Is the “missing time” phenomenon responsible for several alien abductions? CASE DETAILS Hundreds of people claimed they have had a bizarre experience called “missing time.” You are about to meet one of them—a member of the Air Force who disappeared for an entire hour. Under hypnosis, he described his abduction, believe it or not, by aliens. At 8:45 PM on October 1, 1966, a bus pulled up in front of Dutra’s Market, in the small Cape Cod village of North Truro. Only one man got off the bus, nineteen-year-old Airman First Class Robert Matthews. He was reporting for his first tour of duty at a nearby Air Force base and noticed that the area was deserted: “I got off where the bus driver told me where I was supposed to get off. And he told me to phone the base and they would send a truck down to pick me up. I told him that I was in front of Dutra’s Market and he told me to stay there and that there would be a truck there to pick me up in a minute. While I was standing there, I saw these lights you know, moving from right to left across the sky. That’s when I felt this fear.” Matthews called the base again and informed them that something strange was happening: “When I called the base again, they asked me where I’d been and he told me, he says, we sent a truck down there already. And I says, well I’ve been standing here waiting and no one’s been by here.” The Air Force told Bob Matthews that a driver had arrived to pick him up at 8:50 PM, just five minutes after his first phone call. The driver claimed that Matthews was nowhere in sight. Almost an hour later, at 9:45, the base had received the second call from Matthews. Yet in Bob Matthews’ mind, those two phone calls had been made less than four minutes apart. According to Budd Hopkins, an author of several books on the phenomenon, the “missing time” Bob Matthews experienced is a mini-period of amnesia: “It is not perceived as a break in which something happens and then a resumption. It is… remembered as continuous and… the half hour trip… turns out to be a two hour trip or whatever, and this is sometimes experienced in conjunction with a UFO sighting or something like a light, but not always.” In 1964, Hopkins experienced a UFO sighting himself. He has since delved into the field and became an expert on the subject of missing time and alien abduction: “I began getting phone calls from people and letters and many of their sighting reports had pieces of missing time in them. They could not account for what, why something that should’ve taken 15 minutes took two hours and a half, a drive in a car, which involved in a sighting of a UFO. And we began looking into those cases and discovered one after another of these abduction cases.” Bob Matthews was one of the people who contacted Budd Hopkins: “I was on vacation looking for something to read and on the shelf there in front of me, I saw this book with this creature on it you know. I read the book and I thought someone had stepped into my head and taken my innermost fears and put them in a book. It brought tears to my eyes, you know, I couldn’t believe this was actually happening to someone else.” After weeks of intensive interviews, Budd Hopkins put Bob Matthews under hypnosis to explore the details about what happened to him outside of Dutra’s market. According to Bud, hypnosis is a very useful tool in retrieving lost memories: “So I connected myself with a psychiatrist and a couple of psychologists who were doing the hypnosis. And we began looking into a number of cases. Bob Matthews’ case is… a very good missing time case because of the fact that there is an indirect witness to his having been missing…” Bob’s recollections were so vivid that he was able to return to Cape Cod and reconstruct what he believed took place outside Dutra’s Market: “Under hypnosis, I observed in the sky, three lights moving in this direction. They hovered over here. And the red one came at me so fast… I walked up to… the ramp and I looked inside. And I saw four beings sitting… And the place reminded me of a doctor’s office.” There’s no question that Bob Matthews’ story of alien abduction stretches the imagination. The idea seems unbelievable, even to those who claimed it happened to them. But some take their stories even one step further than Bob’s. They say they’ve been victims of experiments… and they claim to have physical evidence to prove it. Budd Hopkins has organized support groups for these people so they can compare their disturbing experiences of missing time and alien abduction. Kristina Florence, a New York choreographer, believed she has had multiple experiences of missing time and alien abduction. In 1974, Kristina was 17-years-old when she, her mother, and her older sister crossed the Mojave Desert on their way to San Francisco. According to Kristina, their car overheated near Barstow, California, and they took the first exit off the highway: “Somewhere along the line we got to this park. My sister got out of the car and I heard her run around the back and all of a sudden she said, oh my God, come out here quick. And the next thing I remembered consciously was that we were lying on this blanket in the middle of the park as if we’d had a little nap, just lying there. Our mom was still not around. And we woke up and we were like, whoa, what happened. And then the next thing I remember, the three of us are just driving like hell. We never talked about it until my sister just called me up one day and we sort of began to talk about it further and realized that we’d both had this very bizarre memory of this missing time thing. And she knew about Budd and she suggested I get in touch with Budd.” Kristina took her sister’s advice and contacted Budd Hopkins. She agreed to undergo hypnosis, hoping she could recall some details about what had happened that afternoon in Barstow: “Under hypnosis, I started having this picture that my sister’s getting out of the car and then I get out of the car and I looked up and there was something above the car. And I was so scared, I didn’t know what it was… And I was trying to start the car and it wouldn’t start. Then the next memory that I had under the hypnosis was that I was on a table and there were some people around. There was this screen, it was about as wide as a large television screen but it was paper thin and it was just moving around the table and it wasn’t attached to anything. And I could see three-dimensional shapes of my skull and my whole body. It was just taking pictures. And it was just this huge spherical room that was just covered with dials, there wasn’t space. It was just dials. And I felt like they put like these rubber pants on me or something with things attached. And then they left the room. And I lay there and I was asking for my sister and somebody was telling me she’s okay, she’s alright… that’s the last thing I remember. Then we were back on the grass.” If Kristina’s abduction actually happened, then the question is: why? Bob Matthews may have the answer: “Ultimately the focus becomes reproductive and the interest seems to have to do with taking sperm and ova samples. And the whole central focus of the physical part of it seems to deal with the idea of an ongoing genetic experiment and these abductees are involuntary victims or specimen in this ongoing genetic experiment.” The idea of abduction by aliens may seem outrageous. Yet those who have experienced missing time episodes believe that is exactly what happened to them. Of course, there is no proof either way. Perhaps someday, science will discover a reason for missing time. Until then, the rest of us should just be glad that all of our minutes have been accounted for. Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season one with Robert Stack and season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.