Hopkins met and encouraged self-proclaimed abductees to discuss their experiences by holding free monthly group therapy sessions.
Groups such as this were reported at the time as the most recent development in UFO-mania.
Attendees represented people from all walks of life: attorneys, policemen, teachers, airline pilots, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like.
Drawing as many as 20 people each month, these support meetings were, according to Hopkins, like other New York social events, complete with "dinner and a lot of social chatter."

Hopkins, trained as an artist not as a psychotherapist or social worker, described the people who attended these groups as veterans of trauma.
They were, in his view, victims who experienced often intrusive and painful physical examinations by their alien abductors and whose stories were best told through hypnosis.
Abduction memories, according to Hopkins, rarely emerged unaided and may, at first, present to the abductees as "vague anxieties, specific phobias, bad dreams, fragmentary and disturbing memories, or what seemed like an explicable episode of missing time."

Many of his attendees contacted Hopkins after reading his books or newspaper advertisements that included his books as reference material, seeing him on television programs such as Will Shriner, Sally Jessy Raphael, the Marsha Warfield Show, Charles Grodin and others.
Some critics interpreted these television appearances as a way for Hopkins and other UFO authors such as Whitley Strieber to recruit possible abductees.

Still other support group members attended the many UFO conferences held within the United States and internationally at which Hopkins was a speaker.
Hopkins met and encouraged self-proclaimed abductees to discuss their experiences by holding free monthly group therapy sessions. Groups such as this were reported at the time as the most recent development in UFO-mania. Attendees represented people from all walks of life: attorneys, policemen, teachers, airline pilots, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like. Drawing as many as 20 people each month, these support meetings were, according to Hopkins, like other New York social events, complete with "dinner and a lot of social chatter."
Hopkins, trained as an artist not as a psychotherapist or social worker, described the people who attended these groups as veterans of trauma. They were, in his view, victims who experienced often intrusive and painful physical examinations by their alien abductors and whose stories were best told through hypnosis. Abduction memories, according to Hopkins, rarely emerged unaided and may, at first, present to the abductees as "vague anxieties, specific phobias, bad dreams, fragmentary and disturbing memories, or what seemed like an explicable episode of missing time."
Many of his attendees contacted Hopkins after reading his books or newspaper advertisements that included his books as reference material, seeing him on television programs such as Will Shriner, Sally Jessy Raphael, the Marsha Warfield Show, Charles Grodin and others. Some critics interpreted these television appearances as a way for Hopkins and other UFO authors such as Whitley Strieber to recruit possible abductees.
Still other support group members attended the many UFO conferences held within the United States and internationally at which Hopkins was a speaker.
Budd Hopkins