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Kidnapped by UFOs? [Nova, WGBH Television, 1996] NOVA: Could you tell us briefly about your own personal introduction to UFOs and what it is that got you believing in the reality? seriously, it took them 20 years to accept the idea that a UFO might have an inside. And in retrospect, now that I know about the abduction phenomenon, and I’ve been looking into it for practically 20 years, I realize that in those early years before we accepted the idea of occupants, before we accepted the idea of abduc- tions, and we were just looking at the objects themselves, that it was as if we were trying to get the license plate number on the get away car, without having figured out what the crime was. But, as these cases began to come my way, where people were reporting a sighting, a period of missing time, they couldn’t account for a couple of hours. Perhaps they were in a car, the car ended up on another road aimed in the wrong direction. They were having nightmares and fears and so on afterwards. You have to assume that something traumatic had occurred in a number of these cases. So, I 1 1 coe 1 1 HOPKINS: I had a daytime UFO sighting on Cape Cod. It lasted about three minutes. The object seemed to be able to hover. And then it zoomed at great speeds straight into the wind. We had thought perhaps it was some kind of flat balloon or something, but clearly it wasn’t. And when you see something like that and the three of us jumping out of the car finally to watch it disappear, you realize that there’s some factor in the world that you had previously been unaware of. And it could be an extraordi- narily important factor. NOVA: As you know, many people have a hard time believing the literal truth of abductions. Can you please describe for a on us how you overcame your skepticism and became a believer? used a couple of friends who were psychiatrists, psychologists and others to help us with hypnotic regressions to look into these experiences that the people were unable to recall all the details of. And one of the interesting things, of course, is the people who were doing the hypnosis for us were all skeptics. I don’t think they ended up skeptics, but that’s the way they began. But, as the case material mounted up, and case after case after case replicated the cases before, and these were totally believable people from all walks of life, and even down to tiny details in their descriptions of what happened to them, these tiny details were replicated again and again—you have to feel you’re dealing with a phenomenon that has an absolute core of reality about it. own HOPKINS: As I was looking into a few early sighting reports, many years after I had my own sighting and I began to look into the cause, I was curious. At that point I thought that an abduction case was an extremely rare item. And when I first heard of an abduction, which was in 1966, two years after ['d had my daytime sighting, I couldn’t accept it, I couldn’t believe it. And I had a very simple reason; it’s just too hard to believe. I had no logical reason. If I have seen something flying around in the sky, there’s no reason to think that there might be people inside the ship—occu- pants. Although we looked down upon that, at the time, as ridiculous. And David Jacobs made a wonderful remark that it took the investigators who took UFOs 14 Budd Hopkins NOVA: Assuming that there is a literal