Missing time

In the early '70s, Lear owned and skippered the twelve-meter America's Cup boat So-Soliloquy out of Marina del Rey.

Lear's interest in UFOs began after reading Budd Hopkins' book, Missing Time, and then a chance encounter with a US Air Force pilot who was at a base in England where an extraterrestrial craft landed in December of 1980.

Ladies and gentlemen, John Lear.

Good morning, John.

In other words, uh, he has simply come to the point where he's absolutely convinced, yes, we're being visited, uh, and, and the only remaining area of interest is not whether to try to prove the saucers are out there, but, uh, figure out why these aliens are interested in human beings and why they're taking them.

Well, let me tell you something about Budd Hopkins.

When I first, uh, read Missing Time, uh, which was his first, uh, book about this, I was really intrigued, that somewhere s- something inside me told me this stuff is true.

And at the time, I worked for this, uh, major charter company that I eventually got fired from.

And that's what he's researching and what he's into.

In 1981, he publishes a book called Missing Time.

In 1987, he publishes a book called Intruders, in which he argues that people experience abductions without consciously remembering them.

But kind of in the place of that, they experience missing time, title of the book.

Strange dreams, unexplained fears, phobias, fragmented memories.

So a lot of this weird stuff happens to the mind.

Um, as Dave Jacobs once said to me, and I'm paraphrasing here, all of our attention was focused on the cars and none on the drivers.

The fact is this book came out in nineteen seventy-nine, a full two years before Bud Hopkins' Missing Time, which puts it in a very special place.

Also it was researched as, um, Dr. Hynek tells us by one of the original research team members that worked with him when he returned his attention to that letter and realized this had potential tremendous importance.

He asked Fowler, uh, Raymond Fowler i-if he would lead the investigation.