Budd Hopkins
Author, Artist, UFO/abduction
Researcher
Budd Hopkins
Author, Artist, UFO/abduction
Researcher
It is in the nature of human psychology that an
event as dramatic as contact with extraterrestrial intelligence
cannot be thought about neutrally, without deep-seated hopes and
preconceptions. Most of us, I'm certain, prefer to believe that
extraterrestrials would arrive on our planet as friendly, helpful
beings, eager to share their technology and to aid us in solving our
social and ecological problems. Upon this basic and very human wish
certain people have erected a powerful set of interpretations of
modern-day UFO reports. These hopes, hardened into a kind of
theology, can be described as a modern religion, willed into
existence after the decline of our more traditional deities. Ater
all, we have been told more than once that God is dead.
On the other hand, our recent wars, both hot and cold, and the
venality and deceit we have seen in many of our political leaders
have also inspired an undercurrent of pessimism, global in extent
International chaos, terrorism and governmental incompetence have
trained many of us always to expect the worst. And so, if the
majority opinion, or hope, is that extraterrestrials would arrive as
Space Brothers, a strong minority opinion fears the opposite: that we
would find ourselves taken over by a band of inter-galactic
conquerors. Our popular science-fiction films spell out these hopes
and fears quite literally: We have the kindly Space Brother, Michael
Rennie, stepping out of a gleaming spaceship to help earthlings
through their troubles, and then we have Body Snatchers out to do us
all in. I've dwelt on these basic attitudes about extraterrestrial
contact for an important reason: when we examine reports of actual
contact, especially as revealed in UFO-abduction encounters, we must
always bear in mind how our basic preconceptions might influence our
reading of these events.
After 19 years' experience investigating the abduction phenomenon, I
will not deal with the validity of such reports in this paper. I've
considered this issue elsewhere, in two books and a number of
articles, so we will here assume that the abductees I've worked with,
more than 500 in all, are telling the truth as they best recall it. I
will concentrate, instead, on what their accounts tell us about the
moral nature of the UFO phenomenon. Are the UFO occupants, as they
are described by their abductees, good or bad, friends or foes, or is
the situation just not reducible to such terms? The very first step,
previously, is to analyze what the abductees say they feel about
their captors, and that, every investigator knows, is a complex task.
My 19 years' experience leads me to a distinct conclusion: each
abductee's emotions are invariably intense and many-leveled -- and
usually mutually contradictory.
First of all, confrontations with UFO occupants are generally
experienced as frightening, so fear, at some point, is an almost
universal element in the emotional mix. Second, there is a kind of
awe or wonder at the power and seeming magic of the aliens'
technology. This often translates itself into a kind of affection,
even love, that an abductee might feel for the captor with whom he or
she senses a special relationship.
On the other side of the same coin is an almost universal anger--
verging sometimes on hatred -- that abductees feel toward their
abductors because of their enforced helplessness, their sense of
having been used, involuntarily, and even, upon occasion, of being
made to suffer severe pain. According to every broad study of the
abduction literature that I know of, and Thomas E. Bullard's is the
most authoritative, fear, awe, affection and anger are the basic
emotional components of almost every UFO-abduction experience.
It is safe to say, then, that powerful and confusing emotions follow
such experiences, and that after their encounters abductees do not
believe they have been taken either by purely malevolent foes or by
selfless, angelic Space Brothers. The situation is far too
complicated for either simplistic reading.
During the past sixteen years I have conducted an informal support
group for UFO abductees in the New York City area and have kept in
touch with many others in various parts of the country. These
circumstances have allowed me to observe a number of men and women,
over an extended period of time and to see various patterns of
response to their abduc- tion experiences. The weight of each
component in the standard emotional mix varies widely from individual
to individual and also changes with time within any one psyche. But
the basic components always seem to remain, subtly at odds with one
another, in each abductee.
Several things must be kept in mind, however, as we study the
abductees' emotional charts. First, when one is abducted, he or she
is in something of an altered state, not unlike a hypnotic trance.
The abductee is controlled by the abductors and his or her behavior
is in many ways far from normal. The abductees may be told things,
shown things, that may not be true or "real." So in this context we
must consider the abductee's occasional affection for his or her
captors. Psychologists have shown that this phenomenon, the "Patty
Hearst" syndrome, all too often appears in earthly kidnapping
experiences.
Therefore, in evaluating the four emotions commonly described by UFO
abductees, three seem appropriate but one must be dealt with warily.
Fear is something one would surely expect if the aliens actually look
and act as reported by their captives. Feelings of awe at the aliens'
technological magic are an emotion that again seems appropriate.
Anger, often extreme anger, seems to be most abductees' reaction to
being paralyzed and controlled by their captors. The physically
invasive and sometimes painful operations performed upon them
underline this response, which is often deepened because the UFO
occupants usuaIly refuse to discuss the purpose of these disturbing
procedures. One has no choice except to submit to needles, lights,
knives, "scanners" and so forth, with no power to protest or refuse.
"I feel like a lab rat," one abductee said, her anger entirely
appropriate to her situation.
It is the odd affection abductees often report feeling for their
captors that, seems suspect, under the circumstances. Is the feeling
possibly an artificial emotion, induced telepathically through some
kind of quasi-hypnotic control? Is it a version of the Patty Hearst
syndrome? Is it a genuine reaction? Obviously no one can answer these
questions satisfactorily, but it seems to me that affection is the
one common abduction response that must be viewed with suspicion.
When one tries to tally up the pros and cons of an abduction
experience as it immediately and visibly affects human emotion, it
can be said that two reactions are essentially negative, or even
damaging. Fear and anger, which are often felt deeply as terror and
hatred, are surely disruptive of anyone's life. The sense of awe,
while basically neutral and sometimes tinged with fear, may enhance
one's world view and thus contribute positively. The fourth and most
suspect emotion, affection for one's captors, if genuine is a
positive one. So the emotional "score" after an abduction experience
does not support either a simple ""Space Brother" or "Body Snatcher"
interpretation. Judging purely by obvious surface reactions, we are
still in ethically mixed territory, though to me and to many
abductees the negative effects seem more powerful than the
positive.
Moving away from the patterns of the abductees' immediate emotional
responses, we can evaluate the ethical content of an extraterrestrial
presence by considering another, larger plane. Is there any evidence
that extraterrestrial intelligence has actively intervened in human
affairs, either helpfully or destructively?
The modern era of UFO activity begins in earnest in 1947, but many
UFO reports surfaced during World War II in the phenomenon labeled
"foo fighters" by our airmen. No force, either extraterrestrial or
otherwise, put a stop to the Holocaust until Allied armies conquered
Nazi Germany. By then it was too late for millions of innocent
people, murdered by a system no one seemed able to stop. The United
States developed nuclear weapons and used them to incinerate tens of
thousands of children, women and men. No one, terrestrial or
otherwise, prevented those bombs from failing. Continuing Stalinist
butchery, international terrorism, American intervention in a
Vietnamese civil war - all meant that thousands upon thousands of
innocent people lost their lives because of the cruelty or
indifference of political leaders of every persuasion. No one
intervened. Michael Rennie, alas, never stepped out of his spaceship
to save us from ourselves.
We have polluted our planet, spreading cancer by industry's greedy
indifference to the consequences of chemical "bonanzas." No one came
to our rescue; the Chariots of the Gods evidently drew up just to
watch the damage deepen. And now we have a new plague -- the disease
known by its ironic acronym AIDS..something fresh and new that we
apparently did not have before the advent of the modern UFO era.
Now all of this means one thing. As a moral presence the UFO
phenomenon seems sublimely indifferent to what we do to ourselves.
Intervention is evidently not part of the plan, as diving into the
surf to rescue a drowning child is sometimes not part of an indolent
sunbather's plans. On the other hand there seems to be no evidence
that an extraterrestrial presence has inflicted any excess pain upon
us, either. If Michael Rennie's alien saves us only in Hollywood
films, the evil, intervening Body Snatchers seem to exist only there,
too. I believe that the cruelty that mankind has endured in this
century has an all-too- human origin; one doesn't have to look to
spaceships for its cause. And we look to them in vain for
salvation.
But how should we evaluate what seems inescapable evidence of
extraterrestrial indifference to human tragedy? I feel that the
grades should be harsh. The power and technology revealed by UFO
report upon UFO report indicate that inter vention of some kind
should have been possible; help should have been given. Apologists
for a Space-Brothers theory use the same argument as Christian
apologists: The UFO occupants, like God, tolerate evils such as the
Holocaust because life is only a fleeting reality -- the afterlife,
or a reincarnated life, renders this question moot. As a Humanist I
disagree. The death of a child at the hands of a gun-bearing adult is
an abomination, not a necessary learning experience. The only excuse
I can offer for extraterrestrial indifference is some kind of flaw in
their apparent power, some very real vulnerability that might provide
them with an excuse to avoid moral responsibility the way our
indolent sunbather could avoid trying to save the drowning child
because he, himself, might be unable to swim.
A few valid UFO cases contain accounts of healing, descriptions of
wounds made whole, eyesight strengthened and so on, after two
abductions or encounters. These rare examples of healing, however,
raise more ethical problems than they solve. If the occupants of UFOs
do have the power to heal, why is it used so sparingly, so
arbitrarily? Why save one swimmer and let the others drown?
A woman I've worked with and know well was abducted along with her
older sister. Each had had childhood abduc- tions; each had lived
uneasily with her memories. Last spring the older sister was murdered
in a park, by an apparently deranged individual. The tragedy had
nothing to do with UFOs, but my friend said this to me: "I've always
thought, somehow, they were looking out for us, watching over the
people they'd taken in these experiments. Now I know I'm no safer
than anyone else. They don't seem to care." And yet in one case I
know about an abductee was apparently saved in a similar situation.
The arbitrariness of it all undermines any attempt to accept a
Space-Brother reading of the entire phenomenon. Amorality is the term
that comes most quickly to mind.
If the immediate emotion reactions to UFO abductions are usually more
negative than positive and there is literally no sign of benign
extraterrestrial intervention in world affairs, there is still one
more area to examine, and it is extremely important. It is the
long-term psychological and physical aftereffects of UFO-abduction
experiences. Dr. Aphrodite Clamar, a clinical psychologist with whom
I have worked in many such investigations, has stated that she feels
almost every abductee she has dealt with has been psychologically
scarred by the experience. This is surely my opinion also, and I
believe that the psychological tests of abductees administered by Dr.
Elizabeth Slater, as well as the psychological histories taken
through Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, all provide
support for this thesis. Though she points out that cause and effect
obviously cannot be established with certainty, Dr. Slater describes
the psychological profiles of the nine abductees she tested as
resembling those found with rape victims: a low self esteem, a
distrust of their bodies, their physicality, their sexuality, and a
hesitancy to trust others. Not a pretty legacy from our would-be
Space Brothers.
My case files include three instances in which individuals - all
males and apparently somewhat depressed to begin with committed
suicide after what were described by their friends and family as
UFO-abduction experiences. And there is more on this debit side of
the ledger, including what seems to have been an accident following a
car-stopping incident and abduction; the driver, the only surviving
parent of four children, died later of complications suffered in this
encounter. Two female abductees I've worked with either planned or
carried out suicide attempts when they were 10 years old, and another
recent attempt involves a frightened, despondent 14-year-old
girl.
No one who has has this experience regards it as an unmitigated
blessing. Some live in perpetual terror. Some have suffered nervous
breakdowns and as a result of their experiences and the chemical and
shock treatments administered by baffled and incompetent doctors are
living thoroughly damaged lives. I have seen disfiguring scars on the
bodies of abductees who have involuntarily been used in the UFO
occupants' "medical" procedures. Yet I have also seen abductees whose
lives have been undeniably broadened by their bizarre experiences:
survivors who have managed the human task of surmounting their
traumas and gaining something from them.
The reports, again, are mixed, but the pain and suffering are
immense. Deaths, injuries, terrors and mental breakdowns must be
weighed against a philosophical broadening in many individuals, an
awareness that the universe is larger -- and closer -- than anyone
has imagined. The cost, of course, has been tremendous, and the gain
due more to human resilience than alien kindness.
But there is, I believe, an explanation for the apparently callous
and often destructive behavior of the aliens who perpetrate these
temporary kidnappings of innocent men, women and children. One vivid
example should make the point.
Two years ago a Minnesota man whom I shall call Earl wrote to me
about his partially remembered UFO experiences. Eventually I visited
him on his farm and we began a series of hypnotic regressions. He
recalled a time years before when his wife had been helping him
harvest a crop of hay in a rather isolated field. She lay down to
rest on the wagon while Earl worked a few hundred yards away...but
then he saw three small UFOs fly in at tree-top level and hover above
his sleeping wife. One of them lowered to the ground as Earl put his
tractor in gear and raced to her side to protect her from whatever
was happening. A normal-looking blond man, speaking English, stepped
from behind the clump of trees where the UFO had landed and asked
Earl to stop. "Everything is all right," he said. "She won't be
hurt."
Earl ignored him and leaped off the tractor, continuing on foot
toward the wagon where his wife lay, surrounded now by small,
gray-skinned figures. Earl suddenly found himself paralyzed and
helpless. He stood there, unable to move, as the blond man continued
speaking, assuring him that "everything is all right. Nothing will
happen to your mate."
Earl watched in horror as his paralyzed wife was undressed. A long
needle was pushed into her abdomen as she lay on a bed of hay, crying
out at the pain but unable to resist. Skin and hair samples were
taken, and a thin probe was inserted into her vagina. Still frozen in
place, Earl cursed and raged, and the blond man seemed genuinely
surprised by his reaction. "We want you to see this," he said. "We're
not hurting your mate. She'll be fine. Why are you upset? We're not
hurting her...."
The scene ended shortly thereafter, and the couple returned home,
aware of a period of missing time but with no memories of the UFO
encounter. In the days and weeks after this event, Earl's wife began
suffering from nightmares, clawing in her sleep at the area near the
bridge of her nose, between her eyes, and screaming for them to "take
it out, it's hurting." She dug deep gouges in her forehead while the
nightmares continued unabated. Other symptoms of her terror appeared,
half-understood recollections of the events in the hay field.
Eventually she had to be hospitalized, suffering from a severe
nervous breakdown. She lives at home now, tranquilized, no longer
herself.
This story is but one of many that I could present to illustrate a
central point about UFO occupants and their relation to their human
subjects: they simply appear unable for the most part to understand
us, our feelings, our terrors, our love for one another. They seem
psychologically blind to basic human emotions. In Intruders I
recounted case after case in which women were artificially
inseminated or endured ova-retrieval operations, but whose reactions
of rage or terror surprised their captors. These impassive UFO
occupants seem as remote from our "peculiar" human emotions as they
are from our obviously differing anatomy: perhaps more so. And their
lack of understanding offers a kind of excuse for their callous
behavior.
It seems to me that we are left with but two possibilities, neither
very attractive. If the UFO occupants actually do understand us and
can empathize with our needs and emotions, then they are morally
deficient - even in their single-minded selfishness. Not malevolent
or deliberately evil, but as callous as the sunbather who watches the
child drown in the surf. At some point, amoral behavior becomes
immoral behavior. But if these same alien beings simply do not
understand our feelings, then they have an excuse of sorts for their
behavior. And the evidence suggests they really may not know what
disasters they sometimes cause. A female abductee recently wrote me a
letter which goes in part:
I was watching a show about animals, because I love animals. I
don't know if it was Wild Kingdom or some National Geographic show,
but these scientists were tracking some polar bears. They had all
kinds of weird looking equipment and were using a white board which
rendered them invisible in the snow to the bears. As I watched I got
a real sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. These scientists were
dressed in identical white suits, lured the bears closer, and drugged
the big one with the cubs. The whole time they were tagging her they
were taking blood samples, measuring fat, checking eyes, mouth, etc.
And whenever the bear struggled they would pet her, talk to her, tell
her everything was going to be fine. The scientists placed a device
on her that would track her movements for so many years. They even
marked her with a special paint that could be spotted from the air.
Then when they were through with her they ran and hid behind the big
screen so that when she woke up she wouldn't see them. She got up,
looked around, and ran so fast her cubs could hardly keep up. Imagine
how she must have felt the other times when they followed her in a
helicopter. She could run, but with the paint and homing device she
oould never hide! I think all we are is a bunch of animals to these
beings. Some little experiment that has been ongoing for who knows
how long. I don't like the idea of being something's lab animal.
I thought about her letter, her understanding of the animal's plight
and traumas inlicted by the scientists upon the hear and its cubs
These zoologists -- as well as the occupants of UFOs, one hopes --
are all acting from decent, scientific motives. And yet in both cases
pain is inflicted, paralysis is imposed, and traumatic terror is the
result. Some animals might abandon their cubs after such an
experience or die of a mis- measured dose of a tranquilizing drug or
even die from pure shock, just as some humans, like Earl's poor wife,
may never recover from the horror of their experiences. Sad though
this alternative seems, it is easier for me to believe that the
occupants of UFOs simply do not understand what they are doing to us,
what traumas they are inflicting, than to believe they do know and
are merely indifferent to human suffering.
I have talked with many people who will not give up on the benign
Space-Brother reading of these cases, no matter what. At the outset I
said that our quasi-religious hopes die slowly. And so, despite
massive negative evidence, there are still many people who cling to
the idea that somehow, some way there may be two alien groups, one
bad and one good. The bad group, according to this theory, does the
abducting and experimenting while the good group really loves and
understands us. Sometimes a kind of sub-rosa Aryan racism can be
detected beneath these hopes, in that the "grays," as they have been
called, are the bad aliens, while attractive "blonds" are good.
In my 19 years of investigation, however, the more human- seeming
aliens, whenever they are reported (as in the cases of Earl and his
wife or the Travis Walton abduction), seem to be operating as a team
right along with the so called grays, participating in
abductions-as-usual. I am unaware of a shred of evidence that
supports this simple-minded good-guys, bad-guys dichotomy -- but
there is plenty of evidence that this kind of wishful thinking is an
all-too-common psychological habit.
The contactee phenomenon, discounted by almost all serious
investigators, represents the triumph of hope against reality, of
need against evidence. The abduction cases I've studied over the
years can be defined as being, in effect, "all evidence and no
ideology," while the contactee cults are essentially the opposite.
Contactee messages, as passed on through helpful "channels," reduce
themselves generally to soft entreaties to love one another, to make
peace, not war, and to take care of our planet's precarious ecology
-- in other words, the kind of cliche even people like Reagan and
Gorbachev routinely utter in their formal speeches. (This kind of
nebulous message, it should be said, is sometimes also reported in
valid UFO-abduction cases. What we really need, one abductee said to
me, is actual alien help in solving our prob- lems, not just another
newspaper editorial pointing them out.) In short, there is no reason
to assume that any benign group of aliens anywhere has yet done
anything truly helpful to our planet Such evidence simply does not
exist.
The final difficulty in the cultist view of a good alien-bad alien
duality lies in the age-old problem of evil. If the bad aliens are
hurting us by their abduction, why don't the good aliens prevent it?
For centuries we've asked ourselves, if God is omnipotent, how can He
permit, say, the torture of children? Many of us felt that since no
answer consistent with the idea of God's omnipotence could satisfy
us, there was something seriously wrong with the theology. And so it
is with this kind of alien theology, apart from the fact that no
credible evidence of any kind indicates a struggle between rival
alien groups. If there are various groups of aliens from different
places of origin in the universe, they are apparently all
cooperatively doing the same thing to us -- and I for one think that
what they're doing is, in the short term at least, immensely
destructive.
Once again we are back to the only two available alternatives. Either
the UFO occupants have not grasped the psycho- logical toll they are
taking in these abductions and genetic experiments because they
really do not understand human psychology, or they must be viewed as
an amoral race bent solely upon gratifying its own scientific needs
at whatever cost to us, the victims. The question of which
alternative is true cannot now be answered. There is evidence to
support both interpretations, but I, for one, wish to choose the
former.
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