Missing Time

Missing time is an unaccounted-for gap in a witness's memory surrounding a UFO encounter — hours passing that felt, subjectively, like only minutes, with the witness typically arriving somewhere much later than a normal drive or walk should have taken. Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 New Hampshire case introduced the concept to ufology when the couple realized their trip home had taken roughly two hours longer than the route should require, a discrepancy they initially couldn't explain. Budd Hopkins formalized "missing time" as a named diagnostic marker in his influential 1981 book of the same title, arguing that an unexplained time gap — even without any consciously recalled encounter — could itself be evidence of a suppressed abduction, and encouraging witnesses with such gaps to seek hypnotic regression to recover what happened. That recommendation is exactly what makes missing time controversial: memory researchers point out that ordinary experiences — highway hypnosis, simple misjudgment of elapsed time, an unremembered stop — account for the great majority of perceived time gaps, and that treating a gap as presumptive abduction evidence, then using hypnosis to "fill" it, risks constructing the very memory it claims to uncover. Missing time nonetheless remains one of the standard screening questions abduction researchers ask prospective witnesses.