Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, Hopkins survived childhood polio, graduated in art history from Oberlin College in 1953, and studied briefly at Columbia while working at the Museum of Modern Art.12
Throughout the 1960s–70s he exhibited abstract expressionist paintings and sculptural collages at the Whitney, MoMA, and SFMOMA, receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting in 1976.3 Circles, grids, and architectonic guards dominated his mature work, later shown in a 2017 Provincetown retrospective.
First UFO Observation
A broad-daylight sighting of a lens-shaped craft over Truro, Massachusetts in August 1964 convinced Hopkins "something unexplained was at work."4 The episode ignited a parallel vocation in ufology.
Transition from Witness to Researcher
Hopkins investigated the 1975 North Hudson Park landing in New Jersey, documented occupant footprints, and published the findings in The Village Voice. Letters from other witnesses—many describing missing time—led him to collaborate with psychologist Aphrodite Clamar and MUFON's Ted Bloecher.5
Abduction Methodology
Adapting forensic interviewing and hypnotic regression, Hopkins amassed more than 700 candidate cases. He organised patterns—screen memories, medical sampling, reproductive procedures—that remain the template employed by later scholars such as David M. Jacobs and John Mack.6
Major Works
Missing Time (1981) introduced the abduction schema; Intruders (1987) popularized the hybridisation thesis and reached The New York Times best-seller list; Witnessed (1996) analyzed the Brooklyn Bridge case; Sight Unseen (2003, with Carol Rainey) explored invisibility technology.7
Intruders Foundation
In 1989 he founded the Intruders Foundation to pair experiencers with licensed therapists, maintain a research archive, and brief media and scientific audiences. The organization's bulletin and conferences professionalised a previously marginal discourse.8
Legacy and Critique
Supporters hail Hopkins as "father of the abduction movement"; critics dispute the reliability of hypnotic memory and the paucity of physical evidence. Despite the debate, his protocols, terminology, and public advocacy shaped cultural and academic treatment of alleged alien contact for four decades.9
Death
Hopkins died of cancer in New York City on 21 August 2011, leaving a body of art in major museums and an enduring, if controversial, research paradigm.10