DR. HOPKINS' STRANGE VISITATION
DR. HOPKINS' STRANGE VISITATION
In September 1976, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, a 58 year-old doctor and hypnotist, was acting as consultant on an alleged UFO teleportation case in Maine. One evening, when his wife and children had gone out leaving him alone, the telephone rang and a man identifying himself as vice-president of the New Jersey UFO Research Organization asked if he might visit Dr. Hopkins that evening to discuss certain details of the case. Dr. Hopkins agreed; at the time, it seemed the natural thing to do. He went to the back door to switch on the light so that his visitor would be able to find his way from the parking lot, but while he was there, he noticed the man already climbing the porch steps. "I saw no car, and even if he did have a car, he could not have possibly gotten to my house that quickly from any phone," Hopkins later commented in delayed astonishment.
At the time, Dr. Hopkins felt no particular surprise as he admitted his visitor, The man was dressed in a black suit, with black hat, tie and shoes, and a white shirt, "I thought, he looks like an undertaker," Hopkins later said. His clothes were immaculate - suit unwrinkled, trousers sharply creased. When he took off his hat, he revealed himself as completely hairless, not only bald but without eyebrows or eyelashes. His skin was dead white, his lips bright red. In the course of their conversation, he happened to brush his lips with his grey suede gloves, and the doctor was astonished to see that his lips were smeared and that the gloves were stained with lipstick!
It was only afterwards, however, that Dr. Hopkins reflected further on the strangeness of his visitor's appearance and behavior. Particularly odd was the fact that his visitor stated that his host had two coins in his pocket. It was indeed the case. He then asked the doctor to put one of the coins in his hand and to watch the coin, not himself. As Hopkins watched, the coin seemed to go out of focus, and then gradually vanished. "Neither you nor anyone else on this plane will ever see that coin again," the visitor told him. After talking a little while longer on general UFO topics, Dr. Hopkins suddenly noticed that the visitor's speech was slowing down. The man then rose unsteadily to his feet and said, very slowly; "My energy is running low—must go now—goodbye." He walked falteringly to the door and descended the outside steps uncertainly, one at a time. Dr. Hopkins saw a bright light shining in the driveway, bluish-white and distinctly brighter than a normal car lamp. At the time, however, he assumed it must be the stranger's car, although he neither saw nor heard it.
Later, when Dr. Hopkins family had returned, they examined the driveway and found marks that could not have been made by a car because they were in the center of the driveway, where the wheels could not have been. But the next day, although the driveway had not been used in the meantime, the marks had vanished.
Dr. Hopkins was very much shaken by the visit, particularly when he reflected on the extraordinary character of the stranger's conduct. Not surprisingly, he was so scared that he willingly complied with his visitor's instruction, which was to erase the tapes of the hypnotic sessions he was conducting with regard to his current case, and to have nothing further to do with the investigation.
Subsequently, curious incidents continued to occur both in Dr. Hopkin's household and in that of his eldest son. He presumed that there was some link with the extraordinary visit, but he never heard from his visitor again. As for the New Jersey UFO Research Organization, no such institution exists.
Dr. Hopkins' account is probably the most detailed we have of a MIB (Man in Black) visit, and confronts us with the problem at its most bizarre. First we must ask ourselves if a trained and respected doctor would invent so strange a tale, and if so, with what conceivable motive? Alternatively, could the entire episode have been a delusion, despite the tracks seen by other members of his family? Could the truth lie somewhere between reality and imagination? Could a real visitor, albeit an impostor making a false identity claim, have visited the doctor for some unknown reason of his own, somehow acting as a trigger for the doctor to invent a whole set of weird features?
In fact, what seems the LEAST likely explanation is that the whole incident took place in the doctor's imagination. When his wife and children came home, they found him severely shaken, with the house lights blazing, and seated at a table on which lay a gun. They confirmed the marks on the driveway and a series of disturbances to the telephone that seemed to commence immediately after the visit. So it would seem that some real event occurred, although its nature remains mystifying.
