AudioBlog: UFO Abduction Research Gone Sideways: Part 2

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”

In 2010, an article by Jeremy Vaeni headlined “The Incredible Visitations of Emma Woods” appeared in the November issue of UFO Magazine. The story that was detailed therein caused people in the UFO community to take hard look at the methods and conclusions of the two most prominent people in alien abduction research at that time. “Emma Woods” was the pseudonym of a woman who lived in England, and she was one of David Jacobs’s research subjects. She had posted some tapes of her hypnosis sessions with him that contained some details that Jacobs probably would have preferred had not been made public. Woods provided more details in an interview she gave on March 29, 2010, on the Paratopia podcast hosted by Vaeni and Jeff Ritzman, which appear in the UFO Magazine article. The article prompted Budd Hopkins’s wife, Carol Rainey to write an article of her own headlined “The Priests of High Strangeness” published in 2011 in Volume 1, Number 1 of Paratopia magazine detailing some of Hopkins’s methods with his subjects as well. Last week we looked at the experiences of Woods during her interaction with Jacobs. This week we’ll look at the aftermath and the reaction of some in the UFO community to Woods’s story. Read more