Strange Arrivals is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

In late spring, I interviewed documentary filmmaker Carol Rainey.

For 10 years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she was married to the artist and prominent UFO researcher Bud Hopkins.

Even before they were married, she worked with him on his research.

She was inside that community as alien abductions peaked in public consciousness and the stories

reach the Zenith of their strangeness. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals. I'm Carol Rainey and I was married for 10 years to Bud Hopkins, abstract expressionist painter and

UFO researcher.

And I came from a background of spending 20 years

making films for epidemiologists in the Boston area.

And that involved writing many, many grants

to National Institutes of Health, along with the epidemiologists, and we brought in millions

in grant funding to make films about issues of public health. I don't come from a science background originally,

but in all of those years of working for epidemiologists and later in New York City with the major medical institutions like New York Presbyterian.

I learned a lot about how scientists think about protocols, how they think about their hypothesis about some

phenomena in the natural world and how they go about gaining real knowledge in the real world.

And that was pretty wonderful to know about.

What was Bud's sort of hypothesis about alien abductions?

I would say he started developing that even before his first book, Missing Time.

But he had a pretty good line on the narrative that many people in the United States were being out and about in a

lonely place somewhere where nobody else was, you know, out riding along at night in their

car. And if they'd stop and get out, there would be a bright light overhead and there would be a UFO looking at them and

Eventually the light would get extremely close and the person would be pulled up a beam of light into the alien craft.

...