Friday, April 01, 2011

New excerpt from rough cut of Carol Rainey's documentary "Priests of High Strangeness: Co-Creation of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon"



Even as a rough cut, this is more compelling material from Ms. Rainey.

One thing to note - while I suspect that many people will focus on "Linda Cortile's" sharing in the profits from Hopkins' work on her "case", I see nothing wrong with that, in theory. It all depends on the context, and timing.

One could just as easily say that if "Cortile" received nothing, and Hopkins was the sole person to profit from her story, that he was exploiting her for profit.

The issue of whether a witness should profit from their story, and to what extent, is not an easy question to answer, and it varies from case to case, and person to person. However, a good basic rule of thumb, at least to me, is that anyone who looks for money up front is incredibly suspect; anyone who is offered a piece of the profits by a researcher after-the-fact might not be telling the truth, but if they're lying it's probably not because they're motivated by profit.

Having said that, I'll add that the part of this segment from Ms. Rainey's rough cut that stands out to me is the story about someone trying to kidnap "Cortile" - how ridiculous the story seems on its face, and how easily and completely Hopkins swallows it, and immediately links it to her alleged "abduction".

If someone tried to grab me on the streets of New York, or anywhere else, I would report it to the police, not Budd Hopkins. Wouldn't you?

Ms. Rainey is absolutely right about one key thing: what Hopkins was engaged in wasn't objective research.

Paul Kimball

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