Abduction

Abduction is the claim that a witness was taken, usually against their will, aboard a craft and subjected to an examination or procedure by non-human beings, typically recalling the event only partially or under hypnosis afterward. The modern abduction narrative begins with Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, whose hypnotically recovered account of a 1961 New Hampshire encounter established nearly every element — missing time, occupant beings, a medical examination, later hypnotic recall — that would recur in thousands of subsequent reports. Antônio Vilas-Boas's 1957 Brazilian account actually predates the Hills and is now recognized as an earlier, less publicized abduction case. The genre exploded into a full research field during 1987-2000 through Budd Hopkins, John Mack, and David Jacobs, whose books systematized abduction "screening" questions and hypnotic-regression protocols; Travis Walton's 1975 Arizona disappearance and Pascagoula's 1973 Charles Hickson/Calvin Parker case became the era's other landmark abductions. The field is ufology's most contested territory precisely because its central evidence — hypnotically recovered memory — is also what mainstream memory science treats as its most unreliable source, since hypnosis is well documented to manufacture vivid, confidently held false memories rather than simply "unlock" suppressed true ones.