Elliot Budd Hopkins (June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011) was an American artist, author, and ufologist. He was a prominent figure in alien abduction phenomena and related UFO research.
Early life Elliot Budd Hopkins was born in 1931. He was raised in Wheeling, West Virginia. He lived with his parents, Elliot B. Hopkins and Eleanor A. Hopkins, brother, Stuart, and sister, Eleanor. At age two, Hopkins contracted polio. During the long recovery process, Hopkins developed an interest in drawing and watercolors, which eventually led him to Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in art history in 1953. It was here, Hopkins was exposed to art with "a capital A", and attended a lecture by Robert Motherwell that first introduced him to the "automatic, gestural approach that Motherwell espoused."
From Oberlin, Hopkins moved to New York City, where he met Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and other abstract expressionists. For a time, Hopkins studied art history at Columbia University and worked a low-level job selling tickets at the Museum of Modern Art. His experimentation with collage techniques and style as an abstract expressionist won him national acclaim.
Art career Hopkins' first solo show was held in New York City in 1956, the same year he met and married his first wife of thirteen years, Joan Rich. In 1963, Hopkins' work was included in American Painters, a film documentary of American artists and styles with commentary from Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Hess of Art News Magazine, Sidney Janis, gallery director, and Harold Rosenberg, art critic.
In 1969, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired Hopkins' Norbeck Yellow Vertical, describing him as "a leading American painter who has successfully brought together the vocabularies of painterly abstraction and hard edge painting." In 1972, Hopkins was among five artists whose work was commissioned as part of a statewide effort to support the creative arts in West Virginia. It was, Governor Arch Moore claimed, "the first project of this kind to be undertaken in the nation." The piece was to be displayed in the state's cultural center located near the Capitol.
In 1976, Hopkins was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting.
Exhibits Hopkins exhibited his paintings and sculptures in museums, galleries such as Andre Zarre, Levis Fine Art and Poindexter (New York) and Jan Cicero (Chicago), and universities throughout the United States.
Hopkins had a major retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in mid-2017.
The Whitney Museum, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the British Museum, include Hopkins' work in their permanent collections.
Art style Hopkins' paintings in the 1960s combined the precise, hard-edge geometric shapes he was enthralled with and drawn to as a child with gestural, atmospheric painting characteristic of second- and later-generation Abstract Expressionists. "I had come to understand that an abstract painting at its most powerful was a kind of aesthetic scrim behind which lurks a concealed, obsessive 'thing' or image of some kind, transformed, made palatable by the artist's mediating skills."
Hopkins viewed collage as an artistic technique and a philosophical, aesthetic means of unifying a disjointed and fragmented world. He saw collage, the assemblage of fragments and varying points of view, in the poetry, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and, especially, motion pictures of his day:"Consciously or unconsciously, contemporary artists work to create harmony from distinctly jarring material, forcing warring ideas, materials and spatial systems into a tense and perhaps arbitrary detente. Seen most broadly, the presence of the collage aesthetic is the sole defining quality of modernism in all the arts."
Hopkins worked to achieve harmony, clarity and precision while maintaining a sense of mystery: "I like neither extreme in art wholeheartedly, neither the purified world of geometrical art nor the free, indulgent world of Expressionism."
In the 1970s, Hopkins' work included a series of assembled paintings, incorporating architectural elements. Sculptures such as Gallatin's Drive I, White City Hall, New York Wall II and others bore urban names and echoed elements of New York City's skyline. Many of his works during this time featured circular shapes with primary colors set against black and white backgrounds suggestive of Piet Mondrian.
Later, Hopkins included abstracted figures in his sculptural pieces. While moving away from Abstract Expressionism, Hopkins retained in his work the use of intense colors and hard-edged forms. His works of the 1980s, including Temples and Guardians, featured these "sentinals" who were, according to Hopkins, "participating in a frozen ritual, fixed – absolutely – within a privileged space..." Though Hopkins denied any connection, some critics viewed these ritualistic pieces as an extension of Hopkins' fascination with alien beings. Hopkins viewed his sculpted guardians not as human per se, but as magical, fierce, noble robots of the unconscious.
Interest in UFOs As a child, Hopkins experienced, firsthand, Orson Welles' 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds. This both terrified Hopkins and his family and left psychic scars. He considered the radio play a dramatic, theatrical hoax and, because of his childhood scare, felt it added to his skepticism about alien invasions rather than enamor him to the idea of it.
His interest in UFOs and alien visitations was renewed when, in August 1964, Hopkins and two others reported experiencing a day time sighting of an unidentified flying object, or UFO, in the form of a darkish, elliptical object off Cape Cod in Truro, Massachusetts. Dissatisfied with the response Hopkins received when he reported the incident to nearby Otis Air National Guard Base, he suspected a possible government cover-up. Hopkins began reading about UFOs and collecting stories of people who claimed to have experienced contact with alien beings.
In 1975, Hopkins was approached by George O'Barski who, purportedly, witnessed alien figures step out of a spacecraft and take soil samples at North Hudson Park in North Bergen, New Jersey. Hopkins, Ted Bloecher, then director of New York State's Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), and Jerry Stoehrer, also of MUFON, investigated the incident, interviewing the witness and taking soil samples.
After Hopkins' account of the O'Barski case appeared in The Village Voice in 1976, he began receiving regular letters from other UFO witnesses, including a few cases of missing time, seemingly inexplicable gaps in abductees' memories. Hopkins, using data from his investigations with Bloecher and psychologist Aphrodite Clamar, expanded this idea in his book Missing Time.
Behavioral patterns extrapolated from abductee letters led Hopkins to identify core emotional responses based on their experiences: fear, awe or wonderment at alien technological abilities, affection toward their captors (which he likened to the "Patty Hearst" syndrome), anger, and helplessness. He believed aliens were either incapable of understanding the psychological effects of their encounters with humans or that they were a "callous, indifferent, amoral race bent solely upon gratifying its own scientific needs at whatever cost to us."
After the publication of his book Missing Time in 1981, Hopkins became known as much for his UFO and abduction research as for his art. As a self-described humanist, Hopkins saw his work with alleged alien abduction victims as a way to bring attention to an otherwise marginalized part of society. His follow-up book Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods, published in 1987, helped establish Hopkins as a prominent leader in the UFO movement.
Hopkins' Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (1987), spent four weeks on The New York Times Paperback Best Seller list. It and other best-sellers on the phenomena, including Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987), prompted stories of alien abduction by people who read the books. Abductee Linda Cortile had also participated in Hopkins' support group, starting five months before her alleged abduction, and read his book, Intruders.
In 1989, Hopkins organized the Intruders Foundation in Manhattan to provide support for alleged victims of alien abduction, conduct research and investigations, and promote public awareness of the phenomenon.
The 1992 made-for-television film Intruders featured fictionalized characters based on the works of Hopkins and psychiatrist John E. Mack, and, like Hopkins' book of the same name, portrayed abduction scenarios.
In 1996, Hopkins' book Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions was published. The book portrayed an abduction case that was alleged to have occurred in late 1989 near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.
Hopkins and his third wife, Carol Rainey, co-wrote the 2003 book Sight Unseen, Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings.
Alien abduction claims
Hopkins is often credited with popularizing the idea of alien abductions as genetic experimentation through the publication of his book Intruders. He has been dubbed "father of the abduction movement" by some.
Hopkins, along with Elizabeth Slater, who conducted psychological tests of abductees, likened these experiences to rape, specifically for the purpose of human reproductive capabilities. In fact, Hopkins was inclined to dismiss his clients' conscious memory of abuse for more alien explanations. He was an alarmist, rather than a spiritualist, in his approach to the alien visitations, believing the visitations to be apocalyptic and that no good could come of these encounters. He described victims' experiences as severe and nightmarish.
While both men and women reported to Hopkins abductions by aliens that included sexual encounters, allegedly for some form of extraterrestrial eugenics, women in particular seemed to be a part of a "highly technological colonization scheme." These victims were, reportedly, taken to spaceships, impregnated by extraterrestrials, then later as the hybrid baby developed, returned to the ship to have the fetus removed and given up to the alien parent. The alien parents, purportedly, had the ability to communicate telepathically with their child. On occasion, according to victims' reports as told by Hopkins, the human parents were allowed to see their human-alien hybrid, or transgenic, children. Once a victim, according to Hopkins, abductees were powerless over the intrusions and susceptible to additional kidnappings, which may extend to their (human) children. "If people have had one abduction experience," Hopkins said, "then they will have others."
Critics of Hopkins' views on alien abductions state that the alien abduction phenomenon is not as mysterious as Hopkins makes it out to be. Much of the phenomenon can, according to researchers such as Ronald K. Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles, be explained as the consequence of "normal hallucinatory powers of the brain."