The Sysop's Bookshelf
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TITLE: Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions
AUTHOR: Budd Hopkins
PUBLISHED BY: Marek
AT: New York, 1981
VIEWPOINT: Zetetic
258 Pages

Budd Hopkins is an artist of no little repute, who has maintained an
interest. in the UFO phenomenon for 20 years. While writing a UFO
column for the Village Voice, he became involved in a particularly
fascinating aspect of the field,. the abduction cases. Starting with
the famed Betty and Barney Hill case, many. people claim to have been
actually taken aboard UFOs and examined by their humanoid occupants. In
most of these cases, the actual abduction is erased from the victim's
memory, leaving only a vague fearfulness and an unexplained lapse of
several hours -- missing time. The encounter with, and abduction by,
aliens is brought out only through the use of regressive hypnosis

In this riveting book, Hopkins documents several abduction cases with
the transcripts of the actual hypnotic sessions. The basic accounts by
the various subjects so nearly match each other that there can be
almost no question of hallucination or fantasizing. Unless Hopkins has
written a work of total fiction, the reader is confronted with
inescapable evidence of alien encounters

The most important contribution the book makes is to reinforce the
rather sketchy image we have of our visitors. The race we are dealing
with seems to be humanoid,.about 4-5 feet in height, with slender
bodies, bulbous, hairless heads, small mouths, nose and ears, and large
almond-shaped eyes. Their skin is grey, with a leathery quality,
alternately described as like "putty" or "marshmallowy". They almost
invariably communicate via a form of telepathy

The presentation of this knowledge counteracts yet another of the many
insidious claims by arch-skeptic Phil Klass. In a letter to myself,
Klass maintained that "one of the characteristic fingerprints of
'pseudo-science' that distinguishes it from true science is that the
passage of time and effort adds no increased knowledge, or
understanding, for pseudo-sciencetoday, 20 years after I entered the
field of UFOlogy, we do. not know an iota more about what UFOs 'really
are' than was 'known' two decades ago." It would seem, with the
publication of this book, that Klass himself has redefined UFOlogy as a
true science

Now I'll offer a generalization of my own. One of the surest signs of
the truthfulness of a paranormal phenomenon is when the "explanation"
offered by. its would-be debunkers is more extraordinary than the claim
itself. Just what. do the skeptics make of the incredible tales told
under hypnosis in Missing Time? "A subconscious reliving of the birth
trauma." Besides being patently ludicrous on its face, this explanation
ignores the palpable physical evidence presented in the book -- scars
from wounds inflicted by the alien examiners Scars that appear, in many
cases, on the exact same place from victim to victim, and correlate
perfectly with the description of the "operation."

SUMMARY: This is not a book I would recommend for those who prefer not
to believe that we are under surveillance. For the rest of us, it may
be the most important book written since the days of Donald Keyhoe


Charles,
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