PATTERNS OF UFO ABDUCTIONS, PART 3
By Budd Hopkins

One of our most endearing human traits is the endless capacity to dream, to imagine, to invent whole worlds. And yet the raw material our imagination shapes and refines and embellishes is nothing more than everyday human experience. We have no other resources available. No matter how exotic the images and events our minds create, we still recognize their humble beginnings in prosaic, everyday experience. And since we all spend a great deal of time at certain basic activities such as eating, sleeping, playing and making love, one or more of these activities should naturally appear in any of our extended fantasies. This simple fact becomes extremely relevant when one considers such admittedly exotic and controversial accounts as those involving alleged abductions of human beings by the occupants of UFOs. IF these stories were merely lengthy, detailed fantasies, one would naturally expect the most common human activities to appear frequently. To take one example, we should often hear elaborate descriptions of alien food and drink, of alien galleys and messrooms aboard their craft.

The evidence for this assertion can be easily checked. Altogether, the two of us, Jacobs and Hopkins, have listened to well over a thousand detailed abductions accounts from more than four hundred different people, and we've read hundreds more. Descriptions of aliens ingesting food and drink? Never once has such a thing been described to either of us. Alien kitchens? Eating utensils, dining areas? Never. Never in thousands of accounts. Further, we have never heard any account in which an alien even put his hand to his mouth for any reason. Abductees do not report being offered food or water while on board the UFO (although they are at times forced to ingest substances as part of an apparent medical-type examination). Abductees do not see any type of sink or faucet or basin which might be used in the dispensing of water. Although some abductees have been forced to ingest a liquid from a cup-like container, aliens are not seen taking liquid of any kind. In fact, abductees do not report water being part of the experience, and some have complained of extreme thirst over the minutes and hours of captivity.

Aliens appear to have a mouth - or at least a slit-like line where a mouth would be on a human - but we cannot say that this slit functions as a mouth. On rare occasions when abductees report an open mouth they do not see teeth, saliva or a tongue. In fact, none of the human anatomical structures involved in our digestion and elimination of food seem to be present. An interesting exchange on this subject took place during an abduction that occurred in April of 1989. Lynn Miller, an abductee with whom David Jacobs has explored ten different abduction events, was able to ask her captors this simple question: "Do you eat?" The two small figures standing next to her took a long time to reply, and, according to Lynn, one of them finally said, "We need no human consumption like the matter you eat." The accuracy of that statement is problematic, like everything else reportedly said by aliens, but at least it is consistent with their morphology, as we understand it.

We have interviewed many very young children for whom food and water and sweets are naturally very important; none has ever described alien snacks or sodas or food of any sort. If their UFO abduction accounts were merely childish and often wishful fantasies, many youngsters would surly have invented such treats by now. In these thousands of descriptions of alien encounters, the consistency of detail - both in what is included and what is never reported - argues powerfully for their objective truth. The absence of normal fantasy material involving such basic human concerns as food and drink - areas that, from time to time, invention would naturally touch upon - provides clear-cut evidence that real, consistent experience is being described. If human fantasy were their cause, these thousands of abduction reports would be vastly different from the accounts investigators have received worldwide for decades. The issue is simple: in their spare, consistent, traumatic content, UFO abduction accounts, events which are easily separated, detail by detail, from the infinitely varied realm of human imagination.

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