Cases and themes
Reports of people taken aboard craft, the investigations of them, and the research controversies. 46 events, newest first.
Media17 May 1992
CBS aired Intruders, a two-part prime-time miniseries starring Richard Crenna and Mare Winningham about people who believe they were abducted by aliens. The network promoted it as drawn from hundreds of case histories; critics found it slow and exploitative.
Photo: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Close encounters12 Mar 1992
Temple University historian David M. Jacobs published Secret Life with Simon and Schuster, drawing on hypnotic-regression sessions with more than 60 people who said they were abducted. He argued abductions were real and widespread; critics questioned his reliance on hypnosis.
Photo: Hinata47d, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters1992
A report funded through Bigelow Holding Corporation analyzed 1991 Roper poll questions written by Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and Ron Westrum. It projected that about 3.7 million Americans might be abductees. Critics such as Susan Blackmore said the questions did not measure abduction.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encountersJun 1991
Robert Bartholomew, Keith Basterfield and George Howard reviewed biographies of 152 people who reported abductions or ongoing contact with UFO occupants. They found little history of mental illness but traits of a fantasy-prone personality in most cases, and urged clinicians to test for it.
Close encounters30 Nov 1989
Linda Napolitano told researcher Budd Hopkins she was floated from her Lower East Side apartment into a craft. Hopkins cited letters from purported witnesses, including men claiming to guard a world leader. Investigators Hansen, Stefula and Butler published a detailed critique of the case.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters12 May 1989
Psychiatrist Rima Laibow founded TREAT (Treatment and Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma) and held its first conference at Fairfield University, bringing clinicians together to discuss people reporting abductions. She treated the symptoms as real while leaving their cause open.
Photo: Doc Searls, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media1989
Philippe Mora's film Communion, adapted by Whitley Strieber from his bestselling 1987 account of alleged abduction experiences, starred Christopher Walken as Strieber. The Deseret News called it a disappointment despite solid lead acting; it put Strieber's visitors on cinema screens.
Photo: John Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1989
Dean Alioto made UFO Abduction, a low-budget found-footage film of a family menaced by aliens. Copies circulated without credits and were shown at a UFO convention, and some viewers treated it as genuine; Alioto later remade it for UPN in 1998.
Close encounters1988
Prometheus Books published aviation journalist Philip Klass's critique of abduction research, which traced the narrative from the Hill case and argued that hypnosis and media exposure produced the reports. Psychologist Robert A. Baker praised it in the Skeptical Inquirer.
Photo: Robert Sheaffer, CC BY-SA 3.0
Close encounters1987
Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard, who earned his doctorate at Indiana University, catalogued about 300 abduction reports for the Fund for UFO Research in UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery. He reported that the more reliable accounts shared many details of sequence and content.
Media1986
Disney released Randal Kleiser's Flight of the Navigator, in which a 12-year-old returns home to find eight years have passed while he has not aged. He learns he was aboard an alien craft, a missing-time premise familiar from abduction accounts.
Photo: Almagordo; derivative work by Keraunoscopia, Public domain
Close encounters1981
New York artist Budd Hopkins published Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions, drawing on interviews and hypnosis sessions with people who reported unexplained gaps in memory. It helped put abduction reports at the center of UFO research.
Photo: Carol Rainey, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media14 Dec 1980
Episode 12 of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos, 'Encyclopaedia Galactica', opened with a dramatized retelling of Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 abduction claim, which Sagan then picked apart, before turning to the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Photo: NASA/JPL, Public domain
Close encounters26 Nov 1979
Friends of Franck Fontaine, 19, told police he vanished from a car near Paris after a UFO appeared; he reappeared a week later. France's GEPAN found nothing of value. In 1983 friend Jean-Pierre Prevost told a reporter he had staged it and hidden Fontaine in an apartment.
Photo: Alvar Lavague, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media20 Oct 1975
NBC broadcast The UFO Incident, a TV movie dramatizing Betty and Barney Hill's account of a 1961 abduction, based on John G. Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey. James Earl Jones played Barney Hill and Estelle Parsons played Betty Hill.
Close encounters11 Oct 1973
Shipyard workers Charles Hickson, 42, and Calvin Parker, 19, told the Jackson County sheriff that creatures took them aboard a glowing craft while they fished on the Pascagoula River. Deputies found them genuinely frightened; many people doubted the story.
Photo: SMG2019, CC BY-SA 4.0
Close encounters3 Dec 1967
Ashland police officer Herbert Schirmer said he saw a lighted, saucer-shaped craft over a highway before dawn and later could not account for about 20 minutes. The Condon Committee examined the case and said it had no confidence the experience was physically real.
Photo: Ammodramus, CC0
Media1966
Journalist John G. Fuller published The Interrupted Journey, a book written with Betty and Barney Hill's cooperation that told their 1961 experience and hypnosis sessions. It brought the idea of alien abduction to a wide audience.
Media16 Sep 1963
ABC premiered Leslie Stevens' science fiction anthology The Outer Limits with The Galaxy Being, about a radio engineer who contacts an alien made of energy. Its February 1964 episode The Bellero Shield was later cited by skeptic Martin Kottmeyer in discussing the Hill abduction account.
Photo: ABC Television, Public domain
Close encounters1957
Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas said small beings took him aboard a landed craft in 1957, examined him and coerced him into sex. Physician Olavo Fontes examined him in Rio; Flying Saucer Review spread the story worldwide in 1965. Skeptics note it followed magazine stories of alien attacks.
Media23 Jan 1954
RKO released Killers from Space, a W. Lee Wilder film in which a scientist whose plane crashes near an atomic test wakes in an underground lair of bug-eyed aliens who have operated on him. It is an early screen version of a medical-examination abduction story.
Photo: film screenshot (RKO Radio Pictures), Public domain
