SUBJECT: MISSING TIME FILE: UFO2743 The Sysop's Bookshelf --------------------- TITLE: Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions AUTHOR: Budd Hopkins PUBLISHED BY: Marek AT: New York, 1981 VIEWPOINT: Zetetic 258 Pages Budd Hopkins is an artist of no little repute, who has maintained an interest. in the UFO phenomenon for 20 years. While writing a UFO column for the Village Voice, he became involved in a particularly fascinating aspect of the field,. the abduction cases. Starting with the famed Betty and Barney Hill case, many. people claim to have been actually taken aboard UFOs and examined by their humanoid occupants. In most of these cases, the actual abduction is erased from the victim's memory, leaving only a vague fearfulness and an unexplained lapse of several hours -- missing time. The encounter with, and abduction by, aliens is brought out only through the use of regressive hypnosis In this riveting book, Hopkins documents several abduction cases with the transcripts of the actual hypnotic sessions. The basic accounts by the various subjects so nearly match each other that there can be almost no question of hallucination or fantasizing. Unless Hopkins has written a work of total fiction, the reader is confronted with inescapable evidence of alien encounters The most important contribution the book makes is to reinforce the rather sketchy image we have of our visitors. The race we are dealing with seems to be humanoid,.about 4-5 feet in height, with slender bodies, bulbous, hairless heads, small mouths, nose and ears, and large almond-shaped eyes. Their skin is grey, with a leathery quality, alternately described as like "putty" or "marshmallowy". They almost invariably communicate via a form of telepathy The presentation of this knowledge counteracts yet another of the many insidious claims by arch-skeptic Phil Klass. In a letter to myself, Klass maintained that "one of the characteristic fingerprints of 'pseudo-science' that distinguishes it from true science is that the passage of time and effort adds no increased knowledge, or understanding, for pseudo-sciencetoday, 20 years after I entered the field of UFOlogy, we do. not know an iota more about what UFOs 'really are' than was 'known' two decades ago." It would seem, with the publication of this book, that Klass himself has redefined UFOlogy as a true science Now I'll offer a generalization of my own. One of the surest signs of the truthfulness of a paranormal phenomenon is when the "explanation" offered by. its would-be debunkers is more extraordinary than the claim itself. Just what. do the skeptics make of the incredible tales told under hypnosis in Missing Time? "A subconscious reliving of the birth trauma." Besides being patently ludicrous on its face, this explanation ignores the palpable physical evidence presented in the book -- scars from wounds inflicted by the alien examiners Scars that appear, in many cases, on the exact same place from victim to victim, and correlate perfectly with the description of the "operation." SUMMARY: This is not a book I would recommend for those who prefer not to believe that we are under surveillance. For the rest of us, it may be the most important book written since the days of Donald Keyhoe ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************