PATTERNS OF UFO ABDUCTIONS, PART 4
By Budd Hopkins

Possessing what may be an incorrigibly tribal and warlike nature, human beings seem irresistibly drawn to the glamour of deadly weapons. Young children of (as W.C. Fields might say) the male persuasion feel naked without their plastic pistols or mock semi-automatics. And to no one's surprise, in many neighborhoods adolescents feel deprived if they don't own - and use - the real thing. Gangster movies are as popular now as they were in the days of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, and in today's "action" genre Rambo and the Terminator have multiplied the old firepower many times over. Sci-fi movies of the Star Wars variety have prospered partly because of their spectacular laser shoot-'em-ups, and, lest we forget, a recent president wasted billions on such an unworkable, but seductively gaudy weapons system.

A first rule of fantasy is that the source of our imagination is the inchoate mass of things we deal with in everyday life. Weapons are as much a part of our vivid first- and second-hand experience as typewriters or microwave ovens; more so, in fact. They are inescapable in our image world of memorable dramatic events. As such, we would expect pistols, ray-guns, lasers and assorted sci-fi variations to be standard fare in a large percentage of UFO reports - if these accounts were only fantasies. There is only one possible reason that such exotic weaponry would not figure in such encounters: That is, that these reports describe actual experiences, and real UFO occupants do not, in fact, use this kind of lethal hardware. Such seems to be the case.

Of the more than one thousand abduction reports I have read of or investigated, I know of no more than two or three in which abductees described what seemed to them to be hand-held alien weapons. If these UFO reports were mere fantasies, constructed by thousands of "fantasy-prone" types who've seen too many movies, we would most likely have heard, by now, hundreds upon hundreds of accounts of vividly "remembered" alien weapons. The truth is, we have almost none. I have even worked with three policemen and three army officers who have reported UFO abduction experiences; none of these generally macho, gun-conscious men ever described the alien as using weapons of any kind.

In films and on TV, gangsters move their prisoners at gunpoint and the cops yell FREEZE. Rambo brings in the captured enemy troops at the end of his hand-held machine gun. By contrast, in the standard UFO abduction scenario, the captured abductees simply walk without will, or float into the ship. Threatening hardware in the earthly sense is missing and obviously unnecessary. The abductees' minds are controlled at the aliens' will, their bodies paralyzed, and that is all. Fantasy, by its very nature, should sometimes produce wildly different scenarios. One can imagine tales in which aliens, wielding lasers and ray-guns, stop automobiles and force the drivers out and into their landed ships. We should occasionally expect to hear tales of perilous escapes from alien captivity, heroic accounts of hand-to-hand struggles in which a brave earthling at least temporarily wrenches a weapon from an alien's determined grip and thereby avoids capture. But no such stories, in my experience, have ever been told. Common sense tells us that the infinite variety of human imagination cannot be the source of these narrowly defined, similarly detailed UFO abduction accounts.

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