Budd Hopkins' Response to the ABC Peter Jennings "Seeing is Believing" TV Program

Courtesy of the Intruders Foundation
Feb 25, 2005

During the past year Jenning's producers interviewed me a number of times, and because I sensed what they had in mind, I made, as a preemptive strike, a number of careful, highly specific observations about the UFO abduction phenomenon. All of these crucial points - recorded by ABC on videotape - were designed to underline the physical reality of UFO abductions and to demonstrate the implausibility of current skeptical explanations.

To its shame, ABC suppressed _all_ of these observations.

I knew, of course, that the skeptics' favorite explanation du jour is impossibly simple: abduction reports, they believe, are all due to misperceived "sleep paralysis." Ranking as a distant second is another erroneous belief: abduction reports, they say, "ONLY emerge under hypnosis," and since hypnosis is "totally unreliable", all abduction reports must be discarded. In the light of these tediously familiar errors and misstatements, I made certain in my taped interviews to explain the following:

* In the first two decades of our research, _all_ of the central abduction cases involved people who were outside their houses when they were taken _none_ were lying paralyzed in their bedrooms.They were driving cars, walking, fishing, hunting and even, in one famous case, driving a tractor on a farm. "Sleep paralysis" as a blanket explanation of UFO abductions is therefore, ipso facto, a ludicrous non-starter. Nevertheless _all_ of my insistent statements on this point were systematically eliminated by the producers.

* Second, I indicated that there are many abuction reports involving two, three, six or more people who were taken simultaneously and whose highly detailed recollections are virtually identical. This fact alone eliminates not only "sleep paralysis" but "fantasy-proneness" or any other idiosyncratic psychological aberrations as riggering causes. My descriptions of these many cases of multiple abductions were likewise ompletely suppressed by the producers.

* Third, I showed the interviewers many photos of, again, virtually identical scoop marks, consistent straight-line scars and ground landing traces at abduction sites, and other physical sequelae. _All_ of these vivid photographic examples of physical evidence were suppressed by the producers.

* Fourth, I was not alone in making these points. My colleague Dr. David Jacobs was asked by ABC to carry out a hypnotic regression for the camera, but since the woman he chose had been abducted in the daytime while driving a car, the case did not fit ABC's "sleep paralysis" agenda and was thus not only suppressed, but Dr. Jacobs' many hours of taped interviews were also scrapped.

* Fifth, I made it very clear that perhaps 30% of all the abduction reports collected by researchers are recalled _without_ the aid of hypnosis, a fact which renders the issue of hypnosis moot. This point was also suppressed by the producers whose only goal, it appeared, was to eliminate any data that contradicted their transparently false debunking hypotheses.

Despite my having presented - and reiterated - the points above, the producers chose to trot out on camera two debunking scientists (whose experiments with a mere handful of subjects have yet to be taken seriously by the psychological community) to buttress the untenable "sleep paralysis" theory, the false "no physical evidence" claim, and the demonstrably untrue "its all hypnosis" assertion. The smug presentations of these two would-be experts were accompanied by the producers' lurid
"reenactments" of "sleep paralysis" phenomena, complete with flashing lights and spooky music. The taped testimony of a serious mental health professional like Dr. John Mack was likewise suppressed, along with my statement that over the years eight psychiatrists and numerous other mental health professionals had come to me about their own UFO abductions. The producers' obvious goal was to conceal the fact that within the mental health community there are many professionals who look with amusement on the "sleep paralysis" theory, and who accept the physical reality of UFO abductions.

So what can one say about such a deliberately dishonest presentation as Peter Jenning's "Seeing is Believing" take on abductions? Perhaps one can only shrug and warn, yet again, that the incurious members of the press and the many blinkered, conservative scientists had better collectively pull their heads up out of the sand and join us in our work. Whatever one's personal attitude toward the UFO abduction phenomenon, science insists that an extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation. What ABC served up on Thursday night was, instead, an extraordinary whitewash of the abduction phenomenon, and a brutal suppression of the evidence for what may well be the most portentous event in human history.

Peter Jennings and his staff should be ashamed


Budd Hopkins
New York