Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron manky Well. Starting about in the
Speaker 1: the ninety one UM actually starting the ninety seven a century,
Speaker 1: we began here about the abduction the auction corona started
Speaker 1: out by slowly We're basic Arney and Betty Hill sixty
Speaker 1: one and then in Tonio b s Rows cases Brazilways
Speaker 1: having the seven weeks and there about that sis Well.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing about the cases that we resually
Speaker 1: were where what was that? They were a very home
Speaker 1: party Cowey, They were rare, they were odd, they were strange.
Speaker 1: At the same time the people who were having the
Speaker 1: experiences seemed to be having We couldn't really tell whether
Speaker 1: there was any thing over What was it about Farney
Speaker 1: and Betty Hill, you know that caused and abductions? Who
Speaker 1: happened to them? Well, the way we looked at it
Speaker 1: now days was there was only one reason they were
Speaker 1: in the wrong place at the wrong him. I went
Speaker 1: else one of the reasons could they're possibly be? And
Speaker 1: time only that. But Barney and Betty he said things
Speaker 1: that let us two things. And the experiments model, as
Speaker 1: to say, and they had skins Treby tame the body
Speaker 1: there then made a sass amount of here. They asked
Speaker 1: Party why his steeds came out? Asked Betty why Party
Speaker 1: seeking out of hers, didn't they They put a merely
Speaker 1: into Betty's Mabel and said they were doing pregnancy test. Well,
Speaker 1: all of this was the model for more experiments audience.
Speaker 1: This was a phasic situation where you have a model,
Speaker 1: there's one. Yeah. The publication of John Fuller's A Journey
Speaker 1: Interrupted began a decades long series of ever more incredible
Speaker 1: old tales of alien abduction. Using the Hill story as
Speaker 1: a foundation, Each successive abduction account had to be more
Speaker 1: extraordinary than the last. Public interest in alien abduction reached
Speaker 1: its height in the nine nineties, partly because of the
Speaker 1: hit TV show The X Files, which had an ongoing
Speaker 1: abduction subplot. Another reason was the success of three men
Speaker 1: who pushed the alien abduction narrative to its limit in
Speaker 1: a number of best selling books I'm Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: This Is Strange Arrivals Episode nine, The Troika. In the
Speaker 1: twenty years following the Hill experience, there was a clear
Speaker 1: understanding of the type of situation in which a person
Speaker 1: could be abducted. They would be driving in lonely isolated
Speaker 1: places at night, a UFO would appear and the abduction
Speaker 1: would follow. But this conception changed and the study of
Speaker 1: abductions became something entirely different. UFO researcher Robert Schaeffer, starting
Speaker 1: with Bud Hopkins in the eighties, you didn't have to
Speaker 1: go anywhere to be abducted by aliens. Aliens would come
Speaker 1: right into your bedroom and grab you, drag you up
Speaker 1: to the saucer, and then bring you back whenever they
Speaker 1: were done with you. You didn't have to drive out
Speaker 1: somewhere late at night and see a lightning us at
Speaker 1: You're just sitting there, minding your own business, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, the aliens come the Once you've
Speaker 1: accept that this could happen, you've opened the door to
Speaker 1: every kind of fantasy and imagination possible. Bud Hopkins was
Speaker 1: a well known abstract expressionist artist who became a leading
Speaker 1: researcher into the alien abduction phenomen man On he published
Speaker 1: his first book on the subject, Missing Time, a documented
Speaker 1: study of UFO abductions. Hopkins made the conceptual leap that
Speaker 1: abductions could happen any time, in anywhere. An associate professor
Speaker 1: of history at Temple University named David Jacobs seized upon
Speaker 1: this idea and began his own research. We heard him
Speaker 1: giving a lecture at the opening of this episode. David
Speaker 1: Jacobs got into the UFO business quite a bit earlier.
Speaker 1: He wrote The History of UFO Belief in the United
Speaker 1: States back in the seventies. He state at this, and
Speaker 1: then he too picked up the idea from Hopkins and
Speaker 1: whoever else that these types of bedroom abductions were taking place.
Speaker 1: After his nine book, The UFO Controversy in America, Jacobs
Speaker 1: didn't publish again for seventeen years. His next book, The Threat,
Speaker 1: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda, was specifically about abductions and
Speaker 1: featured a foreword by the third major figure in this
Speaker 1: era of abduction research, one who brought with him impeccable
Speaker 1: academic credentials. Done back was a whole was very important guy,
Speaker 1: and he was not just a PhD. It was a
Speaker 1: professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Mac was very,
Speaker 1: very talented, very prominent guy. But somehow he got bit
Speaker 1: by this book too and decided it was real. So
Speaker 1: these three guys pop against Jacobs and Mac sometimes referred
Speaker 1: to them, those Ditroitka. The Troika was a type of
Speaker 1: temporary government that occurred four times in the history of
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, where three leaders sat atop the government
Speaker 1: without any of them able to exert power alone. These
Speaker 1: guys thought that they were very scientific, and I guess
Speaker 1: it's of credentials and stuff like that. They kind of work.
Speaker 1: In Hopkins published Intruders, which laid out the case that
Speaker 1: humans were being abducted and used by aliens for genetic research.
Speaker 1: In he met a Boston based documentary filmmaker named Carol
Speaker 1: Rainey in they were married. I'm Carol Rainey and I
Speaker 1: was married for ten years to Bud Hopkins, abstract expressionist
Speaker 1: painter and UFO researcher, and I came from a background
Speaker 1: uh spending twenty years making films for epidemiologists in the
Speaker 1: Boston area. I don't come from a science background originally,
Speaker 1: but in all of those years of working for epidemiologists
Speaker 1: and later in New York City with the major metal
Speaker 1: institutions like New York Presbyterian, I learned a lot about
Speaker 1: how scientists think about phenomena in the natural world and
Speaker 1: how they go about gaining real knowledge in the real
Speaker 1: world from working with scientists, Carol found a very different
Speaker 1: world surrounding Hopkins, who was doing UFO research but was
Speaker 1: by training an artist. I married an artist, as did
Speaker 1: his second wife, I'm sure, but by the time I
Speaker 1: met him, he had pretty much given up on being
Speaker 1: part of the art world in Manhattan, and almost his
Speaker 1: entire life was really taken up with being this leader
Speaker 1: in a movement called alien abduction. It was a very
Speaker 1: overwhelming lifestyle. It was UFOs seven. Carol moved from boss
Speaker 1: In down to New York In where Hopkins was the
Speaker 1: center of gravity for a group of people who identified
Speaker 1: themselves as abductees. So I got my own camera and
Speaker 1: started shooting yet one more documentary, but this one would
Speaker 1: be no strings attached, no federal funding, no state funding,
Speaker 1: no city funding. Funded out of my back pocket. That
Speaker 1: gave me a great deal of freedom. If Betty Hill
Speaker 1: had talked to Bud Hopkins, she would have found that
Speaker 1: the aliens that he believed were kidnapping and experimenting on
Speaker 1: people were far different from the leader with whom she
Speaker 1: carried on a pleasant and occasionally funny conversation. They didn't
Speaker 1: resemble Quasga and jew hop either, Bud's work expanded the
Speaker 1: original narrative, and he didn't stay relatively close to the
Speaker 1: pattern for the Hill case Betty and Barney Hill. But
Speaker 1: what his writing added to it was that nobody was
Speaker 1: safe anywhere, that aliens could enter your bedroom at night,
Speaker 1: coming straight through the walls, coming through the windows. I mean,
Speaker 1: his view of alien beings in the world was that
Speaker 1: they were godlike, really ordinary physics did not prohibit them
Speaker 1: from doing whatever they wanted to do to take advantage
Speaker 1: of people's helplessness. And the abductees were used in Budd's
Speaker 1: thoughts in the same way that Lee observed, you know,
Speaker 1: wolves in the wild, and we experimented on them to
Speaker 1: some degree from afar. And that's what he felt the
Speaker 1: aliens were doing to us. They might put tracking devices
Speaker 1: in us, what's called old an implant these days. You know,
Speaker 1: many of his people came up with those implants, partly
Speaker 1: to add credence to Bud's narrative, and because that was
Speaker 1: the story that was becoming increasingly popular in mainstream media
Speaker 1: during the nineteen eighties and nineties. Figure out what that
Speaker 1: little thing of race sums his nose as yet, No,
Speaker 1: and I'm not losing any sleep over it good. I
Speaker 1: bond was very believable. You know, one of the more
Speaker 1: intelligent people I've ever met, But with this caveat, not
Speaker 1: at all given to science or interest in science. He
Speaker 1: knew almost nothing about psychology or psychiatry or recovered memories.
Speaker 1: He didn't know except to mouth in a bit. He
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about scientific protocols, were the scientific method
Speaker 1: and how you use that to make sure that the
Speaker 1: information you believe you're gaining in the world, that that
Speaker 1: information is valid. As I became more and more part
Speaker 1: of the U of a world, I became less and
Speaker 1: less convinced that many of the people doing research, we're
Speaker 1: doing it with enough valid understanding of science and manipulation
Speaker 1: of testimony and leading witnesses. How did this gap in
Speaker 1: knowledge play out in their research? After the break, strange
Speaker 1: arrivals will return in a moment. Carol Rainey expresses concern
Speaker 1: that Bud Hopkins and David Jacob's lack knowledge that should
Speaker 1: have informed their work with hypnotically recovered memories. This is
Speaker 1: especially concerning because we know that hypnosis subjects have an
Speaker 1: increased vulnerability to suggestion. In Hopkins cases, the way in
Speaker 1: which quote unquote, memories were created and manipulated. Is easy
Speaker 1: to identify. Hopkins could be acting in good faith, but
Speaker 1: his subjects testimony was tainted. First of all, Peter Robbins
Speaker 1: would be there as his assistant and would read for
Speaker 1: the letters. Is how things came in originally, and Peter
Speaker 1: would read through them and he'd write abductee on the front,
Speaker 1: or he'd write probable abductee on the front, and then
Speaker 1: that person would be mailed a kit of information about
Speaker 1: the abduction phenomena and then told in the kit to
Speaker 1: avoid reading the literature in the field, so the new
Speaker 1: possible abductive would be sent as kit of material. And
Speaker 1: I think it varied sometimes, but it was information about,
Speaker 1: you know, the abduction phenomena. And also the people who
Speaker 1: were calling Bud knew enough about the field to call
Speaker 1: a top researcher in the field. They had also often
Speaker 1: read one, two or three of his books previously, and
Speaker 1: they had watched movies, they watched documentaries. He had been
Speaker 1: in I mean, he was appearing on the Phil Donahue's show,
Speaker 1: on the Oprah Winfrey Show, on Canadian talk shows. He
Speaker 1: was all over. So by the time they show up
Speaker 1: at hopkins house for a hypnosis session. They've already been
Speaker 1: exposed to his work on alien abductions. When people would
Speaker 1: first call and begin talking to him, he could go
Speaker 1: on easily for an hour with each person over the phone,
Speaker 1: and he would often tell them about the new cases
Speaker 1: that he was working on. The queue that sends to
Speaker 1: the person on the other end of the phone is
Speaker 1: that if you want the attention of his television personality,
Speaker 1: you might do well consciously or unconsciously to have your
Speaker 1: own memories that were similar to the ones he was
Speaker 1: interested in. And that is where the tailoring of tales began,
Speaker 1: long before he even met the people. These people would
Speaker 1: come to Bud in Carol's house to undergo regression hypnosis.
Speaker 1: Bud would sometimes talk to the visitor, telling him or
Speaker 1: her about some of his cases or things that he
Speaker 1: was interested in, and then Bud would put them under hypnosis.
Speaker 1: You don't have to lead anybody under hypnosis after that,
Speaker 1: they already know which way to go. And that happened often,
Speaker 1: and it's that pre hypnosis session. All those sessions, those
Speaker 1: contacts is what people on the outside never knew about.
Speaker 1: Here's Bud Hopkins conducting a hypnosis session with an alleged abductee.
Speaker 1: This is from a recording of a conference where he
Speaker 1: presented this tape as part of a lecture. Very see
Speaker 1: what's you can seeing? What you're feeling? Long time ago?
Speaker 1: Me table, father or something. It's around, it's around the world.
Speaker 1: Them standing beside me. Mh, I'm here talking to me.
Speaker 1: I don't I hear them. They're telling me, I'm all right,
Speaker 1: m you can't do it? Fine? They yeah, I want something.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. I don't know what you want. I've seen
Speaker 1: you before. Okay, all right, all right, just tell me
Speaker 1: very cool. What's happening, Kathy? You can do it? Finds
Speaker 1: a long time ago. We're just remembering this. You what's happening?
Speaker 1: It's this has happened to me before. Okay. H The
Speaker 1: table is to moving my legs. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: It's just the same. What's happened to your lig as
Speaker 1: you mentioned there arre youre apart. It's like having guyan man.
Speaker 1: It's okay, it's the same. I've had this before. Ye
Speaker 1: I'm Cathy. I'm going to touch your shoulders me. I's
Speaker 1: going to feel very calm, and when I count to three,
Speaker 1: you feel the warmth in my hand one, two, three,
Speaker 1: and now my hands, and you should live very safe,
Speaker 1: much better, much better. Jacobs also prepped his subjects, and
Speaker 1: his methods were often less subtle. Here he is giving
Speaker 1: a lecture talking about the consistency of stories he's heard
Speaker 1: during hypnotic regressions, but also letting slip a clue as
Speaker 1: to why these stories might be so similar. They may
Speaker 1: not know if they may be. It's not aware of
Speaker 1: it at all, But we pretty much know. We know
Speaker 1: the sequence of advances may happen the wround world. It
Speaker 1: almost doesn't matter. In other words, we know when they say,
Speaker 1: hey DC, we know the coming and they're not gonna
Speaker 1: like the you know, and I have to prepare them.
Speaker 1: And this uh about seven city of many compressions US
Speaker 1: and we see a certain routine here. Obviously this is
Speaker 1: a strange statement to be coming from a person supposedly
Speaker 1: engaged in research. Again, he could have the best of intentions,
Speaker 1: but as we have seen in earlier episodes, hypnosis subject
Speaker 1: is particularly vulnerable to suggestion, and of course the way
Speaker 1: they lead to witnesses is just pathetic. I think Jacobs
Speaker 1: wanted the worst. People have pointed this out from going
Speaker 1: over these transcripts and saying, you know, basically he's telling
Speaker 1: her what to what he wants to hear. He's you know,
Speaker 1: he's telegraphing. It rouses there and she just tells him
Speaker 1: what he wants to hear. In Carol Rainey wrote a
Speaker 1: lengthy article titled Priests of High Strangeness to expose what
Speaker 1: she felt like, we're unsigh scientific and unethical practices among Hopkins, Jacobs,
Speaker 1: and mac When I wrote the article, many of the
Speaker 1: old time UFO research was contacted me privately to thank
Speaker 1: me for putting that out there. He Stan was one
Speaker 1: of them, and they said, we knew there was something
Speaker 1: off in this research that but and Jacobs were putting out,
Speaker 1: but we didn't know what it was. We only knew
Speaker 1: what he told us about how he researched cases. When
Speaker 1: she refers to stand, she's talking about Stanton Friedman, who
Speaker 1: we heard from earlier in this series, mainly about Marjorie
Speaker 1: Fish and the Star Map. I didn't bring up Hopkins
Speaker 1: in our interview, but when he was talking about the
Speaker 1: qualifications of Dr. Benjamin Simon as a hypnotist, Friedman used
Speaker 1: Hopkins as an example of someone who did not meet
Speaker 1: the same standard. We're not talking about some amateur and look.
Speaker 1: I like Bud Hopkins, so I knew him. I've been
Speaker 1: in his home. Great guy, But Budd was an artist,
Speaker 1: not a professional psychiatrist or psychologist or justst with training
Speaker 1: and dealing with traumatic experiences, you get a fine job.
Speaker 1: I'm not not conuted, but on any comparison of skills
Speaker 1: brought to the problem, there's no question Dr Simon rules
Speaker 1: the roost. The other method that Hopkins used with the
Speaker 1: supposed abductees with support group meetings. Hopkins would host meetings
Speaker 1: with a number of abductees and conduct a kind of
Speaker 1: group therapy session revolving around their abduction experiences, but other
Speaker 1: issues from their past as well. And what I began
Speaker 1: to understand from attending those meetings is that if you
Speaker 1: were knew to the field, you could pick up everything
Speaker 1: you needed to know about being a standard abductee just
Speaker 1: by going to those support meetings and by talking with
Speaker 1: other abductees. They would lay out certain patterns and other
Speaker 1: people would second that and they would say, oh, that
Speaker 1: happened to me too, and Bud would guide the discussions.
Speaker 1: I did call him on this in terms of support
Speaker 1: group meanings. I said, why don't you use an a
Speaker 1: a kind of model where there is no leader, where
Speaker 1: the witnesses, the abductees themselves could guide the discussion instead
Speaker 1: of you leading it. And my objection to his leading
Speaker 1: the discussion was that he would tell people about brand
Speaker 1: new cases and things he was most interested in pursuing.
Speaker 1: Carol describes the participant as bright, sensitive, and artistically driven,
Speaker 1: while there were occasionally more eccentric people on the margins.
Speaker 1: She says of the main group that she did not
Speaker 1: think they were crazy, not once. They were people to
Speaker 1: whom something was happening, and that fascinated me, as still
Speaker 1: should fascinate researchers if it's you know, psychosmatic, if the
Speaker 1: narrative is being developed entirely inside individuals. And then they
Speaker 1: meet in some sort of a place like a support group,
Speaker 1: and they began to share things they've picked up from
Speaker 1: television series which were everywhere, or from movies, from reading
Speaker 1: buds books. They came with a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: of knowledge about what other people were saying about their experiences.
Speaker 1: They were not blank slates. They came in knowing the material.
Speaker 1: And when you're working with that psychologically, research shows there's
Speaker 1: a great deal of spread of terms and means and
Speaker 1: thoughts and patterns between the researcher himself and the people
Speaker 1: who have come to him for help, and between each other.
Speaker 1: They would pass ideas back and forth. So to me,
Speaker 1: it was fairly easy to see how without really careful,
Speaker 1: careful protocols, and without being peer reviewed, such a researcher
Speaker 1: intentionally or totally unintentionally could be creating the story of
Speaker 1: what had happened to all of these people. University of California,
Speaker 1: Irvine professor Elizabeth Loftis. We heard from her earlier in
Speaker 1: the series. One of my friend colleagues once said, this
Speaker 1: group therapy it's a little like poker, where you say,
Speaker 1: I'm going to match your memory and raise you one
Speaker 1: with my even more lurid and bizarre and upsetting memory.
Speaker 1: And that's a way in which this group therapy situation
Speaker 1: helps to create an environment where people are trying to
Speaker 1: come up with ever more interesting and exotic and dramatic
Speaker 1: stories because that's what will get attention. And in this case,
Speaker 1: what would get Hopkins attention would be stories that would
Speaker 1: indicate abduction. What Bud called evidence would be people sending
Speaker 1: him snapshots of mark on their body, whether it was
Speaker 1: a scar or bruise or whatever. Here's Hopkins from the
Speaker 1: same lecture as before, or this time showing images of
Speaker 1: these physical marks. Now very quickly some of the scars.
Speaker 1: These are very characteristic. And this is the scoop mark
Speaker 1: rather than the straight line cut. This is what we
Speaker 1: have on the front of Cathy Davis leg I'll show
Speaker 1: you might need a tiny bit of focus on this.
Speaker 1: Now this uh looks as if the tiny little scoop
Speaker 1: element came in there and took took away flesh. We
Speaker 1: don't know what this is for, except that obviously would
Speaker 1: give you a good chance of knowing a lot about
Speaker 1: that individual's makeup if you had the question the mark is.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say, and from memory, I would say
Speaker 1: it's probably about three eighths of an inch law Carol
Speaker 1: and John mac realized that as much as they wanted
Speaker 1: to discover physical evidence of these abductions, these photos fell
Speaker 1: short of that mark. John knew that those would not
Speaker 1: be taken well as evidence. You know, it's not something
Speaker 1: you gather first person. There's no guard on the chain
Speaker 1: of custody, none of that. We often talk about the
Speaker 1: echo chamber in the context of politics, where if everyone
Speaker 1: you here expresses the same opinions, you begin to uncritically
Speaker 1: accept them. But it happens outside politics as well, and
Speaker 1: something like this occurred in the small, intense abduction community,
Speaker 1: where the incredible might barely provoke a raised eyebrow. At
Speaker 1: some point. I remember thinking when I was shooting with Bud.
Speaker 1: We were on Cape Cod and a man I didn't
Speaker 1: know had called in and was talking to him, And
Speaker 1: I walked through the room and I heard Bud say,
Speaker 1: did they come through the wall this time? Too? And
Speaker 1: when I thought about it a few minutes later, I thought,
Speaker 1: I didn't even break a sweat. I didn't even jump
Speaker 1: when he said that. I just up did That's how
Speaker 1: it happens. And when that happens to you, you know
Speaker 1: you need to put your guard up even more. This
Speaker 1: effect could be especially strong on the people at the
Speaker 1: center of the work, Hopkins and Jacobs, whose observations and
Speaker 1: theories were mutually confirming that Jacobs would rent a house
Speaker 1: on the Keep, a few houses down from our house
Speaker 1: in wealth Lee, and over dinner one night, Dave Jacobs
Speaker 1: said to Bud, Bud, you and I are the only
Speaker 1: two people on the planet who really know what's going
Speaker 1: on with the alias. I kind of did a double take,
Speaker 1: and I said, the only two people on the planet,
Speaker 1: Isn't it kind of a dangerous way to think about
Speaker 1: something that you don't really know for sure? These dangers
Speaker 1: became realized as Hopkins, Jacobs, and Max rees Church led
Speaker 1: to theories of escalating strangeness. They seem to need genetic
Speaker 1: material that they're taking sperm over, and we think we
Speaker 1: are seeing this twenty four hours a day next to
Speaker 1: seven days a week. But we see them as well
Speaker 1: with twenty people, fifty people, hundreds of people, five hundred
Speaker 1: tables in a room with people on them, you assembly
Speaker 1: line fashion. We know they're doing these reproductive experiments in
Speaker 1: attempt at hybridization and so forth. Then Hopkins found the
Speaker 1: perfect case that ultimately proved the step too far next
Speaker 1: time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and
Speaker 1: produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was
Speaker 1: portrayed by Gina Rickike Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at
Speaker 1: the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C
Speaker 1: h A M. In Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary,
Speaker 1: the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project
Speaker 1: blue Book. Learn more about the show over at Grimm
Speaker 1: and mile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.