Budd Hopkins

Monday, 10 August 2009 00:00 |

budd hopkins photo:Screen capture from The Real 4400 on the UK's Sky1

In a recent radio interview artist, author and pre-eminent ufo & abduction researcher Budd Hopkins was asked perfunctorily if he had any doubt about the earth being visited by extraterrestrials.

' Well.. it's an unfortunate thing to have to admit but yes, I don't have a doubt. I no longer have the luxury of disbelief...'

Budd has a new book out, Art, Life and UFOs – A memoir. He's an accomplished artist, with works in the permanent collections of joints like MOMA and the Guggenheim. He comes across as a thorough and sincere investigator and is one of the few doing his best trying to separate the wheat from the chaff of this phenomenon.

Budd's parents were one of the many to have missed the 'this is a radio play' announcement during the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1983. His parents were quite panicked for a bit until the dust finally settled. The end result of that however was that Budd became quite the skeptic. When the topic of UFOs came up he naturally thought the 'accounts covered by the media, and the many reports that were officially made to the Air Force, were nothing more than clever, deceptive pranks like The War of the Worlds.'

He had a 3 minute sighting in 1964 that changed all that. Two years later he heard about the Betty & Barney Hill abduction case and quite frankly he 'thought it was ridiculous because you can't believe a crazy story like that.' It took him several years to come to terms with that event, in the end he found the people involved and the details credible enough to keep him interested in the topic. A few more years passed and it wasn't until 1975 that he started to actively look into cases of missing time around UFO sightings. With few people willing to listen to these stories, and fewer still willing to give the victims of these events an absolutely unbiased ear, Budd (along with compatriot Dr. David Jacobs ) quickly became one of the go-to guys in the field.

If you want to know all about them, you should grab all of his books and if you have the time, peruse video of his presentations wherever you find them.