The Man with the Red Mouth
Activities of MiB in the USA did not shrivel to nothing in the ’70s. Although frequency began to diminish, the decade produced one of the most detailed of all MiB encounter stories. In 1976, a sixtyish physician named Herbert Hopkins worked as a general practitioner in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. He had an interest in hypnosis, and had used hypnotherapy to help a pair of locals recall their UFO sighting and subsequent abduction. On October 27, 1975, Tripp Pond residents Danny Stephens and a friend now recalled only as Paul were taken aboard a UFO and examined by what the young men described as “a box.”
Although the abduction seemed brief, Stephens and Paul shortly realized that hours, and not minutes, had passed. Each was further disconcerted by a peculiar orange glow that surrounded—or perhaps originated in—their eyes. The next day, a burly man in a dark suit and sunglasses found the pair’s trailer home.
Consistent with such meetings, the MiB ordered the men to say nothing about their experience.
The bravado of youth (Stephens was just twenty-one) encouraged the pair to see Hopkins, who grew excited when hypnotic regression filled gaps in Stephen and Paul’s memories. On the evening of September 11, 1976 (eleven months after Hopkins’s session with Stephens and Paul), the doctor took a nighttime phone call at his home from a man who identified himself as a leader of the New Jersey UFO Research Organization. The caller requested a brief visit. Hopkins complied.
The caller showed up just moments later (cell phones did not exist at the time), and Hopkins naturally wondered where the call had originated. In his attire, the visitor conformed to some aspects of the MiB type: black suit, black shoes, white shirt with dark tie. But unlike some MiB, the man filled out his clothes well, and kept his suit and shirt carefully pressed. He eschewed sunglasses (a concession to the night) but covered his hands in gray suede gloves.
The man removed his dark hat (whether out of deference or so Hopkins could see him clearly, Hopkins did not know), revealing a bald head. The penetrating aspect of the man’s eyes was exaggerated by a lack of eyelashes and eyebrows. His red lips stood out starkly against his deathly white skin. (Later in the visit, the man absently brought a gloved hand to his mouth, and Hopkins was startled to see that the suede came away with a red smear of lipstick. One account claims that when Hopkins looked at his guest more closely, he saw a slit where a human mouth should be.)
The visitor was brusque but polite—though he gave Hopkins a chill when he blandly revealed that he knew how to remove human hearts without leaving a scar. Getting down to business, the man told Hopkins to erase the regression tapes from the previous year. Although the remark about hearts still hung in the air, the visitor expressed his request not as a threat, but as a simple order that the visitor expected to be obeyed. (Hopkins later did as the man instructed.)
And then the visitor performed an impressive parlor trick. He said Hopkins’s pocket held two coins. Correct. Hopkins brought them out. The visitor put one aside, and left the other in Hopkins’s palm. “Do not look at me,” the visitor said, “but at the coin.” Hopkins obeyed. In a moment, the coin blurred to blue and shimmered in Hopkins’s gaze, as if, he said later, “it was going out of focus.” The coin vanished.
Hopkins gave his hand an involuntary flex. He looked at his visitor, who said, “Neither you nor anyone else on this plane will ever see that coin again.” (Some accounts substitute “planet” for “plane.”) The man suddenly appeared weary. He said something about his “energy” running low. The visit was over. Hopkins walked with his guest to the door, and felt compelled to close it the moment the man stepped outside. Through the drapes, Hopkins saw a moving, blue-white light in the driveway, but neither heard nor saw an automobile. Marks on the driveway (a dirt or gravel one, presumably) were not consistent with car tires. The next morning, the marks were gone.
For weeks afterward, Hopkins had trouble placing and receiving phone calls.
When he reflected on his destruction of the Stephens and Paul tapes, he felt that he did it from compulsion rather than fear.
In a coda to many (but not every) account of Dr. Hopkins’s adventure, the doctor’s son John, and John’s wife Maureen, agreed to meet a peculiar man and woman at a restaurant. The meeting eventually moved to John and Maureen’s house, and the strange couple (attired in old-fashioned clothes) behaved more strangely than before. When the woman was inexplicably unable to step around her companion she complained, “I can’t move him.” John Hopkins went into the kitchen, and the strange man seized the opportunity: he asked Maureen, “What are you made of?” Then he inquired if she had nude photographs of herself.
Assuming this part of the Hopkins narrative is true, it appears that this “MiB” couple needed to brush up on their social skills—or were aliens with no knowledge or interest in such skills.