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The “UFO abduction” scenario changed significantly after the publication of Hopkin’s book Missing Time in 1981. Prior to that time, UFO abductions were supposed to occur only when people ventured out to lonely, deserted places late at night, and encountered aliens (Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton). Hopkins’ contribution was to entirely sever the connection between UFO sightings and UFO abductions.

To explain why nobody ever sees or photographs somebody else being abducted, Hopkins suggested that the aliens have the ability to make themselves, and their abductees, invisible during this process.

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"Barbara Lamb has hypnotically regressed almost 800 supposed UFO abductees. She has found that ETs enjoy having sex with earthlings, and not necessarily just in a saucer. Indeed, we heard much about some peoples’ fantasy sex lives involving these latter-day incubi and succubi. She has been researching the matter of ET-human “hybrids,” many of whom according to Lamb are already living amongst us. Indeed, she has interviewed some of them (many do not realize they are hybrids, and still think themselves human). Others embrace their ET heritage as a sort of badge of distinction."

"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."

"Wide-eyed and lacking true discernment, Mack was as susceptible to the suggestion that ET “takes us” as were his patients. His lack of historical perspective on UFOs was alarming. What Mack said to me left me genuinely shaken. It is with some reluctance -but without regret- that I now relate here what I know to be the truth about such abduction “research."

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Alvin Lawson, an English professor at Cal State Long Beach who spent decades studying unidentified flying objects and questioning the beliefs of people who said they had been abducted, has died. He was 80. Lawson died Sept. 8 at Western Medical Center in Anaheim from complications of pneumonia, said his daughter, Leslie Dirgo.

Over the years, he developed “a personal kind of fascination” with UFOs, his daughter said. Lawson taught a class on the subject at Cal State Long Beach, started a telephone hotline about UFOs and became convinced that people who said they had been abducted actually were using memories of their birth to describe encounters with extraterrestrials.

“Do I think there are unidentified flying objects, things that people can’t explain what they are or why they’re there? Yes,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1996. “Do I think little green men are inside abducting people? No.”

With an Anaheim doctor, William C. McCall, Lawson used hypnosis on people who said they had been abducted. Lawson started becoming more skeptical of the accounts, and he and McCall decided to hypnotize people who made no claims about space aliens. They were asked to imagine being abducted so the accounts could be compared to reported abductions. Lawson was struck by the similarities.

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"The contactee/abductee dichotomy is part of a broader dichotomy within the UFO field, both on the part of the percipients and the researchers: what Peter Rogerson has defined as the ‘religious’, contactee-oriented flying saucer myth, and the ’secular’, scientific, quasi-military ‘UFO’ tradition. And it is this division between the attitudes of the researchers which is largely responsible for the contactee/abductee division which some researchers seem to have reduced to an Orwellian slogan of ‘contactee – bad; abductee – good’, and forced a division where none exists. One need only look at the strong contactee elements in the abductions reported by John Mack, and note the strange – one might almost say John Keel-ish – elements which are creeping into the stories emerging from the Budd Hopkins abduction factory, to see that there is little real difference between the abductees and the contactees."

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“There is not a single shred of physical evidence that alien abductions areaking place other than the tainted testimony of the abductees. The physical evidence to support the claims is nonexistent. What has been offered as proof has been eliminated through testing by objective scientists or additional research by unbiased investigators. The scars, the missing fetus, or the implants do not carry the proper medical documentation to make a strong case, and in fact, suggest something else altogether.”

The abductionologists had simply not proven their case. In my view, this has become an Alien Abduction Cult (of personality), aided and abetted by some in ufology who should know better.

The abductionologists themselves are beyond irresponsible - they are dangerous, causing real pain and suffering to people who in at least some cases no doubt need real help.

The ultimate irony for anomalists is that, should there really be a paranormal element to a few of these “abduction” cases, the Alien Abduction Cult has so muddied the waters with their bunk that it will be almost impossible to ever chart a different course.

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UFOlogy Hits a New Low With The Fourth Kind: Analysis
The Fourth Kind’s unconvincing, irreverent UFOlogy gives this reviewer chills. The movie stumbles directly into the biggest problems facing the discussion and investigation of UFOs and alien abductions: missing evidence, too many coincidences, cover-up conspiracies and aliens that, given their high-tech know-how, are just plain dumb. [SPOILER ALERT: This article is filled with them.]

It opens with actress Milla Jovovich explaining that the movie is about events that occurred between Oct. 1 through 9, 2000, that she’s portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler, a “renowned psychologist,” and that “every dramatized scene in this movie is supported by either archived audio, video,” or is based on Dr. Tyler’s “extensive interviews with the director.” In the world of UFOlogy, aliens don’t show up on camera. Witnesses, abductees and investigators all find threads of evidence, but there’s nothing cohesively tying them together.

As the internet is flooded with snapshots and video clips of unexplained lights in the sky, none of them is ever conclusive. They always fall short. There’s no UFO equivalent of the Rodney King beating.

Sometimes, the aliens physically walk into victims’ bedrooms and manhandle them into spaceships. But later, as though to prove a point, they use a tractor beam to pull a victim right through the ceiling. This is done in full view of a police officer, even though the aliens have also gone to great pains to suppress their abductees’ memories.

They’re also a little stupid—at one point, they scoop up an entire room full of people, presumably to scare them into ending their investigation, but they don’t bother to grab the audio evidence of their own threats.

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Belief in UFOs and visitors from other worlds remains high today despite decades of sensational claims unaccompanied by proof.The face of UFOlogy has changed much in these past sixty-two years, but it has not faded away as some rationalists naively assumed it would. Indeed, its mutability is indicative of the strength of the myth, not of its weakness.

If the social phenomenon of UFOs tells us anything, it is that the future of the movement turned out differently than its proponents expected.

The idea of a major “disclosure” coming soon has long been a major hope and expectation in UFOlogy, paralleling the Christian fundamentalists’ expectation of the Second Coming.

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Alien abduction flick The Fourth Kind bills itself as containing “actual footage” from case histories. But this footage is so poorly faked that it insults the audience’s intelligence. So why are people still calling this movie scary? Spoilers ahead.

Having grown up utterly terrified by the alien abduction scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I understand why The Fourth Kind sounds scary. Plus it promised to be a pseudo-documentary, showing us never-before-seen footage of people who have evidence that they’ve been stolen from their beds at night by hostile aliens. There is no “archival footage.” There are no “actual case studies.” Instead, we get badly-acted, blatantly fake documentary footage which fuzzes out whenever anything alien happens.

I’m not against fake documentaries. I loved Paranormal Activity, which was effective because the actors seemed so effortlessly real. Nothing felt stagey or artificial about that movie’s “documentary” evidence.use the actors seemed so effortlessly real. Nothing felt stagey or artificial about that movie’s “documentary” evidence.

What pushes Fourth Kind from the merely bad into the actually insulting was the filmmakers’ insistence that the documentary evidence was real.There was even an ill-fated Web campaign to create false professional credentials and publications for Abigail Tyler, but after investigative reporter Kyle Hopkins revealed them as fakes they were taken down.

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