Budd Hopkins Sighting

Hopkins’ interest in extraterrestrial visitors began after an unusual episode in August 1964 while driving with his wife and a friend from Truro to Provincetown to attend a cocktail party. Hopkins recounted the life-changing episode in chapters of two of his books – Missing Time and in his 2009 memoir, Art, Life and UFO’s.

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The August UFO Sighting

(Excerpt from Art, Life and UFO’s)

In 1964, Joan and I made a particularly early exit, leaving for our new Truro studio at the end of May because we just couldn’t wait any longer. The blessed change of mood from New York to the Cape happens quickly, and in a day or two, after unpacking and arranging things in our brand new house, we fell into a quiet routine. Joan and I worked in the morning, swam at Balston Beach in the afternoon, and then later, at home, watched the stunning sunsets from our deck high above the tiny, meandering Pamet River. What I think of now as the August UFO incident began on yet another uneventful but productive summer day. I worked in the studio while Joan, sitting in the sunlight that streamed in through the big glass doors, wove beautiful things on her Swedish loom, and our houseguest, Ted Rothon, lounged outside on the deck, reading. We had met Ted, a young English social worker currently living and working in Chicago, during our 1959 trip to Europe and subsequently maintained our friendship. He was interested in my work and had recently bought a major painting that I dedicated to the memory of Medgar Evans, the murdered civil rights leader. Joan and I got along very well with Ted, an intelligent Brit with an engaging sense of humor, and he had been staying with us for a while, bunking without complaint on the built-in living room couch.

About 5:15, the three of us, all sitting in the front seat, started the twenty-minute drive to Provincetown. I was at the wheel with Joan beside me and Ted next to her. The sky above us was clear, containing only a series of small clouds that blew in rather quickly from the sea. An earlier storm had broken up, and these fast moving puffs were its low-lying remnants, though a distant cloud mass still lingered to our right, out over the ocean. As we drove along High Head on Route 6 in Truro, just before the highway dips down to only few feet above sea level, we were carrying on an animated conversation when, as Joan recalls, we were all silent for a few moments. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” she asked.

The three of us were looking at a small, lens-shaped object in the sky ahead of us, a bit off to our left but clearly visible through the windshield. Whatever it was, it seemed stationary, but since we were moving and the small clouds were scudding by, it was difficult to tell if the object was standing still or gliding very slowly. I thought for a moment that it might be some kind of flatish balloon with a surface like dull, brushed aluminum, but then I realized that it was not keeping pace with the nearby clouds. If it were an oddly shaped type of balloon, it would have to be tethered to the ground or it would surely be blowing in the same trajectory as the clouds. As I eased up on the accelerator, a small cloud passed rapidly across it, temporarily blocking our view. A second later, as that cloud moved on, another passed behind it, silhouetting it nicely. Then, after a moment, another cloud seemed to swallow it up, so that for a few seconds we could see its dark shape within, as one might observe a ship in a fog bank.

Whatever this object was it did not seem to be very big, though under the circumstances it was difficult to judge its size. In relation to the cars on the road below us, it appeared to be as large as an automobile or perhaps a bit larger, but it was definitely a solid object with a somewhat reflective surface. (Later, Joan told me that she thought it was much farther away and therefore quite a bit larger.)

As we drove slowly down the hill to the lower ground, I was looking out of the left window as Joan and Ted, to my right, strained to see what this odd thing might be. From below, viewing it from a steeper, more nearly vertical angle, it appeared to be circular and utterly without details – no lights, wings, doors, windows, or protuberances of any kind.

Then, suddenly, it began to move in a straight horizontal line, flying directly into the wind. Whatever it was, it was certainly not a balloon, and it was now traveling at the speed of a small airplane.

I stopped the car, and the three of us jumped out and watched it fly into the cloudbank that hovered over the ocean. At this point, one of us – I’m not certain who – said, “Do you suppose that was one of those flying saucers you used to read about?” In fact, none of us had ever actually read anything substantive about “flying saucers,” though by 1964 it was impossible for any literate American not to have at least heard the term.

By the time we arrived at the Walker’s home about ten minutes later, we were keyed up and eager to talk about what we thought of as a unique experience, but it was here that things became even stranger. The first person we met as we entered the crowded room was the painter Giorgio Cavallon. He looked at us, and said, “What happened to you? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” We told him about our sighting, and he replied rather calmly that he’d seen things like that a number of times over the years, “lights, at night, moving erratically.” What we described, of course, was a metallic disc in broad daylight, not a moving light, but nevertheless, Giorgio’s report added to the mystery.

Next we approached two friends of ours, Molly Cook, a photographer and gallery owner, and her partner, the poet Mary Oliver (who would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize), and told them about the object we had just seen. They were immediately interested because, they said, a few years before, as they drove along Route 6, they had noticed a similar craft just above the trees, again in the daylight but apparently much closer than the object we sighted. They described it as looking metallic with what appeared to be a row of windows along its side. I was astounded. The two women were obviously sincere and had no reason to invent such a story, yet neither had ever mentioned their strange experience to me. Later in the evening, under similar circumstances, still another friend told me about his similar UFO sighting. What is going on? I thought. Were these experiences actually widespread, an underground phenomenon that no one discussed, even though they might be of potentially great importance?

After the party we returned home, still talking about the sighting, but the next day we went about our usual patterns of work and pleasure. The question of the nature of this odd object seemed to linger in my mind more tenaciously than in Joan’s or Ted’s, though the following summer, when Ted came to visit us again, virtually his first question to me when he came down the ramp from his plane was: “Do you remember that thing we saw in the sky last summer? What do you think it was?” Obviously it had been preying on his mind, too.

Ever since our sighting of whatever it was, I was feeling more and more intrigued. Within the year, I sought out several serious books on UFOs, and the more I read about the phenomenon the more I became persuaded that these craft-like objects, which behaved as if they were under intelligent control, could be extraterrestrial in nature. However, when I brought up the subject with my friends and fellow painters, I discovered that most had no trouble dismissing UFO reports as explainable by one mundane cause or another, even if they were clear, daylight sightings by Air Force personnel or experienced commercial pilots and had also been detected on radar. Such accounts, my friends said, had no bearing on their lives, so why worry about them? For me, however, these reports constituted a disturbing mystery that I could not leave alone.

From the vantage of the present, I can easily see an analogy with my continuing interest in UFOs in 1964 and the indifference almost everyone else displayed – particularly those colleagues of mine in the art world. In my analogy, a biologist in the 1980s comes across some statistics that suggest the average temperatures near the surface of our planet are rising very slightly each year. He realizes that these tiny, incremental increases may have simple explanations and are possibly temporary, but he also understands that these data might mean something quite important, a process of steady global warming, year after year. When he mentions the subject, he finds that most of his fellow scientists dismiss his data, ascribing the rising temperatures to various accidental, unimportant factors. And yet, as the biologist reads about the changes in temperature and their possible connection to greenhouse gas emissions, he becomes even uneasier, and so begins to carry out his own scientific study of the phenomenon. We know, now, how global warming finally came to be seen as truly important, even dangerous, by mainstream science. Though no similar widespread realization has occurred with the UFO phenomenon, as time passes more scientists and laymen are recognizing its potential significance for our planet, and objective investigations have long ago been undertaken in many different countries.

But more than 40 years ago – after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Cold War, the escalating Vietnam morass, the Beatles, Elvis, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, and a national mood of deepening social unrest – the UFO issue was easily pushed aside by many people in much the same way that twenty years later, ominous signs of global warming could be conveniently overlooked by scientists and the public alike.

I often recall the various uneasy thoughts and peculiar images that the August sighting stimulated in my mind immediately after its occurrence. I had little to go on then, having as yet read nothing about the UFO phenomenon, but I know that from the first moments after it flew out towards the ocean, I began to question the idea that this round, metallic thing was man made. It seemed to be soundless; it could apparently hover and then speed away at will; it had no identifying characteristics; and yet it appeared to be under intelligent control. The central image I formed in my mind in the first few days after the sighting was this: that the object was some kind of probe from “elsewhere,” a piece of advanced observational equipment that I thought of as functioning like a diving bell, which had been lowered on an (invisible) cable to examine the “seabed” – the dunes and roads and structures at the end of the Cape – and had then been retracted up and away after the survey was complete. I could even picture how our “seabed” must have appeared from above: a hard-surfaced strip on which tiny machines passed up and down, a rolling expanse of light brown “soil” and green plant life on one side and the blue sea on the other. Stretched along the edge near the water was a row of small, identical, “Monopoly” houses – one of the many motel complexes on Beach Point. My homely conception, then, was of a virtually magical, disc-shaped object that did not require intelligent beings – ”aliens” – inside, steering it. No Beebe or Cousteau in this image, or little green men; in fact, no living things of any sort. I saw it as an unmanned futuristic wonder, a space-age, exploratory vehicle of extraordinary efficiency. Though my brain was obviously tying itself into knots in an effort to make sense of such a new and utterly puzzling experience, I tried to theorize as parsimoniously as possible about its nature. Nevertheless, as time passed and I began to read about the numerous UFO occupant reports, my ideas began to change. Perhaps, I decided, these craft might contain sentient beings after all. At any rate, it was abundantly clear that the metallic disc we saw that August afternoon had opened a big door in my thinking about the limits of our known world, a portal that remains ever more ajar.

But this is not the whole story of the events associated with our sighting that August afternoon in 1964. A few days later, a friend mentioned that the night before he had watched a strange light maneuvering erratically in the sky over Cape Cod Bay. Had “our” UFO come back? I began to think that perhaps Joan and I should go out to the beach at night, spread a blanket, and watch the sky, just in case whatever it was might return a third time. Amazingly, an unlikely pair of friends surprised us by asking if they could join our vigil, because they, too, had had an unusual recent sighting.

The Provincetown-Truro-Wellfleet area is the summer work and playground for many academics, psychiatrists, writers, and intellectuals, as well as the artists I’ve mentioned before. In 1964, all of us were pretty well intermixed, with warm friendships flourishing amongst a range of professionals. The interaction was stimulating, with the artists providing the paintings and sculptures and the intellectuals doing the talking, except in those cases when certain artists tried to talk too pompously and certain intellectuals tried to paint too gaudily.

Among my intellectual friends were the psychohistorian Robert J. Lifton and his wife Betty Jean, a therapist and expert on issues of adoption; the composer Arthur Berger; the art historian Eleanor Munro and her husband, New Yorker writer E.J. Kahn, Jr.; the poet Stanley Kunitz; and the Columbia University professor, Richard Hofstadter and his wife, “Beatie.” I suppose I had mentioned my UFO sighting to all of these friends shortly after its occurrence, but I was taken aback by the response from two of them. Richard Hofstadter, one of America’s leading historians, said that he and Beatie had once had a strange recent encounter with a blue light as they drove home from a dinner party at the Wellfleet home of their friend, the historian Stuart Hughes and his wife Suzanne. The Hughes’ house was located at the edge of Long Pond, and their winding, unpaved driveway curved around through fairly dense woods before it joined the two-lane macadam road that led to Route 6. Dick Hofstadter explained that as they drove away from the Hughes’ summerhouse, they noticed a small blue light in among the trees near their car. It seemed to move slowly and erratically, suddenly darting behind the foliage and then reappearing nearby, as if it were following them. Both he and Beatie said that the light seemed small, perhaps the size of an orange or a grapefruit, but it behaved in an intelligent, controlled manner. At one point, Dick stopped and tried to see what might be supporting this bright blue light, which he felt was only a matter of yards away from his car. It seemed to disappear, but then, as he resumed the drive, it reappeared, always staying fairly close, weaving in and out of the shrubbery. When they finally emerged onto the macadam road, the light was gone, but the experience continued to puzzle them.

Though this was not exactly a UFO sighting, it was certainly strange. The blue orb never rose above the trees, and it moved far too quickly to be some kind of hand-held flashlight. Interestingly, a year or so later another friend of mine, aware of my interest in UFOs but knowing nothing of the Hofstadter’s “blue light,” told me that a neighbor of his on Long Pond (who lived some distance from the Hughes) had occasionally seen a mysterious blue light across the water, moving in and out of the trees. One night when it reappeared he became so curious that he got out of bed, dressed, and rowed his boat across the pond to investigate. Apparently, once he was on the other side, the light vanished, so we still have no idea as to the nature of this intriguing phenomenon.

When the Hofstadters told me their story of the blue light, I asked if they would like to come with Joan and me to the beach one night soon to sky-watch, and they immediately accepted. Though ultimately our August vigil failed to spot any UFOs, it was the time of meteor showers so we were lucky enough to witness many spectacular, split-second false alarms. Dick and I had brought some good cognac to “help keep us warm” on the beach, and, as I recall, Joan and Beatie had fixed some hors d’oeuvres. With our binoculars at the ready, the four of us lay on our beach blankets and passed around our goodies, feeling both a bit foolish and a tad apprehensive. Though we saw nothing but shooting stars and were finally driven away by the mosquitoes, the company, the cognac, and the cheese made the evening a definite success.