Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. In late spring. I
Speaker 1: interviewed documentary filmmaker Carol Rainey for ten years in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen nineties and early two thousand's. She was married
Speaker 1: to the artist and prominent UFO researcher Bud Hopkins. Even
Speaker 1: before they were married, she worked with him on his research.
Speaker 1: She was inside that community is alien abductions piqued in
Speaker 1: public consciousness, and the stories reached the zenith of their strangeness.
Speaker 1: I'm Toby Ball, and this is Strange Arrivals. I'm Carol Rainey,
Speaker 1: and I was married for ten years to Bud Hopkins,
Speaker 1: abstract expressionist painter and UFO researcher. And I came from
Speaker 1: a background uh spending twenty years making films for epidemiologists
Speaker 1: in the Boston area, and that involved writing many many
Speaker 1: grants to National Institutes of Health along with the epidemiologists,
Speaker 1: and we brought in millions in grant funding to make
Speaker 1: films about issues of public health. I don't come from
Speaker 1: a science background originally, but in all of those years
Speaker 1: of working for epidemiologists and later in New York City
Speaker 1: with the major medical institutions like New York Presbyterian Um.
Speaker 1: I learned a lot about how scientists think about protocols,
Speaker 1: how they think about they're hypothesis about some some phenomena
Speaker 1: in the natural world, and how they go about gaining
Speaker 1: real knowledge in the real world. And that was pretty
Speaker 1: wonderful to know about. What was Bud's sort of hypothesis
Speaker 1: about alien abductions. I would say he started developing that
Speaker 1: even before his his first book, Missing Time, but he
Speaker 1: had a pretty good a line on the narrative that
Speaker 1: many people in the United States, we're being out and
Speaker 1: about in a lonely place somewhere where nobody else was,
Speaker 1: you know, out riding along at night in their car,
Speaker 1: and if they stop and get out, there would be
Speaker 1: a bright light overhead, and there would be a UFO
Speaker 1: looking at them, and eventually the light would get extremely
Speaker 1: close and the person would be pulled up a beam
Speaker 1: of light into the alien craft and there they would
Speaker 1: be examined and prodded and tested and eventually had their
Speaker 1: reproductive organs dealt with in one form or another. And
Speaker 1: this was the idea that people who were taken out
Speaker 1: of their out of their cars, out of their their
Speaker 1: walk in the woods, that they were being used and
Speaker 1: through many extents, abused by a t S who came
Speaker 1: down for whatever reason to interact with humans. And then
Speaker 1: he So my understanding is that he kind of took
Speaker 1: that original narrative and then sort of a wildly expanded it. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the narrative that may not be fair. It
Speaker 1: is in a way, and there are reasons for that.
Speaker 1: But um, but first of all, it's extremely bright, very articulate,
Speaker 1: able to think on his feet. I mean, I admired
Speaker 1: so much about him, um, including his art, which is
Speaker 1: I married an artist, as did his wife, second wife,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. But um, by the time I met him,
Speaker 1: he'd pretty much given up on being part of the
Speaker 1: art world in Manhattan, and is almost his entire life
Speaker 1: was really taken up with being this leader in a
Speaker 1: movement called alien abduction. And his best friend in the
Speaker 1: world was David Jacobs, and they were as close as
Speaker 1: father and son or two brothers. They spent hours talking
Speaker 1: on the phone to each other, sharing their cases and
Speaker 1: in many cases they shared actual abductees. And I'll use
Speaker 1: the word the abductee that people called themselves it's not
Speaker 1: that I'm saying they are they aren't. I'm just you know,
Speaker 1: that that's their designation of themselves, so I call them that.
Speaker 1: And then so he um again that this is my
Speaker 1: my my impression is that that he and Jacobs um
Speaker 1: both sort of ended up coming to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: the number of people who are being abducted was was
Speaker 1: far higher than was sort of previously thought. Yes, and
Speaker 1: that's partly because um. Bud's work expanded the original narrative,
Speaker 1: and he did stay relatively close to the pattern from
Speaker 1: the Hill case Betty and Barney Hill. But what his
Speaker 1: writing added to it was that nobody was safe anywhere,
Speaker 1: that aliens could enter your bedroom at night, coming straight
Speaker 1: through the walls, coming through the windows. I mean, his
Speaker 1: view of alien beings in the world was that they
Speaker 1: were godlike. Really they i mean, ordinary physics did not
Speaker 1: prohibit them from doing whatever they wanted to do to
Speaker 1: take advantage of people's helpless business. And they were the
Speaker 1: abductees were used in in Bud's thought, in the same
Speaker 1: way that we observe you know, wolves out on the
Speaker 1: out in the forest or out on the in the wild,
Speaker 1: in the wild, and we experimented on them to some
Speaker 1: degree from Afar, and that's what he felt the aliens
Speaker 1: were doing to us. They might put tracking devices in us,
Speaker 1: like um, you know what what's called an implant these days?
Speaker 1: And you know, many of his people came up with
Speaker 1: those implants, partly to um add credence to Bud's narrative
Speaker 1: and because that was the story that was becoming increasingly
Speaker 1: popular in mainstream media during the nineteen eighties and nineties
Speaker 1: and the during the nineties. I met him in nine
Speaker 1: and I had never heard of UFOs literally, nor had
Speaker 1: I heard of alien abduction. By the time I met him.
Speaker 1: Fours too complicated to go into. Why was such a virgin?
Speaker 1: But I was so this seemed like a great intellectual
Speaker 1: adventure that I was going to go on. Um. I
Speaker 1: had left behind a clan of seventy close family members
Speaker 1: who were fundamentalist Christians in the Midwest, and basically lost
Speaker 1: the entire family. So I think when I heard about
Speaker 1: this there was a spiritual element to it too, And
Speaker 1: it was only much much later, nine years later, that
Speaker 1: I discovered that but also had a ritual element in
Speaker 1: what he was wanting to do, And his sister informed
Speaker 1: me after we've been married, I don't know, eight or
Speaker 1: nine years, that Bud, who wasn't avowed atheist, that he
Speaker 1: had once as a young man, applied to the Princeton
Speaker 1: School of Theology and was accepted after high school, so
Speaker 1: he was set up to become a minister, a spiritual leader.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't believe that, after all of these years
Speaker 1: and our shared intimacies, that he had never once mentioned
Speaker 1: that he had wanted to be a minister and had
Speaker 1: been enrolled at Princeton. So that was very, very startling
Speaker 1: to me. But I could see it in the way
Speaker 1: that he ministered to needy people who just filled the
Speaker 1: apartment most days, and it was a very overwhelming lifestyle.
Speaker 1: It was UFOs. I had left my job in production
Speaker 1: in Boston, so I got my own camera and started
Speaker 1: shooting yet one more documentary, but this one would be
Speaker 1: you know, nobody, no strings attached, no no federal funding,
Speaker 1: no state funding, no city funding. Funded out of my
Speaker 1: back pocket. Yeah, that gave me a great deal of freedom.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the evidence that I was gradually
Speaker 1: building up in terms of the validity of this phenomenon
Speaker 1: is on videotape, and I have over a hundred hours
Speaker 1: of tape. Unfortunately it's it's um in a lower format
Speaker 1: that's going to be hard to use today. But uh,
Speaker 1: that's you know, I can use the transcripts of that
Speaker 1: to quote people directly, and I have hypno successions with
Speaker 1: many of the abductees. But Bud was all for that
Speaker 1: and completely backed it and said I was free to
Speaker 1: use any of his resources. And when the witness case,
Speaker 1: which was where he was focused when I met him,
Speaker 1: he opened the drawer where and the cabinets were all
Speaker 1: of the evidence was for that case, and he said,
Speaker 1: it's yours, go in. And again that impressed me that
Speaker 1: he was that open to having me on my own
Speaker 1: terms research what he had already been researching for I
Speaker 1: don't know, eight nine, ten years when I met him,
Speaker 1: so he hadn't yet completed Witnessed when I met him,
Speaker 1: and he handed the manuscript to me to read, and
Speaker 1: a can bond was very believable. Um, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the more intelligent people I've ever met, but with
Speaker 1: this caveat, not at all given to science or interest
Speaker 1: in science. He knew almost nothing about psychology or psychiatry
Speaker 1: or recovered memories. He didn't know, except you know, kind
Speaker 1: of to mouth at a bit. He didn't know anything
Speaker 1: about scientific protocols, were the scientific method and how you
Speaker 1: use that to make sure that the information you believe
Speaker 1: you're gaining in the world, that that information is valid.
Speaker 1: And you know that. As I became more and more
Speaker 1: part of the uf 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, all of those sorts of things.
Speaker 1: Nothing about neurobiology. None of them knew anything about that
Speaker 1: except for I won't say nobody, but the people in
Speaker 1: my immediate circle, where David Jacobs, John mac and Bud Hopkins,
Speaker 1: and John was the only one with a background in science.
Speaker 1: It's interesting thing you say that, because I do feel,
Speaker 1: just as I've been doing research for this podcast, that
Speaker 1: there's sort of this kind of science adjacent um work
Speaker 1: that's being done which isn't very you know, doesn't doesn't
Speaker 1: have the critical ah, I don't know, sort of self
Speaker 1: examination or or initial skepticism about about data that you
Speaker 1: expect from No, there's too much credulousness after a while.
Speaker 1: But I can explain some of that because as a
Speaker 1: complete newbie, not having I mean I was in graduate
Speaker 1: school for years and years. Nobody talks about UFOs there,
Speaker 1: but um so it was so new to me that
Speaker 1: I was very open minded, very willing to listen. But
Speaker 1: I never lost my critical faculties. And I can tell
Speaker 1: you that when I was spending you know seven involved
Speaker 1: in the uf O foren dominent and with producers and
Speaker 1: directors coming in and taking shows all through the nineties,
Speaker 1: it was like back to back production in our apartment.
Speaker 1: But here's what what happened to me. I at a
Speaker 1: certain point, again, coming from academia and medical fields, I
Speaker 1: still had you know, you never completely outgrow your your
Speaker 1: first education, and mine was the fundamentalist take on the
Speaker 1: development of the entire world and all of humanity. And
Speaker 1: there's something in me still longed to incorporate a more
Speaker 1: spiritual understanding of myself. And this was John max take
Speaker 1: on it too. John was so not interested in science. Um.
Speaker 1: Once I was sitting on a porch in Newport and
Speaker 1: Newport and Breakfast, where a bunch of people interested in
Speaker 1: the subject gathered every summer, and I was in the
Speaker 1: middle of writing sight Unseen with Bud and I started
Speaker 1: to tell him about this really exciting find I had
Speaker 1: that science research had just developed the use of a
Speaker 1: laser beam of light that would pull objects up the light,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what was being reported by um by abductees,
Speaker 1: that they were pulled up the light, which sounds science
Speaker 1: fiction crazy, But I was out there researching cutting edge
Speaker 1: scientific discoveries, and so I'm telling John this, I'm excited.
Speaker 1: He looked at me and he just said, Carol, I'm
Speaker 1: not interested in the science, and I just started laughing.
Speaker 1: I just because that was the hope of people like
Speaker 1: Bud and Dave, who knew they weren't scientists and didn't
Speaker 1: really have any interests in science. They hoped that John
Speaker 1: would come in to the field and bring serious scientific
Speaker 1: research into the field. I mean, they genuinely did. And
Speaker 1: that wasn't John's interest. He was definitely more interested in
Speaker 1: an extra terrestrial outreach program and something that would be
Speaker 1: um a welcoming program for any beings who might approach
Speaker 1: the Earth. And Bud and Dave regarded what they were
Speaker 1: their their findings as they interpreted them. They regarded their
Speaker 1: findings as showing that that if the aliens were here
Speaker 1: to ar mess and we didn't know maybe they were,
Speaker 1: that they certainly weren't here to do us any good.
Speaker 1: Um that they used us basically as research subjects, and
Speaker 1: they had no compunction about coming into our bedrooms at night,
Speaker 1: or dipping into our cars or wherever we happened to
Speaker 1: be and vacuum us up and um either experiment with
Speaker 1: eggs and sperm. You know, none of this makes sense
Speaker 1: scientifically over decades and decades, but anyway, that those were
Speaker 1: the two opposing forces in research at that time. For me,
Speaker 1: what what was amazing and I could kind of catch
Speaker 1: myself doing it but not entirely, is that there's almost
Speaker 1: a force yield that is set up for anyone in
Speaker 1: the in the area, in in reach of it when
Speaker 1: that is a strong belief that this is what is happening,
Speaker 1: and we're trying hard to prove that this is what
Speaker 1: is happening, and that is happening all over the world.
Speaker 1: And we have evidence of what Bud called evidence would
Speaker 1: be people sending him um snapshots of mark on their body,
Speaker 1: whether it was a scar or a bruise or whatever.
Speaker 1: And John knew that those wouldn't those would not be
Speaker 1: taken well as evidence. You know, it's not something you
Speaker 1: gather first person. There's there's no there's no guard on
Speaker 1: the chain of custody, none of that. So um things
Speaker 1: that Bud and Dave considered to be it is, I
Speaker 1: did not, And but that didn't stop me from being
Speaker 1: pulled over into that that sphere of strangeness is all
Speaker 1: I could say, strangeness and felt like it was paranormal.
Speaker 1: It felt like these stories that I was videotaping, not
Speaker 1: just what Bud was telling me, but what I was
Speaker 1: hearing and putting on tape, that there was enough there,
Speaker 1: enough similarities between the stories that you had to pay attention.
Speaker 1: And at some point I remember thinking when I was
Speaker 1: shooting with Bud, we were on Cape Cod and um,
Speaker 1: a man I didn't know had called in and was
Speaker 1: talking to him. And I walked through the room and
Speaker 1: I heard Bud say, did they come through the wall
Speaker 1: this time too? And when I thought about it a
Speaker 1: few minutes later, I thought, I didn't even break a sweat,
Speaker 1: I didn't even jump when he said that. I just
Speaker 1: accepted that's how it happens. And you know, when when
Speaker 1: that happens to you, you need you know, you need
Speaker 1: you know, you need to put your guard up even more.
Speaker 1: And I would always always ask him skeptical questions. That's
Speaker 1: really interesting. Did he welcome sort of skeptical questions or
Speaker 1: was that was that seen as uh sort of questioning
Speaker 1: his work or authority or what have you. Yes, Um,
Speaker 1: he was good with me in the beginning. Um. He
Speaker 1: wanted me to see what he saw and UM again
Speaker 1: offered all of the you know, tape recordings over what
Speaker 1: a twenty someome year period and for me that we're
Speaker 1: open to my inspection, my listening. Um. But he wanted
Speaker 1: me to be able to ask questions on camera because
Speaker 1: that's where some of the best most spontaneous material happens,
Speaker 1: is when you're just going through your day and you
Speaker 1: pick up the camera and I start to ask him
Speaker 1: about the phone call that had just happened in the
Speaker 1: Cape Cod house and you know, he tells me about it.
Speaker 1: It's good stuff. I mean, I'm a filmmaker, and you know,
Speaker 1: I had a really articulate, no wacko husband who was
Speaker 1: telling me things I've never heard about. So it was
Speaker 1: worth listening and I did strange arrivals will return in
Speaker 1: a moment so maybe you can tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about the Linda Quartill case, because that that that
Speaker 1: seems to be sort of the height of things or
Speaker 1: a turning point. No, I think, um, the Linda Quartilla
Speaker 1: case was his big case. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that why the Linda Quartilla case was such a huge
Speaker 1: case for him is that it pushed new boundaries. I mean,
Speaker 1: the thing is, there's almost no money in working the
Speaker 1: UFO research field unless you're doing regular gigs like standard
Speaker 1: Stan Friedman, who was a friend of mine, and you know,
Speaker 1: he knew how to market himself and he got gigs
Speaker 1: all over the world actually, so he kept a modest
Speaker 1: income coming in. Bud didn't do that. His The way
Speaker 1: he worked was to have really strong concept in missing time,
Speaker 1: and then he was only interested in cases after that
Speaker 1: that broke new ground. So um, the the case in
Speaker 1: Intruders broke all sorts of new ground in terms of
Speaker 1: him claiming to have discovered patterns. Um. I guess in
Speaker 1: that case it would be the breeding pattern of abductees
Speaker 1: who would feel they had once been um their eggs
Speaker 1: had been taken or the sperm had been harvested, and
Speaker 1: years later they'll be taken aboard a craft and they
Speaker 1: will see what they believe are their children, half alien,
Speaker 1: half you. And and you know, it began to get
Speaker 1: so weird to me that I would push back even
Speaker 1: more on how that knowledge came to be. But the
Speaker 1: deal was and I would go when we were thinking
Speaker 1: of writing a book together based on my science background
Speaker 1: and looking at cutting edge aspects of science that would
Speaker 1: possibly illuminate the UFO phenomenon. When we were doing that,
Speaker 1: we went to talk to a couple of editors at
Speaker 1: publishing houses and what they said categorically, don't come I
Speaker 1: mean this was in what this must have been the
Speaker 1: early two thousand's. They said, don't come back unless you
Speaker 1: have a brand new, never seen before idea um for
Speaker 1: a U phone book. So the push is always for new, bigger, better,
Speaker 1: more outlandish. And I would say that Dave and Bud
Speaker 1: definitely delivered on that in each of their books. So
Speaker 1: that's where the pressure was coming was from from the
Speaker 1: need to publish and the fact that you just can't
Speaker 1: publish the same book again. Well that and to have
Speaker 1: any any uh kind of standing in the lecture circuit
Speaker 1: UFO lecture circuit, you have to have new material, new
Speaker 1: cases to present. Always people don't want to come there
Speaker 1: and you know, pay to hear the same thing they've
Speaker 1: heard before, so they were always he was wanting cases
Speaker 1: that would further develop the narrative, or as he might say,
Speaker 1: cases that would illuminate it further. Yeah, it's interesting, and
Speaker 1: you know, you know what to respond to this, but
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's similar time period to the Satanic Panic,
Speaker 1: which was also absert with with people being used as breeders,
Speaker 1: which I hadn't really and that was I started reading
Speaker 1: that literature down in my studio maybe sometime into knowing Bud,
Speaker 1: maybe about three or four years into it. And then
Speaker 1: came the multiple personality um debacle with women they're mainly
Speaker 1: women therapist kind of taking women under their under their
Speaker 1: wing and helping to develop their own narratives of having
Speaker 1: you know, ten, twelve, fifteen different personalities within one body
Speaker 1: and um, you know, whether that phenomenon has any basis
Speaker 1: in reality, perhaps, but it's extraordinarily rare. There was a
Speaker 1: creation factor here. The therapists were creating the very thing
Speaker 1: that they wanted to study, and the Satanic, the ritual
Speaker 1: abuse the phenomenon was part of that at about the
Speaker 1: same time it came along and was written about beautifully
Speaker 1: by a New Yorker writer, Lawrence Wright. And I started
Speaker 1: reading all of that information and couldn't really get Bud
Speaker 1: to read or take any of it seriously, but I
Speaker 1: felt it should be. It was new information coming into
Speaker 1: our understanding of how people developed their own internal narratives,
Speaker 1: and that there were some very, very big red flags
Speaker 1: dropped in that research. And Bud considered anything like that
Speaker 1: to be the work of skeptics. And his favorite word
Speaker 1: was debunker, and it was a word used a great
Speaker 1: scorn and derision, and you know, so he quickly let
Speaker 1: me know that debunking would not be acceptable in his household.
Speaker 1: So I was. I just kept asking questions. It was
Speaker 1: all I could do. And when we got to my
Speaker 1: documenting the Linda Quartila case, Linda was in and out
Speaker 1: of our house often, and there was alien abduction support
Speaker 1: groups in the front room somewhat regular basis, although I
Speaker 1: guess they'd been doing that in the eighties and early
Speaker 1: nineties before I got there. But that's where I first
Speaker 1: met Linda, was at an alien abduction support meeting, and
Speaker 1: what I began to understand from attending those meetings is
Speaker 1: that if you were new to the field, you could
Speaker 1: pick up everything you needed to know about being a
Speaker 1: standard abductee just by going to those support group meetings
Speaker 1: and by talking with other abductees. They would lay out
Speaker 1: certain patterns and other people would second that and they
Speaker 1: would say, oh, that happened to me too, And Bud
Speaker 1: would guide the discussions, and I was I did call
Speaker 1: him on this in terms of support group meetings. I said,
Speaker 1: why don't you use an a a kind of model
Speaker 1: where there is no leader, where the witnesses, the abductees
Speaker 1: themselves could guide the discussion and instead of you leading it.
Speaker 1: And my objection to his leading the discussion was that
Speaker 1: he would tell people about brand new cases and the
Speaker 1: things he was most interested in pursuing. Well, this is
Speaker 1: a very tight group of very bright, sensitive, artistically driven people.
Speaker 1: I respected them a lot, and I did not think
Speaker 1: they were crazy. Not once. Um. I mean there were
Speaker 1: some of the margins, but they weren't part of that group.
Speaker 1: But they were people to whom something was happening, and
Speaker 1: that fascinated me and still should fascinate researchers. Um, if
Speaker 1: it's you know, psychosomatic, if it's being if the narrative
Speaker 1: is being developed entirely inside individuals. And then they meet
Speaker 1: in some sort of a place like a support group,
Speaker 1: and they began to share things they've picked stup from
Speaker 1: television series which were everywhere, or from movies, from reading
Speaker 1: Bud's 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, you know, blank slates. They came in
Speaker 1: knowing the material. And when you're working with that psychologically,
Speaker 1: you know, research shows there's a great deal of spread
Speaker 1: um of terms and means and and thoughts and patterns
Speaker 1: between the researcher himself and the people who have come
Speaker 1: to him for help um and between each other. They
Speaker 1: would pass ideas back and forth, and Bud by either
Speaker 1: pumping on them those ideas, you know, like somebody had found, um,
Speaker 1: cherry blossoms on the floor of her bedroom after an
Speaker 1: abduction that led to Bud confirming that that meant an
Speaker 1: alien had come through the window and pulled some branches
Speaker 1: in on the way in, et cetera. So it was
Speaker 1: to me it was fairly easy to see how a
Speaker 1: researcher without really careful careful protocols and without being peer reviewed,
Speaker 1: that such a researcher could intentionally or totally unintentionally creating
Speaker 1: the story of what had happened to all of these people,
Speaker 1: and they would often welcome it because the story of
Speaker 1: being abducted by aliens explained what was dysfunctional in each
Speaker 1: of their lives. And you know, just as you and
Speaker 1: I have some things that don't work as well as
Speaker 1: we wished. If you found an idea, if you found
Speaker 1: some concept that explained why you felt uneasy at night,
Speaker 1: or why you were really mournful at a particular time
Speaker 1: of year, or why bright lights in the sky startled you,
Speaker 1: or it's just one thing after another, or why the
Speaker 1: person was sexually not functional, why the person didn't get
Speaker 1: ahead in their own chosen career, And those were all
Speaker 1: real concerns that people had. So how did this stall end?
Speaker 1: Pretty badly actually and really kind of tragically. Um the
Speaker 1: the Linda Quartilla story and then the stories that the
Speaker 1: cases that were coming to bud then like Jim Mortlauro,
Speaker 1: who you know, the crowd of people online had supported
Speaker 1: for quite a while until his various um lies and
Speaker 1: hoaxes and untrue stories of what he had done and
Speaker 1: experience until the truth of those stories began to come out.
Speaker 1: Um many people supported this one guy who was was
Speaker 1: next big case. And that was the uniqueness of Jim
Speaker 1: Morte Lauro's case would be that it was the first
Speaker 1: time an entire group of physicians upstate New York were
Speaker 1: honed in on this phenomenon, had a number of patients.
Speaker 1: They the as Jim told Bud, had a number of
Speaker 1: patients in this in this clinical study of abductees, and
Speaker 1: Bud definitely wanted to be part of that study, and
Speaker 1: he had help from a new protege, Leslie Kane, and
Speaker 1: she pushed wholeheartedly to follow Jim's story. And a number
Speaker 1: of people who were on Bud's board of advisors, which
Speaker 1: was that board of advisors, was amazing group of very
Speaker 1: diverse people, but smart people. A medical writer, an engineer,
Speaker 1: someone in marketing, a musician and astronomer. They were strong,
Speaker 1: smart people who had hoped that Bud was going to
Speaker 1: share what he learned about how to research this phenomenon
Speaker 1: another or when was a psycho psychologist. So there were
Speaker 1: people with a broad enough background that if he had
Speaker 1: allowed them to guide his research. It would have been
Speaker 1: so much better for everybody. But he would not permit
Speaker 1: any oversight of his cases, and of course Dave Jacobs
Speaker 1: didn't either. Each of those two men worked entirely on
Speaker 1: their own. Occasionally they would have someone come sit in
Speaker 1: on a session or two, but you know that's that
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily the standard way they did things when that
Speaker 1: person was there watching. It's just that but had a
Speaker 1: very strong tool he might have used, which was the
Speaker 1: the the Intruders Foundation Advisory Board, and they could have
Speaker 1: prevented him from going so far into the weeds with
Speaker 1: the Linda Cortilia case, with the Gym more Laro case,
Speaker 1: it kind of it kind of fell apart just because
Speaker 1: of sort of credulousness to people who were, you know,
Speaker 1: became clear were hoaxers. Yes, I think that a lot
Speaker 1: of it went that way, um, but also because I
Speaker 1: was finding out things about the case in witness that
Speaker 1: we're um kind of knocking the breath out of me.
Speaker 1: There was so much cherry picking that Bud did. I mean,
Speaker 1: this was a case from thirty years ago and it's
Speaker 1: still right now today, is still not completely vetted or
Speaker 1: debunked by anyone who knows the material, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: on a memoir about that period, and maybe your interview
Speaker 1: will help me get jump started back into finishing it.
Speaker 1: But um, there was so much material there that was
Speaker 1: not included. Things that let's say Linda meeting with the
Speaker 1: Pope and the Pope was knew all about her story
Speaker 1: and abducted her in a in one of the popemobiles
Speaker 1: or a black car to take her down to wherever
Speaker 1: he was staying when he came to visit in yes,
Speaker 1: the early nineties. And you know, Bud did not in
Speaker 1: include that story because it was pretty over the top
Speaker 1: that Linda Courtilla was invited by the Pope to come
Speaker 1: be the ambassador to extraterrestrials and that she would have
Speaker 1: to live at the Vatican and leave New York City
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. So there were, you know, others that
Speaker 1: were equally outside the boundaries of common sense that I
Speaker 1: do have documented. When you see how many things are
Speaker 1: left out, and makes you doubt the things that are included.
Speaker 1: So then I went in and started looking at the drawings,
Speaker 1: which were some of Bud's best evidence, drawings of the
Speaker 1: scene where Linda was seen eventually by twenty three witnesses.
Speaker 1: Bud's books says twenty three witnesses to her being pulled
Speaker 1: of a what is it, fourteen story apartment building and
Speaker 1: pulled up a beam of light into a hovering UFO.
Speaker 1: And that was late November of right by the Brooklyn Bridge,
Speaker 1: pretty much a hot spot for Manhattan early hours of
Speaker 1: the morning or all hours of the day at night.
Speaker 1: And he he has you know, he interviewed most of
Speaker 1: the most of the witnesses, the people he called the
Speaker 1: witnesses UM, although he never met two key witnesses who
Speaker 1: were the government agents, Richard and Dan, who were escorting
Speaker 1: a member of the United Nations International staff. They were
Speaker 1: escorting him down to a heliport in Lower Manhattan that
Speaker 1: night and their car was stall old by the UFOs
Speaker 1: power train, as you know, as the part of the
Speaker 1: story that that's what always happens. And so a person
Speaker 1: whose name but didn't use, but it was Perez the
Speaker 1: quare as the UM acting as the Secretary of the
Speaker 1: United Nations at the time that he was the dignitary
Speaker 1: who was accompanied by to either Secret Service or UM
Speaker 1: other US security agencies, and by the two of them.
Speaker 1: So Bud did interview to quay Are in an airport
Speaker 1: at some point Um and kind of took the negatives
Speaker 1: that he got there as being positives. I don't know,
Speaker 1: It's it's a case of someone who wants so badly
Speaker 1: to prove this is but I'm talking about he wanted
Speaker 1: so badly to prove what he believed to be happening.
Speaker 1: He wanted to prove that it was actually happening and
Speaker 1: that he had evidence. What in Bud and like David Jacobs,
Speaker 1: what did they think was sort of ultimately going on?
Speaker 1: Like why why were the aliens putting in tracking devices
Speaker 1: and trying to get you know, against reproductive data or
Speaker 1: experimentation or whatever? Was our theory? Yes, and it was
Speaker 1: one they defended to the hilt. The beings who were
Speaker 1: coming to us either needed our resources, which we're Bud
Speaker 1: certainly believed were our humanist resources, our ability to be empathetic,
Speaker 1: our ability to love our children and to love other
Speaker 1: people in our lives and to take care of them.
Speaker 1: I mean, Bud was the humanist to bubble all things.
Speaker 1: He really was, and that's the quality I loved in him. Um,
Speaker 1: he is understanding that the aliens were coming to um
Speaker 1: either take our culture, take our the privacy of our
Speaker 1: minds away from us, by using telepathy, to take the
Speaker 1: sanctity of our independent personal bodies, to take that away
Speaker 1: from us too, by you know, taking German material like
Speaker 1: eggs and sperm and creating alien beings that would be
Speaker 1: part them and part us. And I can tell you
Speaker 1: they believed this so firmly that sitting over dinner one night,
Speaker 1: Jacobs would that Jacobs would rent um a house on
Speaker 1: the Keep, a few houses down from our house in
Speaker 1: wealth Leet, And over dinner one night, Um, Dave Jacob
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. Yeah. I kind of did a
Speaker 1: double take, and I said, the only two people on
Speaker 1: the planet. How how is that? Isn't that kind of
Speaker 1: a dangerous way to think about something that you don't
Speaker 1: really know for sure? But they believed they did know
Speaker 1: for sure. So it's hard not to believe that there
Speaker 1: would be moments where either one of these researchers would
Speaker 1: realize how much they had manipulated the the subjects, the abductees,
Speaker 1: and their narratives. They're written narratives they had to have
Speaker 1: known that at some point. Wow, this is this has
Speaker 1: been really great. Listen to all this. It's so interesting
Speaker 1: and I think sort of gives greater depth to what
Speaker 1: I've been sort of interested and kind of thinking about
Speaker 1: as I've been going through this whole process of making
Speaker 1: this UH podcast series. Are there other things that we
Speaker 1: haven't discussed that you think are important to get across? Well,
Speaker 1: the fact that they always said, these researchers always said
Speaker 1: that they never led the subjects, They never you know,
Speaker 1: walked them into some sort of a hypnosis trap. But
Speaker 1: what I knew from being right underneath doing my work
Speaker 1: in writing and in video product should right underneath an
Speaker 1: old wooden floor next to Bud's phone, I could hear
Speaker 1: the way that he did intake. First of all, Peter
Speaker 1: Robbins would be there as his assistant and would read
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
Speaker 1: front or he'd write probable abductee on the front, and
Speaker 1: then that person would be mailed a kit of information
Speaker 1: about the abduction phenomenon and then told in the kit
Speaker 1: to probably be best to avoid reading the literature in
Speaker 1: the field, so the new possible abductee would be sent
Speaker 1: as kit of material. And I think it varied sometimes
Speaker 1: when it was information about, you know, the abduction phenomenon.
Speaker 1: And also the people who were calling Bud knew enough
Speaker 1: about the field to call a top researcher in the field.
Speaker 1: They had also often read one, two, or three of
Speaker 1: his books previously, and they've watched movies, they watched documentaries
Speaker 1: he had been in, I mean, he was appearing on
Speaker 1: the Phil Donahue Show, on the Oprah Winfrey Show, on
Speaker 1: Canadian you know, talk shows. He was all over during
Speaker 1: that time. And so when when people would first call
Speaker 1: and begin talking to him, he could go on easily
Speaker 1: for an hour with each person over the phone, and
Speaker 1: he would often tell them about the cases, the new
Speaker 1: cases that he was working on, and what that the
Speaker 1: queue that sends to the person on the other end
Speaker 1: of the phone is that if you want the attention
Speaker 1: of this tell television personality named Bud Hopkins, you might
Speaker 1: do well consciously or unconsciously. Two have your own memories
Speaker 1: that were similar to the ones he was interested in.
Speaker 1: And that is where the tailoring of tales began long
Speaker 1: before he even met the people. So in that time,
Speaker 1: then people would come into the famous person's house and
Speaker 1: may be, you know, talked with a while, told some
Speaker 1: more about cases Bud was interested in, or things that happened,
Speaker 1: and then Bud would put them under hypnosis. You don't
Speaker 1: have to lead anybody under hypnosis after that, they already
Speaker 1: know which way to go. And that happened often, and
Speaker 1: it's that pre pre hypnosis session. All of those sessions,
Speaker 1: those contacts is what people on the outside never knew about.
Speaker 1: I mean, when I wrote the article Priests of High
Speaker 1: Strangeness in in the Pera Toopia magazine back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eleven, UM, many of the old time UFO
Speaker 1: research has contacted me privately to thank me for putting
Speaker 1: that out there. He stand was one of them, and
Speaker 1: they said, we knew there was something off in this
Speaker 1: research that but and Jacob's were putting out, but we
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was. You know, we only knew
Speaker 1: what he told us about how he researched cases. So
Speaker 1: it reflects a little bit of the Betty and Barney
Speaker 1: Hill and that Betty had those dreams that she wrote
Speaker 1: down that sort of served as the basis for what
Speaker 1: they talked about hypnotically right. It's really interesting. There's such
Speaker 1: a well, if you're interested in um psychiatry psychology at all,
Speaker 1: the porousness that I think exists between a therapist, which
Speaker 1: but in Dave were de facto therapists for people who
Speaker 1: were very troubled over things that they couldn't explain in
Speaker 1: their lives. And there there is a certain resonance that
Speaker 1: I personally felt coming from my husband, uh, the resonance
Speaker 1: of his belief. It was an influence on what I
Speaker 1: was able to stay open to hearing. And I watched
Speaker 1: the people come in and they were very deferential to Bud.
Speaker 1: Not many people, you know, question his methods or anything
Speaker 1: like that. And that's where the Board of Advisors might
Speaker 1: have helped enormously if he had allowed them to be
Speaker 1: actually trained to do research work that's up stay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just a missed opportunity and a sadness because they eventually,
Speaker 1: after um, you know, the things with the Gym Mortal
Speaker 1: r O case and few other hoaxes came down the pike. Uh,
Speaker 1: the advisory committee just said, you know, we can't support
Speaker 1: you going around and speaking at conferences about cases that
Speaker 1: we believe are not valid, that we believe our hoaxes,
Speaker 1: and we would like to have one or two of
Speaker 1: our advisory board members work with you on cases. And
Speaker 1: Bud was only willing to give them access to the tapes,
Speaker 1: but he would take a trip to the museum while
Speaker 1: they listened to it. In other words, he would not
Speaker 1: be supervised. Again. It makes me sad because I think
Speaker 1: I think this is a valid area for cross disciplinary
Speaker 1: teams to study. Um if if you know reports of
Speaker 1: alien abduction are entirely psychological or people drawing from the
Speaker 1: zeitgeist of the time, we should know about that. We
Speaker 1: should know how how easily people can buy into a
Speaker 1: false narrative or one that appears to explain problems they
Speaker 1: might have, as this one did, and that most people
Speaker 1: themselves won't realize that they're being studied without any scientific method,
Speaker 1: without scientific prote calls, without you know, safeguards on where
Speaker 1: their quote unquote evidence comes from. I have a scene
Speaker 1: that I shot with where but as in the lobby
Speaker 1: of our building. He's opening a big package that has
Speaker 1: an enormous brazier and he's pulling that out. It has
Speaker 1: stains on the back, and he describes to me the
Speaker 1: woman he's talked too off and on for years. Um,
Speaker 1: and this woman has sent him her bra after a
Speaker 1: an event the night before where she believes that she
Speaker 1: was abducted and they were experimenting with some liquid and
Speaker 1: poured it on her back. So she's sending him this brazier.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, what about the chain of custody? Now,
Speaker 1: how do you know this came from the alien abduction event?
Speaker 1: The woman describes, Well, she has no reason to lie.
Speaker 1: And that's that's Dave Jacob's response often too, they have
Speaker 1: no reason to lie. Well, come on, people have thousands
Speaker 1: of reasons to tell whatever story they're telling, and you
Speaker 1: know they're just they're multifaceted, they're complicated, and there is
Speaker 1: no way you can say someone has no reason to lie.
Speaker 1: That's not how you judge the truth of an event.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written
Speaker 1: and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins
Speaker 1: and Josh Thayne, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick,
Speaker 1: and Aaron Mank. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike
Speaker 1: Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: the Milne's Special Collections and Archives at the University of
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C H thirteen ten
Speaker 1: 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.