A NOTE ON THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE ABOUT SUSAN CLANCY
By Budd Hopkins

Shortly before I went to Europe on October 3 to speak at Italian and French UFO conferences, I received a phone call from Sharon Begley, a writer for the "Wall Street Journal." She explained that she was doing a piece on Susan Clancy's new book on UFO abductions and wanted to interview me about it. "I have a number of questions," she said. I replied that I would be away until the 18th, but that I would call her when I returned. I asked for her address and told her I would send her some material about UFO abductions to read before we did the interview. I sent her a photocopy of my article on hypnosis for David Jacob's collection of articles "UFOs and Abductions - Challenging the Borders of Knowledge," published by the University Press of Kansas, as well as color Xeroxes of a number of photos of scoop marks and straight-line cuts on the bodies of abductees.

When I returned to New York, I phoned Ms. Begley and left a message saying that I was back and that I looked forward to doing the interview. I did not hear from her, and about two days later her article appeared in the "Wall Street Journal," completely endorsing Clancy's view that all abductions were nothing more than "false memories." There was no reference to any of the material I had sent her - which obviously contradicted Clancy's belief - and no suggestion that any scientists or abduction researchers rejected the false memory explanation, or that there was any kind of physical evidence to be considered. I phoned Ms. Begley the next day, and asked what had happened. She explained that she realized she didn't need to talk to me, to "bring you into the article," so she had decided against phoning me. I said that I never expected to be brought, personally, into the article, but that I thought the contrary viewpoint on abductions that I had presented would at least be mentioned. After all, newspapers like to claim that they present both sides of a contentious issue. I asked if she had read my hypnosis piece, and she said she had, though she mentioned no point that it had raised. She merely said that she found it unconvincing. I asked about her reaction to the photos of the scoop marks and straight-line cuts. "I couldn't tell anything about them," she said. "Well," I replied, "let's start with this. Did you find that the scars were similar?" She admitted that they were. I asked what she knew of the evidence for the reality of UFO abductions, assuming she had done some minimum research on a topic she was writing about, at least enough to learn that there were two sides to the question, and she stated, with some impatience, that "all that stuff has been explained away."

At that we were off. I asked how it had all been explained away and by whom. She simply restated her belief that there was nothing to it, that she just knew it had all somehow been explained away, but she was still unable or unwilling to mention how she might know that. I mentioned one debunker - Philip Klass - who said he could explain everything away, no matter what, and repeated his explanation of one case (Travis Walton) with six eyewitnesses, in which he stated, on no evidence whatsoever, that it was a hoax. "Maybe it was a hoax," she answered, whereupon I informed her that all six passed lie detector tests - twice - concerning their account of the UFO and the onset of Walton's abduction. "That's because they believed it!" she said triumphantly. "But," I explained, "If they were perpetrating a hoax, then they didn't believe it."

"No," she argued, "you can believe in a hoax and that means you can pass a lie detector test. It's like a delusion." I tried to explain that the very definition of a hoax was that it represented a deliberate, conscious effort to deceive. When she still insisted that a hoax was the same as a delusion, I decided to end the conversation. We disagreed, not just about the UFO phenomenon, but also about the English language.

Ironically, the theme of her article on Susan Clancy's "false memory" theory was that people who report UFO abductions are as a group unable to think logically and scientifically! As they say, "People who live in glass houses...."

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