by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In 2010, an article by Jeremy Vaeni headlined “The Incredible Visitations of Emma Woods” appeared in the November issue of UFO Magazine that caused people in the UFO community to take hard look at the methods and conclusions of the two most prominent people in alien abduction research. “Emma Woods” was the pseudonym of a woman who lived in England, and she was one of David Jacobs’s research subjects. She had posted some tapes of her hypnosis sessions with him that contained some details that Jacobs probably would have preferred had not been made public. Woods provided more details in an interview she gave on March 29, 2010, on the Paratopia podcast hosted by Vaeni and Jeff Ritzman, which appear in the UFO Magazine article. The article prompted Budd Hopkins’s wife, Carol Rainey to write an article of her own headlined “The Priests of High Strangeness” published in 2011 in Volume 1, Number 1 of Paratopia magazine detailing some of Hopkins’s methods with his subjects as well. Read more →

by Charles Lear

Throughout the 1990s, the foremost authorities on UFO abduction research were Budd Hopkins, an artist who brought the subject to mainstream attention with the publication of his 1981 book, Missing Time, David Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University who published Secret Life in 1992, and John Mack, head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who published Abduction in 1994. Their books sold well, and they all spoke openly to the press and were largely responsible for getting the alien abduction phenomenon a good deal of media coverage. Even some in the scientific community, probably due to Mack’s efforts and tenure at Harvard, were willing to look at the phenomenon with an open mind, and an Abduction Study Conference was held in 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sponsored by a physics professor there, David Pritchard, with the help of financial backing from Robert Bigelow. Hopkins, Mack, and Jacobs were featured speakers, and Hopkins faced some public criticism during the conference regarding his methods. It wouldn’t be long before he faced even harsher criticism from within the UFO community. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In 1981, a new narrative became firmly established as part of the UFO mystery with the publication of Budd Hopkins’s book Missing Time. A large part of the book consists of transcriptions of recordings made during hypnosis sessions where the subjects described being taken aboard craft by 3-4 feet tall creatures that performed medical procedures on them. The descriptions of the creatures were similar to descriptions of beings that would become known as “the greys,” which are the now iconic creatures with large black eyes that became commonly reported after Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion. The eyes of the creatures reported in Hopkins’s book vary. The book came out in July of 1981 and Hopkins, along with Dr. Aphrodite Clamar, a psychotherapist hired to conduct some of the hypnosis sessions, gave interviews to the press. From this point on, the UFO Abduction phenomenon began to receive serious consideration from the mainstream press with Hopkins as the leading authority for the rest of the decade. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

While UFO researcher/investigators came to accept abduction reports as being worthy of their time by the end of the 1970s, only a few, such as John Keel and Gray Barker, were open to contactee reports. Even so, contactee reports kept showing up, and sometimes they would even make it into the newspapers. One British case from 1980 involved creatures that resembled the Venusians reported by George Adamski starting in 1952, and the witness claimed he had physical trace evidence as proof of his encounter. Read more →

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

By the end of the 1970s, after the 1973 Pascagoula incident and the 1975 Travis Walton case, abduction claims were not only an accepted aspect of the UFO mystery by many investigators, they were considered worthy of attention by the news media, and there are many lengthy newspaper articles detailing reports throughout that decade. The narrative hadn’t yet been taken over by the now-common reports of being taken aboard a craft by creatures 3 to 4 feet tall with big, slanted, black eyes and being subjected to invasive medical procedures that seemed to have something to do with reproduction. The creatures and the natures of the encounters reported throughout the 70s were varied, but by the decade’s end, elements had emerged that would become common in the decades to come. What would also become common in such cases would be the use of regressive hypnosis, which was thought to be an effective means to recover lost memories. However, this technique has since came under criticism, particularly in its use to provide evidence in legal cases, as can be seen in the article titled “Hypnosis, Memory and Amnesia” which was published in the November 29, 1997 (pp. 1727-1732) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B: Biological Sciences. Read more →