The Brooklyn Bridge Abduction of Linda Cortile

Linda Napolitano lived on the 12th floor of an apartment block on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She was a housewife, married with two sons. The building stood near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, beside the FDR Drive and the East River. In April 1989 she contacted Budd Hopkins, whose book Intruders she had read, and joined his abduction support group. Five months later came the night that would make her famous as Linda Cortile.

November 30, 1989. About 3:00 a.m. Linda was paralysed in her bed. Then, as she later recalled, much of it under hypnosis, a blue beam lifted her out through the closed bedroom window. Three grey beings came with her. She was "standing up on nothing," rising toward "an opening in the disc above."

Inside she saw "lots of benches," "sliding doors" and a hallway with "many lights and buttons." There was a "large table." She screamed until one of the figures said something she could not understand and put a hand over her mouth until the procedure was over. Then she was back in bed. Her husband had slept through it.

February 1991. A letter reached Hopkins from two men calling themselves "Richard" and "Dan." They said they had been security officers guarding a VIP, parked beneath the FDR Drive. Their car had stalled. They wrote: "we can't live with ourselves." Richard described a craft with horizontal rectangular windows and "green rotating lights rotating around and around." The beings were "three of the ugliest creatures I ever saw." As soon as the figures were inside, the ship plunged into the East River.

More voices followed. "Janet Kimble," a retired telephone operator, said she saw it from the Brooklyn Bridge at 3:16 a.m. The bridge lights seemed to be off. A former resident, "Francesca," recalled a light that flooded the courtyard, with "trees like black silhouettes against the light." Hopkins would claim 23 witnesses in all. The man being guarded, he came to believe, was UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.

Hopkins presented the case at the MUFON symposium in July 1992. After the event Linda had found a lump on her nose. An X-ray showed "a small foreign object." Hopkins called it a "radiological smoking gun." The object then disappeared. In 1994 MUFON's Walter Andrus called the case "definitely authentic." In 1996 came Hopkins' book, Witnessed.

Critics saw it differently. In January 1993 Joseph Stefula, Richard Butler and George Hansen wrote that "Hopkins failed to obtain and verify even the most basic investigatory information." They also noted striking parallels with the 1989 novel Nighteyes. Philip Klass covered the case critically in his Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Greg Sandow found the investigation flawed, yet judged Linda "completely credible."

Pérez de Cuéllar denied it in writing: "I cannot but strongly deny the claim that I have had an abduction experience at any time." Richard and Dan were never identified. Hopkins never met them.

Carol Rainey, married to Hopkins from 1996 to 2006, wrote in 2011 that a call to "Cousin Connie" had really been Linda disguising her voice. In Netflix's The Manhattan Alien Abduction (2024) she calls the case "an elaborate hoax." Linda, Peter Robbins and the Hopkins estate sued. The series aired as scheduled. Linda once answered her doubters in a single line: "If I was hallucinating, then the witnesses saw my hallucination."