May 26, 2020 • 30 mins
Three researchers, Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and John Mack, revolutionized the study of alien abductions in the 1980s and 90s. Their research, based on hypnotic regression of people they suspected were abductees, suggested that aliens could access anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron manky Well. Starting about in the
the ninety one UM actually starting the ninety seven a century,
we began here about the abduction the auction corona started
(00:25):
out by slowly We're basic Arney and Betty Hill sixty
one and then in Tonio b s Rows cases Brazilways
having the seven weeks and there about that sis Well.
And the interesting thing about the cases that we resually
were where what was that? They were a very home
party Cowey, They were rare, they were odd, they were strange.
(00:46):
At the same time the people who were having the
experiences seemed to be having We couldn't really tell whether
there was any thing over What was it about Farney
and Betty Hill, you know that caused and abductions? Who
happened to them? Well, the way we looked at it
now days was there was only one reason they were
in the wrong place at the wrong him. I went
(01:06):
else one of the reasons could they're possibly be? And
time only that. But Barney and Betty he said things
that let us two things. And the experiments model, as
to say, and they had skins Treby tame the body
there then made a sass amount of here. They asked
(01:26):
Party why his steeds came out? Asked Betty why Party
seeking out of hers, didn't they They put a merely
into Betty's Mabel and said they were doing pregnancy test. Well,
all of this was the model for more experiments audience.
This was a phasic situation where you have a model,
(01:48):
there's one. Yeah. The publication of John Fuller's A Journey
Interrupted began a decades long series of ever more incredible
old tales of alien abduction. Using the Hill story as
a foundation, Each successive abduction account had to be more
(02:09):
extraordinary than the last. Public interest in alien abduction reached
its height in the nine nineties, partly because of the
hit TV show The X Files, which had an ongoing
abduction subplot. Another reason was the success of three men
who pushed the alien abduction narrative to its limit in
(02:31):
a number of best selling books I'm Toby Ball and
This Is Strange Arrivals Episode nine, The Troika. In the
(02:56):
twenty years following the Hill experience, there was a clear
understanding of the type of situation in which a person
could be abducted. They would be driving in lonely isolated
places at night, a UFO would appear and the abduction
would follow. But this conception changed and the study of
(03:16):
abductions became something entirely different. UFO researcher Robert Schaeffer, starting
with Bud Hopkins in the eighties, you didn't have to
go anywhere to be abducted by aliens. Aliens would come
right into your bedroom and grab you, drag you up
to the saucer, and then bring you back whenever they
were done with you. You didn't have to drive out
(03:38):
somewhere late at night and see a lightning us at
You're just sitting there, minding your own business, and then
all of a sudden, the aliens come the Once you've
accept that this could happen, you've opened the door to
every kind of fantasy and imagination possible. Bud Hopkins was
a well known abstract expressionist artist who became a leading
researcher into the alien abduction phenomen man On he published
(04:02):
his first book on the subject, Missing Time, a documented
study of UFO abductions. Hopkins made the conceptual leap that
abductions could happen any time, in anywhere. An associate professor
of history at Temple University named David Jacobs seized upon
(04:23):
this idea and began his own research. We heard him
giving a lecture at the opening of this episode. David
Jacobs got into the UFO business quite a bit earlier.
He wrote The History of UFO Belief in the United
States back in the seventies. He state at this, and
then he too picked up the idea from Hopkins and
(04:44):
whoever else that these types of bedroom abductions were taking place.
After his nine book, The UFO Controversy in America, Jacobs
didn't publish again for seventeen years. His next book, The Threat,
Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda, was specifically about abductions and
(05:07):
featured a foreword by the third major figure in this
era of abduction research, one who brought with him impeccable
academic credentials. Done back was a whole was very important guy,
and he was not just a PhD. It was a
professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Mac was very,
(05:28):
very talented, very prominent guy. But somehow he got bit
by this book too and decided it was real. So
these three guys pop against Jacobs and Mac sometimes referred
to them, those Ditroitka. The Troika was a type of
temporary government that occurred four times in the history of
the Soviet Union, where three leaders sat atop the government
(05:50):
without any of them able to exert power alone. These
guys thought that they were very scientific, and I guess
it's of credentials and stuff like that. They kind of work.
In Hopkins published Intruders, which laid out the case that
humans were being abducted and used by aliens for genetic research.
(06:16):
In he met a Boston based documentary filmmaker named Carol
Rainey in they were married. I'm Carol Rainey and I
was married for ten years to Bud Hopkins, abstract expressionist
painter and UFO researcher, and I came from a background
(06:39):
uh spending twenty years making films for epidemiologists in the
Boston area. 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 with the major metal
(07:00):
institutions like New York Presbyterian, I learned a lot about
how scientists think about phenomena in the natural world and
how they go about gaining real knowledge in the real
world from working with scientists, Carol found a very different
world surrounding Hopkins, who was doing UFO research but was
(07:24):
by training an artist. I married an artist, as did
his second wife, I'm sure, but by the time I
met him, he had pretty much given up on being
part of the art world in Manhattan, and almost his
entire life was really taken up with being this leader
(07:47):
in a movement called alien abduction. It was a very
overwhelming lifestyle. It was UFOs seven. Carol moved from boss
In down to New York In where Hopkins was the
center of gravity for a group of people who identified
themselves as abductees. So I got my own camera and
(08:14):
started shooting yet one more documentary, but this one would
be no strings attached, no federal funding, no state funding,
no city funding. Funded out of my back pocket. That
gave me a great deal of freedom. If Betty Hill
had talked to Bud Hopkins, she would have found that
(08:35):
the aliens that he believed were kidnapping and experimenting on
people were far different from the leader with whom she
carried on a pleasant and occasionally funny conversation. They didn't
resemble Quasga and jew hop either, Bud's work expanded the
original narrative, and he didn't stay relatively close to the
(08:58):
pattern for the Hill case Betty and Barney Hill. But
what his writing added to it was that nobody was
safe anywhere, that aliens could enter your bedroom at night,
coming straight through the walls, coming through the windows. I mean,
(09:19):
his view of alien beings in the world was that
they were godlike, really ordinary physics did not prohibit them
from doing whatever they wanted to do to take advantage
of people's helplessness. And the abductees were used in Budd's
(09:41):
thoughts in the same way that Lee observed, you know,
wolves 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, what's called old an implant these days. You know,
(10:02):
many of his people came up with those implants, partly
to 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. Figure out what that
little thing of race sums his nose as yet, No,
(10:26):
and I'm not losing any sleep over it good. I
bond was very believable. 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 or recovered memories.
(10:50):
He didn't know except to mouth in 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. As I became more and more part
(11:13):
of the U of 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
of testimony and leading witnesses. How did this gap in
(11:38):
knowledge play out in their research? After the break, strange
arrivals will return in a moment. Carol Rainey expresses concern
(12:05):
that Bud Hopkins and David Jacob's lack knowledge that should
have informed their work with hypnotically recovered memories. This is
especially concerning because we know that hypnosis subjects have an
increased vulnerability to suggestion. In Hopkins cases, the way in
which quote unquote, memories were created and manipulated. Is easy
(12:28):
to identify. Hopkins could be acting in good faith, but
his subjects testimony was tainted. First of all, Peter Robbins
would be there as his assistant and would read for
the letters. Is how things came in originally, and Peter
would read through them and he'd write abductee on the front,
(12:51):
or he'd write probable abductee on the front, and then
that person would be mailed a kit of information about
the abduction phenomena and then told in the kit to
avoid reading the literature in the field, so the new
(13:11):
possible abductive would be sent as kit of material. And
I think it varied sometimes, but it was information about,
you know, the abduction phenomena. And also the people who
were calling Bud knew enough about the field to call
a top researcher in the field. They had also often
(13:31):
read one, two or three of his books previously, and
they had watched movies, they watched documentaries. He had been
in I mean, he was appearing on the Phil Donahue's show,
on the Oprah Winfrey Show, on Canadian talk shows. He
was all over. So by the time they show up
(13:54):
at hopkins house for a hypnosis session. They've already been
exposed to his work on alien abductions. 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 new cases
(14:16):
that he was working on. The queue that sends to
the person on the other end of the phone is
that if you want the attention of his television personality,
you might do well consciously or unconsciously to have your
own memories that were similar to the ones he was
interested in. And that is where the tailoring of tales began,
(14:41):
long before he even met the people. These people would
come to Bud in Carol's house to undergo regression hypnosis.
Bud would sometimes talk to the visitor, telling him or
her about some of his cases or things that he
was interested in, and then Bud would put them under hypnosis.
(15:04):
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 hypnosis session. All those sessions, those
contacts is what people on the outside never knew about.
(15:24):
Here's Bud Hopkins conducting a hypnosis session with an alleged abductee.
This is from a recording of a conference where he
presented this tape as part of a lecture. Very see
what's you can seeing? What you're feeling? Long time ago?
(15:47):
Me table, father or something. It's around, it's around the world.
Them standing beside me. Mh, I'm here talking to me.
(16:09):
I don't I hear them. They're telling me, I'm all right,
m you can't do it? Fine? They yeah, I want something.
(16:30):
Mm hmmm. I don't know what you want. I've seen
you before. Okay, all right, all right, just tell me
(16:57):
very cool. What's happening, Kathy? You can do it? Finds
a long time ago. We're just remembering this. You what's happening?
It's this has happened to me before. Okay. H The
(17:24):
table is to moving my legs. That's right, that's right.
It's just the same. What's happened to your lig as
you mentioned there arre youre apart. It's like having guyan man.
(17:51):
It's okay, it's the same. I've had this before. Ye
I'm Cathy. I'm going to touch your shoulders me. I's
going to feel very calm, and when I count to three,
you feel the warmth in my hand one, two, three,
(18:12):
and now my hands, and you should live very safe,
much better, much better. Jacobs also prepped his subjects, and
his methods were often less subtle. Here he is giving
a lecture talking about the consistency of stories he's heard
during hypnotic regressions, but also letting slip a clue as
(18:34):
to why these stories might be so similar. They may
not know if they may be. It's not aware of
it at all, But we pretty much know. We know
the sequence of advances may happen the wround world. It
almost doesn't matter. In other words, we know when they say,
hey DC, we know the coming and they're not gonna
like the you know, and I have to prepare them.
(18:56):
And this uh about seven city of many compressions US
and we see a certain routine here. Obviously this is
a strange statement to be coming from a person supposedly
engaged in research. Again, he could have the best of intentions,
(19:22):
but as we have seen in earlier episodes, hypnosis subject
is particularly vulnerable to suggestion, and of course the way
they lead to witnesses is just pathetic. I think Jacobs
wanted the worst. People have pointed this out from going
over these transcripts and saying, you know, basically he's telling
her what to what he wants to hear. He's you know,
(19:44):
he's telegraphing. It rouses there and she just tells him
what he wants to hear. In Carol Rainey wrote a
lengthy article titled Priests of High Strangeness to expose what
she felt like, we're unsigh scientific and unethical practices among Hopkins, Jacobs,
and mac When I wrote the article, many of the
(20:10):
old time UFO research was contacted me privately to thank
me for putting that out there. He Stan was one
of them, and they said, we knew there was something
off in this research that but and Jacobs were putting out,
but we didn't know what it was. We only knew
(20:33):
what he told us about how he researched cases. When
she refers to stand, she's talking about Stanton Friedman, who
we heard from earlier in this series, mainly about Marjorie
Fish and the Star Map. I didn't bring up Hopkins
in our interview, but when he was talking about the
(20:53):
qualifications of Dr. Benjamin Simon as a hypnotist, Friedman used
Hopkins as an example of someone who did not meet
the same standard. We're not talking about some amateur and look.
I like Bud Hopkins, so I knew him. I've been
in his home. Great guy, But Budd was an artist,
not a professional psychiatrist or psychologist or justst with training
(21:18):
and dealing with traumatic experiences, you get a fine job.
I'm not not conuted, but on any comparison of skills
brought to the problem, there's no question Dr Simon rules
the roost. The other method that Hopkins used with the
supposed abductees with support group meetings. Hopkins would host meetings
(21:40):
with a number of abductees and conduct a kind of
group therapy session revolving around their abduction experiences, but other
issues from their past as well. And what I began
to understand from attending those meetings is that if you
were knew to the field, you could pick up everything
(22:03):
you needed to know about being a standard abductee just
by going to those support meetings 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.
(22:25):
I did call him on this in terms of support
group meanings. I said, 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 instead
of you leading it. And my objection to his leading
(22:48):
the discussion was that he would tell people about brand
new cases and things he was most interested in pursuing.
Carol describes the participant as bright, sensitive, and artistically driven,
while there were occasionally more eccentric people on the margins.
(23:09):
She says of the main group that she did not
think they were crazy, not once. They were people to
whom something was happening, and that fascinated me, as still
should fascinate researchers if it's you know, psychosmatic, if the
narrative is being developed entirely inside individuals. And then they
(23:34):
meet in some sort of a place like a support group,
and they began to share things they've picked up from
television series which were everywhere, or from movies, from reading
buds books. They came with a hell of a lot
of knowledge about what other people were saying about their experiences.
(23:59):
They were not blank slates. They came in knowing the material.
And when you're working with that psychologically, research shows there's
a great deal of spread of terms and means and
thoughts and patterns between the researcher himself and the people
(24:23):
who have come to him for help, and between each other.
They would pass ideas back and forth. So to me,
it was fairly easy to see how without really careful,
careful protocols, and without being peer reviewed, such a researcher
(24:43):
intentionally or totally unintentionally could be creating the story of
what had happened to all of these people. University of California,
Irvine professor Elizabeth Loftis. We heard from her earlier in
the series. One of my friend colleagues once said, this
(25:04):
group therapy it's a little like poker, where you say,
I'm going to match your memory and raise you one
with my even more lurid and bizarre and upsetting memory.
And that's a way in which this group therapy situation
helps to create an environment where people are trying to
(25:26):
come up with ever more interesting and exotic and dramatic
stories because that's what will get attention. And in this case,
what would get Hopkins attention would be stories that would
indicate abduction. What Bud called evidence would be people sending
(25:48):
him snapshots of mark on their body, whether it was
a scar or bruise or whatever. Here's Hopkins from the
same lecture as before, or this time showing images of
these physical marks. Now very quickly some of the scars.
These are very characteristic. And this is the scoop mark
(26:10):
rather than the straight line cut. This is what we
have on the front of Cathy Davis leg I'll show
you might need a tiny bit of focus on this.
Now this uh looks as if the tiny little scoop
element came in there and took took away flesh. We
don't know what this is for, except that obviously would
give you a good chance of knowing a lot about
(26:30):
that individual's makeup if you had the question the mark is.
It's hard to say, and from memory, I would say
it's probably about three eighths of an inch law Carol
and John mac realized that as much as they wanted
to discover physical evidence of these abductions, these photos fell
(26:51):
short of that mark. John knew that those would not
be taken well as evidence. You know, it's not something
you gather first person. There's no guard on the chain
of custody, none of that. We often talk about the
echo chamber in the context of politics, where if everyone
(27:14):
you here expresses the same opinions, you begin to uncritically
accept them. But it happens outside politics as well, and
something like this occurred in the small, intense abduction community,
where the incredible might barely provoke a raised eyebrow. At
some point. I remember thinking when I was shooting with Bud.
(27:37):
We were on Cape Cod and a man I didn't
know had called in and was talking to him, And
I walked through the room and 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 up did That's how
(28:00):
it happens. And when that happens to you, you know
you need to put your guard up even more. This
effect could be especially strong on the people at the
center of the work, Hopkins and Jacobs, whose observations and
theories were mutually confirming that Jacobs would rent a house
(28:23):
on the Keep, a few houses down from our house
in wealth Lee, and over dinner one night, Dave Jacobs
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. I kind of did a double take,
(28:43):
and I said, the only two people on the planet,
Isn't it kind of a dangerous way to think about
something that you don't really know for sure? These dangers
became realized as Hopkins, Jacobs, and Max rees Church led
to theories of escalating strangeness. They seem to need genetic
(29:06):
material that they're taking sperm over, and we think we
are seeing this twenty four hours a day next to
seven days a week. But we see them as well
with twenty people, fifty people, hundreds of people, five hundred
tables in a room with people on them, you assembly
(29:27):
line fashion. We know they're doing these reproductive experiments in
attempt at hybridization and so forth. Then Hopkins found the
perfect case that ultimately proved the step too far next
time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of
(29:54):
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and
produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers
Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was
portrayed by Gina Rickike Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.
(30:14):
Special thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at
the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C
h 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,
(30:37):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron manky Well. Starting about in the
the ninety one UM actually starting the ninety seven a century,
we began here about the abduction the auction corona started
(00:25):
out by slowly We're basic Arney and Betty Hill sixty
one and then in Tonio b s Rows cases Brazilways
having the seven weeks and there about that sis Well.
And the interesting thing about the cases that we resually
were where what was that? They were a very home
party Cowey, They were rare, they were odd, they were strange.
(00:46):
At the same time the people who were having the
experiences seemed to be having We couldn't really tell whether
there was any thing over What was it about Farney
and Betty Hill, you know that caused and abductions? Who
happened to them? Well, the way we looked at it
now days was there was only one reason they were
in the wrong place at the wrong him. I went
(01:06):
else one of the reasons could they're possibly be? And
time only that. But Barney and Betty he said things
that let us two things. And the experiments model, as
to say, and they had skins Treby tame the body
there then made a sass amount of here. They asked
(01:26):
Party why his steeds came out? Asked Betty why Party
seeking out of hers, didn't they They put a merely
into Betty's Mabel and said they were doing pregnancy test. Well,
all of this was the model for more experiments audience.
This was a phasic situation where you have a model,
(01:48):
there's one. Yeah. The publication of John Fuller's A Journey
Interrupted began a decades long series of ever more incredible
old tales of alien abduction. Using the Hill story as
a foundation, Each successive abduction account had to be more
(02:09):
extraordinary than the last. Public interest in alien abduction reached
its height in the nine nineties, partly because of the
hit TV show The X Files, which had an ongoing
abduction subplot. Another reason was the success of three men
who pushed the alien abduction narrative to its limit in
(02:31):
a number of best selling books I'm Toby Ball and
This Is Strange Arrivals Episode nine, The Troika. In the
(02:56):
twenty years following the Hill experience, there was a clear
understanding of the type of situation in which a person
could be abducted. They would be driving in lonely isolated
places at night, a UFO would appear and the abduction
would follow. But this conception changed and the study of
(03:16):
abductions became something entirely different. UFO researcher Robert Schaeffer, starting
with Bud Hopkins in the eighties, you didn't have to
go anywhere to be abducted by aliens. Aliens would come
right into your bedroom and grab you, drag you up
to the saucer, and then bring you back whenever they
were done with you. You didn't have to drive out
(03:38):
somewhere late at night and see a lightning us at
You're just sitting there, minding your own business, and then
all of a sudden, the aliens come the Once you've
accept that this could happen, you've opened the door to
every kind of fantasy and imagination possible. Bud Hopkins was
a well known abstract expressionist artist who became a leading
researcher into the alien abduction phenomen man On he published
(04:02):
his first book on the subject, Missing Time, a documented
study of UFO abductions. Hopkins made the conceptual leap that
abductions could happen any time, in anywhere. An associate professor
of history at Temple University named David Jacobs seized upon
(04:23):
this idea and began his own research. We heard him
giving a lecture at the opening of this episode. David
Jacobs got into the UFO business quite a bit earlier.
He wrote The History of UFO Belief in the United
States back in the seventies. He state at this, and
then he too picked up the idea from Hopkins and
(04:44):
whoever else that these types of bedroom abductions were taking place.
After his nine book, The UFO Controversy in America, Jacobs
didn't publish again for seventeen years. His next book, The Threat,
Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda, was specifically about abductions and
(05:07):
featured a foreword by the third major figure in this
era of abduction research, one who brought with him impeccable
academic credentials. Done back was a whole was very important guy,
and he was not just a PhD. It was a
professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Mac was very,
(05:28):
very talented, very prominent guy. But somehow he got bit
by this book too and decided it was real. So
these three guys pop against Jacobs and Mac sometimes referred
to them, those Ditroitka. The Troika was a type of
temporary government that occurred four times in the history of
the Soviet Union, where three leaders sat atop the government
(05:50):
without any of them able to exert power alone. These
guys thought that they were very scientific, and I guess
it's of credentials and stuff like that. They kind of work.
In Hopkins published Intruders, which laid out the case that
humans were being abducted and used by aliens for genetic research.
(06:16):
In he met a Boston based documentary filmmaker named Carol
Rainey in they were married. I'm Carol Rainey and I
was married for ten years to Bud Hopkins, abstract expressionist
painter and UFO researcher, and I came from a background
(06:39):
uh spending twenty years making films for epidemiologists in the
Boston area. 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 with the major metal
(07:00):
institutions like New York Presbyterian, I learned a lot about
how scientists think about phenomena in the natural world and
how they go about gaining real knowledge in the real
world from working with scientists, Carol found a very different
world surrounding Hopkins, who was doing UFO research but was
(07:24):
by training an artist. I married an artist, as did
his second wife, I'm sure, but by the time I
met him, he had pretty much given up on being
part of the art world in Manhattan, and almost his
entire life was really taken up with being this leader
(07:47):
in a movement called alien abduction. It was a very
overwhelming lifestyle. It was UFOs seven. Carol moved from boss
In down to New York In where Hopkins was the
center of gravity for a group of people who identified
themselves as abductees. So I got my own camera and
(08:14):
started shooting yet one more documentary, but this one would
be no strings attached, no federal funding, no state funding,
no city funding. Funded out of my back pocket. That
gave me a great deal of freedom. If Betty Hill
had talked to Bud Hopkins, she would have found that
(08:35):
the aliens that he believed were kidnapping and experimenting on
people were far different from the leader with whom she
carried on a pleasant and occasionally funny conversation. They didn't
resemble Quasga and jew hop either, Bud's work expanded the
original narrative, and he didn't stay relatively close to the
(08:58):
pattern for the Hill case Betty and Barney Hill. But
what his writing added to it was that nobody was
safe anywhere, that aliens could enter your bedroom at night,
coming straight through the walls, coming through the windows. I mean,
(09:19):
his view of alien beings in the world was that
they were godlike, really ordinary physics did not prohibit them
from doing whatever they wanted to do to take advantage
of people's helplessness. And the abductees were used in Budd's
(09:41):
thoughts in the same way that Lee observed, you know,
wolves 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, what's called old an implant these days. You know,
(10:02):
many of his people came up with those implants, partly
to 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. Figure out what that
little thing of race sums his nose as yet, No,
(10:26):
and I'm not losing any sleep over it good. I
bond was very believable. 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 or recovered memories.
(10:50):
He didn't know except to mouth in 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. As I became more and more part
(11:13):
of the U of 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
of testimony and leading witnesses. How did this gap in
(11:38):
knowledge play out in their research? After the break, strange
arrivals will return in a moment. Carol Rainey expresses concern
(12:05):
that Bud Hopkins and David Jacob's lack knowledge that should
have informed their work with hypnotically recovered memories. This is
especially concerning because we know that hypnosis subjects have an
increased vulnerability to suggestion. In Hopkins cases, the way in
which quote unquote, memories were created and manipulated. Is easy
(12:28):
to identify. Hopkins could be acting in good faith, but
his subjects testimony was tainted. First of all, Peter Robbins
would be there as his assistant and would read for
the letters. Is how things came in originally, and Peter
would read through them and he'd write abductee on the front,
(12:51):
or he'd write probable abductee on the front, and then
that person would be mailed a kit of information about
the abduction phenomena and then told in the kit to
avoid reading the literature in the field, so the new
(13:11):
possible abductive would be sent as kit of material. And
I think it varied sometimes, but it was information about,
you know, the abduction phenomena. And also the people who
were calling Bud knew enough about the field to call
a top researcher in the field. They had also often
(13:31):
read one, two or three of his books previously, and
they had watched movies, they watched documentaries. He had been
in I mean, he was appearing on the Phil Donahue's show,
on the Oprah Winfrey Show, on Canadian talk shows. He
was all over. So by the time they show up
(13:54):
at hopkins house for a hypnosis session. They've already been
exposed to his work on alien abductions. 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 new cases
(14:16):
that he was working on. The queue that sends to
the person on the other end of the phone is
that if you want the attention of his television personality,
you might do well consciously or unconsciously to have your
own memories that were similar to the ones he was
interested in. And that is where the tailoring of tales began,
(14:41):
long before he even met the people. These people would
come to Bud in Carol's house to undergo regression hypnosis.
Bud would sometimes talk to the visitor, telling him or
her about some of his cases or things that he
was interested in, and then Bud would put them under hypnosis.
(15:04):
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 hypnosis session. All those sessions, those
contacts is what people on the outside never knew about.
(15:24):
Here's Bud Hopkins conducting a hypnosis session with an alleged abductee.
This is from a recording of a conference where he
presented this tape as part of a lecture. Very see
what's you can seeing? What you're feeling? Long time ago?
(15:47):
Me table, father or something. It's around, it's around the world.
Them standing beside me. Mh, I'm here talking to me.
(16:09):
I don't I hear them. They're telling me, I'm all right,
m you can't do it? Fine? They yeah, I want something.
(16:30):
Mm hmmm. I don't know what you want. I've seen
you before. Okay, all right, all right, just tell me
(16:57):
very cool. What's happening, Kathy? You can do it? Finds
a long time ago. We're just remembering this. You what's happening?
It's this has happened to me before. Okay. H The
(17:24):
table is to moving my legs. That's right, that's right.
It's just the same. What's happened to your lig as
you mentioned there arre youre apart. It's like having guyan man.
(17:51):
It's okay, it's the same. I've had this before. Ye
I'm Cathy. I'm going to touch your shoulders me. I's
going to feel very calm, and when I count to three,
you feel the warmth in my hand one, two, three,
(18:12):
and now my hands, and you should live very safe,
much better, much better. Jacobs also prepped his subjects, and
his methods were often less subtle. Here he is giving
a lecture talking about the consistency of stories he's heard
during hypnotic regressions, but also letting slip a clue as
(18:34):
to why these stories might be so similar. They may
not know if they may be. It's not aware of
it at all, But we pretty much know. We know
the sequence of advances may happen the wround world. It
almost doesn't matter. In other words, we know when they say,
hey DC, we know the coming and they're not gonna
like the you know, and I have to prepare them.
(18:56):
And this uh about seven city of many compressions US
and we see a certain routine here. Obviously this is
a strange statement to be coming from a person supposedly
engaged in research. Again, he could have the best of intentions,
(19:22):
but as we have seen in earlier episodes, hypnosis subject
is particularly vulnerable to suggestion, and of course the way
they lead to witnesses is just pathetic. I think Jacobs
wanted the worst. People have pointed this out from going
over these transcripts and saying, you know, basically he's telling
her what to what he wants to hear. He's you know,
(19:44):
he's telegraphing. It rouses there and she just tells him
what he wants to hear. In Carol Rainey wrote a
lengthy article titled Priests of High Strangeness to expose what
she felt like, we're unsigh scientific and unethical practices among Hopkins, Jacobs,
and mac When I wrote the article, many of the
(20:10):
old time UFO research was contacted me privately to thank
me for putting that out there. He Stan was one
of them, and they said, we knew there was something
off in this research that but and Jacobs were putting out,
but we didn't know what it was. We only knew
(20:33):
what he told us about how he researched cases. When
she refers to stand, she's talking about Stanton Friedman, who
we heard from earlier in this series, mainly about Marjorie
Fish and the Star Map. I didn't bring up Hopkins
in our interview, but when he was talking about the
(20:53):
qualifications of Dr. Benjamin Simon as a hypnotist, Friedman used
Hopkins as an example of someone who did not meet
the same standard. We're not talking about some amateur and look.
I like Bud Hopkins, so I knew him. I've been
in his home. Great guy, But Budd was an artist,
not a professional psychiatrist or psychologist or justst with training
(21:18):
and dealing with traumatic experiences, you get a fine job.
I'm not not conuted, but on any comparison of skills
brought to the problem, there's no question Dr Simon rules
the roost. The other method that Hopkins used with the
supposed abductees with support group meetings. Hopkins would host meetings
(21:40):
with a number of abductees and conduct a kind of
group therapy session revolving around their abduction experiences, but other
issues from their past as well. And what I began
to understand from attending those meetings is that if you
were knew to the field, you could pick up everything
(22:03):
you needed to know about being a standard abductee just
by going to those support meetings 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.
(22:25):
I did call him on this in terms of support
group meanings. I said, 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 instead
of you leading it. And my objection to his leading
(22:48):
the discussion was that he would tell people about brand
new cases and things he was most interested in pursuing.
Carol describes the participant as bright, sensitive, and artistically driven,
while there were occasionally more eccentric people on the margins.
(23:09):
She says of the main group that she did not
think they were crazy, not once. They were people to
whom something was happening, and that fascinated me, as still
should fascinate researchers if it's you know, psychosmatic, if the
narrative is being developed entirely inside individuals. And then they
(23:34):
meet in some sort of a place like a support group,
and they began to share things they've picked up from
television series which were everywhere, or from movies, from reading
buds books. They came with a hell of a lot
of knowledge about what other people were saying about their experiences.
(23:59):
They were not blank slates. They came in knowing the material.
And when you're working with that psychologically, research shows there's
a great deal of spread of terms and means and
thoughts and patterns between the researcher himself and the people
(24:23):
who have come to him for help, and between each other.
They would pass ideas back and forth. So to me,
it was fairly easy to see how without really careful,
careful protocols, and without being peer reviewed, such a researcher
(24:43):
intentionally or totally unintentionally could be creating the story of
what had happened to all of these people. University of California,
Irvine professor Elizabeth Loftis. We heard from her earlier in
the series. One of my friend colleagues once said, this
(25:04):
group therapy it's a little like poker, where you say,
I'm going to match your memory and raise you one
with my even more lurid and bizarre and upsetting memory.
And that's a way in which this group therapy situation
helps to create an environment where people are trying to
(25:26):
come up with ever more interesting and exotic and dramatic
stories because that's what will get attention. And in this case,
what would get Hopkins attention would be stories that would
indicate abduction. What Bud called evidence would be people sending
(25:48):
him snapshots of mark on their body, whether it was
a scar or bruise or whatever. Here's Hopkins from the
same lecture as before, or this time showing images of
these physical marks. Now very quickly some of the scars.
These are very characteristic. And this is the scoop mark
(26:10):
rather than the straight line cut. This is what we
have on the front of Cathy Davis leg I'll show
you might need a tiny bit of focus on this.
Now this uh looks as if the tiny little scoop
element came in there and took took away flesh. We
don't know what this is for, except that obviously would
give you a good chance of knowing a lot about
(26:30):
that individual's makeup if you had the question the mark is.
It's hard to say, and from memory, I would say
it's probably about three eighths of an inch law Carol
and John mac realized that as much as they wanted
to discover physical evidence of these abductions, these photos fell
(26:51):
short of that mark. John knew that those would not
be taken well as evidence. You know, it's not something
you gather first person. There's no guard on the chain
of custody, none of that. We often talk about the
echo chamber in the context of politics, where if everyone
(27:14):
you here expresses the same opinions, you begin to uncritically
accept them. But it happens outside politics as well, and
something like this occurred in the small, intense abduction community,
where the incredible might barely provoke a raised eyebrow. At
some point. I remember thinking when I was shooting with Bud.
(27:37):
We were on Cape Cod and a man I didn't
know had called in and was talking to him, And
I walked through the room and 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 up did That's how
(28:00):
it happens. And when that happens to you, you know
you need to put your guard up even more. This
effect could be especially strong on the people at the
center of the work, Hopkins and Jacobs, whose observations and
theories were mutually confirming that Jacobs would rent a house
(28:23):
on the Keep, a few houses down from our house
in wealth Lee, and over dinner one night, Dave Jacobs
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. I kind of did a double take,
(28:43):
and I said, the only two people on the planet,
Isn't it kind of a dangerous way to think about
something that you don't really know for sure? These dangers
became realized as Hopkins, Jacobs, and Max rees Church led
to theories of escalating strangeness. They seem to need genetic
(29:06):
material that they're taking sperm over, and we think we
are seeing this twenty four hours a day next to
seven days a week. But we see them as well
with twenty people, fifty people, hundreds of people, five hundred
tables in a room with people on them, you assembly
(29:27):
line fashion. We know they're doing these reproductive experiments in
attempt at hybridization and so forth. Then Hopkins found the
perfect case that ultimately proved the step too far next
time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of
(29:54):
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and
produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers
Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was
portrayed by Gina Rickike Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.
(30:14):
Special thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at
the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C
h 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,
(30:37):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Good Hang with Amy Poehler
Come hang with Amy Poehler. Each week on her podcast, she'll welcome celebrities and fun people to her studio. They'll share stories about their careers, mutual friends, shared enthusiasms, and most importantly, what's been making them laugh. This podcast is not about trying to make you better or giving advice. Amy just wants to have a good time.