Hello, and welcome to Open Minds Radio. This is Alejandro Ah. Thank
you so much for joining the show today. This is actually an edited version
of the show that we aired live, and I've edited out the news because
we had a few glitches there and unfortunately it didn't come across too well.
But we are going to be trying some new stuff where we're going to be
doing the shows remotely because we're movers and shakers and Jason and I are not
always in the same place at once, so it's going to be exciting and
different, and hopefully for those of you who listen to the show on the
podcast, you won't notice much of a difference, but the YouTube's will be
a little different since we'll be on the little computer screens there as opposed to
the nice cameras in the studio. But our shows are still going to be
as wonderful and great as usual. Another couple of new things I wanted to
tell you about because I know last time I told you there'd be some new
exciting things coming up, and they are. So many of you subscribe to
my podcast, my Paranormal Reporter podcast that's Paranormal rpt R, and I update
that with the headlines on all of the areas of the paranormal on a regular
basis that you guys can get stay up to speed on what's going on there.
However, since some of you are just into UFOs and would rather focus
just on that subject, I've also created one that's solely for UFOs where I
put headlines up there all the time from the conventional media to show you know
what kind of impact that UFOs have on culture, how many sightings are getting
reported out there and some of the credible stuff were or otherwise that's being reported
by the media. That's UFO Daily News, So you can find that at
UFO Daily News. So it's all one word if you go search it,
or two words if you go search it on Twitter dot com. Now,
if you don't want to be on Twitter, that's fine too. You'll also
find these at Ufodailynews dot com, so it's fun and exciting. I hope
you like it. Otherwise, the news that Jason went over you can find
at Openminds dot tv, and I hope you enjoy this great interview with Peter
Robbins where he gives us a unique insight into the life of alien abduction researcher
Bud Hopkins about how he and Peter met, and also about how Bud Hopkins
got involved with all of this and you know, made such a big impact
on really society by bringing the alien abduction phenomena to the forefront. Now everybody
knows what it is. So I hope you enjoy the show and this great
interview with Peters. Thanks for joining us. Now that's your relationship with Bud
starting. Okay, well, that requires a little bit of backstory to tell
you how but Aen I first met in nineteen seventy five. My life was
all about being a young painter in New York City. It was all I
ever wanted to do was be an artist. And I had now graduated from
the School of Visual Arts and was on their faculty as a painting instructor.
I had a little loft down in Chinatown. My work was starting to sell
a little bit. My sister, Helen was a poet and soon to be
a singer songwriter, and she lived about a mile north of me in New
York's East Village. And life was good. And one afternoon I was going
over a bunch of old drawings that I had done when I was a kid,
and maybe that was part of the reason I hadn't been sleeping. Well,
it was Chinese New Year had just passed, and seventy two hours of
fireworks going on sounded like I was in a war zone. But something triggered
inside of me, and a memory returned from childhood. I should say,
I grew up in a little community about thirty miles east of New York City
on Long Island, had a pretty idyllic childhood, I think, no major
traumas, and certainly no repressed memories that I was aware of. But I
had one. And what it was was of a UFO siding that my sister
Helen and I had had when we were kids. I was fourteen, as
best as I can recall, and Helen was just twelve, and we were
playing on the front lawn of the house we grew up in, and it
was an absolutely beautiful late afternoon in late spring or early summer, and not
a cloud in the sky. Alejandro, and something caught my attention in the
sky, and I looked up and I watched him complet and utter amazement as
five silvery white disc shaped objects flying in quite a precise V type formation that
you know we'd associate with like fighter planes or something on display, came without
a sound from my right peripheral vision and stopped over the neighbor's house in that
same formation, and I immediately said, either look or Helen, look,
and we looked up and there they were, as still as if they were
painted on the sky. I was a good kid. I was a bad
liar. I, you know, collected rocks and bugs and stamps, and
it was kind of nerdy. I wasn't into sports. I drew and painted
and cooked, and I had watched my share of you know, b science
fiction movies at our local fantasy theater, where I had some of my great
movie memories. And you know, I knew about flying saucers as much as
any kid. But also somehow I understood the implied message of the adult world
that they were not real. They were science fiction. But these were round,
and I can't tell you exactly how large they were, but you know,
if they were the size of small private planes, maybe they were a
thousand feet up. If they were like airliners, maybe they were several thousand
feet up. But Helen and I both agreed that we could see regular detailing
around each one that we could only read like windows, and we were transfixed,
and we looked, and we looked and we looked, and it went
on forever several minutes. In any case, you and I have certainly collected
our share of accounts of people who have had sightings, and in the countless
hundreds I've done, many people describe what I would now call the checklist phenomena.
You look up and there is something or things that you have never seen
anything like, and your mind immediately rattles off stuff that they're not. They're
not planes, helicopters, kites, blimps, balloons, clouds, reflections from
the ground, floating debrithe and then you're stuck. And I was absolutely at
the most extraordinary moment of my young life. I could not believe what I
was seeing, Yet there it was. We didn't say a word. Helen
was standing about six feet to my left, and at a certain point I
had had it. Some people would say, well, don't tell me you
didn't you stop looking because this is the most amazing thing you've ever seen,
and you know it might go away in a second. Well that was just
the case. I went to run into the house to tell our mom,
and within moments I felt like I was running through molasses. What had happened
within seconds was so shocking to me and so fascinating, and not scared at
all, I should say, unlike these things in the sky, which gave
me a great deal of anxiety. I was falling, but in very slow
motion. I realize now I had kind of lost motor coordination. And in
my last conscious moments, I thought several things that seemed as anomalous as the
things that I was running away from, namely, what a beautiful afternoon it
was, and how pretty my mom's garden looked. And as I was falling
toward our sidewalk, you know, there are the ants in the sidewalk doing
their thing, and bang. I was unconscious. Some time passed. I
had wanted to think that it was a minute or two, but I now
realized it was considerably longer. And when I woke, they were gone.
My sister was gone, and I had scraped my right elbow pretty bad.
But you know, it was impressed that I'd have a great scab, like
a fourteen year old might think. And went into the house and intuitively went
upstairs, and I saw my sister room looking out the window at our backyard.
It did and wanted to disturb her. And I went into the kitchen.
I told my mom what we had seen, and I think I said
word for word, Mom, Helen, and I just saw some things in
the sky that looked like flying sausage from the movies, and my mom,
God, rest there she did something very smart and very sensitive without realizing it.
I think she just looked at me and appraised me seriously, and she
said, are you sure. I said, yeah, I'm sure that's what
they look like, and she just nodded and went back to cooking, but
seemed very thoughtful to me. Next thing I knew, I was taking my
bicycle to town to get out some books from our local library, which I
hated both of them. One of them was flying Sausages landed. I wanted
something that was going to tell me they were completely understandable. That afternoon,
Helen asked me if I wanted to talk about what we had seen, and
I said no. I wasn't stupid. I knew that if I mentioned this
to my palace junior high school, I'd be laughingstock. You know, no
girl would ever want to have me touch her and never have any cool clothes.
I'd be a pariah and of you know, an outcast, and you
on, he's just kidding. I love your brother, that's great. Well
you got great clothes. Well I can only tell you that. Over the
next weeks, I worked very hard to kind of repeat that mantra that I
think a lot of people do, which is it couldn't be, therefore it
wasn't therefore it must have been something else. And my life started to go
on, and I found my kind of social bearings and got into music and
art at a deeper level, and ultimately did have girlfriends and all that great
stuff. And I completely forgot about it, and almost fifteen years passed,
and that afternoon it exploded. And I have to tell you when the memory
came back, I couldn't shut it all. It was like playing through my
head like a tape loop. And I thought I must be going crazy because
my logical mind said, how could I have ever ever forgotten this? And
I really had, you know, kind of broke down a bit and finally
sort of got myself together, washed my face, had a cup of tea,
and thought, what should I do? Thought there's only one thing to
do, which is to call my sister. However, in thinking it out.
I thought, if I tell her what I've remembered, she'll say yes
or no, and I need more. I need her to say it,
and so I called her and asked her if it was a good time to
talk, and essentially said, I've remembered something that happened to us when we
were kids. I need to know what you remember, but I'm afraid if
I just tell you, you know, you'll say yes or no, etc.
So let me set the scene and I began to talk about that morning
and what the weather was like and where we were standing on the front lawn,
and she stopped me mid sentence, kind of with a rush of laughters
that stop, I know what you're talking about, and then described to me
what we had seen. Well. I had a reaction I can only describe
as one of the great split moments of my life. One part of me
was going, oh my god, they're real, and the other part of
me is going, oh my god, they're real. And then she said
something I will never forget. And she said there's more, and you're not
going to like it. Said, well, what she said, Well,
I remember you literally peeling off from my right peripheral vision, and I assumed
you're running to house to tell mom. But then within a second or two,
a beam of blue light shot out of one of these things. And
the first thing that struck me was, it's a beautiful, clear day.
How can I be seeing a beam of light? You know what I mean?
Right down to the ground. It's not like you know, it's just
rained. And you shine a flashlight and it's catching on every molecule of moisture
in the air. And I turned around and I saw you in the light,
and the light went out, and then you dropped, and then I
lifted off, and I remember my hair blowing in the wind, and the
bottom of one of these things was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And
at that point my mind just kind of cut out, and my first thought
was my God, my sister's crazy. And then I caught myself and I
said, wait, but three seconds ago, she wasn't crazy. When five
discs with windows on them were hanging over the Parker's house. Well, we
got together the next day. I had already done a bunch of drawings.
And to say my life changed overnight is an understatement. My life changed in
a moment and has never gotten back on the same track, and Helen went
on to a very distinguished career in the music industry and its Golden Platinum record
award winner and wonderful singer, songwriter and performer. And I was completely immersed
in UFOs. I played it being an artist for years, ultimately went into
a theater management and then on to become an investigative writer. But about a
year past and one afternoon, I picked up a copy of a famous New
York weekly, the Village Voice, and there was an article on a major
UFO incident that had taken place the year before in New Jersey. Well I
had already started to collect UFO books and picked up the Odd magazine, and
I realized that there were a core of scientific kind of writers and a whole
bunch of new age goofballs and welcome space brothers and contactees. Had no interest
in meeting any of these people, but this author I wanted to meet.
The article was sensational, it was beautifully written, it was analytical, it
was objective, it was well researched, and the author was a guy named
Bud Hopkins. Now, remember, I'm a painter in New York City,
and it's a world where many of us know each other's names, and I
thought, I know there's a painter named Bud Hopkins, but chances ar it's
not him. I looked in the New York phone book. There's only Bud
Hopkins, and I just cold called him, and I introduced myself and told
him why I was calling. We chatted a bit, and they invited me
over for coffee. And that was in early nineteen seventy six, and we
became friends, mostly bonded by our love of art and our fascination with this
very improbable topic. Now this is five years before he published his first book,
Missing Time, and I knew he was getting involved in this wildest area
of research, and overnight, in nineteen eighty one, he became Bud Hopkins,
the Bud Hopkins that many of your listeners are familiar with, and his
life changed very dramatically as well. From then on, our friendship deepened,
and because we already had a great bond of trust and certainly other things in
common, he was starting to get a lot of mail, more than he
could handle, and he invited me to begin to help him with the mail.
And as he realized that I was more and more in tune with this,
he gave me more responsibilities. He began to study hypnosis, and for
the first seven years that he did regressive hypnosis. Many people don't know this,
he worked under the very careful supervision of a very highly regarded hypnotherapist named
doctor Aphrodite Clamar. Bud did not come to this in any kind of cavalier
way. He did it in the most methodical, scholarly sensitive way. I
was very, very impressed with the way he dealt with the people, because
that's what meant the most to me. We were both humanists. We both
really cared about what these people were going through. And for me, I
had grown up with an abductee in the family, and Helen and I had
already put together parts of her history from her memories. She was doing drawings
now of her abduction experiences, and she worked with Bud on and off for
several years Hypnotic Regression, member of one of his earliest support groups, and
that is how we met and began to work together. Now, you spent
lots of time with Bud. I'm sure you talked a lot about his history.
How did he get interested in the phenomena? Yes, he discusses this
at length better than I ever could, although I will in his very last
book, which is one that should be on the shelves of anybody who is
serious about the subject of UFOs, and almost more interestingly, anybody who is
interested in a very unique twentieth century American life. It's a memoir appropriately titled
Art, Life and UFOs, and it's as fine a memoir as I've ever
written. Bud's interest was not sparked. Remember he was born in nineteen thirty
one, and again he died in August, so he was eighty years old
just when the whole thing kicked in in forty seven. He was already a
teenager, but had his eyes completely set on being an artist, and this
was something that he ignored as I did. It wasn't until I believe the
mid sixties, and I would have to look it up. It's either that
he was driving with his wife or walking on the beach, but he saw
it was kind of a gray day, as is often the case in Cape
Cod, where he had his second home and spent many of his happiest times
over the last fifty years of his life. That he saw a single disc
tracking along the sky and followed it with his eyes, and he does wonderful
drawing in the book of just what he saw, and of course it's as
good a drawing as you've seen of something like that, and it just it
was something he never forgot, but he sort of filed it. Now.
Where he really got involved was in nineteen seventy five, the year I got
involved. Bud was a Scotch drinker and he drank Cutty Sark, and we
had many Cutty Sarks together. And there was a local liquor store. Anybody
that's listening who knows New York but lived on West sixteenth Street, just east
of Eighth Avenue, and there was a liquor store on the block run by
a man named George o'barski. George was a kind of cantankerous character. I
met him once in World War Two, veteran Catholic religious teetotaler, didn't drink,
so it was kind of a joke that he owned a liquor store.
And one day Bud went in to pick up a bottle and George was noticeably
withdrawn. They would always chat a bit, and he was affable, and
Bud asked him what was wrong, and he wouldn't say, And Bud liked
the guy, and he pushed him, and he essentially said, Bud,
you'd never believe me. I wouldn't believe myself. And he went on to
tell Bud a story that I believe ultimately was the one that Moufon rated as
the best or as good as any for that year, and the one,
of course, that the article that I read was based on. George had
been doing inventory late that night and was there till about two. He lived
in Jersey and was driving home along the Jersey Coast Road on the Hudson River,
and I guess if you drew a line from Manhattan over he was probably
in the eighties when his radio started to go on the fritz. It was
middle of the night, there were no other cars on the road. Banged
the radio a few times, and he sees a light coming up behind him,
and as light gets closer, the static gets worse, and it passed
us is over the car by a very small amount of space, and the
static got at its worst, and then it veered off to the left and
landed out in a field near a new housing development, ironically a round apartment
complex named Stonehenge Towers. I believe you can't take that stuff up well you
can. And George slowed down and he watched in complete shock as the thing
came down without a sound, and as it was coming down, what we
can only describe as some kind of landing apparatus came out of it and it
settled on the ground. And then some kind of entryway, gangplank, ladder,
whatever you want to call it, came down, and a number of
small beings came down, and he watched as they collected soil and then went
back up, and then the thing rose, the gear retracted and it took
off. Well. George arrived home and complet and total shock, he told
Bud told me that he basically got in bed and prayed like he had not
prayed in years, pulled the covers over his head. He's a widower.
He lived with his grown up son, who worked a night shift, and
his son came home about dawn. His father was in a terrible state.
He told him what he had observed, and the son said, Dad,
I've got to go check this out for myself and went back and walked into
the field that morning and found the impressions in the soil. Well that afternoon
may have been the great turning point in our friend Bud Hopkins's life Like me,
he became quite obsessed with the subject. Investigated this case with the skill
of a born detective. He interviewed people who lived in the apartment, who
worked in the apartment, He found other witnesses. In fact, one of
the most compelling memories I have was that the man who had been the night
doorman that night had observed the lights in the field and he thought at first
they were cars, you know, teenagers parking or something, but they weren't.
And he was very disturbed by it, and he lifted the house phone
to call a New York City detective police detective who lived in the building to
tell him because he knew he was home, even though it was the middle
of the night, he decided to do it, and as he went to
talk to him, the entire plate glass window in front of him shattered.
Wow. When the police investigated this, there was not It wasn't like a
bullet was shot. They don't know how it chattered or why it chattered.
There was no entry, but it chattered, and that was how Bud got
involved. It's incredible that he's an artist, but he really found this other
skill and was it through this UFO setting, that he was so good at
the reporting and at the getting the interviews and the writing. Because even though
that's his first case he wrote about, Yes, a lot of people reference
it as such a great piece of work. Yes. I talked to him
about this, and one of the things we both agreed was that as children,
as young boys, we had set our sights on this goal of being
painters, and nothing was going to stop us. He went to Oberlin graduated
with his BFA as I did, from the School of Visual Arts where I
was teaching, And he had written, but it had been art criticism and
wonderful articles about impressionists or BRANCUSI. In fact, we reference one of them
in the Remembrance that we have out in the new issue of Open Minds.
So he was already adept at expressing himself in words. Also, when you
are trained to make pictures as a writer, I never took a course in
writing, but I learned most of it from I just started making pictures with
words rather than the medium that I'd been trained to work in. His natural
sense of caring about people was, you know, maybe I'm reading a little
Freudian stuff into this, But his father had issues, as a lot of
guys of his generations did with certain minorities and things, and Bud was very
reactive to that and very inclusive in his place, the way that he saw
people in the world. Loved being a New Yorker. I mean, it
is the greatest city, and it's just the most wonderful place to see the
great play of humanity of people from every corner of the world. And he
was just very expressive. He had all the natural tools. In other words,
he had kind of spent years before thinking and living out of the box,
and here was the most abiding, mystery imaginable. The thing that really
separated us as far as this goes, is that he never stopped painting,
and it stayed the central passion in that other part of his life where at
a certain point I just couldn't do it anymore. I felt like I was
faking it. I never really put down the camera, and I'm very proud
of my work as a photographer, although I've not, you know, showed
it, but I've taken pictures seriously for forty years. And for me,
it was wonderful when he could grab some time to pain, because it was
like me cooking. I love to cook, and it's for me. Obviously,
it's practical, but it's a form of self expression. It's an unwinding
kind of thing. It's fun, it's an adventure and you get to share
it with friends in a very visceral kind of way. So that was an
anchor for him in a world that meant the world to him. However,
I can tell you the art world, especially as represented by the quote unquote
New York City Art World, an unforgiving mistress. And after a fashion,
when people in the art world got wind of the fact that Bud Hopkins the
painter was now some kind of well known personage in the world of well flying
saucers, I think a lot of them started to look at him with more
disdain. And it made me angry because he was a wonderful painter, and
anybody that's ever seen his work knows that a very serious painter as well,
and his career as a painter in terms of sales I think suffered as a
result. He has work in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum
and collections and museums all over the world. A lot of people don't know
that, but especially in our field, but he really did live in those
two worlds and was fortunate enough to have this wonderful old building in Lower Manhattan
with a huge studio in it that was also our office. And then in
nineteen eighty nine when he chartered our nonprofit organization, Intruder's Foundation, which was
created to assist people who had been through these experiences to study it, to
try to educate others about it, and to become a repository of information on
the subject. That's when his profile changed a little bit. But that became
our headquarters for the Intruders Foundation and support group meetings as well. Over the
years now from the Stoneheade case, I think he moved quickly into abduction research,
right, and how did that happen? Well, I'm trying to remember
he again. I would have to refer people to Missing Time, his first
book, or art Life and UFOs. And I'm not here to try to
sell Bud's books. In fact, I think for anybody that's interested in building
an actual physical library, and we should all be doing that. The Internet's
wonderful, but nothing replace is a real library. You can find these books
online, except for the newest book used for a couple of dollars so that's
where you should spend your money. But at some point he became very interested
in the Betty and Barney Hill case. Now, if you lived when that
case broke in the sixties, even if you had no interest in UFOs,
Betty and Barney Hill became world famous in nineteen sixty five, even though the
case broke and happened in sixty one, and you could you know, they
were the subject of countless articles and I think a special issue of Life or
Look magazine or what have you. And for him, the impact on human
beings of this kind of contact superseded any interest in studying lights in the night
sky or the configuration or maneuvers of so called, you know, unknown aerial
objects. He wasn't stupid, though, he realized that it was a subject
that was fraught with ridicule. And it's one of the reasons why separate from
my friendship and the fact that I just loved the guy as a really,
really good man. He was tremendously courageous. I don't think more than a
handful of us can really appreciate what it must be like to be the person
who is pioneering not just a truly new area of study, scientific study,
but one because of the way that we Americans and the West in general have
been so brilliantly conditioned from the summer of nineteen forty seven on our media and
our government and every social force has pounded into our heads overall that this is
nonsense. And don't you think it's interesting that, of all of the subjects
out there, if one is to say I saw something in the sky that
I couldn't identify, that there is a social conditioning where many people will look
at you and they will think you're crazy, or you want to feel special,
or you're lonely, or you want to write a book, or you
want to be on the Oprah Show. Or rather than okay, you saw
something in the night sky or the sky that you couldn't identify, isn't that
interesting? I wonder what it was too. So he knew he was getting
into a lonely place to start with, and for some years it was really
him on his own. And I'll tell you what, Alejandro, I never
had a day there over the many years that I worked with him, almost
all of it on a volunteer basis. For about a year we actually had
little money from a grant to Intruders Foundation, and I made the princely sum
of eight dollars an hour for the same work that I was for free,
and then went back to doing for free for the rest of my life.
But I'll tell you what, there was never a day there where I didn't
appreciate that I was working with a man who was a great man, not
just a great guy, and that history would remember him, and that I
was, you know, a bug on the wall and seeing this happening and
taking shape. I also had the honor of being a proofreader, and when
Bud was working on a book or an article, I would often be the
first one, and it was in a very funny way as a writer infuriating.
Bud was the very best first draft writer I have ever known in my
life. Now, grant that I've not seen a lot of everybody's first drafts,
but it used to drive me nuts. If I could find a colon
that should have been a semi colon in a five page article, I would
rejoice, and you know, mockingly give hell for you know, screwing up
the thing, and he would play along and we would, you know,
just have this great fun exchange. But he was a brilliantly. He wrote
classical prose. He wrote from the heart, but informed by the mind.
And so many of us, you know, when we start to write,
we're concerned about what's my style going to be, or how should I use
a bigger word here, when if you keep out of your damn way,
you learn that the greatest thing you can do is express yourself in as clean
and as accurate and as thoughtful a way as possible. And for him it
was intuitive. And I know for a fact because again I read the first
drafts that so much of his books, and he wrote four books and co
wrote a fifth book. It was the original draft with that some of the
most minor kind of standing at the edges where for me, On left that
he scathed Larry Warren and I worked for nine years on that book. So
there were times I'd go back into some area of text and revised something I'd
written five or six years before, and was still polishing it, you know,
at almost a decade's point when we sold it and got it published.
This is not what Bud did, was not the norm. He was tremendously
gifted in a number of areas, and writing was certainly one of them.
I could tell when I first met him, I kind of had this preconceived
notion because he had strong opinions that he was kind of a grouch. But
when I when I met him, I immediately fell in love with the guy.
He was so nice, he was so charismatic. He had this big,
bright smile that lights up the room, and I immediately fell in love
with him. He seemed to be, like he said, a special person.
He had these special qualities. And did other people react that way?
Well, overall, absolutely he did not. How can I say? He
was certainly diplomatic and understood the politics of life and of euthology and the politics
of politics. And he never, ever that I observed, went out of
his way to hurt anybody's feelings, even if he thought they were jerk.
However, he loved people, and he loved being around people, and like
the best people in the field. And maybe you know, you can tell
me your observation on this. He had a world class sense of humor.
He'd have me laughing so hard at times. In fact, he did imitations
impressions of certain well known people in ufology, as some of us are wont
to do. I won't even name their names, but I'd be in tears.
I'd be laughing so hard because he had them nailed, even to the
cadence as well as the words they would use or would have you. And
we were both big fans of I think the finest general audience radio show still
playing, a wonderful show on National Public Radio called A Prairie Home Companion.
It's Garrison Killer's show, and he's the closest thing we have to Mark Twain
these days. And we would listen to that show regularly, and once a
year Garrison Killer would have a special show, which he still does, and
he's going to be retiring soon. For fans, we're all lamenting it.
Where it was two hours of jokes and we would either never miss that,
or if he was going to miss it, I would make like an audio
cassette of it, having my recorder set up in front of my radio in
that high tech analog manner that we used to do and I sometimes still do.
But a sense of humor can save your life in this work, Let's
face it, serious investigation of the UFO abduction phenomena is chilling. Is the
darkest, most unnerving aspect of everything that comes under the heading of UFO Studies,
and I will tell you for a fact. I mean again, for
me, it's personal and one of the reasons that I am still in the
work is it's a way to honor my sister's memory. We lost her in
two thousand and she was tremendously courageous and very outspoken about this up until a
few days before she died. She would get in anybody's face about this.
And she and I and Bud Oh Gosh, I think in nineteen eighty seven
we were guests on the Heraldo Show and Bud handled himself absolutely brilliantly, and
Heraldo got a little bit silly and with great dignity it. He really had
that gift. And when we learned how ill he was last year, he
had had kidney cancer twenty five years ago, lost to kidney then you know
the countdown of one, five, ten years cancer free, and we figure
he's done with it. And then I guess about eight or nine years ago,
I don't remember, we were going back after a lunch break to a
Whole Life expo that was being held at the Pennsylvania Hotel, I think in
the West thirties, and I could take you to within two feet of where
we were standing waiting for a light to change when he told me, my
cancer's back. I have leukemia, but I'm told it's really slow. But
I don't know if I want to do anything to you know, chemo or
anything. He ultimately did and it helped him, but my heart sank and
I had like eight years to prepare. But last year we learned that he
had stage for liver cancer. And that is, even if you've got a
great attitude and every homeopathic, natural pathic and people praying and loving you,
the chances are very good you're not going to be here that much longer.
And he told me two things with a straight face. He said, Number
one, I really want to see my eightieth birthday, and that came true
on June fifteenth of this year. He was eighty and we had a lovely,
low key party with fifteen or twenty friends about two hours until he got
tired. We had champagne and cake and he spoke and we hung out and
it was a lovely evening. His second wish, again with a very straight
face, was I want to outlive Dick Cheney, and I completely cracked up,
knowing how much he adored our former vice President, and that wish did
not come true, and I guess I should leave it at that, But
his sense of humor did not fail him, and he was pragmatic above all
else. He knew he was living and had lived a remarkable life, and
was not focused on what comes next, but just so pleased that his wonderful
daughter had become a marvelous woman, and he had a beautiful granddaughter and a
very special relationship with Leslie Kane, and this marvelous circle of friends and thousands
of people around the world who to whom he meant so much because of how
much he gave them of his time. I think I mention it in the
article in Open Minds. I've written another piece that's published someplace else that in
all the years he did this, and I know he worked very formally with
at least seven hundred people, and I logged in hundreds of tapes of interviews
and hypnotic regressions, quite a number of which I witnessed, and that was
a whole another story. But he how can I say the reality of what
the people were going through was the thing that concerned him most, and literally,
well, the overwhelming majority of people that came to him had not had
a good time. To put it mildly, they were traumatized, they were
frightened, they were upset. Some thought they were going crazy. Others wished
they were going crazy. I'll never forget how upset Linda Cortil, who is
the subject, of course, of the Remarkable Witnessed the True story of the
Brooklyn Bridge Uf abductions, was after months of Bud investigating her case and finding
the first group of other witnesses, and there were even other witnesses that aren't
published who gave accounts but chose not to be included in the book. When
Bud laid this out for her, she just broke down. She just hoped
that he would tell her that she was crazy and that there was some doctor
or treatment or drug that she could take to have this go away. Of
course, that was not the case. He gave so much to so many
people, and it cost him in his personal and private life. I will
tell you that. And that is the way it is with many great men
and women who are willing to sacrifice what will laughingly call a normal life.
And he loved his life as an artist, and I know quietly he was
hurt that other people in the art world thought less of him as an artist
for having this other life, and at the same time he would not give
it up. He did both, and more power to him. Now.
It's funny you mentioned the Perry Companion joke show because I caught it a couple
of weeks ago. Very funny. It's pretty good. I can see.
It would seem that he had a love for people, which drove his passion
in this field. And also he seemed to have a bit of a rebellious
streak too that kind of drove him in this field. Is that true,
I would say. I would say categorically. He was a complete independent thinker.
He was proud to be a New York intellectual. He was one of
the most well read people I knew in terms of twentieth and nineteenth century literature.
His books in that house numbered into the thousands, and they covered so
many subjects besides art and UFOs. He was particularly well studied in twentieth century
history. He was an avid museum goer, and one of his conditions over
the years that I have made one of mine whenever I travel is if I'm
in a new city and there's a museum I haven't visited and it's humanly possible
to work that into my lecture. Skilled jewel, get me there. And
I remember joking Nick Pope joking with me years ago when Bud had visited London
and stayed with Nick, as quite a number of us did at the time,
and Nick's who took him to the National Gallery. And you know,
Nick has a great sense of humor too, and he was saying, and
I know Nick would appreciate my saying this because it was with great affection and
a having fun at his own expense to a degree, but just going on
about how much Bud had learned about him from him about art as he told
him things as they were walking through the museum, when of course it was
exactly the opposite. And that's another thing. You can speak to conference organizers
and people around the world who brought Bud to a part of the United States
or another country who had the added benefit of going to a museum with him
that maybe they had been too many times or not at all, and having
him educate them to nuances and asked effects of the art that they were seeing
that they otherwise would have never known. When he was a young struggling painter
in New York. He had one of the great kind of romantic jobs that
a young artist would want to have, which was being a guard at the
Museum of Modern Art, and sometimes a night guard. And he always had
his pass to the museum, and we would constantly talk about what was there
or at the Metropolitan, and if there was a particularly good show he had
seen, he would send me to it, and if it was at the
Modern, he would give me his pass because it's rather expensive to get in
there now. And I said, but Bud, what happens if they asked
me, you know, for identification. I don't look anything like you or
anything. He said, don't worry, they never do. I never did.
So it was again another thread that added richness. But there was a
lot of anxiety. There was a fair amount of loneliness. You are sitting
in the damned middle of the most explosive subject in the history of humanity,
as far as many of us are concerned, with a bloody few colleagues or
people that you can really confide in. And there were dark nights, for
sure. My sister and Bud hit it off amazingly well. They were both
outsiders. Helen, in her own way, was the definition of Rebellion.
She was one of the true pioneer female artists in what we now call punk
music, and the legendary CBGB's was a second home to us over the years,
and she performed there more times than I can imagine. And Bud's musical
tastes, although very refined, stopped at about nineteen sixty one. He liked
the fact that my parents had instilled in me a love of the big bands
of the thirties and forties, occasionally used to test me on singers or certain
band leaders and was usually pretty satisfied. He did not like the fact that
I did not think that his favorite big band singer, Vuan Monroe, was
the best big band singer, and that was something that we disagreed on up
until the moment that he left Deserve. But Helen and him hit it off
like crazy, and she got so much from working with him in terms of
doing the hypnotic regression work and making her piece to a degree with some of
the things that had happened to her, and some of the wonderful support group
meetings. And after a while there were so many people that we broke them
into different areas and Helen for a while was a member of one just for
Women, which was brilliant, but never ever pretended to be a therapist,
and when people would kind of accuse him of that, he would get very
rankled. But anybody that understands the dynamics of a support group knows that there
is a de facto kind of therapy that comes from being with people who have
had similar experiences and you're getting through it and trying to be there for each
other and normalize this and go on with your lives. And one of the
only two times that I ever saw Bud come to tears was after my sister
had died. It was terribly difficult for him, more than most of the
people that he had worked with, perhaps because of our years together, but
they had a special bond that not only meant the world to me, Alejandro,
but to my mother and father and my other sister as well. We
all loved him, and my dad and him spent one remarkable day together,
and I'll never forget that either. And my dad is ninety one now and
fascinated by the subject, has read his books and still is waiting to see
a UFO and not very happy that he hasn't yet. I'll tell you that,
yeah, a lot of people are. Unfortunately we're almost out of time.
But this is just a fascinating insight into his life, which is so
special because now that he's gone. But maybe if you could talk about his
legacy, because when I reflect upon his legacy, it's humongous. Yes,
it is. Well, he is the pioneer researcher in what will be seen
in the future if we don't blow ourselves to hell as a species, which
is always a possibility in the world of men as opposed to mankind, he
will be seen for what we know him to be, a true courageous pioneer
who struck out into the dark without really a lamp to light the way,
and with his common sense, his sensitivity, his natural abilities in working with
people, in doing detective work on a level that any major, big city
police department would love to have somebody like that, the fact that he was
incredibly curious and incredibly courageous. His legacy for starters is the fact that these
five books and probably the hundreds of articles, editorials, conference papers, monographs,
commentaries that he wrote, and over the next year's my colleagues and I
in the Intruders Foundation will get more and more of these posted on our website
and try to get them out to the world. More. These books,
I think will stand to a great degree as some of the most important texts
in this field of study, and the pioneering texts that really form a body
of work that is the core of what we would call abduction studies. Then
again, he had, as in terms of a legacy, a wonderful daughter
and granddaughter, and that granddaughter will go on hopefully to continue that bloodline,
and quite a family it is. But then there's something really remarkable that very
few of us will be able to point back to in the afterlife and say
I had that too, which is thousands of people around the world who revere
your memory, either because you help them at some point or another, directly
or indirectly. And he would often just stop what he was doing, and
you might have seen it at the odd conference as I did. Somebody would
come up to him and you'd look at their face, I would, and
you'd have a sense of what it was about, and they'd just go off
and they'd talk. Or if it was a compelling enough case, he would
go to another part of the country at his own expense and visit them.
I should also say, as part of his legacy, in the hundreds and
hundreds of cases formally or possibly you know, the thousands informally, he never
asked a single individual for a single penny. And I took an exception to
this at a certain point, more than just about anybody, I saw how
hard he worked, and this was time taken away from his life as a
professional painter, which was how he made his living. People think because he
was famous, you know, money wasn't a problem. Well think just the
opposite. It was always an issue, and sometimes a very dire issue,
and one that dogged him to the end. And it's infuriating that that's the
way the world is, but it is. And I called him on it
and said, why don't you ask people? You're a professional, you know,
And he said several reasons. Number one, I am concerned that if
I did and they couldn't afford, it would be humiliating for them. I
don't want to be seen to be in this for the money, even though
it would be wonderful if I could make a living doing it. But I'm
sure the moment I asked somebody for a dollar, Philip classt here about it,
and that would be it forever. I don't want to give him that,
And I thought to myself, I don't like the way I'm thinking here,
but what you say makes sense, and I realize, in thirty five
years of doing this work, I have followed that exact same path. Obviously,
I like being paid when I speak or write, but with person to
person, it's another story. And that is the way I was brought up.
In part. We're all here to be here for each other to some
degree, in a not some goofy idealists. I live in the real world,
but for me, people come first, and that is something that was
only reinforced working with him. His legacy is big and it will only grow
larger as the years pass. I'm convinced of that. Well, thank you
so much. We have the article coming out in the magazine, and then
you're also going to be at the UFO Congress in late February. People can
already go register for that. So thank you so much for your contributions to
the magazine and the congress and to the radio show. This was a wonderful
insight into the life of an important person. Well, Alejandro, it was
a privilege to do it. I always like doing your show because it's like
sitting down with a good friend in your living room, because we are good
friends. And I'm really excited about the Congress in February, and for anybody
that's not aware of it, go to the Open Minds website and the International
UFO Congress is coming up. It will be four days with more than twenty
speakers. What did you draw last year? Fifteen hundred or one thousand people?
I mean, it was a phenomenal success, a lot of people.
If you can get there, do and if you do, find Alejandro and
I and say hi. All right, thank you so much. We are
out of time, but like Peter said, you could go to Ufocongress dot
com and you can register for the conference. We're gonna have a lot of
great speakers, including Peter, so check it out openminds dot tv. Thank
you all so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.