BUDD HOPKINS - AN ARTIST'S LIFE

Budd Hopkins. Art, Life and UFOs: A Memoir. Anomalist Books, 2009.

Time and again there arise charismatic figures who claim a special gnosis into the human condition, to possess the master key which tells us why it is no go, the cause of the world's heartache and suffering. One such is Budd Hopkins, but in one crucial respect Budd Hopkins and his side kick David Jacobs differ from almost all the rest.
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For along with this gnosis there is usually a vision of salvation, redemption, utopia, some 'Good News' a gospel which illuminate the path out of the human condition. The road to salvation may be impossibly hard and harsh, the path to the noblest utopian strewn with babies' bones, the final goal as sick and demented as Adolf Hitler's vision of a German master race lording it over a Jew-free Europe, but some goal, some aspiration is offered.

Hopkins' gnosis, that human beings are the helpless playthings of omnipotent, but curiously inept, aliens who can abduct people through solid walls into invisible spaceships, but cannot put the right clothes back on abductees, offers no such solace. Perhaps it is the first true anti-gospel of total despair ever announced. (Some writers such as Bertrand Russell professed despair over the inevitable heat death of the universe, but this event billions of years in the future was not the sort of thing to impact of the lives of most people.

One is naturally curious as to what drives a person to such beliefs and such despair. It is by no means obvious from this book, though there are clues.

Parts of this book provide fascinating cameos of the social history of Midtown USA from the 1930s to the 1960s; its social mores, its narrowness and bigotries, sexual ignorance and authoritarian parenting. Others provide glimpses into the lives of some of the leading characters of the New York art scene. There is plenty here for the historian to mine. But the coming of the UFOs into Hopkins' life, after his sighting of an unusual object in 1964, seem to mark a change of gear, the beginnings of a sense of mission. However lots of people have had UFO experiences of one sort or another without developing the idea that, unknown to themselves, people are constantly being abducted by aliens. We can trace how this idea slowly develops, yet we never quite gather what that exact processes was.

But as I said there are clues. Hopkins is a survivor of polio which left him with a slight limp, but also memories of painful physiotherapy: "In the ominous context of an echoing, medicinal hospital room, I was stripped of my clothes by a pair of bored strangers, thick waisted nurses who plumped me into a zinc tub of rushing water and ordered me to kick and wriggle my legs. I wept and pleaded to be taken out, a response which naturally strengthened their determination to make me work my weakened limb. It was a battle every time I had to undergo this treatment, and together these sessions comprise one of the most terrifying and humiliating memories of my earliest years" (p17).

The parallels with the abduction narratives are startling; the impersonal examination in an alien setting, the authority figures who are just doing their job, the humiliating procedure for "your own good".

We can certainly understand the enormous emotional resonances that the preexisting narratives must have had for someone with that experience. These narratives were however largely set in a context of remembered UFO experiences. The big step, the idea that beneath the surface of our normal lives, unknown to even ourselves, strange and terrible things might be happening, is Hopkins own personal addition to the narrative.

Is it a coincidence then that beneath the surface Hopkins' own family life of placid bourgeois normality, there lay a truly terrible secret? After a political row with his father when he wass 22, Budd is told by his mother not to judge his harsh authoritarian and bigoted father too harshly, for his father's father had shot his own mother and killed himself, and Hopkins' father had been the one to find the bodies. It is not difficult to imagine what trauma this revelation would have had any young man. Now nothing is ever going to be truly normal and safe and rational anymore. This is a world in which anything can happen. Surely long before the final revelation, there must have been a tacit awareness of some vast untellably dark and forbidden secret, the gap in the collective memory of the family.

It is hard not too sense that he might fear that the ghosts of his authoritarian father and murderous grandfather might haunt his own genes, that the invisible Greys represent a safe target against which this rage and hate can be directed, without hurting real people. Yet surely he above all must sense when hearing David Jacobs raving on about how the hybrids are stealing our women and planning to take over the world, he is listening to his own father's anti-Jewish, anti-Black and anti-Communist rants writ large, and that if this idea went feral nobody would be safe.

The artist Robert Motherwell tells him one day "all artists are monsters", and one wonders if Hopkins has not found the most monstrous form of art yet, the sculpting of other peoples memories into works of art that express his own pain. Of course he doesn't set out consciously to do that, probably he genuinely believes that he is a "good listener" and an empathic healer. But only those who come out with the right stories get that empathy. There is no room for ambiguity, he has the answer, the master key, and any other version is outcast.

There are several hints that Hopkins cannot relate to these people as equal, fully rounded human beings. His relationship with the one abductee who was actually more successful than he was, Whitley Streiber, degenerates into explosive rage. No, he wants dependants. When he hears that the actress and New Age guru Shirley Maclaine has said that she thinks 'Kathie Davies' is just a great actor - it takes an actor to know one - Hopkins comes up with this patronising comment, which does suggest he is his father's son more than he would care to acknowledge: "...there was no way that Kathie, a poorly educated young woman from rural Indiana, with no training as an actress could be that convincing a hoaxer".

Beyond the obvious point that several famous actors have come from far more challenging backgrounds (take Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe for a start), many feminists would argue that all women have to be great actresses in order to play the many roles life demands of them, and sociologists such as Irving Goffman would say that is true of everyone. After all "all the world's stage, and all the men and women merely players".

Abductionism clearly becomes for Hopkins a fundamentalist religion so, like many fundamentalists, he interprets everything literally. He just cannot grasp that the abduction stories are metaphors for the human condition, hence their great power. Like many fundamentalists he has profound difficulty with ambiguity. The strange, liminal, anomalous experiences and memories which form the base of the abduction mythos, are all homogenised into a standard narrative, interpreted through a narrow ideological lens. In some sense Hopkins himself becomes the clinical Grey, experimenting on people, moulding their memories to a pre-set script, disabusing them of their dreams and fantasies because it is for their own good.

The one person he exempts from this is himself, he clings to his own 'big dream' in which he meets again the artist Franz Kline, 15 years dead as a transcendent experience, even if crafted by his own unconscious. But if one of his abductees had reported this, he would have no doubt dismissed it as a screen memory for abduction by the GFeys, and you can guess what he would have made of a collection of phobias as generous as his mother's.

We should not however see this just as the record of an aberration of one man, but as an awful warning of the power of belief, creed and cause to possess and destroy fundamentally decent people. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.