missing time

English

Noun

missing time

1. (psychology, parapsychology, ufology) A time period of amnesia or a gap in conscious memory reported by individuals who have experienced alien abduction.
   • 1978, Brad Steiger, Alien Meetings, page 168:

     The report of abduction, the memory loss, the missing time, and the shape of the UFO are all familiar to UFO investigators, for this is not an isolated episode.

   • 1984, John Rimmer, The Evidence for Alien Abductions, page 45:

     We have already seen how the victims of UFO abductions seem to have 'missing time' - sometimes they have no memories of several hours of their lives.

   • 1991, David Allen Lewis, UFO: End-Time Delusion:

     There were two to three hours of missing time in their return trip for which neither of them could account.

   • 1996, Angela Hague, David Lavery, Marla Cartwright (editors), Deny All Knowledge, Reading the X-Files, page 8:

     Hopkins describes "missing time" as a time lapse of approximately two hours, after which the abductee can consciously remember little or nothing of the experience.

   • 1999, Chris A. Rutkowski, Abductions and Aliens - What's Really Going On, page 153:

     While Johnson doesn't display many of the indications of alien abduction, he does have a period of missing time which can be absolutely verified, unlike most abductees' cases.

   • 2018, Nick Redfern, Top Secret Alien Abduction Files, What the Government Doesn't Want You to Know, page 127:

     According to Zerbe, while he and his team were out at the crash site, they experienced a period of what in alien abduction terminology has become known as missing time.

2. (business, management) An operational metric which measures the total amount of time on a timeclock that is unassigned to any task, whether productive or not.