PATTERNS OF UFO ABDUCTIONS, PART 2
By Budd Hopkins

For centuries, thoughts about our anatomy have centered on one organ above all others -- the human heart. Our language speaks of "the heart of the matter," "heart and soul," "having, taking, or lacking heart." The ubiquitous, schematized, twin-chambered heart image appears in the guise of candy-boxes, valentine cards and initialed love messages carved into ancient oaks. We are more familiar with medical operations involving the heart than with any other kind of surgery. Double- and triple-bypasses, heart transplants, artificial valve implants, open-heart surgery and so on are now, literally, phrases in everyday conversation. To hunter, soldier and swordsman alike the heart is the most vulnerable organ -- "aim for the heart, not the head," because the brain, obviously, can survive damage that the heart cannot. Though we try to be of "stout heart," we know this precious organ is extremely vulnerable, and that the chances are great that many of us will die, one day, from its failure.

For any child visiting a doctor for physical examination, one of the most familiar and central procedures occurs when the physician listens to the patient's heart through a stethoscope. In later years many of us will have repeated experiences with an electrocardiogram -- an "EKG" -- during our routine checkups. And clearly the majority of our day-to-day, health-oriented dietary choices are made because of our concern for the well-being of the heart as the center of the cardiovascular system.

How do these facts relate to the issue of UFO abductions? I have now worked, personally, with perhaps three hundred abductees, and I am acquainted with many others through published accounts and the reports of colleagues. In these hundreds upon hundreds of UFO abduction accounts, I have yet to hear anyone state that the UFO occupants paid the slightest attention to an abductee's heart during the physical examination procedures that routinely occur during these encounters. The aliens' interest is almost invariably focused upon the abductee's genitals and lower abdomen. There are frequent additional "operations" involving the abductee's head, and in particular the nasal cavity, the eyes and ears. We also occasionally hear of procedures having to do with the feet, the major joints and the rectum. But never, ever, the abductee's heart. What can we infer from this rather startling fact?

First, it means that the organ we universally consider to be of supreme importance to the health and longevity of the human race is apparently of no interest whatsoever to the alien race, whatever that may be. I have said from the beginning of my investigations into the abduction phenomenon that the UFO occupants are following their own agenda, since there is not a shred of evidence that they are concerned with improving the general health and well-being of their human subjects. Despite the aliens' apparent concern with minimizing the psychological damage these abductions invariably inflict, their forcible taking of human sperm and ova seems to be exclusively for their benefit rather than ours. Nothing to the contrary has, so far, been explained to us, and at no time has our permission for these operations been asked or received. The UFO occupants simply take, while ignoring our simplest and most basic human rights and wishes.

A second inference to be drawn from the peculiar absence of references to the human heart in UFO abduction reports has to do with the veracity of the accounts themselves. Skeptics and armchair theorists of every stripe, casting about for any possible mundane explanations of UFO abduction reports, often claim that these narratives are merely fantasies -- nothing more than hopes and fears and recollected everyday experiences mixed together by emotionally unstable individuals. Now we all know that both fantasies and real-life experiences are incredibly various -- and as complex as human beings themselves. And so if the UFO abduction scenario was only the product of this virtually infinite spectrum of human fantasy and experience, the human heart, our perceived anatomical center, would be turning up again and again as a major object of interest in imagined alien physical examinations. We should be hearing countless tales of miraculous -- or ominous -- alien heart operations, involving mysterious and widely varying alien equipment. Peculiar-looking EKG's, exotic stethoscopes, in fact an unbounded world of imaginary machinery would emerge in thousands of different fantasy descriptions of an extraterrestrial study of the human heart. But as we have seen, such fanciful heart examinations are never reported. References to the human heart never -- never -- turn up in these abduction accounts. And so the objective mind must necessarily ask: IF the entire UFO abduction phenomenon is only the sum total of many different individuals' fantasies, why do all these thousands of descriptions of alien physical examinations ignore with absolute consistency the one part of our body about which we are, in real-life medical situations, most centrally concerned?

The reason is obvious: abduction reports are not the product of individual fantasy. Like it or not, the abductees are recalling the simple, staggering truth about real experiences. And that staggering truth conceals the unexpected fact I discussed earlier: that despite their interest in the process of human reproduction, the UFO occupants apparently have no interest at all in the central organ of the human cardiovascular system. The universal absence of this one major detail in all UFO abduction accounts -- a first-rate example of "negative" consistency -- effectively demolishes the skeptics' mundane "fantasy explanation" for the UFO abduction phenomenon.

An unhappy -- one might say "disheartening" -- parallel exists between the two basic inferences I have made: It would seem that the aliens, by concentrating upon their own genetic and reproductive agenda, are indifferent to our physical health and general well-being, while some skeptics, by clinging to their debunking theory at any cost, are doing violence not only to truth itself but also the psychological well-being of those who have suffered from these traumatic UFO experiences. By blaming the victims, as it were, these skeptics force abductees to suffer twice -- once from the abductions themselves and then once more, later, at the hands of those who accuse them of merely inventing fantasies. But the evidence, now, is clear. To continue referring to these thousands of consistent reports as mere fantasies is not only to ignore the truth but also to risk acquiring a new and ironic adjective: the skeptic's behavior to his fellow man may now truly deserve to be thought of as "heartless."

Click here to read "PATTERNS OF UFO ABDUCTIONS, PART 1"