Missing Time

The gap in the drive home. Hypnosis fills it with things people wish it wouldn't.

The signature gap in abduction accounts, named by Budd Hopkins' 'Missing Time' (1981): drivers arriving hours late with no memory of the interval. Documented explanations cover most cases — highway hypnosis, fugue states, sleep intrusions — and hypnotic regression, the tool that filled the gaps with abduction narratives, is now considered memory-contaminating by mainstream psychology (the false-memory literature grew partly from these cases). The unexplained residue: multiple-witness episodes like the Allagash four and Travis Walton's crew. Links the Hill case (the template), hypnosis-based recall (the method and its problem), and fairy-lore's identical time-slip motif centuries earlier.