Robert Hastings Says He Was Abducted by Aliens Starting in 1988, Kept It Secret for Decades

Author and researcher Robert Hastings said in an interview with Ross Coulthart on NewsNation that he believes he was abducted by nonhuman entities starting in 1988, a claim he kept secret for decades.

I don't cover the abduction side of this topic as much as maybe I should, but there have been tons of conversations and reports over the years from people who say they've had these experiences. I've referenced many times the Jesse Michels interview with a man described as a high level official from the Soviet Union who said he was visited while in his hotel room and taken somewhere else. When I saw this NewsNation segment, an account that I think does a lot of great work said this seemed like one of the more credible interviews with someone who claims to be abducted. That's what made me want to go over it here.

Hastings says a 1988 camping trip convinced him he had been abducted

Hastings explained that everything he'd discussed publicly up to that point he'd tried to frame in terms of nuts and bolts data and reports from military personnel, calling that his whole modus operandi to get as many of those witnesses on the record as possible. He said he went on the lecture circuit in 1981, and then in 1988 he was involved in a camping trip with several other people. In his words: "Long story short, what occurred during that trip led me to believe beyond any question that in fact I had been abducted by nonhuman entities."

He said the circumstances were such that he questioned whether it could really be happening, since he never expected it. From 1988 through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, he said he had multiple experiences that he concluded were abduction experiences.

Why Hastings says he stayed quiet about it for so long

Hastings said keeping the abduction claims secret was a strategic decision. He worried it would complicate his effort to tell lecture audiences across America that UFOs and nuclear weapons were a nuts and bolts problem that the military was trying to keep from the public. As he put it: "If I suddenly from the podium tell people that I've been abducted by aliens, what's that going to do to my credibility? Alien abduction is just a bridge too far for many many people."

He said that changed after he was diagnosed with a serious heart condition in 2017, which affected his ability to do the things he'd wanted to do. Around the same time, Bob Jacobs, who he'd had ongoing contact with, told him: "Neither of us are getting any younger. If we're going to be true to ourselves and not be hypocritical, we really should tell other humans the rest of the story." Hastings said they wrote a book laying out as best as possible what they believe happened to them. He added that his attitude is take it or leave it on the abduction phenomenon, and that if it hadn't happened to him, he'd probably be more dubious himself, but he can't explain away what he says has happened to him repeatedly.

My own take: I understand why he stayed quiet, and I don't think this guy seems crazy

I really appreciated what Hastings said, and I understand the reasoning behind framing it as one of the more believable takes, because here's a guy who didn't want to bring this up because he didn't want it to discredit the larger case he was trying to make about why UFOs keep showing up around nuclear weapons. The second someone says they were abducted two or three times, people write them off, so I get the reasoning behind staying quiet.

I've talked before about how I completely dismissed the Miami mall incident when it first came up, calling it ridiculous and saying it factually didn't happen. I said I'll never do that again, because I wasn't there and I don't actually know what the situation was. Since then, more details and reports have come out that weren't initially reported that struck me as strange, and that's changed my thinking. That doesn't mean you blindly believe everything, but I also don't think you can blindly disregard things right away, because we don't understand everything.

If these craft can reportedly manipulate time and space, and if you follow the reports of witnesses describing telepathic communication, then who's to say they can't visit people and do certain things. That's part of why the Jesse Michels interview stuck with me, the man was speaking through a translator but described an experience similar to other cases, including the Zimbabwe case, where maybe if you're investigating or looking into these things, you end up on their radar, and maybe that's why certain conversations happen.

I think there are shades of this universe we just can't see. We see what's in front of us in this dimension, in this plane, and that's our reality, but I don't think we understand every dimension or every facet of how the universe, time, and space actually work. As for Hastings specifically: he says this happened to him various times, he was taken, and he's not hiding it anymore. He doesn't seem crazy to me. That doesn't mean I believe it outright, he could have taken something a couple times and had a vivid dream, though I don't think that's what it is. It's why I say you can't blindly believe people the same way you can't just blindly disregard them.

It's a strange instinct. When someone asks me point blank if I believe people have been abducted, my first reaction is to say no, but then I think about how many people report these same kinds of experiences. Hastings himself said in the interview that if it hadn't happened to him and someone else told him this story, he wouldn't believe it either. If your best friend told you they thought they were abducted by aliens last night, your instinct is to ask what happened to them and whether they need to go to a hospital, not to take it at face value. I think that reaction is part of why this keeps happening the way it does.

Do you think a lot of abduction claims are real, or made up, or the product of something else entirely?