The Hopkins Effect

• Debbie Jordan and Kathy Mitchell. Abducted: The Story of the Intruders Continues. Carrol and Graf /Richard Gallen, 1994. 
• Katharina Wilson, The Alien Jigsaw. Puzzle Books, 1994.
• Katharina Wilson, The Alien Jigsaw Workbook. Puzzle Books, 1994. 

🔻The heroine of Intruders (better known as Debbie Twomey, a.k.a. Kathy Davies) and her sister give their own story, including the chunks that Budd Hopkins left out.

Here we can see that they have gone through (or at least claimed to have gone through) the whole range of paranormal experiences; ghosts and poltergeists plague them and they become channellers. Debbie has episodes when ideas rush through her head as if from outside; she claims to have ESP powers, and a Geller-like ability to bend metal. No doubt much of this has emerges as Debbie has moved away from the Hopkins orbit, and towards more post-­secularist ufologists like John Campbell, Forrest Crawford and Vicki Lyons.

By her own account Debbie's adolescence was extremely troubled, with a huge range of illnesses which even she suspects may have been largely psychosomatic, and behavioural problems which at one point led her parents to refer her to a psychiatrist. These are the symptoms which we have come to expect from both alleged abduction and alleged ritual abuse 'recovered memory' victims, along with the mood­ swings from being painfully shy to 'wild-child'. In adult life this transforms into periods of 'sensing the inter-connectedness of everything', periods of compulsive writing, hypersensitiveness and deep depression. Some of her problems may have been caused by childhood bullying, but as they also seem to be shared with her sister we might suspect some genetically based medical condition.

Given that Debbie's husband died after just six months of marriage and she had just had a hysterectomy, she was clearly going to need all the support she could get. Budd Hopkins' reaction was to tell her that she was one of the last female abductees to still have all her female parts, and that this happening was probably just a matter of time, seems rather insensitive, and belies the impression of sympathetic old Uncle Budd.

Katharina Wilson, like Debbie Jordan, suffers from classic 'abduction personality' symptoms: extreme fear of the dark, near-paranoid anxiety states and mood swings. In her case there are clear non-ufological reasons why she might be suffering from post-traumatic stress: the deaths of her best friend and a kitten K.W. had given her, in a fire, and a string of abusive relationships. In one such with a born-again Christian, she was told that a light on a wall was Jesus preventing Satan taking her away. Her husband was a weapon-obsessed military man who told her he was obsessed with thoughts of killing her, then when she was pregnant, told her to choose between abortion or divorce.

Not surprisingly she has nightmares connected with abortion, which - especially after filling in a questionnaire and meeting dear old Uncle Budd - she is now convinced are abductions. She started keeping a dream journal, and found, as keepers of such journals do, that she remembers more and more of her dreams, which are becoming ever more vivid. These are like .lucid dreams, but without the insight that one is dreaming. Debbie Jordan called the 'virtual reality dreams' - a useful phrase.

Wilson interprets them as abductions and the bizarre scenarios as dramas staged by the Greys. They reflect her fears, dreams of kittens (like the one burned in the fire), about babies (like the one she was forced to have aborted), about sinister military types (like her shit of an ex-husband), and about her own passionate rage. The dreams in which she is taken into military bases where she witnesses collaboration with aliens reflect the latest trends in ufological folklore. -- Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 56, June 1996.