From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <post.nul>
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:02:35 -0500
Archived: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:02:35 -0500
Subject: Hopkins & Jacobs - High Strangeness




[Thanks to Dave Haith for the lead...]

-----

Source: Paratopia Magazine - Vol 1 Issue 1

http://tiny.cc/2pzis

High Strangeness
The Co-Creation Of The Abduction Phenomenon
by Carol Rainey

Sometimes an event comes hurtling along and scatters
well-intentioned plans left and right. I had intended to wait
several more years before writing about my hard-won insights
into the alien abduction phenomenon.

During my ten-year marriage to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, I'd
actively participated in some of Budd's UFO cases; edited his
third book, Witnessed; co-authored the next book, Sight Unseen,
with him; shot extensive documentary footage of Budd's research;
and produced short films that he used on the conference circuit.
But we haven't been married for the past several years, we've
each gotten on with our own lives, and, since 2004, I've refused
to participate in abduction research.

There seemed to be a lot to lose and nothing to gain by speaking
up, during my former husband's lifetime, about my perceptions of
some researchers' ethical violations, misuse of human subjects,
and their steady manipulation of the abduction narrative into a
rigid doctrine. No need to rush to print.

But then along came Emma Woods' story, reaching me last spring
while I was living and working in the 14th century Moroccan
walled-city of Fez. It was an explosive case of subject abuse
that shook up many people and would later become the November
2010 cover story for UFO Magazine.

During a long rainy day, waiting for the donkey to deliver my
cooking gas, I took the time to carefully review the material on
both sides - on the subject (Emma Woods') website and also on the
website of researcher David Jacobs.

The audio taped excerpts of the sessions provided a trail
through the labyrinthine ways in which researchers are able to
"lead" the subject in a certain direction by pre-hypnosis
conversation about other cases they're interested in; how the
narrative is manipulated to fit the high strangeness
requirements of the researcher's upcoming book; the tapes also
show egregious boundary crossing and ethical improprieties.

It electrified me out of my silence and into action. Because
Emma's case brought painfully to mind several other cases that
had passed through my own home in the not too distant past - and
for any adverse effect on these individuals' lives that I might
have contributed to as the documentary filmmaker or writer on
the scene, I am genuinely sorry.

At this point, perhaps I can best make amends by responding to
the question asked in a letter to the editor of UFO Magazine by
veteran UFO researcher Ray Fowler: "I wonder how many other
Emmas there are out there?"

Let me begin to name them, because they are most definitely
there.

And in their naming, it will become clear - despite Hopkins' and
Jacobs' adamant and repeated statements to the contrary, like
politicians working off of the same faxed talking point of the
day - that the marshy ground of alien abductions is afloat in
hoaxes and partial hoaxes.

It will also become clear that what Hopkins and Jacobs claim as
"the powerful evidence" for alien abductions and hybrids among
us is based primarily on the powerful, hypnotic repetition of
their own proclamations - and the public's gullibility in
believing whatever unfounded theories these star paranormal
investigators punt down the field.

Further, it will become clear that these abduction investigators
know that the people featured in their published books or
conference lectures are not the norm for abduction experiences.

The sensational cases published in Hopkins' Intruders and
Witnessed, in Jacobs' Secret Life and The Threat are positioned
as the anecdotal examples that describe the entire phenomenon.

The problem for the rest of us who are trying to understand this
thing is that these particular cases are almost always "high
strangeness," weirder than weird, spectacular exceptions to the
rule. They are not representative of what Hopkins and Jacobs
"discover" in their day-to-day little grey beings with medical
instruments, sexual manipulation or implantation of devices,
return to the original setting with only fragments of memory of
the events, and a realization of missing time. Under hypnosis,
the middle-aged man remembered even more, screamed, swore, and
wept.

Under pretext of filming the session, I was keeping an eye on
what was stuck down the side of the terrified man's boot. The
label on my videotape says the hypnotic regression took place in
Manhattan on June 30, 2002.

This was James S. Mortellaro, Jr., who had come to ask the help
of my then-husband, Budd Hopkins. For the previous three years,
Jim had admired Budd, read all of his books and come to hear his
talks at conferences.

To audiences around the world, Budd Hopkins was often introduced
as the man who had single-handedly brought the alien abduction
phenomenon to the attention of the world. Witty, a natural-born
raconteur with a fatherly charm and a reputation for kindness,
Budd had enthralled television, radio, and conference audiences
for four decades with his bizarre accounts of humans terrorized
and suffering at the hands of the supremely indifferent,
technologically superior alien beings.

Today, Jim told us, he could no longer live without knowing what
had happened to him as a child. Why he had fears of falling from
heights and sudden lights. Why he tossed down prescription pills
the way other people mindlessly eat popcorn at the movies. And
why he entered our home with a pistol shoved into his right
boot.

Several things about this case were making me increasingly
uneasy. It wasn't just the pills and the pistol. Or the fact
that none of Jim's claims had been checked or verified.

Among his more mundane statements, Jim Mortellaro had earlier
told Budd that he had two Ph.D.s (Really? That's impressive, the
skeptical wife thinks from behind the camera. From which
universities?) and that he'd been "the Marketing Director for
Hitachi" before retiring early. (Really? Was that Regional,
National or International Marketing Director? Why is it you
don't look or talk like any marketing director I've ever known?)

Actually, when I got honest with myself, it wasn't just this
case. A sick-in-my-heart feeling had been growing for some time.
It was a festering unease about the way the alien abduction
phenomenon had been developing before my eyes and captured
through the camera's lens for the last seven years of my
marriage to Budd.

A concern about what was truly being discovered during these
hypnosis sessions and what was being manufactured -
intentionally or not.

And a mounting concern about the welfare of vulnerable people
who had contacted Budd after reading his books or seeing him on
television. Often some small detail or distinct image in his
accounts had stirred up echoes of what seemed to be their own
memories. Most of the people who came through our door had
undergone genuinely inexplicable human experiences. Yet they
came primed to cope with the possibility that their experiences
or life traumas were caused by being abducted by
extraterrestrials.

When I met Budd Hopkins in 1994, the abduction phenomenon, as
Budd revealed it to me, filled me with fascination and the
allure of an entirely new intellectual mystery to be solved.
Might this be the origin of the human religious impulse? What if
we had been seeded here by highly advanced beings or a Big Being
from "out there?"

It's amusing and humbling to realize, now, that in the mid-90's
I'd actually thought these ideas of mine were new, original and
daring. In my forties, I was quite simply a UFO virgin.

The short explanation for this odd state is that I'd grown up in
a strict, fundamentalist religion and had no exposure to the
popular culture and science fiction images of the '50s and '60s.
No television, no movies, no comic books, or "worldly"
magazines.

Even after parting with that religious group, from my twenties
through my forties I'd been semi-cloistered in academia, and
then worked closely with scientific types where "that sort of
thing" just never came up. I vaguely associated UFOs with pop
culture and was completely unaware of serious research being
done in paranormal fields.

But newly in love and excited by a fresh adventure with a life
partner, a fellow artist, who'd share it with me, I packed up
and left Boston. There, for over twenty years, I'd produced and
directed films about medicine with research scientists and
epidemiologists. We'd brought in considerable funding with
research proposals awarded by the National Institutes of Health
(NIH).

After working that long, elbow-to-elbow with scientists, I'd
come to know quite a bit about research design, protocols, data
collection, and evaluation of data, testing of the hypothesis,
and the need to protect subjects of the experiment.

I'd also learned (although scientists aren't immune to this
problem) that falsifying data or making outsized claims for
discoveries that weren't justified by the facts were career
killers. They were ethical suicide. Researchers who did such
things lost their jobs. They lost their prestige. They rarely
published again. Who could trust such people?

Yet how very different are the standards for the so-called
"researchers" of alien abduction!

After a decade of involvement in the field, I'm struck that most
people with a ufological fascination don't hold their leading
researchers to anything like these scholastic, scientific, or
even ethical standards.

Many people may not even be aware that such standards exist. But
they exist for a reason, folks, and sometimes UFO abduction
research - as fascinating as it may seem - violates every one of
the basic principles for the getting of knowledge and the
protection of human subjects.

The two best-known abduction investigators, Budd Hopkins and
David Jacobs, work almost exclusively alone (separately,
although with extensive telephone exchanges), without
supervision (and are unwilling to accept any), and without any
training in medicine or psychiatry or neurology.

A bit of comparative religion, anthropology, and folklore under
the belt wouldn't hurt, either, in dealing with these difficult-
tointerpret human experiences. They're not required to get
authorization for their experimentation on human beings from an
Institutional Review Board (IRB), a clearance that's required of
every legitimate institutional researcher in the country. It's
peer review of a proposed study using human subjects, it's
strict, and researchers are required to report back to the IRB
with their findings. None of this applies to UFO researchers.

But, to be fair, for over 40 years abduction researchers have
had the courage to explore - and attempt to heal - often
traumatic human experiences that virtually no university or
institution will touch.

The NIH, the nation's enormously powerful medical research
agency, is made up of 27 Institutes and Centers, each
specializing in a certain area of research. It is highly
unlikely that any one of those institutes has ever seriously
considered a proposal requesting funding for alien abduction
research.

In addition to lack of hard evidence, abduction investigators
have such credibility issues that few would be taken seriously.

That's a situation in desperate need of repair.

A nascent field like ufology with no visible funding stream or
peer- reviewed journals will fail to ever draw enough trained
professionals or scientists to move the field out of the
marginal realm and into the mainstream.

The few researchers in ufology who do have legitimate research
training end up funding their weekend, wee-hours research out of
their own pockets, just as non-scientists Hopkins and Jacobs do.

It's lonely, seat-of-the-pants work that permeates every aspect
of the researcher's life, often costing him or her dearly
through the corrosion of status, income, and personal
relationships.

What we have now is abduction research that not only lacks an
outside funding source; it also lacks researchers who understand
the epistemology of the ways in which knowledge is acquired and
how that's connected to truth, justified belief, and skepticism.
In such an arid moonscape as this, there are no structures, no
boundaries, no standards, and no supervision.

So, given all this freedom and no credentialed peers to naysay
them, what do you suppose happens to two investigators (who are
also each others' best friends in the world) in their search for
knowledge in a wacky, marginal field like "alien abduction?"
And, even more important, what happens to the de facto patients
of researchers without boundaries? Let's open wider what was for
me the Pandora's Box of the Emma Woods/David Jacobs case.


The Emma Woods Case

November's cover story in UFO Magazine, written by Jeremy Vaeni,
gave people a rare look behind the curtain that's drawn across
the tactics of certain alien abduction researchers. While some
people were vocal and heart-felt in their disgust and outrage,
there was almost total silence from the leadership and more
senior members of the community.

Since returning to Manhattan, I've had many personal exchanges
with Emma and listened to her painstakingly excerpted audio
clips taken from 180 hours of "treatment" and hypnosis by Jacobs
- over the telephone, no less, and across the sea.

Wafted about for 180 hours on waves of alien/hybrid/sci-fi
imagery, bits of memories and dreams, all mixed in with shivery
slivers of Jacobs' pre-hypnosis suggestive anecdotes, the
trusting and vulnerable patient delivered up to Jacobs his
hoped-for narrative of predatory hybrids among us - exactly what
he ordered for the book he was writing.

However, it's anything but a typical abductee's experience:
violent sexual encounters with a human/alien hybrid; a request
by the good Doctor (Ph.D. in history, non-medical) to send him
her panties, unwashed, so they could be tested for alien sperm;
and a proposal that she wear a chastity belt with nails across
the vaginal opening, which he'd locate for her from (in Jacobs
words) "a sex shop that specialized in bondage/dominance, a
place that I frequented quite often."1

In later sessions, Jacobs, hyperventilating, can be heard
telling Emma that he's in terrible trouble - that an outraged
hybrid (who knows that Jacobs is the only person on the planet,
other than Hopkins, who knows the evil fate that aliens are
planning for humanity) - that this hybrid is sending him
threatening Instant Messages on his AOL account to make him
cease and desist his work with the abductee Emma Woods.

Jacobs is "the man who knows too much."

Personal IMs from a bloodthirsty hybrid who is entirely
theoretical. It doesn't get more hallucinatory than that.

Afraid for his life, Jacobs panics. To throw the wily hybrid off
his trail, the good researcher deliberately instills into the
hypnotized Emma's mind the information that he is now an expert
on this "public epidemic," that she suffers from Multiple
Personality Disorder - not alien abductions - and she - needs to
take medication for the disorder."

http://www.ufoalienabductee.com/hypnosissession-29-david-jacobs-suggestionsm=
pd.mp3

(Note to Jacobs: Multiple psychiatric journals state that
medication is not recommended for someone with this disorder and
that Multiple Personality Disorder, now known as Disassociative
Identity Disorder, is serious, chronic and the sufferer is at
risk for suicidal attempts, self-injury, violence, substance
abuse, and repeated victimization by others. Good call, Doctor-
Practicing-Medicine-Without-a-License. Save your own skin and
the patient be damned.)

I ask you: What would happen to a licensed psychotherapist who
falsely assured a hypnotized patient that she had an incurable
mental illness which would make the rest of her life a living
hell? He'd get the pants sued off of him, his license suspended
or revoked and would possibly never be allowed to practice
again. A panel of peers would review his professional conduct
and make appropriate rulings.

But, evidently, in the unstructured world of ufology, nothing at
all happens to such a - doctor." Jacobs underwent some drubbing
on certain blogs and radio shows (especially in the bold
coverage of the case by Jeremy Vaeni and Jeff Ritzmann of
Paratopia and Gary Haden of Speculative Realms.)

His employer, Temple University, didn't scent a powerful law
firm in the offing and so claimed Jacobs wasn't doing research,
just "taking an oral history." And Budd Hopkins jumped in with a
letter to Emma that compared her to George W. Bush invading
Iraq, causing the deaths of thousands, if she exposed his
friend's longdistance bedside manner.

Ufology's two best-known abduction researchers continue to take
victory laps over the airwaves, while the leaders in the field
are largely closemouthed about the cringe-inducing revelations.

Neither the two researchers nor the UFO community seemed to have
learned anything from the mistakes. In fact, on November 28,
2010, Hopkins stated on the popular Coast-to-Coast radio show
that he and Dave "are very close in the way we handle abductees
who come to us."

T h r o u g h o u t December, both men have been heard on
multiple forums still making extremely confident assertions
about "what we know" and - our powerful evidence" for alien
abduction and - our absolute certainty" that alien/human hybrids
are living among us and that the prospects for humans are grim.
Everything asserted confidently, without a mote or molecule of
tangible proof. Not even a snippet of hybrid DNA, which would be
fairly easy to bring back from one of these earthly encounters -
especially the alleged violent and sexual ones. An object that
is even touched by one of these alleged creatures could readily
be analyzed with current DNA technology. The experiencer could
discreetly pick up a glass, a hair, a spoon, anything the being
contacted and bag it, then contact a lab or their local MUFON
representative. If the claim of "hybrids among us" is indeed - a
falsifiable hypothesis," as Jacobs often states, there must be a
reason it remains simply all hot air.

People drawn to the great mystery of UFO sightings and abduction
accounts are becoming all too aware that nothing new has been
learned about the phenomenon for a very long time. For years,
the abduction stories have remained essentially the same at the
core: just the names, places, and a few details change.

Once when I was on a Mindshift Institute panel in Maine, someone
in the audience asked me if it wasn't just fascinating and so
exciting to live in the middle of all this UFO and abduction
activity. "Uh, actually, no," I blurted out. "It was fascinating
for the first four or five years. But six, seven, eight years
later and you're still hearing the same story over and over, it
gets a little tedious. I kept hoping for a new perspective,
another handle on what this thing is! But it almost never
happened."

Budd Hopkins would never acknowledge this, but his actions
showed that he felt equally frustrated by lack of new insights.
After an initial interview and a hypnosis session in our home
with a perfectly credible, yet run-of-the-mill abductee -
especially one who regarded the grey beings with a sort of New
Age, accepting gaze - Budd seldom did more than a single
hypnotic regression with people like that and rarely returned
their follow-up phone calls (some becoming increasingly
frantic).

To me, that was a bit like opening up someone's head with a
rusty can-opener, then skipping town. We had arguments that went
nowhere. It appeared that he dropped people because he was
looking for something with a higher-octane level.

It was going to be hard for Budd Hopkins to find a case that had
anything near the intrigue and high strangeness of the account
that he'd presented in his 1996 book Witnessed: The True Story
of the Brooklyn Bridge Abductions.


The Linda Cortile Case

I entered the picture in 1995, when Budd was just completing
Witnessed. He'd been investigating the complex case for
approximately the past five years, putting together all the
pieces of the puzzle as they continued to tumble in.

Budd and Linda had shared in the advance money for the book
(although Linda falsely told other investigators of the case
that she and Budd would be splitting it, 50/50.) If Witnessed
did well and sold to Hollywood, that's where the real money
would come from - and both researcher and subject would share in
that money, too (just not 50/50).

I found that arrangement a bit puzzling. Where I'd come from,
researchers might give study participants stipends of $10 or $20
a visit, say, or bus money to and from the clinic, but not
amounts of this size. Might not that influence Linda to... What?

I had no idea what this was or how things worked. I tried to get
up to speed and come to my own understanding of events by
delving into the manuscript, editing as I went.

Witnessed was a compelling read. I thought: If any UFO case is
going to be made into a Hollywood film, this is the one! It was
highly dramatic, paced like a thriller - full of otherworldly
treachery, forbidden love, UFOs over Manhattan, twenty-two
witnesses, a heroine whose red blood cells were immortal, lusty
and dangerous Secret Service agents, a Prince from afar, gifts
of many fur coats, chases on foot, more forbidden love, an X-
rayed alien implant, Linda's abduction into a spacecraft
accompanied by an important world leader, her abduction into a
spacecraft with other members of Budd's abductee support group,
and her abduction into a spacecraft accompanied by a famous
Mafia don.

Then, later, as the story continued to unfold (long after the
book's publication), Linda's presence in the lobby of the World
Trade Center when the planes hit and her bloody, barefoot escape
over shards of glass. Although... not all of those events reported
above by Linda Cortile had been selected by Budd for inclusion
in the book. I knew about them, but they weren't in the book.

I sometimes got confused between what I knew from life and the
artfully shaped version of life that I found in the manuscript.
Linda was simply part of our lives, a friend, sometimes at the
house being interviewed by the media, sometimes Budd's co-
presenter at conferences. When the rest of Budd's people
gathered in the living room for abductee support groups, Linda
was always there. Many times, I schlepped my camera and lights
to Lower Manhattan to interview Linda in her apartment, with her
family, over her tomato sauce, in situ.

I liked Linda's spunkiness in her role as a traditional Italian-
American housewife and mother - one that might well have driven
me to take a dive off the Brooklyn Bridge so visible from her
living room. It was also fascinating to watch her adapt to her
new role as the star abductee in Budd's group, many of whom were
artists, writers, social workers, actors and a pastor or two.
For her, it must have been like entering another life.

Although I'd often heard Budd's assertion that Linda simply
didn't have the mental capacity to pull off this complex case as
a hoax, I soon discovered that Linda was quite smart. Not well
educated (a different matter entirely), but quick on the draw.
I've never met anybody, for example, who could get an unexpected
phone call from an admirer and so effortlessly spin a
spontaneously fabricated, intricate, family-related reason for
not meeting him for coffee, all the while winking broadly at me.
She'd just finished telling me she was dying to head home for a
nap.2

In 1996, as my tape rolled, Budd went on an international
conference and media tour to promote the book. We traveled to
London, Paris, Switzerland, San Marino, and later, Istanbul. The
publisher clearly expected Witnessed to do well.

On television studio sets, in radio stations, at podiums, Budd
called the Linda Cortile case "the most important case of the
century."

Budd would go on to tell the riveting story of the November 30,
1989 abduction of Linda Cortile out of her Lower Manhattan
building at 3:00 a.m. His investigation had revealed that a top
international diplomat, two federal security agents, and at
least 20 other people witnessed some aspect of the spectacular
light show and the abduction of Linda, as she was pulled up a
beam of light towards a red UFO in her white nightgown,
accompanied by three alien beings.

Most of these alleged witnesses had contacted Budd via letters,
audiotapes, telephone calls, and drawings, although he'd never
come face-to-face with any of the major players in the story.

Budd stated that the case powerfully supported - both the
objective reality of UFO abductions and the accuracy of
regressive hypnosis as employed with this abductee."3

He also drew the startling conclusion that the Linda Cortile
case provided compelling evidence that the aliens were
deliberately demonstrating to the world their presence, their
power, and their intent to take command. But even before the
book Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abductions
had been published, the case - along with Hopkins' reputation -
was in big trouble.

Witnessed was being severely criticized by independent
investigators, bloggers, and journalists - both inside and
outside the UFO community. Many said he'd fallen victim to a
bored housewife's fantasies or an elaborate hoax.

Eventually, although the book had been optioned twice, the
pending Hollywood movie deal fell through, largely because the
story had been so publicly discredited.

It was hard to watch these things happen to a man who had
devoted over six years of his life primarily to this single UFO
abduction case. But Budd never once backed down or gave an inch
of credence to the "debunkers'" attack on the case. (In our
house, the words "debunkers" and "skeptics" were used very much
in the way that devout Christians use the words "unbelievers"
and "the unsaved.") He continued to tout the major significance
of the case long after he knew that Linda had lied to him on
multiple occasions.

One June night in 1996 (seven years after Linda's alleged 1989
abduction), I was filming in our kitchen as Linda recounted to
Budd and a dinner guest yet another recent, frightening attempt
by government agents Richard and Dan - characters in the book
Witnessed - to kidnap Linda and her cousin Connie into the back
of a van. Linda described the struggle in great detail,
including the two women's successful escape.

Budd was aghast that she hadn't told him earlier and said he
urgently needed to speak with Cousin Connie. Linda left,
promising she'd have her cousin call Budd so he could question
her version of the event.

Later that night, the phone rang, and as Budd answered, I
watched a peculiar look come over his face. The usually voluble
Hopkins was very quiet, mainly listening. After he thanked the
caller and hung up, I asked who that was. His smile was as tight
and wry as a killer Martini: "That was Linda, pretending to be
her cousin Connie."4

This, of course, is only the prelude.

The complete story behind the Linda Cortile case will be told in
my feature-length documentary with the working title of
Something Hidden. It will be released in the summer of 2011, if
adequate post-production funding is raised. More information and
video clips can be found on my website:

www.carolrainey.com

These two leading abduction investigators, I now believe, are
driven by the rules of the game they're in to whip up their best
cases, to drive them hard. These ufologists, whose ego supplies
are dependent on their standing in this marginalized field, are
desperate to keep bringing home the magic. Unless they're to
become quickly obsolete, alien abduction experts are expected to
deliver the goods: newer, fresher, stranger, and ever more
strange reports.

It is not incidental that David Jacobs was intending to write a
book about Emma Woods and several other experiencers, people who
shared a high strangeness narrative focused on the infiltration
of hybrid beings into our society.

In Emma's audiotapes, we can hear Jacobs, before the regression,
telling Emma about his other cases, which included their
hybrids' violent, sadomasochistic sexual behavior and warning
her that they just might discover that in her own upcoming
hypnosis session.

That isn't even "leading": it's an outright push for her to then
deliver, under hypnosis, the exact narrative he needs for his
book.

It is also not incidental that Budd Hopkins does not ever
express doubt about the reliability of Linda Cortile's story and
the seminal importance of her case. If he did, he might be
forced to question his own ability to sort fact from fiction or
to spot a rising hoax before it crests and breaks over him.

It's my personal belief, knowing both Jacobs and Hopkins, that
they are trapped, like Br'er Rabbit in Tar-Baby, by the very
phenomenon they attempt to confront. They can no longer
extricate themselves from the surreal, richly imaginative blend
of fantasy and reality that is generated around anyone who is
deeply involved in paranormal research.5

While I was most active in Budd's work, I also felt the
powerful, suggestive influence of this ambiguous phenomenon. If
I'd come into a room and hear my husband on the phone, asking:
"Did they come through the wall this time, too?" it no longer
struck me as bizarre.

In relationship, close to a partner holding firm to such ideas,
I sensed an almost gravitational influence of that other
person's emotional world. Something like an unconscious
resonance.

For a short time, I had come to accept that the alien
abduction phenomenon was what Budd and Dave said it was. But I
never stopped asking skeptical questions - questions that grew
increasingly unwelcome.

These investigators believe so completely in the reality of
their own interpretation of these experiences that they have
lost touch with both consensus reality and the everyday ethics
of human behavior that go along with it. They genuinely feel
that the fate of humanity is at risk and any tactic taken is
justified by the need to warn the world of the coming takeover.

That's a powerful belief system and in these two men, it is
rigid. There's nothing ambiguous or shifting in their ideas. In
a most disturbing way, such a fundamentalist type of belief
structure leaves them highly vulnerable to credulousness, loss
of critical judgment, and outright hoaxes.

Given the stakes (and audio/visual evidence gleaned from my own
videotapes over a ten year period), I believe now that these
abduction investigators are sometimes trapped by their own
deeply held beliefs into becoming the victims of hoaxers - which
they adamantly refuse to acknowledge. I'll review one such case
below.

In other cases, there's evidence that these same abduction
investigators are co-creating the strangest of high strangeness
cases with the cooperation of the experiencer/abductee.
Sometimes co-creation of the narrative is conscious - by one or
both parties - and in other cases, the collaboration seems to be
primarily unconscious.6

Of course, abduction researchers are acting as de facto
therapists for the - abductee," as well as investigators into
the phenomena. And a certain type of "co-creation" is often
considered part of the therapeutic process, discussed in
psychiatric journals and on therapists' websites.

One author states: "Interaction between patient and therapist is
now considered to be a cocreation of the patient's inner world
resonating with the analyst's inner world."7

Both psychodynamic and Gestalt therapy work with the idea that
what is created in the therapy is a co-creation in which both
the therapist and the patient play a vital role.

I'm in no way implying a relationship of equals in this "work".
The imbalance of power between subject and researcher is
tremendous. It only takes listening to Emma Woods' audio clips
or my own videotapes of hypnosis sessions to realize that.

The researcher is the authority figure - "this famous author,"
as Linda Cortile refers to Hopkins. The researcher is also often
the object of transference, whether he realizes it or not; he is
working with a hypnotized patient; and so he has the full
responsibility to be aware of and manage the relationship with
the subject, using the highest ethical principles.

But the entire enterprise can skid off the side of a cliff if
the investigator/therapist is not constantly aware of and
analyzing his own conscious and unconscious positions and his
own motivations in these delicate encounters.

In actual psychotherapy, of course, many therapists often
periodically sit down with another more experienced
psychotherapist to discuss their clients' issues, as well as
their own response to them.

Many professional organizations
require therapists to incorporate third-party
supervision into their practice as a way to
protect the client.8

When an impartial third party reviews what's occurring between
therapist and client, serious lapses in judgment or oversights
can be caught before something harmful happens - as in Jacobs
telling Emma that she suffers from Multiple Personality
Disorder.

Unfortunately, these ufologists work without supervision of any
kind. In the Emma Woods case and in the four cases below, I
believe we see two psychologically naive investigators who are
completely unaware of their own unconscious positions - and
completely unaware of the powerful force field that sets up in
their encounters with vulnerable experiencers.

Before getting back to Jim Mortellaro, who's still undergoing
trauma on the old studio couch, let's look briefly at two
earlier cases that I participated in and made short films about.

Dora's Case

Sometimes the most publishable abductees are not even mentally
sound. Dora (a pseudonym) was a middle-aged woman with a family
in the Southwest, who had corresponded with Budd for several
years. Every letter described abduction tales that got more and
more outlandish.

During lengthy phone calls with her, Budd's interest grew.
Dora's story had always been filled with accounts of meeting
aliens in insignia and khaki and now they were taking her to
meet their human collaborators - high-level U.S. government
personnel.

She'd also sent him drawings of a brutal Hispanic hybrid named
Pedro, who tormented her, and a drawing of a spacecraft filled
with tanks of floating human body parts.

When we attended a conference in her area in July 1997, Budd did
a hypnotic regression with Dora and she gave me permission to
film. During the session, she "remembered" being conducted into
an underground chamber where the grey beings were waiting for
her, along with Colin Powell and Ralph Nader (go figure!).

They forced her to memorize information essential to humanity's
survival, but Dora became so agitated and hysterical that Budd
brought her out of the trance.

Back home, I went to Dora's file to find the drawings she had
talked about. I planned to incorporate them into the short film
I'd make for Budd to show on his lecture tours. At the very back
of the file, there was a letter to Budd from a therapist and a
consulting psychiatrist who had administered the MMPI-2 tests to
Dora and did extensive counseling with her and her husband.
(MMPI-2 is a standard test that many psychiatrists use to assess
personality structure and psychopathology.)

The psychiatrists did not believe Dora's claims of being
powerless over abductions were credible, according to the tests.
The doctor evaluated her as a volatile, severely sexually and
physically abused woman by both her father (from childhood to
her teens) and also by her husband; she'd lived in a battered
women's shelter and had been a victim most of her life.

The consulting psychiatrist stated: "She has tremendous anger
bottled up inside that she needs to get out. I have strong
doubts that this abduction material is the real thing."

The recommendation was for Dora to use therapy to focus
specifically on issues of sexual abuse and her anger.

The original therapist, who had had his own anomalous
experiences, wrote to Budd that he would no longer treat Dora
for her alien abduction trauma, referring her, instead, to the
more qualified psychiatrist. He stated that he wanted to be sure
he was serving his client's best interests "and not allowing
someone with rather deep mental/emotional disturbances to use
the scenario of alien abductions to bleed out a lifetime of her
abuse."9

The letter was dated January 27, 1995, but Hopkins continued to
do either hypnotic regressions or telephone interviews with her
about alien contact for at least three years after receiving the
doctors' letter.

Earlier in 2010, I attended the New York City premiere of a new
UFO film. It featured Dora, in her still unchanged role of
victim/abductee attempting to regain control of her life from
the enemies who surrounded her on every side, black helicopters
from above and khaki-clad aliens below.

In this case, the welfare of the patient clearly took second
place to the investigator's need for a high strangeness
"discovery" - confirmation for the alien/military conspiracy
theory.

The Beanie Case =96 A New Crash Retrieval Claim in the Early '60s

Budd first investigated the Beanie case in 1995 with veteran
ufologist and astronomer Walt Webb, who had trained under Dr.
Allen Hynek and was one of the first investigators on the Betty
and Barney Hill case, among others.

Budd and Walt Webb traveled to the tiny town of Santa Rosa, New
Mexico to interview a retired X-ray technician in the hospital,
Bina "Beanie" Bean.

She had reported to local Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)
representatives that in either the spring or winter of 1963, she
had been riding shotgun in an ambulance that sped to a crashed
saucer site on a remote desert road and returned with several
non-human little bodies. She'd X-rayed them, she said, and
described them in detail.

A military entourage burst into the hospital and cleaned out
every scrap of evidence, threatening the hospital staff to keep
their mouths shut. Beanie drew maps and named names. But, as
Walt Webb wrote to me several years later: "We had only one
anecdotal story by one alleged eyewitness to a 32-year-old
alleged episode!"10 It would be tough to build a case on that.
The two investigators returned home in 1995, leaving a long list
of possible witnesses for Beanie and Budd to contact.

In 1997, Budd and I returned to follow-up on the Beanie story
while in nearby Roswell. I taped Budd's interview with the
eccentric Beanie, noticing that she was starting to embroider a
great deal around the edges of her original story of a crash
retrieval, including claiming her own abduction experiences and
asserting that her older sister was the famously elusive nurse
who warned off the mortician at Roswell, shortly after that
alleged crash.

Neither she nor Budd had tracked down or spoken to any of the
long list of possible witnesses. The only glint of confirmation
of this single eyewitness's story came during our visit to the
elderly widow of the ambulance driver. When pressed, she seemed
to vaguely recall that the Air Force had indeed once stripped
the ambulance clean and taken the billable trip ticket, as
Beanie claimed. But the widow had no idea what year or what
decade that might have occurred in.

Upon returning home, I made a short film out of the questionable
venture. Beanie was quirky and entertaining and I left the
validity of the case up in the air. But Budd showed the film in
several conference lectures and seminars around the country. It
became his exciting new case, this previously unknown
crash/retrieval in early 1960's Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

He presented the case with his typical well-spoken conviction
and the clear impression of his own personal integrity. Based on
the testimony of his implied impeccable eyewitnesses - Beanie
and the widow - Budd publicly asserted that alien remains had
been found in Santa Rosa in the spring or winter of 1963 and
confiscated by the government.

Disturbed that he'd never tracked down any other witnesses for
such a major claim, I reviewed Beanie's file.

In it were two letters to Budd from Walt Webb, written several
months after their 1995 expedition... Webb expressed grave doubt
about Beanie's credibility, citing major discrepancies in her
stories, told to three separate interviewers.

Sometimes she cited three bodies were found and sometimes two.
In one account they were lined up under a sheet near the crashed
craft; in an account to MUFON, she described the bodies as half-
in, half-out of the craft.

In that same report, Beanie talked of a "coroner's inquest" at
the hospital, bringing in people off the street as witnesses; in
her account to Webb and Hopkins, she and a Dr. Galvin were the
only people present for examination of the bodies.11 But it was
too late for such reservations...

The other investigator's grave doubts had been eliminated from
the official story now. Based on Budd's unproven assertions and
my footage, the case ended up enshrined in the official
literature of the field in Ryan Wood's book on famous UFO
crash/retrieval cases, Majic Eyes Only.12

Beanie's story was the start of a case - but far from an
established, well-researched study of a possible UFO event.

Unfortunately, it had all the hallmarks of a tale co-created by
a lonely old woman hungry for attention and an investigator who
needed to generate his next new thing.


The Jim Mortellaro Case

A breath-taking special hook, a new twist on the standard
abduction story =96 that now seems to be the Holy Grail for some
abduction researchers. That's precisely how Jim Mortellaro
caught and held Hopkins' attention after several years of
hanging around at the edges of the UFO community. It was how he
would take Hopkins for a two-year ride along the lecture
circuit, humiliate him, and cost him the resignation of nearly
half his Advisory Committee =96 and, indirectly, cost him his
marriage.

In my opinion, the Jim Mortellaro case is one of the best
examples of what's wrong with the abduction research that I
observed, second only to the Linda Cortile case.

Jim claimed to have earned two Ph.D.s, and implied he'd held a
national or international marketing directorship with Hitachi,
none of which was confirmed by the investigator.

We learned that he was technically skilled in work with
computers and electronics when he donated and installed in
Budd's Intruders Foundation office a completely new PC, with
printer, scanner, and the newest software.

As the one tech-savvy person in our duo, I'd always kept up on
Budd's computer and other equipment, so I was there to see how
the system was being installed.

That's when I first became aware of Jim's high intake of
prescription drugs and asked why he kept a pistol stuck in his
boot. It just didn't seem like a good combo to me and I said so.

That day, Leslie Kean, Budd's new protege, advisor, and all-
round organizer, was in the studio, too. Just beginning to learn
about alien abductions from Budd, she agreed with me. Not a good
combination, Jim.

But Jim explained that he was a nervous guy and belonged to the
police auxiliary, a volunteer organization for local law
enforcement, so he needed to have the gun handy.

Leslie Kean had begun her exploration of UFO abduction by
allegedly vetting the Linda Cortile case (from Hopkins' book
Witnessed). After doing her own review of source material and
interviewing both Budd and Linda, she concluded that it was a
sound, well-researched case.

Now Kean took up the Jim Mortellaro case in a big way, once she
was let in on the spectacular opportunity of his case. It would
be the first time that ufologists would be included in a major
mainstream, scientific study of the medical evidence of alien
abductions.

According to Jim, an upstate group of physicians had discovered,
to their shock, that they each had people under their care who
had medically inexplicable symptoms, just like Jim's.

Each had between two and five patients with missing time,
scarring without having surgery, phobias that seemed
inappropriate to the person's experience, low self-esteem, and
embarrassed reports of encounters with strange grey beings.

The physicians were fascinated and now had a large number of
Jim's fellow abductees enrolled in a self-funded, longitudinal
study of patients with this constellation of symptoms. Which
would prove, beyond doubt, that something was going on.

They were, however, extremely secretive about the study and Jim
was not allowed to give out anyone's number or talk much about
it. He did assure Budd, though, that a "Dr. Nancy" was going to
put in a confidential call to Budd because she was scared to
death of something and needed his advice.

Since Budd was notoriously lax about listening to voice messages
and returning phone calls, Jim Mortellaro and Leslie Kean went
in together and bought Budd his first cellular phone and a
year's service plan, so that the two of them could be in direct
touch with him at all times and move this case forward.

One evening after Budd had gone down to the studio to check his
messages, he came running back upstairs in great excitement. I
must come listen to the message that "Dr. Nancy" had just left
on his machine. By now, I was a bit skeptical about several
matters, but willing to listen.

Budd replayed the message. A woman's voice came up, identifying
herself as "Dr. Nancy."

A high, agitated voice, rushing through her hope to speak to Mr.
Hopkins about an urgent matter regarding James Mortellaro. She
was concerned, wanted his opinion, would call back, and couldn't
seem to get off the phone fast enough.

Listening, I felt my spirits sink toward the rough floorboards
of the studio like a deflated party balloon. Oh, no. Budd looked
at me in triumph and clapped his hands together. "Now we're
really going to get somewhere!" he said.

"Did you hear that voice?" I asked. "Don't you recognize it?"

"What? What do you mean?" Now he was getting angry. "It's Dr.
Nancy and I've never heard her voice before this instant!"

"It's Jim." I said, very sorry to bring the news. But startled,
too, that he didn't hear it. "It's Jim's voice, electronically
altered."

"It absolutely is not!" he shouted. "How could you say such a
thing? That's a woman, that's not Jim! Why would you tell me
that?"

"Because I've spent twenty-plus years in post-production suites,
with the editor or the mixer altering voices up, down, and
sideways," I said. "It's certainly not rocket science and Jim
knows electronics. Listen, that's his syntax, that's the way he
says 'very concerned' and drops his 'gs' on certain words."

But Budd was furious with me, v e h e m e n t l y denying it.

Over the next month, three more voice messages were left.

One, a baritone male voice, identified himself as "Noah," Jim's
neighbor. He wanted to testify that while standing outside on
his own deck, he'd seen Jim lifted up by a beam of light into a
craft.

There was another woman's voice, higher yet, but with words
emerging at a snails' pace, who identified herself as Jim's wife
and she wanted Budd to know Jamie had been in awful shape, he
really had, coming home that night with blood running down both
legs, okay, if she could help, just let her know; and another
voice message from "Dr. Nancy," still on the run, still
agitated, still desperate for Mr. Hopkins' advice.

They are all Jim, I tell my husband. But Budd will not listen,
will not be stopped.

Leslie Kean, now actively involved in the case, supported him
completely.

Budd began to do the lecture circuit, speaking at various
conferences and on radio shows and podcasts about the Mortellaro
case he was building and the coming day of justice for all of
ufology when what is known by us will have to be reported and
confirmed to the world by the scientists engaged in this ground-
breaking study.

One such lecture on the case, now sold by a major UFO media
distributor, has become a permanent part of the field's
literature. It is entitled "Budd Hopkins Presents 'A 2002
Watershed Abduction In The Environs Of New York City' DVD."

Jim, meanwhile, set up a massive presence on the Internet,
posting regularly and noisily to UFO UpDates and multiple other
sites about his experiences and perceptions as an abductee.

He posted several documents related to his case on the Internet,
one of which purports to be a medical record written by the
physician who treated him in the emergency room after a nasty
abduction. In it, the alleged physician used language and style
I'd never before seen emerge from a doctor's pen.

In this clinical document, the alleged physician reports "nearly
miraculous healing of the contusions in the bladder... Very
strange, indeed. Very strange." The medical record continues:
"We have never before seen such a bizarre case". The phrase
"bizarre case" is sprinkled throughout the medical record. The
physician's text was obviously forged.

Okay, that was it. I was done and urged Budd to stop, too.

Instead, Budd and Jim together began to address the audiences of
several popular paranormal radio shows, with Jim narrating his
savage treatment by alien abductors and Budd playing an audio
taped hypnotic regression session with a terrified Jim railing
and wailing at the aliens. This case, minus the audio, is now
part of the publicly available record of abduction research at
the BUFO Paranormal Radio website.

On November 9, 2002, the Intruders Foundation hosted a New York
seminar in its series called "Jim Mortellaro & Budd Hopkins, An
Important New Abduction Case With Extensive Medical Evidence."
13

Unfortunately, the only medical evidence was that hoped for,
future evidence that would have to be made public by the upstate
physicians when they'd completed their study of abductees. That
and the forged ER physician's letter. I was too embarrassed and
alienated to attend the seminar.

Jim's internet claims were getting broader and deeper. He came
off as somewhat unhinged and was attacked on several of the
public forums as being a fake.

People on the Intruders Foundation's Advisory Committee - a
strong, bright group of people that included an astronomer and
two psychologists - were getting increasingly uneasy. They had
no first-hand knowledge of Jim's case at all, yet Budd had gone
completely public with a case for which he promised to produce
evidence in the future. They had never been shown any of the so-
called evidence or heard the doctor's voice messages. They had
been treated to a highly dramatic audio taped hypnosis session
with Jim, punctuated with screams and shouting. Such emotion,
Budd assured the committee, was never faked. "How could it be
faked? He's not a professional actor. This is a terrified man!"
At least that's what his office assistant reported back to me.

I'd also stopped going to the Advisory Committee meetings, even
though I was a member.

Jim's High Noon moment occurred one day in 2004 - after two
years of collaboration with the world's preeminent abduction
researcher.

That day Jim came into our house, saying that he'd just killed a
man. As a member of the auxiliary police in his small town north
of the city, he'd spotted a burglary in progress and,
unfortunately, had to use deadly force to stop him. Now he was
considered a hero around town and two days ago he'd been
presented with a certain police association's highest award by
the town mayor and the head of the policeman's association and
he was feeling much more confident about things in general.

Oh, and he'd meant to bring the local newspaper article telling
all about the robbery and award, but his elderly mom and dad
wanted to hold onto it.

The office assistant and I glanced at each other. This story was
so checkable! We left the men to their coffee and went to our
respective studios.

She immediately called the Chief of Police in Jim's town. He
said there had been no break-ins in the area for over a year and
that no shootings of any kind had occurred there for at least
five years.

I went to the website of the policeman's organization mentioned
by Jim and discovered that they only gave awards to cops who
were quite, quite dead and permanently underground. Posthumous
awards to heroes, that's what they specialized in. That appeared
to rule out our Jim.

No newspaper article ever materialized, and, eventually, neither
did the great hope for that elusive study of abductees by
physicians.

When word of this obvious hoaxing on Jim's part leaked out to
the Advisory Committee members, many of them came to the
Intruders Foundation and insisted on listening to the voice
messages on tape - "Dr. Nancy," the wife, and 'Noah," the
neighbor. They just shook their heads.

Then one member, a medical writer by profession, stated that the
physician's letter Jim had posted online was a complete hoax.
Physicians don't write that way. In fact, the Committee believed
that the entire case was a hoax, that the man was pathological,
that the very public forum of the case was a disgrace - and that
Budd must stop this investigation. They requested a formal
meeting with him, a forum for the whole group to discuss what
had happened and how there were no checks and balances here. If
they were going to continue lending their names and services to
his organization, they wanted to be part of the process of
teaming up to vet new cases.

Budd responded by getting novice Leslie Kean to write the
experienced Advisory Committee a chastising letter about the
need to not prematurely restrain Hopkins from proceeding on a
case-in-progress.

Budd himself wrote the Committee a letter in which he seemed to
dismiss all but one of their many suggestions for "a deepened
degree of participation by the committee." That suggestion -
that for all cases in the future the advisory group should
gather, bimonthly, to listen to recordings of hypnotic
regressions done in the previous weeks by Budd with an alleged
abductee - Budd conceded was "an excellent idea," then added the
kicker:

"I may excuse myself during those meetings, however. Since I sat
through these hours of often depressing, grueling sessions the
first time, maybe I could just slip off to the Met for a little
personal uplift!"14

In other words, he had no intention of playing on a team that
included anyone but himself and would not put himself in a
position to have his actions or judgment questioned by anyone.

NOTE: Use of Mr. Mortellaro's real name does not violate his
confidentiality because he has both signed a release for my use
of his image and words and he has voluntarily been using his
name over the Internet and on radio broadcasts for a number of
years.

When the Mortellaro case blew up, I resigned from the Advisory
Committee and never again filmed a regression session or
participated in abduction research. Three other Committee
members eventually resigned, including two psychotherapists and
an engineer.

Budd conceded to the remaining members that a public statement
needed to be made about the case. For a brief period, a one page
statement was posted on the Intruders Foundation website. It
said, among other things, that;

"This case was of great interest because of the alleged medical
injuries resulting from [Mortellaro's] abduction in 2001.
Unfortunately, Mr. Mortellaro has never produced credible
evidence in support of these claims.

Furthermore, he provided us with two allegedly official
documents, which have proved to be fabrications. Therefore, Budd
Hopkins and the Advisory Committee of the Intruders Foundation
no longer consider this case worthy of investigation."

The page, summarizing two years of work on a hoax, a case not
voluntarily stopped by Hopkins, concluded by stating that:

"As always, the Intruders Foundation continues to apply a
detailed, cautious and methodical protocol to the consideration
and investigation of all potential abduction cases."

It was positively Orwellian. Language with the meaning turned
inside out, scientificsounding language used to deny and
deceive. The bottom line seems to be that an abduction
researcher is free to make absolutely any claim he cares to
make, and as long as the claim is made convincingly and often -
they will believe.

There are many complex reasons that the UFO community often
finds itself twisted in knots, attempting to defend the validity
of a case, even one that is as clearly hoaxed as Mortellaro's.
Reasons, too, that any criticism of an abduction researcher with
Hopkins' standing in the field will be ferociously attacked.

The subject requires far more development than this article has
room for, but George Hansen's erudite and compassionate book,
The Trickster And The Paranormal, offers one explanation that is
especially apt for the situations covered in this article: that
"Ufology is a tiny field with a tenuous existence and an attack
on Hopkins [and to a lesser degree, Jacobs] has greater
repercussions than one on a comparable person in a larger
field."

Other ufologists, Hansen continues, identify themselves so
closely with the field and with the ET hypothesis, that they
perceive any criticism of these men to be personal attacks on
them, as well.15

There's another, simpler reason that "they" will continue to
believe. Because it was essentially denied as a hoax by Hopkins,
its primary proponent, the Mortellaro case still exists as part
of the historical record of UFO abduction case studies - in a
Hopkins lecture on the case from FortFest 2002, posted on
YouTube; in online pages containing the case materials; audio
files of hypnosis sessions; and in multiple DVDs for sale of
Hopkins' conference presentations about it.

Anyone attempting to study the evidence of alien abduction might
be just as likely to study the Mortellaro case as the Travis
Walton case.

The page on Hopkins' Intruders Foundation website was quickly
pulled down and there seems to be little evidence that anything
went wrong.

However, the official statement is still posted on the Rense.com
site, along with numerous other articles by Mortellaro:

http://www.rense.com/general50/IF.htm

What about demanding a recall, in such cases? Even a cannery for
green peas has to recall a few batches of cans when the product
turns out to be spoiled. But when it comes to the wholesale
creation and public offering of an entire genre of performance
art called "the alien abduction phenomenon", nobody's held
responsible for anything. Especially not the man lauded for his
role in its creation - an artist whose brief, shining moment in
the art world passed over forty years ago.

The final irony occurred barely 19 months after the Mortellaro
debacle.

At the March 3, 2006 UFO Congress, pre-eminent abduction
researchers Hopkins and Jacobs took the stage. They both spoke
on the topic of transgenic beings (otherwise known as -
hybrids") among us. While Jacobs stated (without evidence) that
"the evidence has been amassing for years," this is what Hopkins
asserted before the large assembly - and to future researchers
who will view his statements on the DVD for decades to come:

"This is something that I'm very proud of... that in all the
years of the work that Dave has done and I have done, along with
a number of other people, we have never had to take anything
back, and say: 'Boy, did we make a whopper of a mistake.' We've
been very, very cautious. We haven't had cases, one after
another... blow up...  despite the efforts of many, many, many
debunkers. And that's why we can say...  that the material we
presented tonight, as strange and complicated and difficult as
it is - is, I believe, going to stand the test of time, like the
rest of it has."16

So there you have it: no mistakes were ever made; the flawed,
overly credulous, and at times unethical research tactics in the
Emma Woods case, in Mortellaro's, Dora's, Beanie's and Linda's
cases did not exist; and so neither the researchers nor the UFO
community learned a damned thing.

Denial is such a terrible waste of an opportunity. There's often
enormous power in not being paralyzed by the fear of failure,
especially when people learn from either watching or making the
mistakes.

Certain abduction researchers have been making a lot of
mistakes, not just lately, but in the past, as well. Serious
gaffes that keep mainstream scientists and public funding of
research far, far away from that circus. Serious gaffes on an
ongoing basis that send fairly knowledgeable people like me and
many others running from the field.

But when will ufology, as a community, bother to learn from
those mistakes? And will the community ever have the courage to
step up to the two Priests of High Strangeness and say:

"Thanks for your courageous and dedicated work in this field,
Hopkins and Jacobs. It's been great; you were true pioneers and
we know that your belief system is strict, heartfelt, and
sincere as death. But we'll take it from here.

We just don't think it's possible that you alone, you two,
exclusively hold The Truth about this human experience with The
Other. Face it, you've been engaged in an activity that makes it
impossible for you to see clearly; not any more you don't. So,
thanks, but we'll take it from here."

---

Carol Rainey has been making award-winning documentaries for
PBS, cable networks, and commercial distribution for over two
decades. Many of those films focused on scientific and medical
topics.

Rainey
is currently working on a feature-length documentary
about the story of UFO researcher Budd
Hopkins' investigation into the Witnessed case
(with Linda Cortile). She has also published short
stories, written feature-length screenplays and
teleplays, and co-authored the book Sight Unseen,
published in 2003 by Atria: Simon & Schuster.

www.carolrainey.com

NOTE: All of the cases referred to in this article will also be
featured in the author's up-coming feature documentary,
Something Hidden. Focused on the story of Hopkins' investigation
into the Witnessed case (with Linda Cortile), the film is also
the parallel story of Rainey's uniquely personal journey into
the heart of a human enigma - the UFO abduction phenomenon.

Additional footage and an opportunity to participate in
the film can be found at:

www.carolrainey.com

All photos used in this article are owned by Carol
Rainey unless otherwise noted.

1 http://www.ufoalienabductee.com/hypnosis-session-28-chastity-belt.mp3

2 From a personal conversation with Linda Cortile in the
author's Manhattan home, 1996.

3 Hopkins, Budd, Abstract for the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Abduction Study Conference, June 1992.

4 From a personal conversation with Budd Hopkins, June 11,1996.

5 Hansen, George P., The Trickster and the Paranormal, Xlibris
Corporation, 2001, pp. 216- 217.

6 The term "co-creation" is used here as most lay people would
use it: two people get together and make something. It is
important for the reader to be fully aware that in the situation
under discus sion, the imbalance of power between subject and
researcher is enormous.

7 "Beginning: The Art and Science of Planning Psychotherapy by
Mary Jo Peebles-Kleiger," a book review by E. James Lieberman,
M.D., M.P.H. at

http://ps.psychiatryonline.org

8 Dr. Greg Mulhauser at::

http://counsellingresource.com/aboutcouns/supervision.html

9 Excerpt from psychotherapist's written corre spondence about
"Dora's" case with Budd Hopkins, January 27, 1995.

10 Excerpt from e-mail correspondence from Walter Webb to Carol
Rainey, December 3, 2009.

11 Excerpt from written correspondence from Walt Webb to Budd
Hopkins, February 9, 1996.

12 Wood, Ryan S., Majic Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters With
Extraterrestrial Technology, Wood Enterprises, November 2005, p.
133. The chapter entitled "Santa Rosa: New Mexico, USA, Spring
or Winter 1963" was taken directly from the written account
presented by Hopkins, enti tled "The 1963 Crash Retrieval North
of Albuquerque, New Mexico: Budd Hopkins, UFO Crash Retrieval
Conference Proceedings, 14-16 November, 2003."

13 http://www.intrudersfoundation.org/if_events.html

14 From a letter to the Intruders Foundation
Advisory Committee from Budd Hopkins,
February 23, 2004.

15 Hansen, pp. 258-263.

16 http://tinyurl.com/4qgok7v

Listen to 'Strange Days... Indeed' - The PodCast

At:

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/sdi/program/

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