Word.ws English Dictionary

missing time

missing time noun: a time period of amnesia or a gap in conscious memory reported by individuals who have experienced alien abduction.

Noun

missing time (countable and uncountable, plural missing times)

  1. A time period of amnesia or a gap in conscious memory reported by individuals who have experienced alien abduction.
    • 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.1978, Brad Steiger, Alien Meetings, page 168
    • 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.1984, John Rimmer, The Evidence for Alien Abductions, page 45
  2. An operational metric which measures the total amount of time on a timeclock that is unassigned to any task, whether productive or not.

Examples of missing time in a sentence

  • There were two to three hours of missing time in their return trip for which neither of them could account.1991, David Allen Lewis, UFO: End-Time Delusion:
  • 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.1996, Angela Hague, David Lavery, Marla Cartwright (editors), Deny All Knowledge, Reading the X-Files, page 8:
  • 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.1999, Chris A. Rutkowski, Abductions and Aliens - What's Really Going On, page 153:
  • If not for the contact and encounters, I would never have thought the missing times in childhood might have been for the purpose of meetings with ETs.2001, Dana Redfield, ET-Human Link, We Are the Message:

Forms of missing time

pluralmissing times

Questions about missing time

What does missing time mean?
Missing time means a time period of amnesia or a gap in conscious memory reported by individuals who have experienced alien abduction.
How do you use missing time in a sentence?
There were two to three hours of missing time in their return trip for which neither of them could account.
What part of speech is missing time?
Missing time is a noun.
What is the plural of missing time?
The plural of missing time is missing times.

Words near missing time in the dictionary

  1. missing the mark
  2. missing the memo
  3. missing the point
  4. missing the wood for the trees
  5. missing the woods for the trees
  6. missing time
  7. missing times
  8. missing trader fraud
  9. missing trader frauds
  10. missing white girl syndrome
  11. missing white woman syndrome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: missing time (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “missing time.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/missing_time. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.