Project Blue Book Episode 9 - The Hill Abduction (Almost)

I suppose the only thing to say about this latest episode is that it was really annoying. It was based, loosely, on the Hill abduction in 1961. Yes, we had the black man abducted, but his wife was also black and not abducted. Given the time frame of the episode, that is sometime in the late 1940s or the early 1950s, with laws still forbidding interracial marriages in some states, this might be a nod to keeping the time frame accurate… except they have violated that rule a number of times.

Anyway, the black man was abducted by alien creatures and the terms abducted and aliens were bandied about with no thought that such terminology was certainly not in use in the time frame of the story. He had called the Air Force to ask for help, but Quinn, it seems,

Captain Quinn

had blown him off. In the early 1950s this case would certainly have been ignored given the incredible nature of it.

The man finally bursts into the Blue Book office where Quinn and Hynek are having an argument about Hynek’s resignation. Hynek wants to take his research files while Quinn, in civilian clothes, tells him the files belong to the Air Force. Before they can resolve this dilemma, the man, armed with a .45, bursts in and demands they listen to him.

Meanwhile, the Soviet spies are attempting to compromise the Hynek’s wife so that Hynek will give them information about his investigations, though, given the time frame, I’m not sure what the agents expected. The female spy convinces Mimi to get drunk so that they can take compromising photographs of her.

We do get to learn a little about the abduction, as Hynek interviews the guy. He has a paper with dots all over it and in what can only be described as an impossible deduction, Hynek recognizes the star field, but says that it’s reversed, as if looking at it from a point in space on the opposite side from that we see on Earth… Ah, an oblique reference to the Betty Hill star map.

I won’t say anything about the military response to the locked office and the rifle shot through the window. Or the fist fight between Hynek and Quinn. Really, Hynek? In a fist fight? I don’t think so.

So, let’s talk about the Hill abduction case. The Hill abduction took place in 1961, but the Air Force really didn’t take notice of it then. Betty Hill, rather than contacting the Air Force, wrote to

Donald Keyhoe

Donald Keyhoe at NICAP, which, given the Air Force attitude at the time, and Keyhoe’s prominence in the UFO field, makes sense… Unfortunately, it also sort of contaminates the case.

The only case that I can find in the Blue Book files that references the Hill sighting is from Lincoln, New Hampshire on September 20, 1961. The Blue Book index shows the radar sighting as insufficient data and the accompanying visual sighting as insufficient data, meaning there is no solution, but that the evidence isn’t all that strong either. Neither of these have anything to do with the Hill abduction.

The visual sighting was of a cigar-shaped object that was described as a band of light. The witnesses said that wings seemed to appear on the main body. They were “V” shaped with red lights on the ends. It would change directions abruptly and disappeared to the north.

On the project card, under “comments,” it was noted that the weather might be a factor in both the visual and radar sightings. It was reported that a strong inversion layer covered the area. They thought that an advertising search light playing off the clouds might be the cause of the visual sighting, but that seems unlikely. The Air Force concluded that there was no evidence that the objects were caused by anything other than natural phenomena, though they didn’t really identify any of those phenomena.

Other than weather records, the file contained a letter from Colonel Eric deJonckheere (who would appear in the Zamora case in 1964) which referenced the Hill abduction. He noted that Barney Hill had been investigated by officers from Pease Air Force Base and the case is carried as insufficient. This, I think, is a reference to the Lincoln, New Hampshire, case because deJonckheere’s letter is in that file.

Later in the file, there are parts of a magazine article, written by John Fuller, that chronicles some of the Hill abduction. The article is incomplete.

The points of interest here are the suggestion that the Hill abduction was investigated by officers from Pease, but I found nothing in the Blue Book file to confirm this other than deJonckheere’s letter.

As usual, he mentioned inconsistencies in the sighting report and that Jupiter seemed to be visible near the location of the sighting. He wrote that the sighting lasted about an hour and that Jupiter was in the approximate location of the craft and set about the time the object disappeared. He wrote the same thing that appeared on the project card which is that there was no evidence that the sighting was due to anything other than natural causes.

The one thing I do want to talk about is the star map that Betty Hill seemed to remember in a dream. It had a number of random points with lines connecting some of them. These have been called “trade routes,” which indicates alien interest in those specific points.

I have discussed this in past blogs which can be read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/09/hill-star-map-badly-out-of-date.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-hillfish-star-map-revisited.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/12/betty-hills-star-map.htm

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/11/alien-marjorie-fish-and-zeta-ii-reticuli.html

and finally, here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/04/betty-hill-star-map-revisited-again.html

If you don’t wish to wade through all that, then let me reduce it without all the supporting information. Marjorie Fish created a number of 3D models of our section of the galaxy so that she might search for a pattern in the stars that matched that on Hill’s star map. She used the best information available to her, which has been revised over the years so that the distances to some of the stars are farther away and others are closer. She did not use any red dwarf stars in her models because there were too many of then and there wouldn’t be anything of interest circling them. If the aliens traveled to one, they should travel to them all. Or so she concluded.

This is not to mention that there are four other interpretations of the star map out there, including one that suggests the map represented not stars but planets in our own solar system. The Zeta I, Zeta II Reticuli interpretation seems to have gained the greatest popularity, but given the flaws in the Fish models, I believe that this should be revisited using computers rather than 3D models.

The point here is that one of the best bits of evidence for the reality of the Hill abduction is somewhat flawed (and no, this isn’t the only point that argues against a real event), we should be careful in our acceptance of this particular abduction.

On a person note, when I was investigating the abduction of Pat Roach, I was working with Dr. James Harder. He was conducting the hypnotic regression sessions. But he told me that he wanted to find something that would validate the Hill abduction. He wanted another case that mirrored the Hills because as second report, from an unrelated abduction, would strengthen the Hill case. What I saw during those sessions, and what I have learned about hypnosis, suggested that Harder contaminated the Roach abduction by his techniques. I firmly believe, given the research that I have done personally including my interviews with the principals, is that Roach experienced an episode of sleep paralysis… Harder managed to introduce elements of the Hill abduction into those hypnotic regression sessions. I don’t believe he realized what he was doing at the time.

All this was laid out in the book, The Abduction Enigma, which was published more than twenty years ago.

I mention these things as a way of, well, discussing the abduction enigma and some of the problems with the research. I also mention it to suggest there are terrestrial explanations for some of the abduction reports.

I will note that the writers of the Project Blue Book show seem to have done their research. They interject elements from the real cases into the plots, even if those points are subtlety made. Little things that many wouldn’t notice, such as the racial identity of the man who said he was abducted. Or the star map reference which here was even more obscure.

However, they seem to be drifting more into the realm of science fiction (though I don’t really object to that) and away from the reality of what can be found in the Blue Book files. Next week they are going to be tackling the Washington Nationals and if the previews are any indication, they’re going to move from intercepts without real conflict into intercepts in which the fighters fire on the “lights.” It’ll be interesting to see where they go with that.

Why I'm Beginning to Dislike the UFO Community - Part Two

Last night, while flipping around the cable because there didn’t seem to be much of interest on, I came across another UFO show. Only a small part was devoted to abductions, and frankly, I didn’t see much of that either. I mention this because we were treated to the same lame arguments supporting the idea that some people have been abducted by alien creates. What was annoying was that the arguments being made were the same ones being made two decades ago when Bill Cone, Russ Estes and I wrote The Abduction Enigma. Research into abductions has not changed since then and the evidence supporting the idea of alien abduction have not changed either. This whole area has stagnated so that no progress is made but those same arguments, refuted repeatedly, are still trotted out.

For example, we were told, again, that this was a club that no one wants to join… except, that simply is not true. There are people clamoring to join the club because it provides them with a sense of identity. They meet others who share an interest, they now can go on outings, and they have regular meetings. While they complain about the horror of the abduction, they have found a group that takes them for who they are and are delighted to find the support.

We are told that sleep paralysis is not the answer because some of those claiming abduction were awake when abducted… but David Jacobs, outlining the typical abduction, (Chapter 3, page 49, Secret Life) is describing an episode of sleep paralysis. But no one is suggesting that all claims of alien abduction are the result of sleep paralysis, merely than many of the initial experiences are an episode of sleep paralysis later conflated by hypnotic regression.

The abduction researchers all say that they are not asking leading questions but are allowing the story to take its natural course. An examination of the transcripts as published in various books, shown in various documentaries, and recounted in various lectures proves that such is not the case. I discussed this and these other

points at length on this blog.

For those who attempt to look at these things objectively, there is very little real evidence that abductions are taking place. The alleged implants provide nothing in the way of evidence, and many of them seem to be nothing more than terrestrial objects that have been embedded under the skin in years passed. Nothing has been recovered that suggests alien technology. Some are just lumps of glass, bits of metal, or even just tiny pebbles.

For those interested in exploring all of this in more depth, take a look at The Abduction Enigma. Or take a look at these posts:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Budd+Hopkins

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/09/x-zone-broadcast-network-carol-rainey.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/08/abduction-enigma.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/alien-abduction-and-leading-witness.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/04/alien-abduction-in-pop-culture.html

This all, I believe, provides a comprehensive examination of what I, as well as others including Bill Cone and Russ Estes, have learned about alien abduction. But remember this… I was one of the very first UFO researchers to report on alien abductions, and Budd Hopkins, in one of his books cites a case that I had investigated. All this suggests that I have been at this for a very long time and these articles and The Abduction Enigma is a result of that work.

And this latest “examination” of alien abduction on television is simply another example of so few learning the lessons of the past. It’s just another reason to dislike the stagnation of UFO research because we do not advance our knowledge.

Creating Memories

This one, I’m afraid, is for the skeptics in the crowd. It deals with memory, how it is formed, how it is recalled, and what it means to those of us who conduct investigations of long-ago events. The problem is that most of what we believe about memory is about to be radically altered, and if we pay attention to the on-going research into memory, it can only lead to better information gathered about long-ago events.

First, let me say that I have known for a long time that memory is often hazy and sometimes radically altered in the mere process of remembering. In The Abduction Enigma we looked at the phenomenon of “flash bulb” memory, that is, those memories formed around some sort of important event. The old standby was “where were you when you learned the president had been assassinated?” The thought was that this sort of a memory was “burned” into the brain with greater intensity than the mundane memories of day-to-day life and would be recalled with much better accuracy.

But, according to Professor Ulric Neisser, who was at Emory University in January 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, this might not be true. He had a rare opportunity to study these flash bulb memories because of the Challenger disaster. The day after the spacecraft blew-up, he presented his first-year students with a short questionnaire that dealt with what they were doing, where they were, and what they remembered. Three years later he gave them the same questionnaire but asked one additional question. He wanted to know how accurate they thought their memories were.

According to the results published by Neisser and his graduate assistant Nicole Harsh, one quarter of the students didn’t have any accurate memories of the event. In one case a student said that he had been with his parents when he learned of the disaster, but the questionnaire revealed he had been at school at the time.

More important was the reaction of the students when confronted with the discrepancies. None disputed the accuracy of the written documents but one student, when shown the questionnaire said, “I still remember everything happening the way I told you. I can’t help it.” She was defending her memories that were clearly an invention of her own mind.

The other 75% of the students remembered some, most, or all of it accurately. Twenty-five percent remembered the disaster accurately, so we can see that not all those involved were wrong and some can accurately recall the “stored” events. It would be interesting to see how they remembered the events today, after so many years have passed but that research has not been attempted.

I say all this as introduction to a new study that suggests memory is even more flawed than Neisser and Harsh suggested. According to an online article in Wired (March 2012) by Jonah Lehrer entitled The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories, and available at:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/

memory erodes very quickly. Lehrer wrote:

Consider the study of flashbulb memories, extremely vivid, detailed recollections. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps surveyed several hundred subjects about their memories of that awful day. The scientists then repeated the surveys, tracking how the stories steadily decayed. At one year out, 37 percent of the details had changed. By 2004 that number was approaching 50 percent. Some changes were innocuous—the stories got tighter and the narratives more coherent—but other adjustments involved a wholesale retrofit. Some people even altered where they were when the towers fell. Over and over, the act of repeating the narrative seemed to corrupt its content. The scientists aren’t sure about this mechanism, and they have yet to analyze the data from the entire 10-year survey. But Phelps expects it to reveal that many details will be make-believe. “What’s most troubling, of course, is that these people have no idea their memories have changed this much,” she says. “The strength of the emotion makes them convinced it’s all true, even when it’s clearly not.”

Lehrer noted that most of what we thought we knew about memory going back to the ancient Greeks is in error. Lehrer wrote, “Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.”

But, according to the research, this is all untrue. In studying memory, and the way it is stored in the brain, it seems that the memory evolves as it is accessed. Each time someone remembers something, it can be subtly altered. New information might be included, old information edited out, and anything that a person has heard about an event can be incorporated in the memory.

An example of this Lydia Sleppy, the teletype operator (well, secretary at a New Mexico radio station KOAT in 1947) who was typing the story of the UFO crash as told to her by Johnny McBoyle. According to an article by Bobbi Ann Slate and Stan Friedman in the Winter 1974 issue of Saga’s UFO Report, “As the woman began typing out the fantastic news item over the teletype to their other two radio stations, a line appeared in the middle of her text, tapped in from somewhere, with the official order: ‘Do not continue this transmission!’”

In The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, the statement was, “Attention Albuquerque: Do not transmit. Repeat do not transmit this message. Stop communication immediately.”

She told me, in a February 1993 interview, “I don’t know how much I had typed but I was typing what John [McBoyle] dictated when the signal came on that this was the FBI and we were to cease transmitting.”

In her signed affidavit of September 1993, she said, “This is the FBI. You will immediately cease all communication.”

While it can be seen here that she clearly added the FBI to her story, what we don’t know is how it was introduced. It could be it was something that she remembered, or it could be that someone, asking about that communication wondered if it might not have been the FBI, and she incorporated the FBI into her memory. Clearly the memory has changed from the time it was first told and reported in 1974, until she talked to me and signed the affidavit nearly twenty years later.

What all this new research says to me is that memories, no more than a year old can be badly flawed. Memories that are accessed time and again, as most of those for the various “Roswell” witnesses have been, could easily be altered as they come into contact with new information.

Jason Kellahin, who was a reporter in 1947, told me, that they had been alerted to the UFO crash story in the morning and drove to the Foster ranch. Brazel, his wife and young son were there. Brazel took Kellahin and Robin Adair, the photographer into the field.

There is nothing in the record, anywhere, to suggest that Brazel was in the field with a balloon to be photographed and when Kellahin was in that field, Brazel was already in Roswell, in the hands of the military. These facts can all be documented by various newspaper accounts and the testimony of nearly everyone else interviewed.

Nearly everything that Kellahin told me was wrong and I know this, not because he was reinforcing the balloon explanation, but because the facts, established through documentation from the time, prove that his story is untrue… but I should be clear on this, I didn’t say he was lying. He seemed to have believed everything he was saying, it was just contradicted by documentation.

And that is the key here. How do we determine what is an accurate picture of the events of July 1947 and what is a combination of confabulation (that is, an unconscious filling in of details of a story) and memory reconsolidation which is the way memory is recreated in the brain?

The answer is use the documentation available to corroborate the stories, use the testimony of others who were involved as a way of testing the veracity of a story, and cross check the information with what the witness has said before.

This new information, from Wired, is a cautionary tale for us. While we know that many of the witnesses were telling the truth, as they remember it, we must be aware that they might not remember it correctly. This complicates the task of putting together an accurate history of the Roswell case, but it also provides us with information that will be helpful in determining what the truth is.

Travis Walton and Me

While at this most recent Roswell Festival (2012), I had a chance to sit down with Travis Walton. I knew that he had been more than a little annoyed with The Abduction Enigma and our reporting on the Walton abduction case. In fact, last year, he wouldn’t even speak to me, not that I really attempted to engage him in conversation. Had I done so then, he might well have talked to me.

This year, however, he was with Steve Pierce who had been one of those on the wood cutting crew and who had witnessed the abduction. Steve had become the center of a small controversy about the case in recent months, and I thought this would be a good time to talk with him about that. In fact, I engaged him in conversation the first opportunity that I had.



Travis Walton at the 2011 Roswell Festival.

I worried, however, that Travis might have seen this and think I was digging for dirt on the abduction. I was more interested in what Steve had to say about Philip Klass and Klass’ attempt to induce Steve to say it was a hoax. With that in mind, I walked over to Travis’ table and sat down in the vacant seat.

I opened the conversation by asking, “Are you still mad at me?”

Travis explained that he thought I (and by I, I mean Russ Estes, Bill Cone and me) had relied too heavily on Klass’ arguments about the case. Travis, I think, didn’t believe we had given him a fair shake.



Russ Estes in Roswell in 1997.

That might well be, and of course, we were writing about the alternative explanations for alien abduction, meaning we were writing from the point of view that alien abduction had terrestrial explanations. We used many of the sources available, but Travis didn’t think we had used his book and explanations enough in our reporting.

I did tell him early on in our conversation that my interest in talking to Steve was to get his side of the Klass story and I wasn’t looking for new information on the abduction. That said, we talked a little more about the case.

Yes, it does seem that the first, failed lie detector test might have been more about the operator’s observations of Travis’ reactions to the questions and not anything the machine showed. It might be that the first operator was injecting his own personal bias into his interpretation of the results. I do know that often the lie detector is used as a way to encourage the guilty to confess.

So, the results of that first test might have been skewed by Travis’ reactions to the events of that week and by the operator’s belief that there is no alien abduction. To him anything to suggest otherwise must be a lie. In other words, he based his opinion, not on the results of the machine but on his opinions about UFOs.

And there was the second, passed lie detector test which I mention here in the interest of fairness. And a third test, some twenty or so years later that was also passed.

Anyway, the riff that I had created in the late 20^th century had been repaired now, early in the 21^st. We shook hands and Travis understood that I was not seeking information about the abduction but about Klass’ communication with Steve Pierce.

We did talk about the efficacy of the polygraph and I suggested that I knew a way to test if a lie told over a long period became so ingrained that the machine would not detect it. He said that such experiments had been done by giving lie detector tests to prisoners in an attempt to gauge the way a lie might become, for the teller, the same as the truth.

I was surprised that Travis could discuss such a thing at such a high level, which is not to say that I was surprised by his intelligence. I was surprised that he had been reading, or had access to, psychological journals. These are usually quite expensive and often not “light” reading, not to mention easily available.

And, I’m not sure the validity of those tests. I think a better experiment would be to use Vietnam “wannabes.” These are guys who tell horrific tales of Vietnam combat to families, friends and to support groups. They clog the VA system taking up spaces for real veterans who have real needs.

But there are records that can be checked and by accessing those records we can compare their tales with the facts. In some cases those men were clerks or cooks and while they did serve in Vietnam, they did not have a combat role. Some of these wannabes had served in the Army but not in Vietnam. And in more than a few extreme cases, they didn’t even serve in the military.

The point is that they have been telling the stories for decades and might have become so comfortable with their tales of combat that their lies won’t register… Or maybe, sitting hooked up to the machine, their body would betray them, revealing their lies. I think this might be a more accurate way to test the theory and is something that hasn’t been done, as far as I know.

Kathleen Marden

So, as I say, Travis and I shook hands. If there had been a “feud” it was now over. Later, and by later I mean Sunday evening, I was having dinner at the Cattle Baron (which I mention only because a. I get to plug the Cattle Baron and b. I can mention that I was sitting at a table with Stan Friedman, Kathleen Marden and Stan’s son) when Travis walked up to the table to say, “Hello,” to me. We shook hands again, proving what a class act Travis is.

I asked if he remembered when we met in Germany and he said he did. We didn’t see much of each other because of the schedules, but he did remember. Just a little aside to suggest that we had met a long time ago.

If you ask me today what I think about the Walton abduction, I will tell you that if alien abduction is real, I would expect it to be more like that experienced by Travis, or Betty and Barney Hill. A one-time thing that is more of a target of opportunity than these decades long experiences told by so many others. I would tell you that I believe that alien abduction has a terrestrial explanation, or rather terrestrial explanations but that is just my opinion. I would concede that the Walton experience is quite strange.

But I would note here that most hoaxes are confessed eventually. In the Walton case, you have a number of young men, who are now much older, and yet they have not broken ranks. The Santilli film is an admitted hoax. I can’t tell you the number of UFO photographs that have been admitted to be hoaxes, including those that have fooled some very smart people. Or the number of hoaxes created by skeptics to prove that we are credulous. With this case, there have been no defections from the ranks (and we’ll explore my discussions with Steve Pierce about that later).

I don’t plan to engage in a long debate about the details of the Walton abduction. I do have an autographed version of the updated book that Travis gave me a decade and a half ago, which might explain why he thought we should have used more of his information.

I am glad that Travis, who was once more than a little annoyed with me, and I have reached a new understanding. I really don’t like to offend people (though I seem to do it quite easily and much more often than I care to admit) and I have taken the sting out of some of my words written quite a while ago. I guess it just shows that sometimes you have to talk to one another in person so that everyone is on the same page.

UFOs and the Main Stream Media

The Main Stream Media (hereafter MSM) has, in the last few weeks reported on a couple of UFO related stories that could have had some significance if any of the alleged reporters had ever had an original thought. The clues were there, if they could think beyond the next martini... though I suppose their battle cry, “Fake it until you make it,” tells us something about them.

First there was the big hoopla over an FBI document that suggested there had been a UFO crash. But there were no names attached as the source and the information seemed to be that from the Aztec, New Mexico hoax of 1948. All of the information had appeared in magazines and books in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Without any names, vague locations, and general information, there wasn’t much to do with it.

What the MSM missed, was the fact that the document existed at all. Why would an FBI agent submit something like this? Obviously because he had orders to do so. No, not him specifically, but FBI agents in general. They were to be on the lookout for UFO related information.

We could go back to the July, 1947, when the then Army Air Forces requested FBI assistance in UFO investigations. J. Edgar Hoover, the then director, said that he would do it, but they had to be let in on all UFO information. Hoover mentioned “discs recovered” in his response, in this case a hoax from Shreveport, but the point is the FBI was interested in UFOs. The document in question showed that several years later, the FBI was still gathering UFO information regardless of the source or reliability.

If the situation had changed in those years from Hoover’s order... if the situation was such that the Air Force knew that there were no flying saucers, wouldn’t they have told the FBI? And then, wouldn’t the FBI stopped gathering UFO information, especially when that information was on the lunatic fringe side?

So, the reporters just told us that the document was out there, though we had known that for more than two decades. They didn’t bother to check around. They didn’t bother to see if there was anything important in the document. They just wrote their stories, their superficial stories, and ran off to the next one. They simply didn’t understand.

And then, second, we have to put up with the latest nonsense about Roswell, from a MSM reporter whole knows nothing about the case, has little clue about Area 51 and apparently knows next to nothing about aviation history. Hell, she doesn’t even know that Area 51 didn’t exist in 1951 and that it wasn’t named that because of alien bodies brought there in 1951.

Here’s the point. The MSM rejects the idea of alien spacecraft, looking down their noses at those of us who believe the evidence for visitation is persuasive. They are uninterested in looking at the evidence, but they do know that UFO stories and documentaries are good for ratings. So, while they’ll make fun of UFO reports and UFO sighters, they will also be sure to devote time to them to boost their ratings.

In fact, I just heard someone on television make the crack that those who see UFOs live in the rural south and don’t have a full set of teeth. Of course the MSM doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, that the best sightings come from those with college degrees and who had an opportunity to observe the UFO for a minute or more. It’s just easier to continue with the stereotype because to do otherwise would require some research.

For more than twenty years I have been publishing books about UFOs and UFO sightings. They range from The UFO Casebook which looked at a history of UFO reports with some commentary about those sightings to the highly skeptical The Abduction Enigma which suggested that alien abduction has a terrestrial explanation.

Of course The Abduction Enigma was overlooked by the MSM, though it would have reinforced their belief structure. They were more interested in a book published a decade later that reached the same basic conclusions that we did with The Abduction Enigma. We even had some of the academic credentials that the MSM like, but they ignored our book. The preferred the derivative book that came out later that gave no credit to the work we had done.

The real question here is if the MSM can’t be bothered with learning about a topic before they report on it, if they can’t be bothered with understanding what is happening, why should we accept anything they have to say about... well, anything?

Sure, you can say that reporting on UFOs is not up there with combat reporting, or election reporting, and those in the MSM take that seriously.

I say, “Oh really?”

Two examples.

While in Iraq, I happened to see Ted Koppel reporting on the conditions of the schools in Baghdad. He was at a school where he had found an open sewer just inside the school grounds. He was reporting on how horrible the conditions were.

My response? We had repaired, updated, and donated books, supplies and even computers to some 2500 schools in Iraq and he found the one we hadn’t gotten to yet. He made no mention of all that good work done by American soldiers.

Second, as I was working on a paper in a master’s program, I was reviewing the TET Offensive of 1968. Never mind that the reporters were caught off guard, though the military wasn’t... just look at how many high-ranking officers and political leaders predicted the offensive in the months before (even the ARVN First Division recalled its soldiers 48 hours before the launch of TET). Never mind that the reporters all reported from the Colon section of Saigon where there was great damage (for historic and racial reasons) but not from much of the rest of the city which was not on fire (flames and burning buildings look much better on the news than a downtown street with no damage).

What I learned was that many of the political leaders were not listening to the generals who were in Vietnam... they were taking their opinions from the reporters whose agenda was to look brave and to present their personal yet uninformed views of the situation. The question would be, “Just where did they get their military training, and how is it that they couldn’t understand the situation as it was rather than reporting on what they thought it was?”

So, they don’t get it when it comes to UFOs and in the greater scheme of things, that’s not as important as so much of the other things they don’t get. They just quote one another and worry about filling their time on the air rather than understanding what is really going on.

It is time that we stopped listening to them, their “informed” sources, and realize they just don’t have any inside track, inside knowledge, or even a realistic comprehension of the world around them. They are there to promote themselves, get into the big time, and make the big bucks. They often just don’t care about the truth.

How do I know? Nearly twenty years ago, just before an interview with a reporter for a major daily newspaper, I said that we could prove much of what we said about UFOs. The intern (no they wouldn’t waste the talent of a real reporter on this) said that the editors didn’t care. They knew there were no UFOs.

Just how do you fight that?

Budd Hopkins, Walter Webb and the Santa Rosa UFO Crash

It seems that I am unable to get away from the alleged Santa Rose UFO crash of 1963. I have additional information about the episode that Budd Hopkins reported in his "Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response." Since this has become something of an important case, not for the information contained in it but because of the conflicting views about, I thought we’d take a last, final run at it. (For those who wish to begin at the beginning, please see my posting about Santa Rosa on February 7 of this year).

I want to make one quick point that seems to have been lost, at least in my recital of the case. The Santa Rosa crash was originally discovered by two MUFON members identified by Hopkins as Brenda and Tom. They passed the case along, or rather, helped arrange for Hopkins to meet Beanie, currently the only known witness to the craft and bodies.

We pick up the narrative at the point that Hopkins wrote, "Meanwhile my friend Robert Bigelow agreed to pay my way to Santa Rosa, and that of astronomer Walter Webb, to look further into the case, and I immediately took him up on the offer... She [Beanie, the woman who witnessed the UFO crash/retrieval] was a short, plump, feisty woman who, like me, had suffered from both polio and cancer, but she seemed to be truthful and quite intelligent, speaking in a charming, homespun, country argot. Later, when Webb arrived, we chatted about the case which seemed to him rather dubious; for many researchers, UFO crash-retrievals were - and still are - a hard sell. I was also aware that he was not informed about many aspects of the Beanie case of which I had become aware. Essentially Walt was an astronomer, not someone with extensive experience in working face to face with people like Beanie and I was right to be concerned."

I had suggested, early on that Webb thought, that the Beanie case wasn’t worth further research when he learned the preliminary details. I was, of course, looking at this with hindsight and knew that Webb eventually came to believe that the case wasn’t an important one. He told me, however, "In the beginning we both [Hopkins and Webb] were impressed with what seemed like a consistent and somewhat logical story." This is, of course, in conflict with what Hopkins wrote.

And I think today, and even a decade ago, the idea of UFO crashes was not a hard sell for many researchers. The Roswell case had changed attitudes and almost everyone was now open to the theory that something might have crashed somewhere at some point. The idea had, in the 1970s and the 1980s, been a hard sell, but by the mid-1990s, many of us were looking at these stories carefully thanks to the work of Len Stringfield and his 1978 MUFON Symposium paper outlining many crash cases that he thought deserved another look. But this is a matter of perception and who is to say that my perception is correct and that of Hopkins is wrong?

Hopkins wrote, "In a rented car Walt, Beanie and I drove out to Santa Rosa and when we arrived at the house of the widow of the ambulance driver, I asked Walt to wait in the car for a few minutes until I came out and invited him in. I was afraid that two strangers 'from the East,' charging in together at an elderly woman's house, bearing a tape recorder and microphone, might seem a bit off-putting."

I certainly understand this, especially if the way hasn’t been cleared. But then, the people must have expected something about why they were gathered there. The situation as described by Hopkins might be somewhat different. Rather than Hopkins and Beanie entering the house when they arrived, Beanie went in first, to get acquainted with her old friends while Hopkins and Webb left to eat supper at a local restaurant. This provided Beanie with the opportunity, and I stress this, opportunity to "coach" the witness. I’m not saying it happened, just that there was the opportunity.

As they returned from their meal and pulled up to the house, the widow’s son, wife and children "trooped in from across the street and stood in the crowded room," according to what Webb told me. Webb speculated that there might have been some kind of signal to alert them or maybe they were just watching for the car to return. We now see that the situation, as described by Webb, suggests there had been some communication between Beanie and the widow and we weren’t going to see her facing the strangers from the east alone.

Hopkins then, according to his own report said that he entered the house and was "... received politely by our hostess..." He talked with them for a while and then mentioned he had a colleague out in the car. He said that he made up some excuse for leaving Webb in the car and went out to get him. Webb then entered the house and set up his equipment.　

About Webb’s entrance, Hopkins wrote, "If Walter Webb had set off a small cherry bomb in the room he couldn't have caused more of a disruption."

Webb told me that he brought in his tape recorder and that "Hopkins was aware that I had the device." It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for Hopkins not to know that Webb had planned to record the witness. The best way to take notes is with a recorder because you have the witnesses words right there. I don’t know how many times I have been accused to having misquoted a witness only to be able to prove, with the tape, that the witness said exactly what I reported he or she said. According to Webb, and his notes of the session, "It was only afterward that the informant [Beanie] said the recorder might have been a distraction."

Webb said later that they had agreed from then on not to pull out recorders or cameras until everyone was comfortable with the situation. Here, however, there seemed to be a sense of urgency to document the widow’s tale as it would support Beanie’s story.

Apparently both Hopkins and Beanie complained to Bigelow about this horrendous situation (yes, that is a little bit of hyperbole on my part). But what came from that was about twenty minutes of recorded interview with the various "participants." (And again, the quotes are mine, suggesting that these people, other than Beanie, participated only in the interview, but had not been at the scene of the alleged crash.)

Hopkins, as I noted in an earlier post, said that he returned later, in 1997, to conduct additional interviews and believed he was no longer a stranger to the family and developed a warm friendship with the witness. I have no doubt that this is true. Hopkins seems to be a very nice man, able to relate well to a variety of people, except, in my experience, those who might disagree with him. I found myself on the enemies list after the publication of The Abduction Enigma.

No, I’m not surprised about that. I knew that the message of that book would not be one that those who embraced all of the alien abduction field would want to read. We, meaning Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I were suggesting that alien abduction was less about aliens than it was about researcher manipulation of the situation. We drew the parallels among alien abduction, Satan Ritual Abuse (SRA) and past life regression.

But at the far end of the spectrum, I have had some very cordial email conversations with Hopkins... of course I was reviewing his book, Art, Life and UFOs. Draw your own conclusions.

The point is, however, that Hopkins continued his investigation of the Santa Rosa crash/retrieval without the help of Walter Webb. As I explained in the earlier post, he gathered more information from Beanie but was unable to find any substantial corroboration for her tale. Hopkins suggests there would be no reason for the government, or in this case "the Air Force to have gone to the ambulance and removed everything from the rear area – the sheets, various pieces of portable equipment and so on."

And there is no proof that this ever happened. All we know is that the widow seemed to corroborate that and the operative word here is "seemed."

Carol Rainey, in her article about Hopkins had reported that there had been a long list of possible witnesses to the case. In rebuttal, Hopkins wrote, "The first time I visited Santa Rosa, Beanie and I made a long drive to another town some distance away. She thought that a certain young trooper just may have been the officer in the second car that day, and through Tom [another trooper] we learned his address. I suggested that we not call the man in advance, that we just show up to take anyone there by surprise and thereby get a thoroughly unrehearsed account. [An ambush with recorders and cameras?] So we drove and drove, endlessly it seemed [which, given this is New Mexico, isn’t all that much of a surprise], and when we arrived, the ex-trooper's divorced wife was home and told us that her husband had moved out years ago and she had lost contact with him, though she recalled that he was possibly working for a security company in the far east somewhere. That was that, and I only mention this abortive trip because my ex put it this way: "Neither she [Beanie] or Budd had tracked down or spoken to any of the long list of witnesses." [Emphasis is Hopkins’] I wish we had had even a short list of witnesses from this thirty-year-old incident, but we didn't, so apparently the helpful Ms. Rainey invented such a list for us, but then scorns us for not trying to find them."

But Webb suggests that there had been a long list of possible witnesses and other informants that he had supplied to both Hopkins and Beanie. According to him, neither acted on the list, meaning that no one attempted to find any of those people. And yes, I have seen the list. These included some relatives of Beanie who might have heard her talk about the crash in earlier years, people at the hospital who might have been involved in some fashion, and others who could have had some knowledge... not that they necessarily did, but the questions that should have been asked never were. There were names connected with each of Webb’s suggestions.

Yes, I know from my own experience that sometimes the importance of a witness gets jumbled in the telling. I had once been told of an Air Force officer who had flown President Kennedy in Air Force One to see the Roswell alien bodies. When I finally located the officer I learned that he had been an alternate pilot on Air Force One, had flown with President Kennedy on board and that he, the pilot, had seen a UFO with an alien pilot visible. So the lead, which was supposed to confirm the alien bodies in storage story turned into something else. But it was a lead that had to be followed.

Hopkins wrote, "She [Rainey] quotes from an early letter from Walt Webb in which he berates Beanie for reporting some details about her initial experience which vary, one from one another."

But that’s not quite accurate. Webb said that he berated no one but had questioned Hopkins about some of the conflicting details that had emerged as he learned more about the case. Not embellishments, or additions to the story that could be memories that she had just accessed. Webb also pointed out that he was unaware of the changes when he traveled to New Mexico with Hopkins, and that when he wrote to Beanie, he hadn’t yet seen the transcript of the first interview. Webb’s letter to Hopkins was talking about changes in the story from the time that the MUFON representatives questioned Beanie and when Hopkins and Webb arrived on the scene. It wasn’t about embellishment. It was about contradictory information.

In fact, the one that caught my eye was that in the first interview, conducted by MUFON members in Albuquerque, Beanie said there were two bodies, one outside the craft and one partially out. She told Hopkins and Webb that there had been three bodies, all outside. Not the sort of detail that you would expect to change so significantly.

Here is something else to ponder. We now have information about the Santa Rosa UFO crash from three sources. You might say that two of those sources, Rainey and Hopkins have an interest in the way the story is perceived. I would say that Webb is a disinterested third party except that Hopkins called Webb’s investigatory skills, his experience working with potential abductees, and his motives in the case into question as a way to distract attention from the real weaknesses of the case.

The only person we haven’t heard from at this point is Beanie. I know what the various researchers will say. I know what the details are and have heard those details from three separate directions.

But I also know that there is simply nothing to support this tale. It is, in the end, single witness, and it doesn’t matter if you believe Rainey’s, Hopkins’ or Webb’s version. They all agree that it is single witness... No, the widow and her son didn’t see anything themselves. At best they heard about something strange and the son does seem to mention "alien bodies," but he didn’t see them. Worse still, the son’s memory might have nothing to do with the Santa Rosa crash.

Now I believe we all have enough information to make an intelligent determination about the case and the controversy that has erupted around it. Is this a good sighting, based on the story of an admittedly likeable woman? Does the lack of corroborative detail, other than some vaguely remembered events that might or might not be relevant suggest there is something of value here? Or have we found ourselves in another of Ufology’s turf wars where the cult of personality is more important than finding our way to the truth?

The answers to those questions are, at least to me, obvious. There was no Santa Rosa UFO crash and unless, or until, some kind of corroborative detail is found, this is just another footnote to what is becoming a long and overblown list of UFO crashes. And that is all is should be.　

A Response to Budd Hopkins

(Blogger's note: Yes, this is much longer than it should be but I wanted to cover the topic as completely as possible. I found Budd Hopkins' response to Carol Rainey's article to be little more than an attack. It provide little in the way of fact but quite a bit of opinion. I hope I have not followed that lead, but have rebutted his arguments in a dispassionate way, using fact rather than opinion. At any rate, here is my take on this argument... and let me say, this debate has been a long time coming.)

I have been very reluctant to enter this fight because I have great empathy for Budd Hopkins who is very ill. I had empathy for Phil Klass when he was ill. But I disagree with many of the conclusions that both men drew based on their research techniques.

But as Lee said at Gettysburg, "The enemy is here. I did not want this fight, but the fight is here." So, with reluctance, I enter the fight because I don’t like the way part of it has been conducted.

I read Carol Rainey’s article and am aware of the old adage that the true test of another’s intelligence is how much he or she agrees with you. I have thought, based on my investigations, my research, and my discussions with many others, that the answers for alien abduction did not lie in the stars, but here on Earth. I found terrestrial explanations that were far more satisfying than a group of aliens abducting humans to perform genetic experiments that would have been crude a half century ago.

And now I have read Hopkins’ response ("Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response,") to Rainey’s article and found it to more in line with a smear and less with a discussion of the scientific merit the abduction phenomenon. He reduced the discussion to his beliefs in UFO debunking, erecting strawmen to knock down but providing little in the way of objective evidence for his point of view.

He suggested that Rainey, and others he labels as debunkers, believe that nearly all abductees are liars who are participating in elaborate hoaxes, though I saw nothing in Rainey’s article to suggest that. Hopkins explains the complexity of attempting to keep all the lies straight during convoluted investigations, but never mentions that these alleged liars have the assistance of the researchers to help them keep the story consistent and in developing corroborative details.

What do I mean?

Just look at the transcripts as published in the various books by abduction researchers. You see the same questions asked again and again until the correct answer is supplied... and often those old mistakes in the story are ignored and forgotten. In other words, it is the researcher who is supplying much of that corroborative detail, helping to keep the complex story straight and selecting only those parts that confirm their preconceived notions.

What do I mean?

John Mack mentioned during a video taped interview with Russ Estes (which I mention here only because abduction researchers often claim that we had never interviewed them), that he found a curious matching of researcher and abductee.

Let me explain. In C.D.B. Bryan’s book about the MIT Abduction conference (Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, 270 – 271), Bryan quoted Mack as saying, "And there’s another dimension to this, which Budd Hopkins and Dave Jacobs and I argue about all the time which is I’m struck by the fact that there seems to be a kind of matching of the investigator with the experiencer. So what may be the archetypal structure of an abduction to Dave Jacobs may not be the uniform experience of, say, Joe Nyman or John Mack or someone else. And the experiencers seem to pick out the investigator who will fit their experience."

He then adds, after agreeing he might have that backwards, that "It seems to me that Jacobs, Hopkins, and Nyman [another abduction researcher] may pull out of their experiencers what they want to see."

And right there we have the indictment that there is implantation of the researchers belief structures on those claiming alien abduction. For some reason Mack doesn’t see that he had just explained why there is an agreement from abductee to abductee in a researcher’s investigations and an agreement with a particular investigator’s belief structure. He or she is pulling out what they want to see.

That suggests that the abductees are not liars. Sure, we can point to a couple of cases in which it eventually became clear that the witness was being less than honest. After I had reported on the Susan Ramstead case, I had an opportunity to review the evidence with her and soon learned that she had been making it all up. She had read the necessary books on abduction so that she knew what to say and how to say it.

She was the exception though. Few people who claim abduction are lying about the experience. It is more likely that they have had some sort of an experience and through their own research or their contacts with abduction researchers come to believe that aliens are involved.

Nowhere has any of us suggested that the majority of abductees are liars. In fact I argued the point with Philip Klass. He wanted the abductees to take lie detector tests. I said it would do no good because the majority believed what they were saying. Didn’t mean it was grounded in reality, only that they believed they were telling the truth.

As noted, Mack understood this and he recognized that there was an implantation of ideas by the researcher. Maybe it is time to mention Richard Boylan who had two clients come to him who believed they had been ritually abused by Satan worshipers. They came to him confused and when they left, there were even more confused because Boylan told them that Satanists were not responsible... it was alien creatures. Here is a blatant example of the abduction researcher implanting his own belief structure on his clients.

So none of us are saying that all the abductees are lying, as Hopkins repeats in his attack. Mistaken... led... duped... hypnotized, but not lying. We realize that there is often some sort of a precipitating incident. In many cases this is sleep paralysis.

Yes, I know what the response is going to be. Many abductees were not asleep when the abduction allegedly happened. They were wide awake. If I wanted to be flippant, I would point out that cataplexy, which is basically sleep paralysis while wide awake, might answer this... But cataplexy is always associated with narcolepsy and as far as I know, no one has tested abductees to learn if narcolepsy is a problem with them. (For more information see: J. Hoed, E.A. Lucas and W.C. Dement, "Hallucinatory Experiences During Cataplexy in Patients with Narcolepsy," American Journal of Psychiatry, 136 (1979) 1210 – 11; E. Kahn, A. Edwards K. Grabowski, N. Roese , D.M. Jones and J. Fine, "Psycho-physiological Study of Nightmares and Night Terrors: Mental Content and Recall of Stage four Night Terrors, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1974) 174 – 88, and David Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night, 1982.)

The real point is that the symptoms of sleep paralysis mirror those of alien abduction and no one, in the last decade and a half, since we raised the issue, has attempted to develop a protocol that separates cases of sleep paralysis from alien abduction. Kathleen Marden did tell me that abductees report the events in color but victims of sleep paralysis report the case in black and white. If true, meaning, if confirmed, then we are making progress.

But I don’t want to argue the merits of sleep paralysis versus the possibility of alien abduction. Instead I want to look at Hopkins’ attack and where it slipped off the rails. That would be in his recitation of the Santa Rosa crash/retrieval.

I will say that if nothing else, we now have a great deal of additional information about this event, and anything that does that can’t be all bad. I will also note that with much gnashing of teeth we are still left with a single witness case that has no corroborating information and that makes it very weak.

Hopkins makes it clear that the only real witness is likeable woman he called Beanie, though there were hints to other witnesses. She mentions the name of the state trooper who was on the scene. He might have been the man who covered the alien bodies with sheets but he was certainly there to witness part of this. He would be a wonderful corroborative witness because he was a state trooper, well known to Beanie. He was a man called, "Dutch."

Hopkins wrote, "This detail was, of course, extremely important, because the last person a hoaxer wants to locate is a ‘designated witness’ who says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What incident?’"

And that sounds very good and logical, except it isn’t necessarily true. Gerald Anderson who, as a five-year-old child, said he had seen the crashed alien ship and the bodies of the flight crew on the Plains of San Agustin and even provided the name of one of the witnesses. He said that Adrian Buskirk was the archaeologist who had been there.

The name was actually Winfred Buskirk who was clearly the man Anderson described and who was, in fact, alive, to say that he wasn’t there. He had been on the Apache Indian reservation during the summer of 1947 and even had pictures to prove it. So, was Anderson’s tale rejected? No, Buskirk was labeled a liar and a government agent of some sort. Anderson’s discredited tale is still believed even after he admitted to forging documents and after Buskirk refuted his claims.

Hopkins noted that hoaxers "of anything, when the subject of possible witnesses arises, will say something like, ‘I don’t remember him exactly but I think he might have had... blonde hair... I don’t remember his name.’"

And yet when Robert Willingham was inventing his tale of a crashed UFO, named many names. Now, it is true that every name he supplied turned out to be a dead friend, but it also gave us a place to begin looking for corroboration. So, despite Hopkin’s stark claim, this is not borne out by other cases.

What disturbed me most about this new data on Santa Rosa was Hopkins’ attack on Walter Webb. For those who don’t know, Webb has been investigating abduction cases before Budd Hopkins even believed that UFOs were extraterrestrial. But Hopkins dismisses Webb, writing, "Essentially Walt was an astronomer, not someone with extensive experience in working face to face with people like Beanie and I was right to be concerned."

He then goes on to say, "He [Webb] came in quickly [to a house where there were addition witnesses], bearing his equipment, and immediately asked the widow for a table so that he could put his instrument in the center of what he hastily improvised as a kind of circle so that he could record everyone. Since I had not yet mentioned tape recording any of the family, or asked permission, one can imagine the family’s shocked response."

Hopkins then reports, "If Walter Webb had set off a small cherry bomb in the room he couldn’t have caused more of a disruption."

The interview in question was with the widow of the ambulance driver and not the widow of the recently deceased state trooper. Careful reading of Hopkins’ "Response," makes that clear. So this is a woman who had no direct knowledge of the UFO crash or the recovery of the bodies. In other words, a second-hand witness at best.

Jerry (Jerome) Clark, in his massive The UFO Encyclopedia of UFOs (2^nd Edition) wrote about Walter Webb. "One of ufology’s most respected investigators... Webb spent 32 years of his working life at the Charles Hayden Planetarium at Boston’s Museum of Science as a senior lecturer, assistant director and operations manager... As a scientific advisor to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), Webb investigated the classic Hill abduction case..."

This doesn’t sound like a guy who has no people skills and who just bursts into a room setting up equipment without a thought about the impact of that on those already in the room. Why would Hopkins make any such claims? Could it be that Webb suggested that the Beanie case was not one worth further research? That it was single witness with no corroboration?

I’ll note something else that struck me here. Hopkins wrote that they had visited with the widow and developed a warm relationship. He, with Beanie, visited her to talk about the possible UFO crash. According to Hopkins, this mystery woman (I say this only because Hopkins provides no name... and given the way some people do operate in the UFO field, he is probably justified in sparing her some of those communications), said that she had done all the paperwork for the local ambulance that would include the trip tickets and billing. She explained to Hopkins that on this visit to Santa Rosa they were never paid to pick up the bodies and "what’s more, she recalled that her trip book had a number of consecutive pages missing around the same time."

Great. The documentation is conveniently missing. But I see nothing to suggest that Hopkins asked to see that trip book or attempt to verify the information. The trip book with the missing pages would, after a fashion, provide some corroboration for the tale. Yes, I know that people lose paperwork and this would have been nearly fifty years ago... but as near as I can tell, he never asked about it.

What all this tells me is that there is but a single witness here. The ambulance driver’s widow suggests there is missing paperwork from the time frame but nothing that actually proves this. The trooper is dead and his brother, who was a sheriff, never heard the story. There is absolutely nothing except the tale told by Beanie and the vague memories of the widow who was not involved.

So, the only defense of this rather poor crash/retrieval story is an attack on Walter Webb because it is clear that Rainey’s reporting of Webb’s attitudes is accurate. I verified this with Webb, who told me that it was "essentially correct."

Rather than providing us with a coherent response that includes evidence that can be verified by others, Hopkins, instead, labels Rainey as a debunker who has fixed opinions and no amount of evidence will sway her opinion. In reality, Hopkins offers no evidence that alien abduction is real but more of the same anecdotal evidence that has failed to convince science that here is something that demands further research. All attempts to provide the physical evidence has failed to this point. There is always some reason why it can’t be offered or why it has disappeared.

When challenged, the abduction researchers retreat to a line suggesting that they have interviewed hundreds of witnesses, conducted hundreds of investigations including dozens of hypnotic regression sessions. They tell us that hypnotic regression is a solid research tool but the majority of the scientific evidence refutes this. Hypnosis might be a valuable therapeutic tool, but is not useful in gathering evidence. There are simply too many ways to lead the subject.

In fact, as Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I suggested more than a decade and a half ago, we need to move beyond the case studies in abduction research. We need to gather some useful evidence that can be analyzed but every attempt to provide that additional evidence has failed. The implants cannot be proven to be of alien manufacture. The electronic surveillance always fails for a variety of reasons. The photographs don’t turn out. The DNA analysis is either never attempted or fails to provide the corroboration. All we have, in the end, are the stories told by those claiming abduction and those attempting to investigate it.

Hopkins, unable to prove that alien abduction is real, or that he has solid evidence to prove his case must show that Rainey is wrong in her various assertions and attacks her as a debunker. Hopkins knows, just as anyone around this field knows, that labeling someone a debunker is a quick way to refute what he or she says without having to provide evidence that he or she is wrong. If a debunker said it, then it must not be true.

The title of his paper, "Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response," tells us all we really need to know about the paper. Hopkins isn’t going to deal with the issues raised by Rainey in her article, or by others who have preceded her. He is going use the debunker brush to smear her arguments so he doesn’t have to answer them.

Going back to the Santa Rosa crash, Hopkins wrote, "In her paper she dismisses the [ambulance driver’s] widow’s testimony in this way: ‘When pressed, she seemed to vaguely recall that the Air Force had indeed once stripped the ambulance clean and taken the billable trip ticket, as Beanie claimed.’ Ms. Rainey is good with adverbs: note the word ‘vaguely.’ But she also wields verbs as well: ‘when pressed’ I assume that what she is trying to get across is the idea that since she believes there was never an Air Force visit to the ambulance and no missing trip ticket, (facts Beanie had only learned from the widow) she is claiming that Beanie somehow forced the old lady to join her hoax by accepting her – Beanie’s – lies and then passing them on to me."

But, of course this analysis is not accurate. I’m not sure how you prove that the trip ticket is missing, but that isn’t a fact. There is no evidence that the Air Force stripped the ambulance. And under close questioning, asking about missing trip tickets may certainly produce a positive response but doesn’t prove the Air Force was responsible or that alien bodies were involved.

Hopkins then defends the use of hypnosis and challenges the rest of us to "...go back to my books if you wish, and good luck in finding any mistakes or leading moments you’d like to quote against me."

Ok, challenge accepted.

First, let’s look at an interview conducted by Jerry Clark, editor of the CUFOS International UFO Reporter ("Conversations with Budd Hopkins," Nov/Dec 1988, 4 – 12). Hopkins told Clark, "The first point is, of course, that we have 20 to 30 percent of the abduction accounts recalled without resort to hypnosis."

Clark was pursuing the idea that hypnosis could lead to confabulation, suggesting that abduction reports were similar to past life regressions in that they both emerged under hypnosis. The subject, for example, entered into the session believing in past life and under hypnosis, told of a past life that was rich in detail.

Hopkins told Clark, "A person enters a past-life regression out of a desire to believe in reincarnation. He's entered a situation - allowed himself to be hypnotized - for that reason alone."

Yet in reading what Hopkins wrote about Steve Kilburn in Missing Time, we find the same thing is true. The whole investigation of Kilburn's experience came out of UFO research. Ted Bloecher brought him around because of his fear of the stretch of highway, but Hopkins had noted the "pattern" of victims being taken from deserted highways. During the discussion that preceded the hypnosis, Kilburn said, "It was a very dark road, that was for sure, and it did occur to me as I was driving that this is the kind of place that something like that (a UFO encounter) should happen."

What that says, simply, is that Kilburn had entered the situation, expecting some sort of a UFO encounter. They had discussed it before the hypnosis began. And they found a UFO event. This was a point that seemed to be lost on Hopkins, though he had already demonstrated that he understood it when he was describing the past life regression therapy.

Hopkins in that same interview with Clark, also said that stories of reincarnation are pleasant, but tales of alien abduction are "at least unpleasant and sometimes horrifying, something where the person has every reason to feel terrified, humiliated and upset about the whole experience. Who would want something like that? Yet the stories emerge nonetheless."

Hopkins is suggesting that the tales must be true because the victims of alien abduction would not make up horrifying tales. They must be true, because, as John Mack has said repeatedly, "This is not a club that anyone would want to join."

But these arguments are based on the logic of those making them. There is no evidence that such is the case. When the victim appears at the therapist's office, or at Hopkins' group meetings, he or she expects to find an alien abduction and they do. The relative pleasantness of the experiences is irrelevant to those telling them.

And the parallel to reincarnation can be drawn even further. Although Hopkins suggests the tales of reincarnation are pleasant, often they are not. In one case, a woman afraid of the water learned during a hypnotic probing of a past life that she had been killed by an alligator as she jumped into a river.

Hardly a pleasant experience.

Hopkins has spent the years since the Kilburn case interviewing others who claim abduction. During the Clark interview, he pointed out that he had a number of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists who had come to him to explore segments of missing time with hypnosis. If these people, and their clients, aren't already "programmed" to believe in an abduction, then why search out Hopkins for assistance? Wouldn't anyone versed in hypnosis be able to help them learn what happened during this supposed missing time? Aren't each of them "primed" for an abduction, just as those who go to a reincarnation specialist are "primed" for learning about a past life.

Even that testimony in these sessions is somewhat contradictory. In Hopkins' own work there is evidence that the subjects do not easily accept the notion of abduction. Hopkins reports the tale of a man he called Philip Osborne. Hopkins wrote, "I noticed his interest in the subject had a particular edge to it. It was almost as if he accepted too much, too easily." Hopkins believed "that someone with a hidden traumatic UFO experience might later on be unconsciously drawn to the subject."

Osborne called Hopkins after an NBC UFO documentary and said that he had been struck by Kilburn's remark that anyone could be the victim of abduction. Osborne had been searching his memory for anything in his past that would indicate some sort of strange experience. Then, one night after the NBC program, Osborne awoke in the middle the night, paralyzed. He could not move, turn his head or call for help. The experience was over quickly, but it reminded him of another, similar event that happened while he was in college. That earlier event had one other, important addition. He felt a presence in the room with him.

Hopkins, along with others, met Osborne a few days later to explore these events using hypnosis. During the initial hypnotic regression, Osborne gave only a few answers that seemed to direct them toward an abduction experience. According to Hopkins, Osborne told them that he "had more or less refused to describe imagery or events that seemed 'too pat,' too close to what he and we might have expected in a UFO encounter."

During the discussion after the hypnosis, Osborne told Hopkins that "I would see something and I would say to myself in effect, 'Well, that's what I'm supposed to see.'"

And, in a second hypnotic regression session held a few days later, while under hypnosis, Osborne said, "I'm not sure I see it... I think it's my imagination... It's gone now."

Osborne, it seems, had recognized one of the problems with abduction research, had communicated it to Hopkins, and then had it ignored. Osborne was wondering if the "memories" he was seeing under hypnosis were real. Hopkins believed they were so took no notice of Osborne's concern. Hopkins, as he noted in his response to Rainey, believes in the reliability of hypnosis as a method for uncovering the truth. I, however, see those statements by Osborne as extremely important in attempting to understand alien abduction.

Osborne's initial experiences are also classic forms of sleep paralysis. Even the belief that an entity is in the room happens in about eighty percent of the cases of sleep paralysis. This simple explanation is all too often ignored by UFO researchers.

The point, I think is made. Here were Hopkins own words, from one of this books, telling us a story that Hopkins refused to hear. Both these examples seem to suggest leading the witness to the point where a fear of a stretch of highway, and an episode of sleep paralysis turns into an alien abduction and there is just no physical evidence to take us there. Just the hypnosis used to question the witnesses about their experiences.

So, here’s the dirty little secret about abduction research. All the evidence is anecdotal. There is no real physical evidence. Oh sure, they talk of implants, but when those have been removed and analyzed, there is nothing to suggest an extraterrestrial technology.

Here’s the second dirty little secret. Contrary to what Hopkins believes, or David Jacobs believes, hypnosis isn’t a good research tool. Oh sure, Hopkins talks about a "peer reviewed book" about hypnosis, published by a university press, but the editor is David Jacobs. Do you really believe that any paper suggesting that hypnosis might not be the best investigative technique would have made it into that book? Wouldn’t a better source for objective opinion by the various psychological journals that have studied hypnosis? (See, for example, "Scientific Status of Refreshing Recollection by the Use of Hypnosis, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 34, 1 (1986) 1 –12; Robert A. Baker, "Hypnosis, Memory and Incidental Memory, American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 25, 4 (1983) 253 – 300; Eddie Bullard, "Hypnosis No ‘Truth Serum’," UFO 4,2 (1989) 31 –35: J.H. Conn, "Is Hypnosis Really Dangerous?" International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 20 (1972) 61 – 69; M. Garry and E. Loftus, "Pseudo-memories without Hypnosis," International Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 42, 4 (1994) 363 – 78; K. Grabowski, N. Roese and M. Thomas, "The Role of Expectancy in Hypnotic Hypermnesia: A Brief Communication," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 39 4 (1991) 193 - 7, to name just a few)

As Hopkins said, this has now gone on much longer than I intended. However, I wanted to address issues raised in his response, and I hope I did it without calling into question his personal integrity or motives the way he went after Carol Rainey and even Walter Webb.

What all this tells me is that after a decade and a half, others are beginning to raise the issues that Estes, Cone and I did in The Abduction Enigma. I think it’s about time, and I sincerely hope that the discussion can say on a level of reviewing the evidence, or lack thereof, rather than descending into the cult of personality as it too often does. We have a chance here. Let’s not let it get away. Again.