things. Somehow [we] get into this adversarial thing that if you don't like the government, you link the government to the aliens because you don't like the aliens either. Of course, there are some people who like the aliens but don't like the government.
DL: It's interesting to note your personal background and how you initially became involved with this research. Apparently back in 1964 you had a sighting, and that's what started it all. Before that, you had never had any experiences and no particular interest in the subject.
BH: Right, nothing at all before 1964. I'm an artist. I had absolutely no interest in it and I didn't know anyone who did. I had been married to my previous wife for eight years before we had that first sighting together, along with a third person. And during the first eight years, neither she nor I had ever remembered that subject coming up. It was sort of a non-subject. If anything, I would have thought there's nothing to it; it's ridiculous. But we had a daytime sighting in 1964 of a metallic object flying around. I don't want to go into it too much, as I've told this story so many times before. But it happened over Cape Cod, and it really got my attention.
It was a very interesting thing, because when I talked to my father about it, who was in World War I and II, he said, "You should report this to the Air Force." And by the time I mentioned it, I had read a little about the subject of UFOs, because the incident had happened several months earlier. He continued to encourage me to report it, so finally I said I'd write a letter and see what kind of response I'd get. I wrote the letter literally a year later. And I got this boiler plate type letter back from the Air Force saying, "The Air Force is responsible for investigating these matters, but unfortunately because you didn't report this in a timely fashion, there's nothing we can do about it." Project Blue Book was in affect at that time. And then the last sentence of the letter stated, "However, the Air Force requests that should you have another sighting or experience that you report it immediately to the nearest Air Force installation." And I thought, wait a second. If I was a little old lady and I was writing to the police department about a bump in the attic, the last thing they're ever going to say is, "As soon as there's another bump in the attic, call me." The only reason the Air Force was ever going to say this is that amongst or behind all the boiler plate type writing is something or someone who wants those reports. And that got me quite interested. What happened, essentially, is I started reading about it.
DL: It's interesting to hear your story, because there are a myriad of researchers who believe that you cannot have just one sighting -- that a sighting is just the tip of the iceberg, and beyond the one encounter or event there is a lifetime of unconscious abduction experiences. In your case, you firmly believe that this was just a one-time sighting, and you just happened to be at the right place at the right time.
BH: Oh yes.
DL: And there's no history of any unusual encounters or experiences in your family?
BH: No, no history. I do think that there are many one-time sightings. People do see UFOs all the time. I don't believe that everyone who has a sighting is an abductee. I think that many people have just seen a UFO that was simply in the process of going somewhere else.
DL: We hear many reports and cases about women who report missing fetuses. One of the most difficult things seems to be documenting these cases. There are obviously many medical and scientific explanations for missing fetuses. In some cases, during early pregnancy and for some common reason, the fetus can be absorbed by the mother's body. But other women report far more suspicious situations. Have you ever come close to documenting this through the procurement of doctor's medical records or a doctor's testimony -- some type of evidence that would verify there was a heart beat heard clearly for several months and then absolutely no medical explanation for the missing fetus? These stories continue to circulate and yet getting evidence seems difficult.
BH: There are a number of cases like that, but this is the problem. Because there is a fetus, and then a little later there isn't a fetus, that doesn't prove that aliens swooped down and took the fetus. Now, there have been a lot of hypotheses put forward that there are twins, and then all of a sudden there is just one at birth. And the medical theory is that the second one has just been absorbed. Now, no one has ever found a half-absorbed fetus in an autopsy or anything like that. It's just a theory that has been presented by the medical profession. I have a case, for instance, where a woman had a fetus disappear in the seventh month, which is very late. This was just a singular fetus. She went to bed one night and the next morning she woke up and... no baby. Everything was gone. She goes to the doctor, and there's no fetus. He had no idea what happened. She ultimately sued him for malpractice. So there was a court record, and what was established was that she was pregnant, and then she wasn't pregnant.
DL: Were you ever able to talk to the doctor about it?
BH: No. The doctor didn't want to talk about this because he was in a lawsuit. But there is a court record. And here's the point. She lost the case on the grounds that she hadn't proved that the doctor had done anything wrong. So the judge said to her something to the effect that, "Well, you had a baby and then you didn't have the baby. But you can't prove that the doctor was at fault, It just happened."
We have many cases that leave you in that state. But then, to make an inference that the aliens took the baby, that's hard.
DL: Was that what she was attempting to find out?
BH: She didn't know that at the time, no. The point is, the idea of a disappeared pregnancy is quite common, but a doctor will say, "You passed a tissue; something happened; it was absorbed." I was dealing with a nurse once who had lost her baby at 5 months. And she was an obstetrical nurse. She started to bleed and have a miscarriage. The doctor asked her to come to the hospital right away and to save the tissue, which she did. The doctor then told her there was no fetal tissue, that she must have missed it. And she said, "No, I didn't, I'm a nurse." They had an argument over it. That's where the problem is. Not that there aren't documented cases of pregnancies which just disappear, but how do you explain the disappearance? That's the problem.
DL: This has to be baffling to the obstetrician.
BH: Absolutely. We do know that obstetricians have the highest rate of lawsuits against them for their practice. Therefore, if a baby disappears, which is as key an issue in a mother's life as you can imagine, the doctor will just say, "Well, it might have been this, it might have been that."
DL: Do you consider the possibility that the visitor presence is not a new one, that it has been with us for a very long time? Historians such as Zecharia Sitchin have suggested that extraterrestrials have been integral to our very roots, and may have shaped us both genetically and historically. What do you think?
BH: Well, that's always a very tough question to answer, because we can't get the kind of evidence we need from older times. Obviously you can't question someone from 1790. As far as I'm concerned, there's enough evidence in historical records to suggest that there have been UFO sightings for a long time. For instance, the Nuremberg sightings from the 14th Century. There's a lot of [old] sighting reports and descriptions which sound like modern cases. I don't have a lot of faith, frankly, in some of the over-interpretations of old documents.
DL: Do you feel there's just too many ways to interpret these writings and experiences?
BH: I think in a certain sense it's an irrelevancy, because we can't know. You can speculate, [but] I've never been one to excessively speculate.
DL: You're a here-and-now person?
BH: Exactly. I'm like the person from Missouri: show me. So when it gets into the idea of ancient astronauts, or whether abductions have been going on for a very long time, I really don't know. I think the evidence that abductions have been going on for a long time is flimsy, which is not to say that it hasn't happened.
DL: What is your opinion about how the abduction profile or scenario has changed, if at all, over the years you've been involved in abduction research?
BH: I don't think that the basic patterns have changed much. I think what has changed is our knowledge of them. But I think what seems to have happened more recently is that, whatever they're doing, they're doing it in a slightly less covert way. The erasing of memory, or the suppression of memory, which is an act of deception as far as I'm concerned, is what condemns the whole thing in my point of view. I want to know what's happening to me. I don't want someone to say that this is for my own good.
DL: Do you necessarily think their suppression of memory is a sinister act, or might you possibly interpret their secretiveness as their way of caring or protecting the abductee from being frightened?
BH: Well, that may be part of it, but that's not working. You have too many people who show post-traumatic stress disorder, but don't remember what the trauma was. So it's still causing a lot of problems. These beings may look at it that way, but who knows? The point is, it's an act of deception, as far as I'm concerned, to conceal from people what's being done to them -- to give them false images to stand in for what is actually happening to them. Most abductees tell me, "If 'they' would come in through the front door, sit down and tell me what they need and what their problems are, and ask my permission, I might be the first one to say 'Fine'. But don't paralyze me and take my memory away."
DL: So, do you think the encounters are changing in this regard?
BH: I think they're being less careful about covering their tracks. They're being sloppy. It looks sloppy. I wouldn't say they're necessarily more aggressive. We tend to think that these beings are perhaps so evolved technologically or in other ways that they don't make mistakes. But I think that they're more like human beings, that they make mistakes.
DL: There's obviously a huge gap between our understanding them, and their understanding us.
BH: Exactly, no doubt about it. We're different.
DL: What are your thoughts on the reality of non-physical type abductions, or "Out-Of-Body" (OBE) abductions, such as experienced by abductee Betty Andreasson Luca? Or do you personally believe that absolutely all abductions are physical? [The case of Betty Andreasson Luca has been extensively chronicled by author and veteran UFO researcher Raymond E. Fowler in several books, including "The Andreasson Affair (Phase One & Two) ", "The Watchers (I & II)" and most recently "The Andreasson Legacy".]
BH: No, I don't think that all abductions are physical, because playing with the mind is so obviously a part of this, and you don't necessarily need to take the body to play with the mind. So I do think there are many kinds of experiences that can be done without actually removing someone from their automobile or out of their backyard. However, numerous times I have worked with individuals who described their experiences as an OBE, and when we did hypnosis they would describe floating up through the ceiling, which is a typical OBE. But then I would have them look back on the bed, and they would tell me there's no one on the bed.
DL: So it was just their interpretation that their encounter happened as an OBE?
BH: To have an OBE, the one requirement is that you're sort of in two places, that you're looking down and see yourself. That's an OBE. It you look down and don't see yourself, it's not. So, many times what we really find is that it is "an out of the house experience".
DL: But you do think that there are two types of abduction or contact, one which is physical and one which is not. One of the areas I'm particularly interested in is the dream state. We need to look at how some types of contact may be made -- not in the sense of a physical abduction, but nevertheless the possibility of a contact experience from within our dreams. In this scenario, perhaps, the person is receiving information or being given information because we are easily accessed in that state.
BH: Yes, I definitely think that's there. Yes, I think things like this can happen. The real focus here is really based on creating this hybrid mix or race, and flowing out from this is learning how we think and react emotionally. In a certain sense, there is a gathering of information from us to impart to the hybrid figures. So I think that's an important part of it.
DL: Children are an interesting area of all of this. Generally speaking, if you were to come up with an overall opinion about the ways you've experienced children's reactions to their encounter experiences, would you say that they seemed frightened, neutral or positive about their experiences? Or have you found it's pretty much a mixed bag?
BH: Well, I think it's a mixed bag, and I think it's a mixed bag with an individual child too. I had a case where the child was two or two and a half. The child had seen the picture on Whitley Strieber's book "Communion" and was absolutely terrified. She said, "That's them mommie, that's the man that takes me to see the doctor, they take off my jammies..." The child was just terrified. And I met this little girl and she asked me if I wanted to see her little boo-boo. She lifted her top up and she had three little puncture marks under her navel. The mother was also very upset. Well, about three or four years later when the child was about six, she was still having experiences, but she thought they were wonderful. She said that there was a little man that came to take her from time to time. She had given him the name of Kevin, probably named after one of her little classmates. She said Kevin was her best friend. I asked her why, and she said because Kevin says he loves me. Anyway, she loved Kevin. He was wonderful and he would come and they would go out the window and take her to the round room. But she said, "You know there are bad Kevin's too!" She said that when she gets into this round room where Kevin lives, the bad Kevins still hurt her. But he comes over, and he's wonderful and he tells her he loves her. When he shows up she really likes him and he brings her home. So we're playing with a sort of manipulation, good cop/bad cop. And then there's all the stories where these visitors tell the children, "You belong to us", "We're your real parents", "You came from us". At the very least, that's going to confuse the daylights out of a child.
I remember Karla Turner [the late Karla Turner, Ph.D., was an experiencer and author of "Into the Fringe," "Taken" and "Masquerade of Angels"] saying her first conscious memory of her experiences was standing in a field, at about the age of five, with something that looked like a seven foot tall praying mantis. She said it was trying to tell her it was her mother. So I think there's a lot of manipulation going on. And there's a tremendous amount of trauma, I think, that roots that child in a tremendous degree of confusion and uncertainty for life. And what's worse is that when the child tries to tell their parents or someone about the experiences, they don't believe them. And therefore the child is then split off from the parents.
DL: And the problem with this is, it sets up the child to begin questioning themselves and how they can tell what is real in life and what is not. As a result, they may not trust in themselves, their feelings and experiences. And this translates into many relationship problems when they are adults, both with themselves and with others.
BH: Exactly. From the point of view of the UFO occupants, this manipulation of the child abductee is perhaps a way to make it as easy as possible for them and for the child. But I think that sets the child up for a lot of psychological problems.
DL: And what's amazing is that children often tell of these encounters without solicitation or conditioning. Children often come forward on their own and say things like: "You know mommie, these doctors come into my bedroom every night; they come through my ceiling." Many times these comments come as a total shock to their parents, because up until then there has been no talk of this subject, nor any books on the subject in their home. It's so important for parents to listen, yet so often this type of talk is discouraged or invalidated as simply bad dreams.
BH: I think the evidence from children is extremely powerful and important. It's one of the saddest aspects of all of this, because you know these children are being bounced around emotionally. There's no landing spot for them. I have several things that I mention to parents. The first thing is of course, as you said, for the parents to be good listeners. Also to get the child to do little drawings, because there is sort of an empowerment from getting it down on paper. The third thing is to remind the child that whatever this was, they're here now, everything is fine, we're going to go off to McDonalds and have lunch. The parent needs to be able to admit to the child that if they could have prevented this from happening they would have, because of the fact that they are loved. You could also say something like: "Remember the time you fell off of your bicycle and skinned your knee? Now, if I had been able to stop that, I would have, but I couldn't because I can't always be there." Use an example of something your child remembers where you weren't there, yet everything turned out all right. You can't let your children think you're omnipotent, even though you might like to.
DL: That would set the parents up for failure, because if it happens again, and the parents said they wouldn't let it happen again, then the child can no longer believe their parents, and will feel even less safe.
BH: If the parent is an abductee, I think the toughest thing to admit is that you also had these experiences as a child. But you can say, "You know, when I was little and about your age, I saw them too. They came into my room, I was scared to death too, but they always brought me back and I'm OK." That way the child has the evidence before their eyes that here's the parent... you're here. So I think these are steps which can be taken.
DL: Thank you Budd for your interview, I know our readers and experiencers will appreciate your insights on the subject.
by Deborah L. Lindemann, C.H.T.
July 1998
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