Budd Hopkins, a distinguished Abstract Expressionist artist who after what he described as a chance sighting of something flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable became the father of the alien-abduction movement, died on Aug. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80. After what he described as his own U.F.O. sighting, on Cape Cod in 1964, he began gathering the stories of people who said they had not only seen spaceships but had also been spirited away in them on involuntary and unpleasant journeys. As the first person to collect and publish such stories in quantity, Mr. Hopkins is widely credited with having begun the alien-abduction movement, a subgenre of U.F.O. studies. Later high-profile writers on the subject, including Whitley Strieber and the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, credited him with having ignited their interest in the field. In eliciting the narratives many obtained under hypnosis of people who said they had been abducted, Mr. Hopkins was struck by the recurrence of certain motifs: the lonely road, the dark of night, the burst of light, the sudden passage through the air and into a waiting craft, and above all the sense of time that could not be accounted for. He went in search of that lost time.