Budd Hopkins was an American artist, author and ufologist.1 A well-known abstract painter whose work was collected by the Guggenheim and the Whitney,2 he also worked as a sculptor;3 painting was his main career, and his investigation of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) reports came later.4 His actual first name was Elliott,5 and he had lived in New York USA since the 1950s.6 He was married three times and had many affairs,7 and had one daughter, Grace (Budd Hopkins’s daughter).8 He died two months after his eightieth birthday;9 his daughter subsequently attempted to sell the town house he had lived in for fifty years, and ran into a dispute with a co-owner who did not want to sell.10
Hopkins had been investigating UFO reports for two decades11 by the time he met the journalist Leslie Kean at a UFO conference and, later, again in New York to discuss one of his cases.12 His focus was on people who reported encounters with extraterrestrial beings, whom he called “star people”.13 He said he had dealt with more than a hundred such cases and had come to understand a recurring pattern in how people responded to them,14 drawing on abductees from every borough of New York City15 and documenting cases within Manhattan.16 With John Mack, he presented circumstantial evidence for alien abduction in the form of landing-site traces, biopsy scars, alleged implants and abductee testimony.17 His central method was forensic hypnosis: in one case, a woman who consciously recalled refusing to get onto an examination table found under hypnosis that she had in fact been placed on it many times.18 He also catalogued physical marks reported by abductees, including two “scoop mark” scars on the calf of an abductee he called Kathy Davis, whose case became the central figure described in his 1987 book Intruders, for which she made a small ceramic sculpture of the being;1920 a matching mark was later found on Davis’s mother,21 and the sculpture caused visible discomfort among other members of Hopkins’s support group when it was first shown to them.22 Psychological testing of the abductees he worked with found patterns of deficits comparable to those found in rape victims,23 including lowered self-esteem, heightened fear of the outside world and diminished trust in their own bodies.24 Hopkins said he had never conducted past-life hypnotic regression with abductees,25 and that he had deliberately left descriptions of an alleged fetal “nursery” facility out of his book despite having collected similar accounts.26 His profile also drew interest beyond formal research: the producers of the Tomorrowland attraction ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter used him as an expert on hypnotic regression,27 and as part of the ride he showed children cards depicting aliens, some of whom reacted by screaming and hugging their parents in terror.28
Hopkins’s best-documented collaboration was with the writer Whitley Strieber, who telephoned him after reading Science and the UFOs;29 Hopkins listened to his account and invited him over immediately,30 his apartment being a ten-minute walk from Strieber’s home.31 At their first meeting Hopkins told Strieber that he was not a therapist but could refer him to one,32 and Strieber initially hid the memories that would become the substance of Communion from his wife Anne Strieber and their son, seeking Hopkins’s help instead.33 Hopkins first proposed hypnotising Strieber,34 an idea Strieber initially resisted because Hopkins, as an artist, displayed no professional degrees.35 Strieber recalled that Hopkins described Dr Donald Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute as having expressed interest in, and seeming open-minded about, the phenomenon;36 Hopkins put Strieber in touch with Klein, who then hypnotised him,37 and the resulting memories became more detailed than either man had expected.38 Hopkins attended both resulting hypnosis sessions, covering the events of October 4 and the 1985 abduction experience December 26, recording them and, under the agreed rules, permitted to question Strieber only at the end of each.39 During the March 1, 1986 hypnosis session (October 4 memories), Hopkins remarked that the beginning moments of such experiences are often the worst and that it gets easier afterwards.40 He also hypnotised Anne Strieber, under which she recalled Whitley Strieber leaving their bed and going downstairs on the night of the October 4, 1985 experience,41 and a separate 1982 incident on LaGuardia Place in which she was thumped in the stomach;42 when Robert Naiman later conducted her second hypnosis session, he had not been informed of the results of the first.43 Investigating a loud sound Strieber recalled from the night of the incident, Hopkins asked Annie Gottlieb what would produce a similar noise; she suggested that pushing a heavy door back against a wall would make a comparable bang,44 and Hopkins noted that four different people had independently arrived at similar descriptions of the same explosion sound.45 On 1986-04-13, eleven people gathered at Hopkins’s home for the 1986 colloquy at Budd Hopkins’ home April 13, selected because they lived in the New York area and could attend;46 only Strieber and Hopkins used their real names.47 Strieber later wrote that he confided a detail about a bodily function he had observed in the beings to Hopkins alone, and that Hopkins was disgusted and assumed he had been dreaming;48 neither man wrote publicly about it.49
Hopkins’s public lecture in Sydney in October 1992 helped legitimise and popularise the reality of abductions and shifted UFO Research New South Wales’s previously negative attitude toward the subject, according to the Australian researcher Bill Chalker.50 During the same visit, at the Budd Hopkins 1992-10 Sydney lecture, he presented red-tinted photographs of a playground in suburban Brisbane taken that year, part of the 1992 suburban Brisbane playground abduction photos,51 which he said might show evidence of the invisibility techniques used by alien abductors.52 He also passed on the contact details of Australian abductees to a new support group formed by Peter Khoury, though Chalker noted that none of those witnesses had experiences involving physical evidence such as hair samples.53 Khoury later said Hopkins chose to sit at his table at a UFO conference rather than the seat arranged by organisers,54 and that Hopkins described marks like the one on Khoury’s shin as “scoop marks”, believed to be caused by alien beings taking samples of hair, skin, blood and bone.55 Chalker also said that the account of an abductee he knew as Lucy or Sally, as portrayed by the journalist Jim Schnabel, did not match the person Hopkins had described to him,56 and that Hopkins had told him he believed the case had frightened Schnabel into turning on it and debunking it.57 According to the same source, an abductee named Sally (Budd Hopkins abductee) had been in contact with Hopkins since 1987, when she was trying to understand a peculiar “missing time” experience.58
Hopkins’s friendship with Leslie Kean continued into his final illness and, in an unusual coda, beyond his death. Toward the end of his life, before entering hospice with two types of cancer, Kean gave Hopkins books about evidence suggesting death may not be the end, including Tom Shroder’s Old Souls;59 Kean said Hopkins told her he did not want to read them because he did not believe in any sort of afterlife.60 In preparing for a reading with the medium Laura Lynne Jackson, Kean focused on two people close to her who had recently died: Hopkins and her brother, Leslie Kean’s brother Garry.61 During the Leslie Kean’s reading with Laura Lynne Jackson, Kean said Jackson’s first message from the male spirit was “You were right”, which Kean took to refer to Hopkins’s earlier disbelief in an afterlife, an interpretation Jackson confirmed;62 Kean said Jackson also conveyed that the spirit had died of cancer and that Kean had been with him when he died,63 and that he had one child, a daughter.64 In both that reading and a later, separate one, Hopkins appeared first and dominated the session, described as assertive and clear, while Kean’s brother was withdrawn and appeared only at the end;65 Kean said both men gave at least one very personal detail, among many factual ones, that Jackson could not have known.66 In the second reading, with the medium Sandra O’Hara, Hopkins again dominated, prompting O’Hara to laugh and say, “Today was his show…He was saying, ‘I’m here! I have the floor! I’m talking!’"67 Kean reported that O’Hara’s reading included further details she matched to known facts about Hopkins: O’Hara said the male spirit had died of cancer,68 described him as an artist holding a paintbrush,69 referenced the song “Amazing Grace”,70 and said a property dispute had arisen after his death.71 Kean noted that Hopkins and her brother had both died within recent years of the readings.72