Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time
It begins not with a flash of light, but with a blank space. A stretch of highway that should have taken two hours, but only consumed one. A late-night drive home from a friend’s house that ends with a sudden, jarring realization of being in the driveway, with no memory of the final leg of the journey. A childhood memory of playing in the backyard, followed by a strange gap, and then being called in for dinner, feeling unsettled but not knowing why.
These are the fragments of “Missing Time”—a phrase that, before the 1980s, belonged more to science fiction than clinical psychology. It was popularized, defined, and meticulously investigated by a man who was, by trade, an abstract expressionist painter. His name was Budd Hopkins, and his work created a framework for understanding one of the most perplexing and personal facets of the UFO phenomenon: the alien abduction narrative.
The catalyst for this deep dive was a recent episode of the Phenomena Case Files podcast, which meticulously unpacked Hopkins' seminal book, Missing Time. The episode, available everywhere you get your podcasts, served as a stark reminder that Hopkins’ work remains as controversial and compelling today as it was four decades ago. It’s a legacy built not on crashed saucers or government conspiracies, but on the fragile, contested terrain of human memory.
This is not just the story of alien abductions. It is a story about the nature of memory itself, the power of suggestion, the battle between psychiatry and the paranormal, and the profound, often painful, search for identity by those who believe a part of their own lives has been stolen from them.
“The Artist and the Abyss”
The journey begins with a quote from Hopkins himself, one that encapsulates the chillingly clinical nature of the phenomenon he dedicated his life to:
“The phenomenon seems to be a continuing program, an ongoing project of some sort. It’s not just a one-time curiosity-seeking visit. It’s a long-term interaction with certain individuals and probably with the human species as a whole.”
This is not the language of wild-eyed fantasy. It is the measured, systematic conclusion of an investigator who believed he was looking at evidence of a deliberate, generational program.
Brief Bio & Background of Budd Hopkins
Before he became the reluctant godfather of the abduction research movement, Budd Hopkins was a respected figure in the New York art world. Born in 1931, he was a gifted painter and sculptor, his work exhibited in prestigious institutions like the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was an intellectual, a rationalist, steeped in the post-war modernist tradition. UFOs were not on his radar.
How and why did Hopkins insert himself into the UFO phenomenon?
His entry was gradual. A sighting of a silent, unidentified craft over Cape Cod in 1964 piqued his scientific curiosity. He began researching, and in 1975, he investigated the now-famous case of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It was during this investigation that he first encountered the concept of “missing time”—a gap of unaccounted-for hours in the witnesses’ recollection.
For Hopkins, the artist, this was a compelling pattern. He wasn't looking for little green men; he was looking for the negative space in the narrative, the blank canvas where a story should be. He began to seek out individuals who reported UFO sightings coupled with these memory lapses. To access these hidden memories, he turned to a tool as controversial as the phenomenon itself: hypnotic regression.
The Key to the Locked Room: The Hypnosis Controversy
To understand the legacy of Budd Hopkins, one must first grapple with the method that formed its foundation.
Hypnosis as Psychiatric Therapy and the Controversy of Regression
Hypnosis, a state of focused attention and heightened suggestibility, has a long history in psychotherapy. It is a recognized tool for managing pain, overcoming phobias, and treating PTSD. However, its use in age regression—specifically to recover supposedly repressed memories of traumatic events—is a battleground.
The theory Hopkins operated on was straightforward: the abduction experience was so traumatic that the mind walled it off, creating a period of “missing time.” Hypnosis could bypass this psychic defense mechanism and allow the subject to access the true memory of the event.
Counterpoints from Critics
The scientific pushback was, and remains, fierce. Critics point to several critical flaws:
The Creation of False Memories: Human memory is not a perfect video recorder; it is a reconstructive process. Under hypnosis, individuals are highly vulnerable to suggestion, both explicit and implicit. The hypnotist’s questions (“What do you see now?” “Is there a being in the room?”) can easily shape the narrative, leading the subject to confabulate—to create a detailed, believable, but entirely false memory.
Source Confusion: In a hypnotic state, a subject may have difficulty distinguishing between an actual memory, a dream, a fantasy, or a scene from a movie. The resulting “memory” can be a compelling, yet entirely fabricated, collage.
The Lack of Corroboration: Despite the often incredibly detailed narratives that emerge from regression, physical evidence remains vanishingly rare. The memories are, by their very nature, subjective and unverifiable.
The Unreliable Witness and the Vulnerable Subject
This criticism is amplified by the fact that even cognizant memory is notoriously unreliable. Famous court cases have been overturned due to flawed eyewitness testimony. Our memories are shaped by our beliefs, our expectations, and the questions we are asked.
If a normal memory is a shaky hand-held camera, is a hypnotically regressed memory a special effect-laden Hollywood production, directed by the hypnotist? For skeptics, the answer is a resounding yes. The entire structure of Hopkins’ evidence, they argue, is built on a method that inherently corrupts the very data it seeks to uncover.
The John Mack Rebuttal: A Different Kind of Truth
This is where the late Dr. John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist and abduction researcher, enters the fray. Mack did not dismiss the criticisms of hypnosis, but he proposed a radical counterpoint.
After conducting his own regressions with dozens of alleged abductees, Mack was struck by the consistency of the narratives and the profound psychological trauma exhibited by the subjects—trauma that was consistent with a real, lived experience. His conclusion was not that hypnosis was revealing a literal, physical event that could be proven in a laboratory. Instead, he argued it was revealing a phenomenological truth—an experience that was utterly real to the percipient and was having a tangible, often devastating, impact on their life.
Mack ventured into even more controversial territory, suggesting the phenomenon might be multidimensional or inter-dimensional, interacting with human consciousness in a way that transcends our simple definitions of “real” and “imaginary.” For Mack, the question wasn’t just “Did this happen physically?” but “What is the nature of a reality that can manifest an experience this transformative and traumatic?” His work, detailed in his book Abduction, was a direct challenge to the materialist paradigm, arguing that the experiencers were providing data not just about aliens, but about the fundamental nature of reality itself.
The Value of the Phenomena: The Experiencer’s Voice
Despite the methodological quagmire, to dismiss the abduction phenomenon outright is to dismiss the profound subjective experiences of thousands of individuals.
The value of Hopkins’ work lies in the space he created for the “experiencer” to speak. Before him, people who had these fragmented memories were often isolated, terrified, and labeled as psychotic. Hopkins provided a community and a narrative framework. He collected their stories and found, to his astonishment, a startling consistency: the “Gray” beings, the medical examination, the reproductive focus, the sense of a hybrid program, the spiritual or ecological messages.
Whether these narratives are literal transcripts of events or powerful, shared psychic archetypes, they represent a significant human experience. They are a modern mythology in the making, a set of stories that our culture is producing to grapple with profound existential anxieties about technology, reproduction, our place in the cosmos, and the ultimate lack of control we have over our own bodies and lives.
The contribution of the abductees is the data of their lived reality. Their stories force us to ask uncomfortable questions about consciousness, memory, and the limits of human knowledge.
The Hopkins Legacy: A Fractured Foundation
So, what did Budd Hopkins leave us?
He left a framework. He was the first to systematize the investigation of abduction claims, moving them from isolated weird tales to a seemingly patterned, researchable phenomenon. He founded the Intruders Foundation to support this work and gave a voice to the voiceless.
He also left a cautionary tale. The heavy reliance on hypnotic regression has made his body of work perpetually vulnerable to scientific dismissal. The scandals and criticisms that dogged later years, including questions about the influence he wielded over his subjects, have cast a long shadow.
Ultimately, his legacy is dualistic. For believers, he was a brave pioneer who dared to explore the darkest corners of the UFO mystery. For skeptics, he was a well-meaning but misguided artist who, through a flawed methodology, accidentally created a modern cultural delusion. Both sides can agree on one thing: after Hopkins, the UFO conversation was irrevocably changed. It was no longer just about lights in the sky; it was about the sanctity of our own minds and memories.
The Persisting Phenomenon and the New Storytellers
The phenomenon did not retire with Budd Hopkins, who passed away in 2011. Reports of missing time and abduction-like experiences persist, though the language and imagery have evolved, now often incorporating elements of screen memories, downloads of information, and interactions with other types of beings.
Who Picks Up the Baton?
Today, the stories of experiencers are told through different channels:
Researchers and Authors: Figures like Dr. John E. Mack’s work remains influential. Researchers like David M. Jacobs continued Hopkins' line of inquiry, while others have taken a more experiential or consciousness-oriented approach.
The Podcasting and Digital Media Landscape: Shows like Phenomena Case Files are the modern inheritors of this tradition. They provide a platform for these stories, often presenting them with a level of production and critical analysis that was unavailable in Hopkins’ day. They can reach a global audience, creating a decentralized community of the curious and the experienced.
Support Organizations: Groups like FREE (The Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Encounters) continue the work of supporting experiencers. FREE, in particular, focuses on a rigorous, data-driven approach to understanding the physiological and psychological effects of these events, providing resources and community for those who feel isolated by their experiences.
Where Do We Go From Here? The Uncomfortable Question
This brings us to the final, and most profound, question raised by the Phenomena Case Filesepisode and the work of Budd Hopkins: Where do we go from here?
Are we better or worse off with this knowledge? Is ignorance truly bliss?
If the skeptics are entirely right, then we have spent decades exploring a cul-de-sac of human psychology, a fascinating but ultimately misleading narrative generated by flawed memory and suggestion. We can file it away as a cultural curiosity.
But if there is the slightest chance that any of this is true—even just one story, one case, one instance of “missing time” that corresponds to a real, non-human interaction—then the implications are staggering.
It would mean that our understanding of reality is fundamentally incomplete. It would mean that human sovereignty is an illusion. It would mean that one of the most transcendental moments in human history—the confirmation that we are not alone—is not a future event to be celebrated on the White House lawn, but a covert, ongoing, and often traumatic process that has been happening to individuals for generations, hidden in the blank spaces of their minds.
Budd Hopkins opened a door that many would prefer remained closed. He forced us to look into the abyss of our own unremembered hours and consider the terrifying possibility that we are not the sole authors of our lives. The blank space on the canvas, he suggested, might be the most important part of the painting. Whether he revealed a terrifying truth or a profound illusion, his work ensures that we can never look at a stretch of empty road or a gap in our memory in quite the same way again.
This article was inspired by the in-depth analysis in the episode “Case File: Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time” on the Phenomena Case Files podcast. To explore the cases and controversies in more detail, the episode is available everywhere you get your podcasts.
About the Author - Robert Cavaliere is a writer and host of the Phenomena Case Files podcast and Hacking It! Writer by Trade podcast. His fiction includes the novels Panfried Dialogues, Night City, Phenomena, Sage, Chron, and Borderlands. Preview his novels at Cityscape Press (cityscapepress.com).
