INTERVIEW 3: Carol Rainey

An interview with documentary filmmaker Carol Rainey, who was the research partner and wife of UFO researcher Budd Hopkins in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. In late spring. I
interviewed documentary filmmaker Carol Rainey for ten years in the
late nineteen nineties and early two thousand's. She was married

(00:23):
to the artist and prominent UFO researcher Bud Hopkins. Even
before they were married, she worked with him on his research.
She was inside that community is alien abductions piqued in
public consciousness, and the stories reached the zenith of their strangeness.
I'm Toby Ball, and this is Strange Arrivals. I'm Carol Rainey,

(01:05):
and I was married for ten years to Bud Hopkins,
abstract expressionist painter and UFO researcher. And I came from
a background uh spending twenty years making films for epidemiologists
in the Boston area, and that involved writing many many

(01:29):
grants to National Institutes of Health along with the epidemiologists,
and we brought in millions in grant funding to make
films about issues of public health. I don't come from
a science background originally, but in all of those years
of working for epidemiologists and later in New York City

(01:53):
with the major medical institutions like New York Presbyterian Um.
I learned a lot about how scientists think about protocols,
how they think about they're hypothesis about some some phenomena
in the natural world, and how they go about gaining

(02:17):
real knowledge in the real world. And that was pretty
wonderful to know about. What was Bud's sort of hypothesis
about alien abductions. I would say he started developing that
even before his his first book, Missing Time, but he

(02:38):
had a pretty good a line on the narrative that
many people in the United States, we're being out and
about in a lonely place somewhere where nobody else was,
you know, out riding along at night in their car,
and if they stop and get out, there would be

(03:00):
a bright light overhead, and there would be a UFO
looking at them, and eventually the light would get extremely
close and the person would be pulled up a beam
of light into the alien craft and there they would
be examined and prodded and tested and eventually had their

(03:25):
reproductive organs dealt with in one form or another. And
this was the idea that people who were taken out
of their out of their cars, out of their their
walk in the woods, that they were being used and
through many extents, abused by a t S who came

(03:47):
down for whatever reason to interact with humans. And then
he So my understanding is that he kind of took
that original narrative and then sort of a wildly expanded it. Um. Well,

(04:13):
I think the narrative that may not be fair. It
is in a way, and there are reasons for that.
But um, but first of all, it's extremely bright, very articulate,
able to think on his feet. I mean, I admired
so much about him, um, including his art, which is

(04:35):
I married an artist, as did his wife, second wife,
I'm sure. But um, by the time I met him,
he'd pretty much given up on being part of the
art world in Manhattan, and is almost his entire life
was really taken up with being this leader in a

(05:00):
movement called alien abduction. And his best friend in the
world was David Jacobs, and they were as close as
father and son or two brothers. They spent hours talking
on the phone to each other, sharing their cases and
in many cases they shared actual abductees. And I'll use

(05:25):
the word the abductee that people called themselves it's not
that I'm saying they are they aren't. I'm just you know,
that that's their designation of themselves, so I call them that.
And then so he um again that this is my

(05:46):
my my impression is that that he and Jacobs um
both sort of ended up coming to the conclusion that
the number of people who are being abducted was was
far higher than was sort of previously thought. Yes, and

(06:07):
that's partly because um. Bud's work expanded the original narrative,
and he did stay relatively close to the pattern from
the Hill case Betty and Barney Hill. But what his
writing added to it was that nobody was safe anywhere,

(06:29):
that aliens could enter your bedroom at night, coming straight
through the walls, coming through the windows. I mean, his
view of alien beings in the world was that they
were godlike. Really they i mean, ordinary physics did not

(06:51):
prohibit them from doing whatever they wanted to do to
take advantage of people's helpless business. And they were the
abductees were used in in Bud's thought, in the same
way that we observe you know, wolves out on the

(07:12):
out in the forest or out on the in the wild,
in the wild, and we experimented on them to some
degree from Afar, and that's what he felt the aliens
were doing to us. They might put tracking devices in us,
like um, you know what what's called an implant these days?

(07:36):
And you know, many of his people came up with
those implants, partly to um add credence to Bud's narrative
and because that was the story that was becoming increasingly
popular in mainstream media during the nineteen eighties and nineties

(07:59):
and the during the nineties. I met him in nine
and I had never heard of UFOs literally, nor had
I heard of alien abduction. By the time I met him.
Fours too complicated to go into. Why was such a virgin?

(08:19):
But I was so this seemed like a great intellectual
adventure that I was going to go on. Um. I
had left behind a clan of seventy close family members
who were fundamentalist Christians in the Midwest, and basically lost

(08:42):
the entire family. So I think when I heard about
this there was a spiritual element to it too, And
it was only much much later, nine years later, that
I discovered that but also had a ritual element in
what he was wanting to do, And his sister informed

(09:07):
me after we've been married, I don't know, eight or
nine years, that Bud, who wasn't avowed atheist, that he
had once as a young man, applied to the Princeton
School of Theology and was accepted after high school, so

(09:30):
he was set up to become a minister, a spiritual leader.
And I couldn't believe that, after all of these years
and our shared intimacies, that he had never once mentioned
that he had wanted to be a minister and had
been enrolled at Princeton. So that was very, very startling

(09:55):
to me. But I could see it in the way
that he ministered to needy people who just filled the
apartment most days, and it was a very overwhelming lifestyle.
It was UFOs. I had left my job in production

(10:19):
in Boston, so I got my own camera and started
shooting yet one more documentary, but this one would be
you know, nobody, no strings attached, no no federal funding,
no state funding, no city funding. Funded out of my
back pocket. Yeah, that gave me a great deal of freedom.

(10:43):
So a lot of the evidence that I was gradually
building up in terms of the validity of this phenomenon
is on videotape, and I have over a hundred hours
of tape. Unfortunately it's it's um in a lower format

(11:06):
that's going to be hard to use today. But uh,
that's you know, I can use the transcripts of that
to quote people directly, and I have hypno successions with
many of the abductees. But Bud was all for that
and completely backed it and said I was free to

(11:28):
use any of his resources. And when the witness case,
which was where he was focused when I met him,
he opened the drawer where and the cabinets were all
of the evidence was for that case, and he said,
it's yours, go in. And again that impressed me that

(11:51):
he was that open to having me on my own
terms research what he had already been researching for I
don't know, eight nine, ten years when I met him,
so he hadn't yet completed Witnessed when I met him,
and he handed the manuscript to me to read, and

(12:15):
a can bond was very believable. Um, you know, one
of the more intelligent people I've ever met, but with
this caveat, not at all given to science or interest
in science. He knew almost nothing about psychology or psychiatry

(12:38):
or recovered memories. He didn't know, except you know, kind
of to mouth at a bit. He didn't know anything
about scientific protocols, were the scientific method and how you
use that to make sure that the information you believe
you're gaining in the world, that that information is valid.

(13:02):
And you know that. As I became more and more
part of the uf A world, I became less and
less convinced that many of the people doing research, we're
doing it with enough valid understanding of science and manipulation

(13:26):
of testimony and leading witnesses, all of those sorts of things.
Nothing about neurobiology. None of them knew anything about that
except for I won't say nobody, but the people in
my immediate circle, where David Jacobs, John mac and Bud Hopkins,

(13:49):
and John was the only one with a background in science.
It's interesting thing you say that, because I do feel,
just as I've been doing research for this podcast, that
there's sort of this kind of science adjacent um work
that's being done which isn't very you know, doesn't doesn't

(14:10):
have the critical ah, I don't know, sort of self
examination or or initial skepticism about about data that you
expect from No, there's too much credulousness after a while.
But I can explain some of that because as a
complete newbie, not having I mean I was in graduate

(14:34):
school for years and years. Nobody talks about UFOs there,
but um so it was so new to me that
I was very open minded, very willing to listen. But
I never lost my critical faculties. And I can tell
you that when I was spending you know seven involved

(14:59):
in the uf O foren dominent and with producers and
directors coming in and taking shows all through the nineties,
it was like back to back production in our apartment.
But here's what what happened to me. I at a
certain point, again, coming from academia and medical fields, I

(15:23):
still had you know, you never completely outgrow your your
first education, and mine was the fundamentalist take on the
development of the entire world and all of humanity. And
there's something in me still longed to incorporate a more

(15:44):
spiritual understanding of myself. And this was John max take
on it too. John was so not interested in science. Um.
Once I was sitting on a porch in Newport and
Newport and Breakfast, where a bunch of people interested in
the subject gathered every summer, and I was in the

(16:07):
middle of writing sight Unseen with Bud and I started
to tell him about this really exciting find I had
that science research had just developed the use of a
laser beam of light that would pull objects up the light,

(16:28):
which is exactly what was being reported by um by abductees,
that they were pulled up the light, which sounds science
fiction crazy, But I was out there researching cutting edge
scientific discoveries, and so I'm telling John this, I'm excited.
He looked at me and he just said, Carol, I'm

(16:51):
not interested in the science, and I just started laughing.
I just because that was the hope of people like
Bud and Dave, who knew they weren't scientists and didn't
really have any interests in science. They hoped that John
would come in to the field and bring serious scientific

(17:13):
research into the field. I mean, they genuinely did. And
that wasn't John's interest. He was definitely more interested in
an extra terrestrial outreach program and something that would be

(17:33):
um a welcoming program for any beings who might approach
the Earth. And Bud and Dave regarded what they were
their their findings as they interpreted them. They regarded their

(17:53):
findings as showing that that if the aliens were here
to ar mess and we didn't know maybe they were,
that they certainly weren't here to do us any good.
Um that they used us basically as research subjects, and
they had no compunction about coming into our bedrooms at night,

(18:16):
or dipping into our cars or wherever we happened to
be and vacuum us up and um either experiment with
eggs and sperm. You know, none of this makes sense
scientifically over decades and decades, but anyway, that those were

(18:38):
the two opposing forces in research at that time. For me,
what what was amazing and I could kind of catch
myself doing it but not entirely, is that there's almost
a force yield that is set up for anyone in

(19:05):
the in the area, in in reach of it when
that is a strong belief that this is what is happening,
and we're trying hard to prove that this is what
is happening, and that is happening all over the world.
And we have evidence of what Bud called evidence would

(19:26):
be people sending him um snapshots of mark on their body,
whether it was a scar or a bruise or whatever.
And John knew that those wouldn't those would not be
taken well as evidence. You know, it's not something you

(19:46):
gather first person. There's there's no there's no guard on
the chain of custody, none of that. So um things
that Bud and Dave considered to be it is, I
did not, And but that didn't stop me from being

(20:07):
pulled over into that that sphere of strangeness is all
I could say, strangeness and felt like it was paranormal.
It felt like these stories that I was videotaping, not
just what Bud was telling me, but what I was
hearing and putting on tape, that there was enough there,

(20:32):
enough similarities between the stories that you had to pay attention.
And at some point I remember thinking when I was
shooting with Bud, we were on Cape Cod and um,
a man I didn't know had called in and was
talking to him. And I walked through the room and

(20:55):
I heard Bud say, did they come through the wall
this time too? And when I thought about it a
few minutes later, I thought, I didn't even break a sweat,
I didn't even jump when he said that. I just
accepted that's how it happens. And you know, when when
that happens to you, you need you know, you need

(21:18):
you know, you need to put your guard up even more.
And I would always always ask him skeptical questions. That's
really interesting. Did he welcome sort of skeptical questions or
was that was that seen as uh sort of questioning
his work or authority or what have you. Yes, Um,

(21:42):
he was good with me in the beginning. Um. He
wanted me to see what he saw and UM again
offered all of the you know, tape recordings over what
a twenty someome year period and for me that we're
open to my inspection, my listening. Um. But he wanted

(22:09):
me to be able to ask questions on camera because
that's where some of the best most spontaneous material happens,
is when you're just going through your day and you
pick up the camera and I start to ask him
about the phone call that had just happened in the
Cape Cod house and you know, he tells me about it.

(22:30):
It's good stuff. I mean, I'm a filmmaker, and you know,
I had a really articulate, no wacko husband who was
telling me things I've never heard about. So it was
worth listening and I did strange arrivals will return in

(22:51):
a moment so maybe you can tell me a little
bit about the Linda Quartill case, because that that that
seems to be sort of the height of things or

(23:12):
a turning point. No, I think, um, the Linda Quartilla
case was his big case. And one of the things
that why the Linda Quartilla case was such a huge
case for him is that it pushed new boundaries. I mean,

(23:32):
the thing is, there's almost no money in working the
UFO research field unless you're doing regular gigs like standard
Stan Friedman, who was a friend of mine, and you know,
he knew how to market himself and he got gigs
all over the world actually, so he kept a modest

(23:56):
income coming in. Bud didn't do that. His The way
he worked was to have really strong concept in missing time,
and then he was only interested in cases after that
that broke new ground. So um, the the case in

(24:22):
Intruders broke all sorts of new ground in terms of
him claiming to have discovered patterns. Um. I guess in
that case it would be the breeding pattern of abductees
who would feel they had once been um their eggs

(24:46):
had been taken or the sperm had been harvested, and
years later they'll be taken aboard a craft and they
will see what they believe are their children, half alien,
half you. And and you know, it began to get
so weird to me that I would push back even

(25:08):
more on how that knowledge came to be. But the
deal was and I would go when we were thinking
of writing a book together based on my science background
and looking at cutting edge aspects of science that would

(25:30):
possibly illuminate the UFO phenomenon. When we were doing that,
we went to talk to a couple of editors at
publishing houses and what they said categorically, don't come I
mean this was in what this must have been the
early two thousand's. They said, don't come back unless you
have a brand new, never seen before idea um for

(25:54):
a U phone book. So the push is always for new, bigger, better,
more outlandish. And I would say that Dave and Bud
definitely delivered on that in each of their books. So
that's where the pressure was coming was from from the
need to publish and the fact that you just can't

(26:16):
publish the same book again. Well that and to have
any any uh kind of standing in the lecture circuit
UFO lecture circuit, you have to have new material, new
cases to present. Always people don't want to come there
and you know, pay to hear the same thing they've
heard before, so they were always he was wanting cases

(26:41):
that would further develop the narrative, or as he might say,
cases that would illuminate it further. Yeah, it's interesting, and
you know, you know what to respond to this, but
you know, it's it's similar time period to the Satanic Panic,
which was also absert with with people being used as breeders,

(27:05):
which I hadn't really and that was I started reading
that literature down in my studio maybe sometime into knowing Bud,
maybe about three or four years into it. And then
came the multiple personality um debacle with women they're mainly

(27:32):
women therapist kind of taking women under their under their
wing and helping to develop their own narratives of having
you know, ten, twelve, fifteen different personalities within one body
and um, you know, whether that phenomenon has any basis

(27:54):
in reality, perhaps, but it's extraordinarily rare. There was a
creation factor here. The therapists were creating the very thing
that they wanted to study, and the Satanic, the ritual
abuse the phenomenon was part of that at about the

(28:16):
same time it came along and was written about beautifully
by a New Yorker writer, Lawrence Wright. And I started
reading all of that information and couldn't really get Bud
to read or take any of it seriously, but I
felt it should be. It was new information coming into

(28:39):
our understanding of how people developed their own internal narratives,
and that there were some very, very big red flags
dropped in that research. And Bud considered anything like that
to be the work of skeptics. And his favorite word

(29:02):
was debunker, and it was a word used a great
scorn and derision, and you know, so he quickly let
me know that debunking would not be acceptable in his household.
So I was. I just kept asking questions. It was
all I could do. And when we got to my

(29:25):
documenting the Linda Quartila case, Linda was in and out
of our house often, and there was alien abduction support
groups in the front room somewhat regular basis, although I
guess they'd been doing that in the eighties and early
nineties before I got there. But that's where I first

(29:48):
met Linda, was at an alien abduction support meeting, and
what I began to understand from attending those meetings is
that if you were new to the field, you could
pick up everything you needed to know about being a
standard abductee just by going to those support group meetings

(30:13):
and by talking with other abductees. They would lay out
certain patterns and other people would second that and they
would say, oh, that happened to me too, And Bud
would guide the discussions, and I was I did call
him on this in terms of support group meetings. I said,

(30:37):
why don't you use an a a kind of model
where there is no leader, where the witnesses, the abductees
themselves could guide the discussion and instead of you leading it.
And my objection to his leading the discussion was that

(30:59):
he would tell people about brand new cases and the
things he was most interested in pursuing. Well, this is
a very tight group of very bright, sensitive, artistically driven people.
I respected them a lot, and I did not think

(31:19):
they were crazy. Not once. Um. I mean there were
some of the margins, but they weren't part of that group.
But they were people to whom something was happening, and
that fascinated me and still should fascinate researchers. Um, if

(31:39):
it's you know, psychosomatic, if it's being if the narrative
is being developed entirely inside individuals. And then they meet
in some sort of a place like a support group,
and they began to share things they've picked stup from

(32:00):
television series which were everywhere, or from movies, from reading
Bud's books. They came with a hell of a lot
of knowledge about what other people were saying about their experiences.
They were not, you know, blank slates. They came in

(32:21):
knowing the material. And when you're working with that psychologically,
you know, research shows there's a great deal of spread
um of terms and means and and thoughts and patterns

(32:42):
between the researcher himself and the people who have come
to him for help um and between each other. They
would pass ideas back and forth, and Bud by either
pumping on them those ideas, you know, like somebody had found, um,

(33:07):
cherry blossoms on the floor of her bedroom after an
abduction that led to Bud confirming that that meant an
alien had come through the window and pulled some branches
in on the way in, et cetera. So it was

(33:29):
to me it was fairly easy to see how a
researcher without really careful careful protocols and without being peer reviewed,
that such a researcher could intentionally or totally unintentionally creating

(33:51):
the story of what had happened to all of these people,
and they would often welcome it because the story of
being abducted by aliens explained what was dysfunctional in each
of their lives. And you know, just as you and
I have some things that don't work as well as
we wished. If you found an idea, if you found

(34:13):
some concept that explained why you felt uneasy at night,
or why you were really mournful at a particular time
of year, or why bright lights in the sky startled you,
or it's just one thing after another, or why the

(34:34):
person was sexually not functional, why the person didn't get
ahead in their own chosen career, And those were all
real concerns that people had. So how did this stall end?
Pretty badly actually and really kind of tragically. Um the

(34:58):
the Linda Quartilla story and then the stories that the
cases that were coming to bud then like Jim Mortlauro,
who you know, the crowd of people online had supported
for quite a while until his various um lies and

(35:19):
hoaxes and untrue stories of what he had done and
experience until the truth of those stories began to come out.
Um many people supported this one guy who was was
next big case. And that was the uniqueness of Jim

(35:40):
Morte Lauro's case would be that it was the first
time an entire group of physicians upstate New York were
honed in on this phenomenon, had a number of patients.
They the as Jim told Bud, had a number of
patients in this in this clinical study of abductees, and

(36:06):
Bud definitely wanted to be part of that study, and
he had help from a new protege, Leslie Kane, and
she pushed wholeheartedly to follow Jim's story. And a number

(36:26):
of people who were on Bud's board of advisors, which
was that board of advisors, was amazing group of very
diverse people, but smart people. A medical writer, an engineer,
someone in marketing, a musician and astronomer. They were strong,

(36:49):
smart people who had hoped that Bud was going to
share what he learned about how to research this phenomenon
another or when was a psycho psychologist. So there were
people with a broad enough background that if he had
allowed them to guide his research. It would have been

(37:15):
so much better for everybody. But he would not permit
any oversight of his cases, and of course Dave Jacobs
didn't either. Each of those two men worked entirely on
their own. Occasionally they would have someone come sit in

(37:37):
on a session or two, but you know that's that
wasn't necessarily the standard way they did things when that
person was there watching. It's just that but had a
very strong tool he might have used, which was the

(37:57):
the the Intruders Foundation Advisory Board, and they could have
prevented him from going so far into the weeds with
the Linda Cortilia case, with the Gym more Laro case,
it kind of it kind of fell apart just because

(38:19):
of sort of credulousness to people who were, you know,
became clear were hoaxers. Yes, I think that a lot
of it went that way, um, but also because I
was finding out things about the case in witness that

(38:42):
we're um kind of knocking the breath out of me.
There was so much cherry picking that Bud did. I mean,
this was a case from thirty years ago and it's
still right now today, is still not completely vetted or

(39:07):
debunked by anyone who knows the material, and I'm I'm
on a memoir about that period, and maybe your interview
will help me get jump started back into finishing it.
But um, there was so much material there that was

(39:29):
not included. Things that let's say Linda meeting with the
Pope and the Pope was knew all about her story
and abducted her in a in one of the popemobiles
or a black car to take her down to wherever

(39:51):
he was staying when he came to visit in yes,
the early nineties. And you know, Bud did not in
include that story because it was pretty over the top
that Linda Courtilla was invited by the Pope to come
be the ambassador to extraterrestrials and that she would have

(40:13):
to live at the Vatican and leave New York City
blah blah blah. So there were, you know, others that
were equally outside the boundaries of common sense that I
do have documented. When you see how many things are

(40:33):
left out, and makes you doubt the things that are included.
So then I went in and started looking at the drawings,
which were some of Bud's best evidence, drawings of the
scene where Linda was seen eventually by twenty three witnesses.

(40:53):
Bud's books says twenty three witnesses to her being pulled
of a what is it, fourteen story apartment building and
pulled up a beam of light into a hovering UFO.
And that was late November of right by the Brooklyn Bridge,

(41:18):
pretty much a hot spot for Manhattan early hours of
the morning or all hours of the day at night.
And he he has you know, he interviewed most of
the most of the witnesses, the people he called the
witnesses UM, although he never met two key witnesses who

(41:40):
were the government agents, Richard and Dan, who were escorting
a member of the United Nations International staff. They were
escorting him down to a heliport in Lower Manhattan that
night and their car was stall old by the UFOs

(42:02):
power train, as you know, as the part of the
story that that's what always happens. And so a person
whose name but didn't use, but it was Perez the
quare as the UM acting as the Secretary of the
United Nations at the time that he was the dignitary

(42:24):
who was accompanied by to either Secret Service or UM
other US security agencies, and by the two of them.
So Bud did interview to quay Are in an airport
at some point Um and kind of took the negatives

(42:46):
that he got there as being positives. I don't know,
It's it's a case of someone who wants so badly
to prove this is but I'm talking about he wanted
so badly to prove what he believed to be happening.
He wanted to prove that it was actually happening and

(43:09):
that he had evidence. What in Bud and like David Jacobs,
what did they think was sort of ultimately going on?
Like why why were the aliens putting in tracking devices
and trying to get you know, against reproductive data or

(43:32):
experimentation or whatever? Was our theory? Yes, and it was
one they defended to the hilt. The beings who were
coming to us either needed our resources, which we're Bud
certainly believed were our humanist resources, our ability to be empathetic,

(43:58):
our ability to love our children and to love other
people in our lives and to take care of them.
I mean, Bud was the humanist to bubble all things.
He really was, and that's the quality I loved in him. Um,
he is understanding that the aliens were coming to um

(44:22):
either take our culture, take our the privacy of our
minds away from us, by using telepathy, to take the
sanctity of our independent personal bodies, to take that away
from us too, by you know, taking German material like

(44:44):
eggs and sperm and creating alien beings that would be
part them and part us. And I can tell you
they believed this so firmly that sitting over dinner one night,
Jacobs would that Jacobs would rent um a house on
the Keep, a few houses down from our house in

(45:07):
wealth Leet, And over dinner one night, Um, Dave Jacob
said to Bud, Bud, you and I are the only
two people on the planet who really know what's going
on with the alias. Yeah. I kind of did a
double take, and I said, the only two people on

(45:30):
the planet. How how is that? Isn't that kind of
a dangerous way to think about something that you don't
really know for sure? But they believed they did know
for sure. So it's hard not to believe that there
would be moments where either one of these researchers would

(45:54):
realize how much they had manipulated the the subjects, the abductees,
and their narratives. They're written narratives they had to have
known that at some point. Wow, this is this has
been really great. Listen to all this. It's so interesting

(46:17):
and I think sort of gives greater depth to what
I've been sort of interested and kind of thinking about
as I've been going through this whole process of making
this UH podcast series. Are there other things that we
haven't discussed that you think are important to get across? Well,

(46:37):
the fact that they always said, these researchers always said
that they never led the subjects, They never you know,
walked them into some sort of a hypnosis trap. But
what I knew from being right underneath doing my work

(46:57):
in writing and in video product should right underneath an
old wooden floor next to Bud's phone, I could hear
the way that he did intake. First of all, Peter
Robbins would be there as his assistant and would read
the letters. Is how things came in originally, and Peter

(47:19):
would read through them and he'd write abductee on the
front or he'd write probable abductee on the front, and
then that person would be mailed a kit of information
about the abduction phenomenon and then told in the kit
to probably be best to avoid reading the literature in

(47:42):
the field, so the new possible abductee would be sent
as kit of material. And I think it varied sometimes
when it was information about, you know, the abduction phenomenon.
And also the people who were calling Bud knew enough
about the field to call a top researcher in the field.

(48:05):
They had also often read one, two, or three of
his books previously, and they've watched movies, they watched documentaries
he had been in, I mean, he was appearing on
the Phil Donahue Show, on the Oprah Winfrey Show, on
Canadian you know, talk shows. He was all over during

(48:29):
that time. And so when when people would first call
and begin talking to him, he could go on easily
for an hour with each person over the phone, and
he would often tell them about the cases, the new
cases that he was working on, and what that the

(48:53):
queue that sends to the person on the other end
of the phone is that if you want the attention
of this tell television personality named Bud Hopkins, you might
do well consciously or unconsciously. Two have your own memories
that were similar to the ones he was interested in.

(49:15):
And that is where the tailoring of tales began long
before he even met the people. So in that time,
then people would come into the famous person's house and
may be, you know, talked with a while, told some
more about cases Bud was interested in, or things that happened,

(49:38):
and then Bud would put them under hypnosis. You don't
have to lead anybody under hypnosis after that, they already
know which way to go. And that happened often, and
it's that pre pre hypnosis session. All of those sessions,

(49:59):
those contacts is what people on the outside never knew about.
I mean, when I wrote the article Priests of High
Strangeness in in the Pera Toopia magazine back in two
thousand and eleven, UM, many of the old time UFO

(50:19):
research has contacted me privately to thank me for putting
that out there. He stand was one of them, and
they said, we knew there was something off in this
research that but and Jacob's were putting out, but we
didn't know what it was. You know, we only knew

(50:42):
what he told us about how he researched cases. So
it reflects a little bit of the Betty and Barney
Hill and that Betty had those dreams that she wrote
down that sort of served as the basis for what
they talked about hypnotically right. It's really interesting. There's such

(51:03):
a well, if you're interested in um psychiatry psychology at all,
the porousness that I think exists between a therapist, which
but in Dave were de facto therapists for people who
were very troubled over things that they couldn't explain in
their lives. And there there is a certain resonance that

(51:28):
I personally felt coming from my husband, uh, the resonance
of his belief. It was an influence on what I
was able to stay open to hearing. And I watched
the people come in and they were very deferential to Bud.

(51:48):
Not many people, you know, question his methods or anything
like that. And that's where the Board of Advisors might
have helped enormously if he had allowed them to be
actually trained to do research work that's up stay. Yeah,

(52:13):
it's just a missed opportunity and a sadness because they eventually,
after um, you know, the things with the Gym Mortal
r O case and few other hoaxes came down the pike. Uh,
the advisory committee just said, you know, we can't support

(52:34):
you going around and speaking at conferences about cases that
we believe are not valid, that we believe our hoaxes,
and we would like to have one or two of
our advisory board members work with you on cases. And
Bud was only willing to give them access to the tapes,

(52:58):
but he would take a trip to the museum while
they listened to it. In other words, he would not
be supervised. Again. It makes me sad because I think
I think this is a valid area for cross disciplinary
teams to study. Um if if you know reports of

(53:20):
alien abduction are entirely psychological or people drawing from the
zeitgeist of the time, we should know about that. We
should know how how easily people can buy into a
false narrative or one that appears to explain problems they

(53:45):
might have, as this one did, and that most people
themselves won't realize that they're being studied without any scientific method,
without scientific prote calls, without you know, safeguards on where

(54:05):
their quote unquote evidence comes from. I have a scene
that I shot with where but as in the lobby
of our building. He's opening a big package that has
an enormous brazier and he's pulling that out. It has
stains on the back, and he describes to me the

(54:25):
woman he's talked too off and on for years. Um,
and this woman has sent him her bra after a
an event the night before where she believes that she
was abducted and they were experimenting with some liquid and
poured it on her back. So she's sending him this brazier.

(54:49):
And I said, well, what about the chain of custody? Now,
how do you know this came from the alien abduction event?
The woman describes, Well, she has no reason to lie.
And that's that's Dave Jacob's response often too, they have

(55:12):
no reason to lie. Well, come on, people have thousands
of reasons to tell whatever story they're telling, and you
know they're just they're multifaceted, they're complicated, and there is
no way you can say someone has no reason to lie.

(55:33):
That's not how you judge the truth of an event.

(55:54):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thayne, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick,
and Aaron Mank. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to

(56:18):
the Milne's Special Collections and Archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C H thirteen ten
a m. In Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary,
the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project
blue Book. Learn more about the show over at Grimm
and mile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio,

(56:40):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.