Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2021
An Apparent Out-Of-Body Alien Abduction described to Budd Hopkins
by: Brent Raynes
In 1982, shortly after the publication of Budd Hopkins’ book “Missing Time,” considered by many a groundbreaking classic on the alien abduction phenomenon, that often involves amnesiac lapses of memory called “missing time,” the author became inundated with many letters from readers describing their own experiences that were quite similar to the accounts shared in his book.
Hopkins shared batches of the more interesting letters with a few close and trusted friends and colleagues in the UFO field. One of them, Joe Nyman, a serious UFO investigator in Massachusetts, has been a very good friend of mine and we shared a fairly extensive volume of correspondence in years past, including these letters to Budd Hopkins [identities of the writers were erased].
I was recently thumbing through them once again, after several years of gathering dust in my files, and I came across one that was quite exceptional and uniquely different from the more “nuts and bolts” type accounts that Hopkins was more accustomed to studying, for this one involved a person’s alleged memories of being abducted in an out-of-body state!
“In July or August of 1958, I was a young boy just short of being ten years old. At that time I lived in a farming/suburban area known as Turner, which was southwest of Kansas City, Kansas.
“In the summer of 1958, Turner was still largely woods and plowed ground. To the west of my house, for many miles, there was little except fields and pastures. On the afternoon in question, at approximately 2 p.m., I was alone in an open field about 150 yards west of my house. This portion of the field was sloped downward from the level our house rested on, and thereby not visible from the house itself. It was not at all unusual for me to be wandering around there. Indeed, I spent virtually all my free time in those fields and the nearby woods.
“It was a clear, hot, Kansas day with no noticeable breeze and I was laying on my back in the grass, staring up at the sky. “Without any sort of warning, there appeared in my field of vision the flat bottom of a disk-shaped ‘thing.’ It was something like forty feet in diameter, rotating slowly in a clockwise manner from my viewpoint, and had simply coasted in to stop
directly overhead. Its direction of travel was from east to west. It was about 30 feet above me. I recall only a faint hum emanating from it, audible when it was closest. “From here on, events occurred in rapid succession.
“At my first sight of this object perched in empty sky over my head, I felt instant panic. Although I had seen UFOs depicted in movies, I was too shocked at the moment to make that connection with what I was experiencing. In any case, that panic lasted no more than two seconds because my emotions were suddenly ‘numbed.’ “Here, my report will have to deviate from the routine noted in your book. I was not physically abducted. Please take serious note of what I say as I am sure that my perceptions are accurate. And memory can be made to release far more information than most people would think.
“From the viewpoint of looking up at this machine, there was an instantaneous shift, and I found myself looking down at my body, laying there in the tall grass. It was on the ground, reclined as if asleep, and I was 30 feet in the air, under the shadow of this object. In addition, I could sense that the object was quite solid, metallic, cold, and that it hummed with a great deal of what I’ll have to call horsepower, for lack of a better term.
“Then, bingo. I was a ‘guest.’ I found myself (my choice of word – pick your own for a consciousness independent of a body) positioned just above a small table or grid approximately two feet square, and again looking upward. This time there was a bright light focused down at me from about four feet above. I can recall that the room seemed small and dark except where the light shone.
“My mental state was completely passive, although I certainly did not like the situation. I was alone there for perhaps 15 seconds before I was joined by two very real characters, the likes of which I had never seen before.
“I only saw them from the waist up, and from my position on the table I had to look upward at their faces. I could see their faces well, however, because they were definitely looking down at ‘me.’ Their descriptions will be a familiar litany: just under five feet tall, extremely pale, hairless, oversized skulls, earless except for a small aperature, skin-tight black turtleneck shirts with sleeves to the wrist, small thin delicate hands, slight necks, childlike trunk, small slit mouth which was not used, pointed chin, gentle movements. I was completely fascinated by their eyes. They tapered up under heavy, boney ridges, and they did not flick back and forth. They seemed to swivel from side to side as they looked around. I remember wondering how those eyes must be shaped to be able to function that way. It gave them a built-in and unavoidable sinister look. “I also noted their personalities, which were identical. They had the attitude of an underpaid nurse working overtime on a welfare ward. Utterly dispassionate and somewhat harried. And not without an obvious sense of antagonism. I don’t think they had a high opinion of me.
“They quickly got down to business. The one standing at what I thought of as my ‘right’ turned to a console behind him and the procedure began. Quite simply, I was asked questions. The questions definitely came from the console operator, but were non-verbal and apparently ‘telepathic.’ As each question was asked of me, my answer (the one formed in my mind) was recorded, somehow, through the console. I had an odd feeling of relief each time I answered, as if giving the answer took a burden off my mind. I was not threatened. It was implicit in the situation that I would give them whatever information I had. There was no need to cross-examine. The process was really quite automatic. I had the impression that the light shining on me was the medium by which it was all accomplished.
“My answers were nothing more than a nine-year-old could be expected to supply. The questions were not exotic. They opened by asking what I was doing in that spot, why I was there (like Beaver Cleaver I was just messing around); then they asked me about television (I didn’t know much about how it worked, just that it entertained me); they asked me if I knew where I was meaning Earth, as a planet, which went right over my head); and other minor questions that were not memorable.
“They wasted no time. At the end of my reply to the last question of the interview, there was a flash, or pop, or more descriptively, an electronic slap in the face from that light source and – snap – I found myself waking up on the ground again in that familiar field. Mind and body once again. Except that I had no memory (at the time) of what had just happened. [1] The object overhead was gone. The entire episode could not have taken more than ten minutes. I sat there puzzled for a minute, then walked home, none the wiser.
“There was an interesting postscript to the event that night. One that the whole family was allowed to participate in. At about 9:30, an hour after nightfall, my brothers and I were playing in the yard in front of the house, when one of those enormous twin-rotor cargo-type military helicopters flew over our neighborhood. We had never even seen one in the air before. There were no bases near us. Yet here was one of these mammoth aircraft, and it was right on top of us. It had a searchlight. Just for fun I went into the house and got my father’s powerful flashlight, returned to the yard and blinked it at the helicopter. I got my second big scare of the day when that helicopter came down right above the house and inspected each of us with its searchlight.
“It paused there for awhile, battering us with its backwash, then moved on—to the spot where I had had my encounter during the afternoon. After checking that vicinity, it departed westward. Either an observer or a radar operator somewhere had filed a report.
“Since that time, and until that incident was cleared up some months ago, I had always had a peculiar memory of seeing a disklike thing appear in the sky over my head. But every time I had the memory – I also instantly forgot it. It was booby-trapped to be automatically rejected from consciousness. My personal conclusion about the method used by these uninvited guests is that they employ a sophisticated form of electronics. Something refined enough to separate a living entity from its body (consciousness is supposed to be some kind of energy field anyway) and refined enough to duplicate what is commonly referred to as telepathy. They sure as hell seem to have the electro-gravitic spectrum licked as far as flight goes.
“In summation, I was certainly left with no physical scars, and no emotional ones either. I think I had a tendency to avoid that spot in that field later, but it was not a matter of the shaking terrors. I know I always did have a vague desire to kick one of those little guys in the ass, on the rare occasions that I heard UFO occupants discussed. But that was it.”
Reference 1: Check out the experiencer account of the Cuyahoga Falls (OH) witness in this issue too that allegedly occurred at the drive-in theater where a large group of people saw a UFO hover low overhead for several minutes and then quite oddly all seemed to forget afterwards. – Brent Raynes
