Elliot Budd Hopkins was an American painter, sculptor and author who became the most influential early investigator of alien abduction reports. Already an established abstract artist in New York, he turned in the mid-1970s to interviewing people who believed they had been taken by non-human beings, and his books Missing Time (1981) and Intruders (1987) gave the subject much of the vocabulary and structure it still uses.

Hopkins was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on June 15, 1931, and contracted polio at the age of two, taking up drawing and watercolor during his recovery. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1953 he moved to New York, where he came to know Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. He held his first solo show in 1956, received a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting in 1976, and his work entered collections including the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His 1980s series of Temples and Guardians featured abstracted figures that some critics linked to his UFO interests, a connection he denied.

His path into the subject began with a daytime sighting of a dark elliptical object off Truro, Massachusetts, in August 1964. In 1975 he helped investigate George O'Barski's report of small figures collecting soil samples in North Hudson Park in New Jersey, and his March 1976 article about it in The Village Voice brought letters from other witnesses. Missing Time argued that many people had lost periods of memory during encounters. Intruders, which reached the New York Times paperback bestseller list, told the story of a woman he called Kathie Davis, later identified publicly as Debra Jordan-Kauble, and advanced his claim that abductions served a program of genetic experimentation. He founded the Intruders Foundation in Manhattan in 1989, helped design a 1991 Roper poll with David Jacobs and John Mack, and in 1996 published Witnessed, about an alleged 1989 abduction near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Hopkins had no formal psychological training and relied on regressive hypnosis he said he learned by watching professionals. Psychologist Robert Baker, debunker Philip Klass and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who identified suggestive cues in a taped session for the 1997 NOVA program Kidnapped by UFOs?, argued that his methods could create or shape memories. Hopkins replied that visiting professionals had observed his sessions and reported no leading, and critics also pointed to the absence of physical evidence such as implants or hybrid DNA. He passed away in New York on August 21, 2011, while in a relationship with journalist Leslie Kean.

Hopkins's influence was visible throughout 2026. Old NOVA footage of Hopkins discussing the beings' eyes and abductees' sketches circulated widely, and experiencer Steve Aspin traced the origins of abduction research through Hopkins and Jacobs on The Good Trouble Show. On the Bigelow Podcast, Robert Bigelow, Garry Nolan and George Knapp returned to the Roper poll, bedside encounters, memory and hypnosis. The pattern of missing time, repeated visitation and hypnotic recall that Hopkins laid out in Missing Time remains the framework most abduction researchers work within and the main target of their critics.