The UFO Abduction of Robert Matthews

On October 1st, 1966, a young airman named Robert Matthews was set to be picked up for his first tour with the US Air Force. However, strange lights in the sky derailed his plans, in addition to inexplicably losing an entire hour.

After meeting with Ufologist and author, Budd Hopkins, Matthews quickly realized his past has more paranormal experiences than he originally thought.

Listen now!

Have you ever seen something strange and unexplainable in the sky?

What would you do if you seemingly lost an entire hour of time in a matter of minutes?

Could alien activity be the cause?

What is up, Bizarros? This week, we dive into the UFO Abduction of Robert Matthews.

The Alien Abduction Of Robert Matthews On Outer Cape Cod

(Sources: Unsolved mysteries, mysterious universe, New England folklore, and Cape Cod Times.)

So, this potential alien encounter begins on October 1st, 1966, and involves 19-year-old First Class Airman Robert Matthews.

He had just arrived in Cape Cod’s Village of North Truro, Massachusetts, via a bus in order to be picked up by the US Air Force.

It was his first tour, and the base that he’d be working at was the nearby North Truro Air Force Station.

The time was 8:45 p.m., and his bus stop was right in front of Dutra’s Market.

He noted that the area was pretty much deserted, as there was no one else there to be picked up by the air force except himself.

As the bus that dropped him off drove away, he made his way over to the phone booth attached to the market and dialed the Air Force base.

He alerted them that he had just been dropped off in front of the Dutra market and bus stop.

They told him to stay there and that a truck was on the way to pick him up. He should just chill and wait patiently, and they would be there shortly.

It’s also worth noting that the North Truro Air Force Station was literally only a couple of miles from the pickup location, so theoretically, it should not take long for them to arrive.

Maybe just a few minutes or so.

Anyway, he was standing around, kicking the dirt to kill time, when he noticed something up above him.

It was 3 strange lights.

Not stationary lights, like a star, or something typical like an airplane.

Rather, it was an erratic craft that had 3 lights attached to it.

It was moving back and forth, from right to left, across the night sky. Then, it started moving closer to Matthews.

Immediately, his mind started eliminating what this strange craft could be. They were nothing like anything he’d ever witnessed in his life.

He was initially dumbfounded, but his confusion was quickly replaced with fear.

Fear that felt odd and irrational because he did not particularly feel like he was in danger.

However, this dread sent chills down his spine.

He stared at the strange lights a few moments longer and felt an urge to leave, to get out there as quickly as possible.

Even though he logically knew calling the base wouldn’t change anything, at this point, logic was out the window.

He ran back to the phone booth, called the Air Force base in a panic, pleaded with them to hurry, and explained that something weird was happening.

The Air Force Base asked Matthews where he had gone.

Without missing a beat, Matthews told them he’d been there the whole time, he had just called them in fact.

Matthews was shocked when the Air Force base informed him that they actually had arrived at the bus stop.

No one was there.

This left Matthews speechless.

A quote from Matthews:

“When I called the base again, they asked me where I’d been, and I told them I’d been there in front of Dutra’s waiting, you know? And he told me, well, we sent a truck down there already. And I said, well, I’ve been standing here waiting, and no one’s been by here.”

They told him that the dispatched truck arrived, looked around, and could not find Matthews, so it turned around and returned to the base.

That was over an hour ago, the airman told Matthews.

None of this made any sense to Matthews.

Even if he had been over by the phone when the truck arrived, they still would have easily seen Matthews – he was the only one there.

Plus, it had only been a few minutes since they last called, right?

He checked his watch.

A full hour had passed – it was now 9:45 p.m.

Sheepishly, he asked them to send the truck out again as he realized he had no real explanation for what had happened or the extreme loss of time.

When Matthews got to the Air Force Base, he was extensively questioned, essentially interrogated, on where he had been and what actually happened.

Matthews had no idea. He had no clear-cut answers. For a while, he thought this interrogation may have actually been a part of their basic training.

In his mind, he truly had only been waiting for about 5 minutes or so between when he first called, and they told him a truck had been dispatched and the second time he called when an hour had passed.

The only memories he had in between were walking back to the front of Dutra’s Market and seeing the strange moving lights in the sky.

They kept asking Matthews what kind of aircraft he saw and what exactly it did. Again, he had no answers.

Unfortunately, the officials at the Air Force base did not believe him and thought it was more likely that he had been drinking or just lying about being late.

Matthews stuck to his story, though, and for the time, that was that.

Regardless, the whole affair was eventually forgotten about, and he went to work at the base and would later serve in the Vietnam War.

As time went on, though, the strange incident gnawed away at Matthews in the back of his mind.

Also, very strangely, the more time that passed since the incident, he seemed to get more and more fragmented memories that were hard for him to place but felt related to his potential UFO experience.

It wasn’t vivid by any stretch of the term, but he could vaguely recall strange, inhuman faces and what seemed like a medical room.

But he couldn’t put the pieces of it all together. Not until he stumbled upon something that completely changed the entire experience for Matthews.

By pure chance, in 1987, Matthews stumbled upon a book written by Ufologist Budd Hopkins – titled Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions.

This book gave Matthews an epiphany. Here is a quote from Matthews:

“I was on vacation looking for something to read, and on the shelf there in front of me, I saw this book with this creature on it, you know. I read the book, and I thought someone had stepped into my head and taken my innermost fears and put them in a book. It brought tears to my eyes, you know, I couldn’t believe this was actually happening to someone else.”

Immediately after reading the book, he contacted the author, Budd Hopkins.

After several meetings, discussions, and interviews, Hopkins believed every word of Matthews’ story and was convinced that his missing time was certainly caused by an alien abduction.

He told Matthews that he was not alone, that it’s actually very common for victims of alien abductions to have difficulty recalling exactly what occurred aboard their spaceship.

The aliens likely wiped the human’s memory, and they would wake up later without any idea of what happened, where they have been, and may not even be conscious that time has passed.

Typically, the biggest giveaways for abduction victims are when someone has somewhere to be or when a person randomly finds themselves misplaced, such as a faraway location that would make no sense.

In Hopkin’s words:

“It is not perceived as a break in which something happens and then a resumption. It is remembered as continuous time, and you realize that a half-hour trip turns out to be a two-hour trip or whatever, and this is sometimes experienced in conjunction with a UFO sighting or something like a light.”

So, as a ufologist, Hopkins was familiar with post-abduction conditions that people suffer and also very empathetic, as he organized support groups for these people to compare stories and realize they are not alone.

From his experience and the fact that Matthews had fragmented memories, Hopkins suspected that Matthews did retain vivid memories of what occurred on the spaceship somewhere inside his mind.

It was just how to go about retrieving these memories.

In Hopkins’ opinion, that would be hypnosis.

This would allow Matthews to slip into his subconscious and essentially pull the memories out from where they have been hiding.

Matthews decided ignorance is not, in fact, bliss and opted to do a hypnotic regression session with Hopkins.

While the idea of finding out exactly what happened made him anxious, he couldn’t stand the gnawing of what actually happened and decided it would be better to know, regardless of what was uncovered.

Before I go further – question across the board: if you truly believed you were abducted, would you want to know or not?

Under hypnosis, Matthews was able to recall many more details of what had happened.

He explained that the lights he had seen in the sky that night had approached him at a rapid pace and that it was some sort of otherworldly flying spacecraft.

This ship had then landed, and a ramp had lowered, revealing odd, humanoid, alien-looking beings standing within.

Matthews said that these entities had led him into the craft, where he was examined in an area that looked like a sterile medical room of some kind.

He claimed that the aliens looked at his chest, took samples from his body, and probed him before depositing him back where they had found them when they were through.

Somehow even crazier, though, there was an even deeper layer for Matthews that was uncovered during this hypnosis session.

Hopkins discovered that this was not the first interaction Matthews had experienced with aliens. He had an encounter at a much younger age.

Apparently, when Matthews was just 5 or 6 years old, he witnessed a green glowing figure in his bedroom.

Terrified, Matthews tried to scream but realized that there was no sound coming out of his mouth.

Then suddenly, the glowing figure darted toward him, lifted up his pajama top, and examined his chest.

He claimed under hypnosis that at the time, he mentioned this experience to his parents, but they ignored him, thinking he was only experiencing a bad dream.

Also, this wasn’t explicitly said, but he claimed that the glowing aliens from his experience as a child looked exactly like the alien on the cover of Hopkin’s book Missing Time.

So, that could have been another reason that this book stood out to Matthews, aside from the title. It could have hit a nerve based on this repressed memory.

So overall, Hopkins and many in the Ufology world believe Matthews.

His case fits well with other examples of the missing time phenomenon and is aided by the fact that, technically, there were witnesses – the Air Force truck drivers.

Time Loss Stories

Time Loss Story #1

Some years ago, my husband and I were driving home in rural western PA . We pulled over to look at something strange in the night sky. A weird light.

Somehow, we lost about two hours of time. We “woke up” in a cold car, which was now out of gas.

I would like to talk to anyone who may have had a similar experience. thank you

Story 2 – Inner-Foundation_848

Hello all – I’ve been feeling very crazy about this because this happened in a town of over 2000 people, and no one else ever mentioned seeing it.

I took my dog out after dark, about 9ish. I looked up to see this huge hovering triangle craft right above the tree line, so it was very low.

I watched this thing for a good 10 minutes, just barely moving.

It’s very strange because I don’t remember watching it disappear or anything like that.

All I remember is seeing it being shocked and looking at all the lights underneath the craft.

Then I was back inside, and I don’t remember going back inside. It was like I had missed time after seeing it.

But I was fine. My dog was fine and back inside with me. I don’t know what that was or what happened.

Story 3 – skull drudgery

So I was probably 13 or so, 6th-7th grade.

I had a friend spending the night; we had stayed up playing Nintendo, talking, whatever, so about 11:30, we turned off the TV and were getting settled in for bed.

My room was on the second floor, and a window faced out behind the house towards the back of our farm.

For some reason, we looked out the window and saw a light in the sky. It was moving back and forth quickly, obviously wasn’t an airplane or anything I’d ever seen.

It didn’t appear close and wasn’t much larger than a star. Well, we watched this light for what seemed like 5-10 minutes and remarked how strange it was.

The next thing I knew, I looked at my clock, and it was 1:40 a.m…. I have no idea what happened, no memory, just an odd feeling, like what happened to the last 2+ hours.

My friend and I both just went to bed and never mentioned it again, and this is the first time I’ve ever spoken of it. Still kinda spooks me to think about it, so I honestly try not to, but I had to tell my story.

Story 4 – Commander Jim

I dont know how else to put it. I’ve been thinking this over for the past week, trying to come up with an explanation, but I just can’t. So here is what happened.

Last Sunday night, I decided to go by myself to watch Wonder Woman.

The cinema is about half an hour’s drive with a long empty country road between my town and the town with the cinema.

The session was at 8 p.m., so I set an alarm on my phone for 7:15 to remind me to leave.

So I left at that time, went to the cinema and asked for a ticket for the 8 p.m. Wonder Woman session.

The girl looks at me a bit odd but gives me the ticket. I walk down the corridor and notice the door to the cinema is closed (odd, I think, maybe it’s because I’m a bit early). I open it, and the movie is playing, and clearly well into it from what’s on screen.

So I walk back out and look at my watch, which is reading 9:00 pm. I felt very confused, and I must have looked it as one of the workers came over and asked me if I needed help. “I thought I was going to see the 8 p.m. session”. “Well, you’re only an hour late,” he replies with a laugh.

Trying to figure out what happened, I took my phone out to check the alarm. maybe I’d set it an hour late by accident and accidentally fallen asleep for an hour or something, but no, the alarm was still on the phone and showing as 7:15, which was the time I left as I remember it going off as I was walking out the door.

Stranger, yet I cannot remember the drive over. Like, at all. I remember getting into my car and driving through my town, and I remember arriving at the cinema and driving into the car park, but in between, there is nothing but a huge blank.

The drive is over a windy mountain pass known as Razorback Range, which is a known UFO hotspot, and people have reported lost time in the past.

It’s also kind of a pain in the ass of a drive, which is why only 15 minutes or so after having driven it, it was so strange that I had no memory of the drive at all.

So somehow, between leaving my house at 7:15 pm and getting to my destination at around 9 pm, there is a full hour that has just vanished.

I should also say that for the past week, my car has been covered with what looks like a layer of fine white ash, which is pretty weird.

I can’t say for sure it got there that night as I didn’t notice then in the dark, and it is the middle of winter here, and some people in the neighborhood have fireplaces lit, though it’s strange that none of my neighbors’ cars are affected by it, and it never happened before.

And the ash is very fine, like powder.

So yeah, just a very odd experience. Thanks for reading!

Is The Robert Matthews Abduction True?

What do you think, Bizarros? 

A lot of people think abduction by aliens may seem far-fetched. Do you think Robert Matthews was abducted?

Or was there another explanation for the lost time that Matthews experienced?

Let us know what you think in the comments.