Budd Hopkins

Author, Artist, UFO/abduction Researcher

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"NOTES ON THE ISSUE OF FICTION AND TRUTH"

by Budd Hopkins

Eventually, every UFO researcher learns that certain details in abduction narratives can be so bizarre that conventional reality is left in shreds. A woman, floated through her bedroom wall, finds herself after the abduction in the woods, a mile from home, in her nightgown, shoeless and thoroughly chilled. When she finally stumbles back to her house she is, naturally, locked out. Luckily, she finds some housekeys in the glove compartment of her car, and manages, around dawn, to open the double-turn locks and get back inside. An Ohio woman, abducted in her nightgown, is returned wearing a tee-shirt bearing the logo of a Japanese university. Another woman, abducted while driving her car, finds herself afterwards back in a car, but not her own. The automobile she is in is moving, and in the next lane is a puzzled-looking gentleman driving her car! She is instantly re- abducted, as is the other man, and they are placed back in the proper cars.

I could recite such details endlessly, but it's not really necessary to make the point. If an extensively-researched UFO case lacks any odd details - if its truth is not a lot stranger than fiction, I might find myself becoming a bit suspicious of the case or its investigator.

Recently, the film Sleepers was reviewed by Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker. The movie is based upon what is purportedly a true story, but it has subsequently been widely attacked as fiction, not fact. Without going into the complexity of its implausibly symmetrical, polished and satisfying plot, I would like to quote Rafferty:

"The implausibility of the story isn't what makes it dubious, either: most of us have no trouble believing that truth is stranger than fiction, and the events that [the screenwriter] relates aren't inherently more implausible than those of, say, "Lorenzo's Oil," "Europa, Europa," "Apollo 13," or "Schindler's List." The problem with "Sleepers" - book and movie - is that this "true" story is exactly as strange as fiction, and in exactly the same way...

"Essentially, the idea that truth is stranger than fiction says very little about `truth' and quite a lot about `fiction.' It's a simple aesthetic judgement - an acknowledgement that invented narratives rarely do justice to the complexity and variety of experience."
One rather naive young man recently wrote to me about his feelings about the bizarre details I recounted in Witnessed, my book about the Brooklyn Bridge abductions. Apparently misled by a years-old scurrilous (and now discredited) attack on the book, he regarded the extraordinary complexity and variety of experience in Witnessed as signs of hand-crafted fiction rather than as signs of the bizarre nature of the UFO phenomenon. I explained to him that like UFO reports, even conventional, "real world" truth can sometimes sound "crazy," with all kinds of loose ends and preposterous details.

But fiction, to be effective, should be composed so as to avoid the distractions of irrelevant details, grotesque non sequiturs and the blind alleys of real life. As the playright said, if a pistol is shown in the first act it must be fired by the end of the play. In real life, pistols appear and disappear without ever having been fired. Fiction must smoothly persuade and satisfy us, whereas real life - and certainly UFO abduction accounts - are rarely neat, predictable, or free of inexplicable dead ends.

This young man recalled the admittedly bizarre detail in Witnessed of the third man's having been placed back on the roof of his car after the abduction. He called this detail "preposterous," "smelling like a hoax." However, after twenty years of investigation into reported alien behavior, including their odd "mistakes" and frequent grotesqueries, I find this "preposterous" detail to have precisely the ring of truth. Check with any experienced abduction researcher and he/she will unhesitatingly agree.

But equally important, this detail is also so preposterous that no fiction writer would have invented it, let alone dared to use it - unless, of course, he wanted to lose his audience and invite skepticism from those unfamiliar with the vagaries of alien behavior.

In a second, similar example this young man quoted Janet Kimball as saying that when her car lights went out and the engine died on the Brooklyn Bridge while the abduction scene unfolded nearby, passengers from other stalled cars were "running around.. .with their hands on their heads, screaming from horror and disbelief." For me, having listened to the accounts of hundreds of frightened abductees, Janet's remark has the familiar sound of panicky, shocked hyperbole. Overstatement is more a sign of actual, traumatized experience than a quality one finds in well-crafted fiction designed by a professional to smoothly carry his readers along with him.

It's anyone's right, of course, to reject any case - the Walton case, Kathie Davis, Betty Andreasson, Linda Cortile, Betty and Barney Hill - because the details, hypnotic regressions, images, letters, eye-witness testimony, etc., seem preposterous to one's sense of the possible. Many details in all of the above classic cases do sound preposterous: Andreasson's phoenix, rising from the ashes, Walton's airlocks and UFO hangar, and so on. In fact, each of these cases seem far stranger than fiction. Far stranger.

But for the experienced UFO abduction investigator, these bizarre details are the mark of truth - which is often truly irregular and irrational - rather than signs of fiction. Fn-writers must smooth out their prose in order to convince, elminating whtever awkward detils might get in the way of creating belief in the reader. Signs Qf tbe unique "craziness" of alien behavior and the irrational behavior of traumatized witnesses should rightfully regarded as evidence for, rather than against, the authenticity of an abduction account. If truth is rougher and stranger than fiction, good fiction is neater and - perversely - more easily believed.