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 morequalified 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.
” s1Excerpt from psychotherapist’s written corre spondence about “Dora’s” case with Budd Hopkins, January 27, 1995.
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.