FigureBudd Hopkins (1931–2011)

Elliot Budd Hopkins. BA Oberlin 1953. Established New York abstract-expressionist painter from the late 1950s through his death — represented by André Emmerich Gallery; work in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the Hirshhorn. In 1975 a Cape Cod neighbor described a Brewster, Massachusetts daylight UFO sighting to him; Hopkins’s investigation of the case, published in The Village Voice in 1976, led him to other witnesses whose accounts included missing-time anomalies. Missing Time (Richard Marek, 1981) is the founding text of the modern American abduction-research literature. Intruders (Random House, 1987) — built around the Kathie Davis case in Indiana — was a New York Times bestseller. Witnessed (Pocket Books, 1996) presented the Linda Cortile / ‘Linda Napolitano’ Brooklyn Bridge case, which Hopkins argued was witnessed by an unnamed UN Secretary-General security detail (later widely reported as Javier Pérez de Cuéllar’s). Hopkins founded the Intruders Foundation in 1989; the foundation funded John Mack’s Harvard PEER program early-stage research. Hopkins’s hypnotic-regression protocol — slow induction, repeated returns to the same recollected moment, refusal to lead the witness toward specific imagery — was the methodological model Mack adapted in his 1990–2000 Harvard work. Hopkins was both the source of the methodology that produced much of the modern abduction corpus and the figure to whom much of the corpus’s evidentiary fragility (the well-documented memory-malleability properties of regressive hypnosis) is also attributed. He died of cancer in New York on 21 August 2011.