I first heard about Missing Time during an interview with John Lear on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. He said something along the lines of "I read through that book, and that's when I knew that this was all for real". Based on other things John's brought up in UFO information, I knew I had to get ahold of the book if he thought so highly of it. By the second chapter, I started to feel the same way as John. By the third chapter, I couldn't help but go back to the mind set I was in when I first heard his disclosure interview. I haven't read very many books on UFOs, and mainly get my info from various sites and old radio programs, then try to piece things together. But Missing Time has a genuine feel to it given the source material- people who had a feeling that something happened to them at one time or another, and undergo hypnosis to see what it was. We get to read accounts of people from all over the country, who've never met each other or heard the stories from the others, and when you see how similar they are, you kinda have to agree that there's something going on.
This is one of those books that I wish I could go into detail on, explaining each chapter and giving a synopsis for everything, but I won't, because it makes for such an interesting read going in without knowing much. I -will- say that the majority of the "victims" give very detailed accounts of what happened to them, eventually getting to the abductions. One man pulls over on the side of the road on his way home one night, and is right back on his way, with a good chunk of time missing by the time he gets home. Another person, at a very young age, returns to her family picnic in the woods, with her dress covered in blood. She's not hurt and is excited because she saw a beautiful deer in the forest, and didn't even notice the blood that everyone was panicking over. One more person sees a bright light in their home while watching a certain program on tv, and after it's gone, a show that's on at a much later time is on. There are several other people who undergo hypnosis here, and many references to other abduction cases, including the famous Betty and Barny Hill case. I still haven't looked into that one as much as I'd like, yet they go into some key points, comparing it to another case here.
Budd Hopkins does a good job with the narrative between chapters and hypnosis segments, explaining how he got ahold of the people, what interested him about their stories, and referencing other statements from previous cases to these [at the time] current ones. The psychologist Aphrodite Clamar helps the patients enter the trance state, and does her best to relax them when things get intense. The sessions are transcribed in full, aside from the few words that couldn't be made out, and what's revealed in most cases is so extraordinary that you want them to keep going on. Some patients undergo several sessions, with months in-between, and more info surfaces as they start to recall things. There's also a couple of pages of black and white photos and sketches. Some sketches are of the people/aliens that the patients encountered, some of the tools used on them. Photos include a landing site and unexplained scars that more or less get explained during hypnosis.
I won't lie- a couple of parts in the book did scare me a little, partially because they echo what I've heard in other interviews with Lear, Whitley Strieber and a few others. One account includes a man who sees his body from above, leading me to believe that he was viewing his body from his soul's point of view, put aside while his physical form was checked on. The last two chapters have a couple of things that are bothersome to me as well, and their titles "Speculations Both Grim and Hopeful" and "What Can Be Done?" don't help. Hopkins did his best to not steer the reader in any direction, and he states this in these chapters. His theories aren't bad, but he doesn't come to one final conclusion on anything either. You can't blame him- to this day, no one has a very good idea of what the experiment is all about. What happens when the patients recall their experiences with the alien beings, and how well one of them is treated, while good to hear at first, took me back to yet another interview I heard; one with the man who went by 'Victor' and said "you're not going to have much luck making your dog understand calculus. But if you pat him on the head and say 'good dog' aren't you communicating spiritually? And doesn't the animal control officer say 'good dog' when he comes to put some poor stray to sleep." and "when you're dealing with beings whose intellect is so far beyond your own,
I don't think it's safe to assume they have your best interests at heart". It may make me sound paranoid, I know, yet I still try to have a positive mindset with all of this.
The one negative thing I'll say about Missing Time is that one patient's story sounds like he's throwing stuff in there and making it up as he goes along. At first his story is simple, then he seems to second guess himself and certain things he remembered, making it all sound iffy, right down to the part where he's being examined. There are still some aspects of the story that are interesting. I just wished it had ended sooner than it did.
Overall, I love this book, and at the same time, wish I hadn't read it because it makes me doubt a few things more than I previously had. It also makes me wonder if I should undergo hypnosis to see if something happened to me when I was younger and something strange happened at night. Still, this is an excellent book worth reading if you're interested in aliens at all. I'll be giving Intruders a shot here very soon.
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