Claim: Budd Hopkins was terrified by radio play The War of the Worlds and he considered the radio play a hoax but renewed his interested in UFOs in 1964 and partnered with David M. Jacobs.
Evidence: This both terrified Hopkins and his family and left psychic scars. As a child, Hopkins experienced, firsthand, Orson Welles' 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds. He considered the radio play a dramatic, theatrical hoax and, because of his childhood scare, felt it added to his skepticism about alien invasions rather than enamor him to the idea of it. His interest in UFOs and alien visitations was renewed when, in August 1964, Hopkins and two others reported experiencing a day time sighting of an unidentified flying object, or UFO, in the form of a darkish, elliptical object off Cape Cod in Truro, MA. Hopkins partnered with David M. Jacobs, history professor at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, and John Mack, psychiatry professor at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, to design a Roper poll to find out how many of the nearly 6,000 respondents surveyed had experienced what the three believed to be symptoms indicative of alien abductions.