Interview with Thomas E. Bullard
By, Richard Thieme

RT: How do you get into this area?

TB: I have had an interest in UFOs since I was a kid. Spaceships were always interesting. I was in grad school in Folklore and when it came time to do a dissertation, the obvious thing was UFOs. This was the late seventies, and abductions were becoming well known. The Hill case had made some noise but it had remained isolated, not really integrated into thinking about UFOs, because it was so strange, so different. The case remained, but abduction did not become part of the thinking of UFOlogists for another ten years. By the time of the dissertation, abductions were becoming a leading edge of UFOlogy. As a folklorist I was fascinated by comparisons I could make between UFOs and fairy lore, journeys to the other world, shamanic initiation, so it was a happy convenience. I finished my dissertation in 1982 and saw this notice from FUFOR [Fund for UFO Research] and they wanted someone to do a bibliography on everything that had been done on abductions, a summary and analysis, and five years later I produced this study they were very pleased with.

RT: In terms of your initial presuppositions, what did you find?

TB: I initially thought it would turn out to be a psychological phenomena, some kind of hoax, and there wouldn’t be a great deal of consistency, it would turn out to be fantasies that people told differently or for psychological reasons of their own. I expected only a superficial consistency so I was surprised to find the situation was quite different.

RT: In its essence, what is it?

TB: I’ll have to hedge a bit on that. I found a degree of consistency that I could not explain in any of the psychological or folkloric terms such as urban legends. None of the conventional explanations that came readily to mind would account for this. So either there is literal truth to the accounts or it’s a very interesting socio-psychological problem of a sort that take us into uncharted territory. I can’t go one way or the other. My personal preference would be for some kind of conventional explanation but when I talk to some of these people, they are remarkably sincere, most of them seem to be sane intelligent people, yet they have this incredible story to tell.

RT: Does it make questions about hardware seem mundane now? Now that the abduction phenomena is in the room?

TB: Very much so. You can look at UFO phenomena in these two different ways. There’s hardware that when you kick it, it goes clang. With abductions, you have elements of that, but then there are elements of things that are so bizarre, like people floating, these creatures passing through solid walls.

RT: The more we talk about it, the more it becomes possible to think it. Now we can think of plasma encased craft the inhabitants of which do not get plastered against the wall by Gs. How do we find a common vocabulary to talk to one another about this?

TB: It’s very difficult. We don’t know the ontological categories in which to talk about this. Some of it must be imaginary. If they’re as they describe they are somewhat mentally impaired by the experience, they will not be able to fully describe what is happening to them. Some are angry or terrified, a lot of emotion clouds the issue as well. So it’s very hard to know – this particular story, we know this is a story, but what is its ontological status? Is it something really happening, is it mental, are the aliens doing it to them, is a dream or a hallucination?

RT: How much do you think is part of a process of being socialized to a construction of reality, as in religious experience? The stories taming the nightmare?

TB: It’s an evolving sort of thing. We began with the Hill abduction. There are a number of features of that story that were never schematized by the people looking at it. There were hints and clues of things going on that have become very common since then, but nobody noticed them at first. As the story has evolved and we learned what to look for, some of the elements – staring deep into the eyes of the captive – have emerged as a standard element. This thing has become so much a part of popular and mass culture that now, anybody could describe it. So it has become stereotyped as well. So on one hand, it is very hard to grasp and was not fully formulated at the early end and now it’s overformulated and some people are taking things like sleep paralysis and putting this imagery or interpretation onto that.

RT: Global transient amnesia?

TB: And Michael Persinger’s psychological theories. I don’t know ...

RT: Explaining a chimera with a chimera.

TB: Perhaps.

I still tend to be more of a nuts and bolts guy, following UFO thought from the early days when it was thought to be mechanical through the sixties when the “high strangeness” material was emphasized, Vallee proposing alternate universe theories, there again you’re explaining a chimera with a chimera. The trend has swung back to looking at the things as physical objects, although Mack or others look at abductions as spiritual phenomena.

RT: There has to be a spiritual component to an awesome experience. Trauma always throws people into a deeper place. This is traumatic stuff. whatever the source.

TB: We have to distinguish between the story – what they say happened – and how people interpret the story. Some feel it was a violation and others think it was the best thing that happened to them. But at its core, the stories that they tell are pretty much the same. That consistency of people who do not know much about the phenomenon, have never met Budd Hopkins, but are people who know very little about it and tell very similar stories and don’t know they’re doing it.

RT: Are there significant numbers of spontaneous reports without hypnosis?

TB: Of the early cases in the literature until 1985, about 20% were spontaneously recalled like Charles Hickson or Travis Walton. Most people remember something, it’s not like they had no inkling and something is being created under hypnosis. With the Hill case, it kind of spilled out under hypnosis, not a long process as with false memory cases where it takes months or years to build a false memory, the whole thing with the Hills just spilled out spontaneously once there was a breach in the wall. That's not the same a plying someone with leading questions for months and building a story. The variety of ways these things come out. Usually there is some conscious memory, maybe a lot maybe a little, sometimes the memories start coming back and sometimes they remember completely from the start. Often hypnosis just confirms what’s already there or fills it out a bit. There is so much variety in the way they come out, which exonerates the hypnosis a little bit. I am not confident that every case is entirely aboveboard but the variety leads me to say it’s not the cause of it.

RT: Any physical evidence of any kind?

TB: There have been a lot of claims of that. Some say ground traces, missing fetuses, body scars, implants. The problem with all of that is that it’s not certain the two are tied together. Scars not observed before can be incorrectly associated with it. There is no good documentation on missing fetuses, so you have to wonder – are they real, psychologicals, hoaxes, or false pregnancy positives? Supposedly a number of implants have been recovered, but one was analyzed and turned out to be conventional. Lear has taken some out and claims they have unusual properties but I have never seen a good scientific analysis.

RT: How would you structure that event, the evidence documented to the lab etc.?

TB: First you have to have the money to do it. Find a lab that can do it and will do it. An investigator who will protect their anonymity and carry the object through the course. It has not happened all that often and the cases I know about, most of the analyses have been left hanging, they would not be convincing to a skeptical scientist. So either there’s nothing defined or UFOlogy never achieved what it needs, being an amateur operation. The strongest argument against a physical phenomena is that something that should be producing evidence is not.

RT: What about conscious deception? or disinformation?

TB: UFOs started out as something the government and military wished they did not have to deal with. They were afraid at first it might be a serious threat. and even though it did not turn out to be that, it made them look bad. The problem was, what are we going to do with this? Project Blue Book was pretty much a publicity front that did not do any real research. Did the government know something and were hiding something at a higher level, or did they sincerely believe it was not worth the effort? Some say Roswell was the definitive event. I don’t believe that. I don’t think however highly placed it would be, they could keep a secret of that magnitude for so long and so well.

You have to remember how Roswell started to come out. It first sounded good. People getting on in years recalled what had happened and did not want to die and leave the secret unspoken. As it went along, you no longer got a consistent story. More and more people began to tell their own stories and the whole thing began to blow completely out of proportion. You got more than one space ship, live aliens, off the wall stories like tunnels under New Mexico, and it became a classic case of folklore. There was something that crashed there, but I don’t think it was unconventional. Maybe it was a mogul balloon. Or a conflation of the V-rocket crashes during tests – one crashed in Mexico just over the border nearly exactly a year later –

RT: Why not admit what happened, then? Why keep it secret and issue silly reports that intensify paranoia?

TB: I am saying that memory, over a period of decades, can put things together and create an urban legend out of it. I think there was a genuine crash of something, I just don’t think it was a spaceship. That story of the manikins sounds like guys sitting around the office trying to think up something to say. They sure shot themselves in the foot.

I’ve never been very impressed with MJ-12. Some of the particulars attributed to it sound hokey to me, so I never gave it much credence. There may be an organization but I don’t know.

I have a Ph.D. in folklore but I work for the library doing basic technical services type work, nothing scholarly. All of the scholarship I do is on my own.

RT: Any most compelling account?

TB: A year ago, January 7, there was a sighting of a big thing with lots of lights on it, Venus had not yet risen and even Klass said it wasn’t Venus. Another is the Reverend Gill sighting, which I have researched. It sounds very impressive to me. I have not found anything to contradict it. One person argued there was a shrimp boat on the water with bright lights and a mirage-like illusion made it look like it was in the air. I wrote to Gill and he said it was hovering over land. It could not have been a boat mistaken for an aerial object. Gill is still alive and has never changed his story. He said all he could say about it in his initial report and never elaborated, he tried to add clarity but no additional information or details.

A folklorist does not try to establish the reality of a particular story. We were burned on that in the last century. But there are certain things to look for in a folk narrative. Some become internalized and are described as if it were a personal experience, but that does not necessarily make it real. If you have a folk narrative, you will get variations. People do not tell the same story over and over in exactly the same way. If you have too much consistency, you have to be suspicious that there is some kind of experiential basis behind something. David Hubbard a folklorist, went to Newfoundland and collected a number of accounts of the “old hag,” waking in the night feeling paralyzed, a presence rushes into the room, you can’t breathe, and it suddenly goes away. There was a folk tradition about that. Students reported having the same experience but there was nothing about an old hag. People had the experience without knowing anything about the story, so there has to be an experience separate from the story. The experience in that case was the root cause of the narrative. This phenomena seems to be the basis for a folk tradition. But if the narratives are just fantasies or stories that are retold, there will be a lot of variation.

RT: So what do you really think we’re really dealing with, with abduction phenomena?

TB: One factor that has not been explored fully is what kind of personality these people have. They do not light up with any kinds of oddities through MMPI and the like or sexual abuse. There is a wide range of people but they tend to be normal on average.

RT: Any pattern?

TB: Not in the people.

RT: What about wispy haired hybrids?

TB: You can’t make sense of it. But there is a kind of deep logic to it. There are stories of people being rejected because they were too old, which would not make sense unless people were being used for sexual purposes. The aliens seem to take note of vasectomies or hysterectomies. There are images of other worlds, always a barren looking devastated place or a lush looking place that has characteristics of a subterranean environment, which might indicate something wrong with their planet. The interest in reproductive organs to the exclusion of everything else. They never examine the digestive system, the nervous system seldom.

RT: But the medical investigations have not changed over decades. Here on earth, medicine at my hospital has changed a lot. .

TB: It’s a very strange sort of thing. It has not adapted as you would expect a story to adapt, it has not developed. The technology does not change, which is strange. It’s odd however you take it. A story would update itself better than it has, although there has been some change – ecological damage instead of nuclear threats. But not the kind of widespread sort of change you would expect either from technological societies like ours or fantasizers and story tellers. It doesn’t mimic Hollywood movies, which have more variety than these stories. The bottom line is, it doesn’t fit into any category easily.

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