Budd Hopkins

Anyone familiar with the subject is aware that UFO abduction reports almost always include accounts of physical examinations performed inside the craft. The abductee usually lies naked and immobile on a flat table while one or more of a wide variety of physical operations are carried out. There is, however, one virtually universal detail in these procedures that has never, to my knowledge, been commented upon in the literature: the abductee never seems to feel any degree of shame or embarrassment about his or her nudity. One woman told me that during an abduction in her very early adolescence – usually a time of great shyness and confusion about one’s body – she felt no more concern about her nakedness in the occupants’ presence than she would have felt in the presence of her cat or her tropical fish. This fact is even more surprising when one considers the many accounts in which several humans – sometimes strangers to one another – are naked together in the same craft. The woman in my example had been abducted along with an older brother and a younger sister; all three were nude yet none seemed to feel anything at all about their shared and vulnerable condition.

Fear of the UFO occupants alone does not explain this surprising, even unnatural reaction. There are a number of photos of Nazi concentration camp victims who, after having been taken from their inhuman cattle-car transport, were ordered to strip. The photographs reveal that even under these circumstances these sad, weak, doomed men, women and children still instinctively attempted to cover their nudity with their hands and arms. But with UFO abductees something else, some kind of tranquilizing factor, seems to be at work. One can speculate that the abductees’ calmness about their nakedness results from a combination of quasi-hypnotic trance states, endemic to the abduction process, and simple conditioning. If one has been abducted regularly since early childhood and has each time been undressed throughout the experience, one may come to expect it as a norm. A male abductee once put it to me this way: "That’s just the way it is. Your never have your clothes on. You don’t even think about it."

What insights can we derive from the abductees’ oddly neutral reaction to their state of nakedness, a state apparently devoid of any sexual overtones or embarrassment? First of all, the consistent appearance of this unexpected detail virtually destroys a basic argument invented by UFO debunkers. Many psychological theorists, both professional and amateur, have attempted to explain away all UFO abduction reports as fantasies of one kind or another. The most popular current version of this theory has it that people invent these accounts to mask such disturbing events as childhood sexual abuse, incest, molestation at the hands of doctors, nurses or baby sitters, or rape experiences. Other theorists posit a questionable borderline abductee type which they call, grandiloquently, the "fantasy-prone personality," while still others simply insist that these accounts are nothing more than disturbing dreams. If any of these theoretical "explanations" were true for even half the UFO accounts that have been carefully investigated so far, one would expect to find strong erotic overtones or outright shame and embarrassment described by literally hundreds of abductees as they recall their naked condition. IF an abductee account is nothing more than a fantasy masking a rape or childhood seduction or molestation, the circumstances of undressing or being forcibly undressed should provide key traumatic moments in these narratives. Such, however, is not the case.

The near-universality of this detail not only eliminates any blanket psychological "explanation" of UFO abduction accounts, but it also argues for the hard-edged, precise reality of this bizarre phenomenon. These consistent reports of totally unexpected, non-emotional reactions to enforced nudity clearly provide powerful psychological evidence that thousands of people have undergone the same externally-caused, trance-like experience – abduction, control and examination by non-human UFO occupants.

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