The casual reader (or expert in ufology) squirms. The story of Linda Napolitano's abduction started out bizarre and exceeded unbelievable some time ago. With all these convolutions, how could the so-called biggest case in abduction research be true? If it is false, what does this say about the veracity of the phenomenon as a whole?
In an interview with NOVA, Hopkins said, "You ask the man on the street to explain what a UFO abduction is about, and he may get one or two things right. But, most people really don't have a clear idea of what happens." This might have been true when he began investigating decades ago, but the script of abduction was well worn by 1989--in part because of Hopkins. Per his obituary in The New York Times, "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." Alien abductions are sitcom fodder in the twenty-first century. If you stop a person on the street now, he might describe the mythology down to the implants. If an abductee under hypnosis didn't click these boxes, their story might seem suspect. Hopkins said on an April 1, 1997, episode of NOVA that this "has an absolute core of reality." Maybe so, but what surrounds that core is a primary concern, as evidenced by this case.
According to the TIME article "The Man From Outer Space" by James Willwerth, "A 1991 Roper poll found that 4 million people have had at least some abduction-related experiences, such as seeing unusual lights or missing time." (This poll was done at the behest of Robert T. Bigelow, famous businessman, paranormal enthusiast, former owner of Skinwalker Ranch, and Hopkins' friend.) That lumps much together, implying but not stating outright that invasive sexual procedures performed by indifferent entities and glimpsing what might be a star should be counted together.
Several credible witnesses of the Linda Napolitano abduction contacted Hopkins--he was among the biggest big names in ufology, so it makes sense they might send him a message rather than bothering with a lesser researcher.
"Janet Kimball" wrote, claiming her car had stalled on a drive over the Brooklyn Bridge. She had seen Napolitano and three aliens beamed into a hovering UFO and provided crayon drawings of the event as Richard and Dan had. As she recalled, the object was in view for ninety seconds, which should have been time enough for more people to have seen it.
An article in Magonia Magazine on the Manhattan Transfer Case mentioned how Kimball thought this might be the making of a movie about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not an alien abduction. One can almost forgive this considering the elements in seclusion: a floating woman in a white dress, tiny figures beside her. The rest could be an avant-garde flare, setting it not in the woods but outside the twelfth floor of an apartment building. "With my binoculars," she said, "I could see three of the ugliest creatures I ever saw." (The aliens, presumably.)
How handy that she had binoculars at the ready and the sense to pick them up for a closer look. Skeptics point out that people now have cell phones in their pockets at all times and rarely have the presence of mind to record convincing footage in time when they experience anomalous phenomena. Those faced with a Bigfoot or ghost excuse that it simply had not occurred to them.
As Kimball had worked as a telephone operator, it is strange that she did not call the police about what she had seen but instead waited until the next summer to write to Hopkins. We have no evidence that she sent a letter to any other ufologist. At what point did she disabuse herself of the idea that she was watching the remaking of a fairy tale?
When Hopkins drove to Kimball's upstate New York home, Napolitano refused to join him because "Richard and Dan have caused me so much trouble and fear that I don't want to run the risk of somebody else knowing who I am." Yes, Linda "Cortile" Napolitano, star of the book Witnessed about her case, who was advertised as speaking at MUFON conferences, who is presently suing Netflix for misrepresenting her on the three-part documentary The Manhattan Alien Abduction in which she starred, didn't want to meet with a sixty-year-old woman for fear she would be recognized.
Kimball stated that after Napolitano and the aliens entered the object, it "quickly rose up above the building and flew away at a very fast speed...It passed over a highway or drive below and then proceeded to climb higher over the center of the bridge....when this UFO passed over the bridge..." (154)
This contrasts with Richard and Dan's initial statement that the object plunged into the water "not far from Pier 17, behind the Brooklyn Bridge" (36). Then again, the duo were abducted and played on the beach, so perhaps they were confused. When did they see it take a dive, since they were immediately abducted after Napolitano was? If they were abducted, why didn't Kimball mention the addition of two to three men, whom she surely could have seen with her binoculars? She would have been much closer to their abduction than to Napolitano's, pulled over on the same street as the duo, so it is unlikely it slipped her mind. What does throw some doubt on her recollection is that, according to Greg Sandow in International UFO Reporter, she admitted to having watched something about Travis Walton, who reported having been abducted for days and whose story was turned into the book and movie Fire in the Sky.
Hopkins didn't pin all his hopes on Napolitano, Richard, Dan, and Kimball. He also interviewed Cathy Turner, whom he described as "ailing, middle-aged bookkeeper, a resident of Brooklyn, New York, and as unlikely a participant as any of the others" (341). Her testimony matched at least the object and abduction, though she also could not speak to the coda of Lady of the Sands. Turner has died since her conversation with Hopkins, but her nephew, Frank Turner, maintained his aunt was telling the truth.
Whatever one may believe of the tale of Richard and Dan, no matter one's feelings about hypnosis and suggestibility, there were outside witnesses who confirmed some--but far from all or the most salacious and earth-shattering--details of the account. But why are there only a few witnesses? Are we to believe that not only was everyone in the apartment building asleep, but only a handful of people could afford to look to their left?
The Vanity Fair article "Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestrials?" details how, for a week every summer, ufologist Anne Ramsey Cuvelier turns paying guests away from her Sanford-Covell Villa Marina to host intimate gatherings of abductees, "not a club anyone wants to belong to." It was here that reporter Ralph Blumenthal encountered Napolitano. She told him, "If I was hallucinating, then the witnesses saw my hallucination. That sounds crazier than the whole abduction phenomenon."
Hopkins' credulity is not without cracks in Witnessed, though these seem to be introduced largely to be handwaved away. For instance, after the letter introducing the story of Richard and Dan being bodyguards, Hopkins writes:
Perhaps there never was an important third man. Perhaps he had been invented by Richard and Dan to conceal someone else they felt guilty about. Were they parked under the FDR Drive in some kind of tryst? Was someone's girlfriend in the car with them? Or a prostitute or drug dealer or underworld character? Yet if they had something to conceal, why would Dan and Richard have bothered to mention another person in the first place? (51)
These are wild conjectures, though considerably more credible than "We saw a woman floated out of her building and then were abducted by aliens, whereupon she waved a fish at us." One is not given the feeling Hopkins believed that any of the proposed unseemliness could explain the introduction of the third man but used these only as a rhetorical device to end with that final question.
The answer is simple: The story was growing stale and needed an escalation. After all, this was not the first or last dramatic turn in Linda's narrative, one that involved kidnappers demanding to see her toes because they suspected she might be a hybrid (while also wondering aloud whether she was a good cook), as they supposedly did on April 29, 1991. At a July 1992 MUFON symposium, Napolitano stated this was legal because it had to do with national security.
When Hopkins asked to know more about her kidnapping, "about two weeks later [she] handed me a forty-four-page, double-spaced, typewritten memoir. With as much accuracy as she could muster considering the traumatic nature of her experience, Linda reconstructed the conversation that transpired" (54). This reads more like a novella than a recollection. Hopkins took it as the latter, even though it was self-aggrandizing noir involving at one point her persecutors tickling her and calling her "cutie" and being mildly annoyed when she zaps them with a dead stun gun she happened to have in her purse, after which "the eyes of her human captor [Richard] were transformed into the black, bottomless eyes of an alien" (57)--though this seems to be the only suggestion Richard and Dan might be other than human. Perhaps that plotline didn't stir the one-person audience as she had hoped, or she neglected to pursue it for another reason.
When Hopkins pressed Napolitano for the route they took, she was evasive.
Her recounting of her kidnapping reads like fan fiction, too-clever lines and all (62):
"Okay, sweetheart."
"Stop calling me names," she insisted. "I'm not a sweetheart. Right now I have a bitter heart."
Richard's kinder rejoinder was also repulsed. "You're a sweet kid," he said.
"Stop treating me like a kid!" she retorted. "I'm a grown woman."
Richard's tender response to her anger both shocked and surprised her: "I wish you were mine," he said quietly.
She protested that she was not in a hugging mood, but Richard moved closer. She was becoming frightened. He begged her once more, and she saw that he had tears in his eyes. What he did next was even more perplexing. Pressing Linda's cheeks between his two hands, he kissed her lightly on the nose, saying, "I wish you were my little girl." (63)
This tale began with two to three men seeing a woman abducted by aliens. Now, they are kissing her on the nose. This progresses to bringing her to a beach house on Long Island and forcing her to change into a nightgown like the one she wore on the night of the abduction--though she would only consent to put it on over her clothes. When she flees, Dan gives chase and shoves her head into the ocean twice, after which a "force" knocks him to the sand. She runs, thinks she hears a gun cocking, and turns to see Dan taking pictures of her--which he subsequently mails to Hopkins. Richard appears from thin air and convinces Napolitano to come back to the beach house with Dan, to whom Richard then gives alcohol to calm him. (Dan's demeanor does not seem like one that drunkenness would improve.)
When Hopkins points out that Napolitano is describing a series of major felonies that should be reported to actual authorities, "I hadn't reckoned on Linda's compelling reasons for not reporting the incident. As we talked it became obvious that there was no way she could describe the two men and how she met them without mentioning the November 1989 UFO abduction" (66). They could have with a judicious "these men think they saw me abducted, isn't that weird," which, if anything, would make the police more interested in apprehending they unhinge men who claimed at times to be law enforcement. No one else in Napolitano's life witnessed the abduction. No one on the street reported seeing a woman forced into a van. There were no beachgoers distressed by the attempted murder.
Richard particularly treasured her since he had known Napolitano so long--something unmentioned through many letters and meetings. He recalled in 1991 that he had been abducted since he was a child and had frequent meetings with Napolitano on spaceships. According to Witnessed:
[W]e have learned that specific pairs of children have been repeatedly abducted over the years and brought together periodically in the same strange environment. The purpose, apparently, is to allow the UFO occupants to study systematically the way human beings form friendships and, eventually, sexual relationships (XIV).
According to Klass, Hopkins suggested that Richard might have fathered Napolitano's youngest son Johnny in 1981 during one of their encounters--a conjecture that would be easy enough to prove via a paternity test, though none was reportedly done. Hopkins mildly noted as such, writing "on a domestic level, all of these experiences have increased the strains on her marriage" to Steve.
When Napolitano arrived for her next session on November 25, after Richard's confessional letter, Hopkins reported she was "in a happy frame of mind, completely unaware that Richard had already reported his view of their complex, decades long relationship" (188). A hypnotized Linda remembered even the pet names she and Richard used aboard the ships (she thought he was her imaginary friend Mickey, and he called her Baby Ann). Her shock of being told she had a long sexual relationship with one of her persecutors was videoed, and she refused to remark on who impregnated her.
Hopkins never met Richard and Dan. Instead, they only communicated with him via cassette tapes and upwards of eighty pages of letters--which would be excellent evidence in the criminal case as there were fingerprints and a confession. Dan and Richard were skittish about interacting with Hopkins outside these media, telling him, "Please stop trying to find us or else we will cut all contact with you. If you have a message for us, please give it to Linda." (98) They do not make clear why she is a surer conduit to them than a dead drop or post office box, especially as they seemed not to have trouble mailing things.
Napolitano's apartment was easily visible from the New York Post's South Street office, which led Hopkins to hope its workers loading newspapers into trucks would have seen this abduction. Joseph J. Stefula, Richard D. Butler, and George P. Hansen visited New York City on September 19, 1992, according to "A Critique of Budd Hopkins' Case of the UFO Abduction of Linda Napolitano." Well before Witnessed was published, Stefula, Butler, and Hansen were concerned about the effect this case might have on abduction research. They
spoke to the person who was the loading dock manager in 1989. He told us that the dock is in use until 5:00 a.m. and that there are many trucks that come and go frequently during the early morning hours. The manager knew nothing of the UFO...Greg Sandow's article in International UFO Reporter quotes Hopkins' defense against Stefula et al:
The newspaper owns about 45 trucks, most of which are, at any given time, on the road or parked in a West Side garage. The loading dock at the newspaper office has bays for six trucks. It is located inside an enclosed garage which faces south rather than west toward Linda's building. The work of loading bundled newspapers by the drivers takes place from conveyor belts at the open backs of the trucks; from there, visibility outside the garage, up and to the west where the UFO action took place, is nil.
During their investigation, they found that Napolitano's complex had a guardhouse operated 24 hours a day. The security guard and his supervisor knew nothing about this UFO encounter. When they called the apartment manager, he was likewise ignorant and had heard nothing about it from the approximately 1600 residents.
Richard and David said they had pulled over with many other cars to observe Napolitano floating on a beam of light, escorted by three aliens. Why didn't anyone in those other cars mention anything? New Yorkers have a reputation for unflappability, but there are limits.
Napolitano requested to meet with Butler on January 28, 1992 and met with him and Stefula on February 1, 1992. "During that meeting, she asked them not to inform Hopkins of their discussions." In "Attempted Murder vs. The Politics of Ufology: A Question of Priorities in the Linda Napolitano Case," Hansen stated this was because Napolitano did not think Hopkins would be able to protect her from Richard and Dan--and he did not. Given that Stefula was a former Special Agent with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, he did seem be to a prudent person to whom to reach out. However, Stefula was not called upon to flex his muscles.
If Napolitano is to be believed, men tried to sexually assault and kill her (and did violently kidnap and physically abuse her), and Hopkins refrained from handing the police all his evidence. Why hold off? His star witness to the case of the century almost died.
Hopkins may not have pursued this, but Hansen thought it was criminal negligence not to.
Discovering that Hansen was grumbling as such, Hopkins flew in Jerome Clark, a paranormal author, "whereupon [he] aggressively injected himself into matters and vigorously opposed continuing an outside investigation and reporting the alleged felonies to law enforcement authorities" because "banging on the wrong doors could alert the relevant agency that two of its agents were leaking a huge secret."
Clark would later pen the essay, "The Politics of Torquemada or, Earth Calling Hansen's Planet," equating him with the chief torturer of the Spanish Inquisition. Clark called Hansen "short on ufological experience but long on self-righteous blather" for sharing "Attempted Murder vs. the Politics of Ufology: A Question of Priorities in the Linda Napolitano Case" with all who would listen and republish it. While Clark espoused that "too many links in the chain of evidence are missing to sustain a suspension of unbelief. Moreover, some aspects of it seem to me to be impossible," he also felt it is problematic to consider Napolitano a liar, believing the crimes likely happened as she said. He was not opposed to reporting the felonies to the appropriate authorities but felt Hansen ought to give a six-month grace period given the politically sensitive nature--political in the sense of involving potential agents of three-letter agencies and the Secretary General of the United Nations, not in regards to ufology. Clark wrote, "the story contains elements which, if Linda is telling the truth, seem to explain her what otherwise looks like a puzzling reluctance to act," namely that she believed this was a matter of national security.
The record does not demonstrate that anyone ever reported the kidnappings, sexual assault, assault, stalking, and attempted murder to the law--though Clark assured that Hansen threatened to turn over Clark's identifying information to the FBI for withholding information.
Hopkins heavily implied that Butler and Stefula were government agents "mobilized to subvert the case from the inside, even before its full dimensions are made known to the public at large," and said he would inform others in the community. He later suggested that Hansen might be a CIA agent. On September 14, 1992, "Hopkins faxed Butler a letter saying that as a long-standing member of MUFON, he was issuing an 'order'" to stop investigating the case.
They did not.
A novel, Nighteyes by Garfield Reeves-Stevens, was published several months before Napolitano's abduction. It reads as a sinister reflection of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though it may have taken some inspiration from Whitley Strieber's influential Communion, or at least the energy in the zeitgeist it provoked. The similarities between Napolitano's story and the novel are not incidental, including the urban apartment setting of the abduction, the involvement of two government agents who later kidnap a woman--and one agent is subsequently hospitalized for emotional trauma--to bring her to a safe house on a beach, a woman contacting a prominent UFO researcher in New York City, an agent and woman communicating during their abduction (and it turns out they knew each other before, though the romantic interest is overtly consumated in Nighteyes), and others. It isn't ironclad evidence of inspiration, but it does give one pause. We cannot know if Napolitano read this book or if she was ever asked.
According to Carol Rainey, Napolitano--for reasons that may be hers alone--admitted she intentionally spread disinformation, so maybe she wouldn't have answered honestly anyway.
Rainey entered Hopkins' life in 1995 when he was putting the finishing touches on Witnessed (she claimed she edited the book before publication--she received no thanks or mention in it--and did coauthor Sight Unseen). Hopkins continued claiming this was "the most important case of the century" even after Napolitano lied to him on several occasions. Noted Rainey:
[...] Hopkins does not ever express doubt about the reliability of Linda Cortile's story and the seminal importance of her case. If he did, he might be forced to question his own ability to sort fact from fiction or to spot a rising hoax before it crests and breaks over him.
While one might hesitate to call Hopkins, who pioneered so much of the field of modern ufology, a fool, Rainey found it impossible to avoid the fact that he was easy to fool.
Hopkins had spent two years committed to the Jim Mortellaro case, which Rainey stated was "one of the best examples of what's wrong with the abduction research that [she] observed, second only to the Linda Cortile case." His devotion to Mortellaro, in the face of obvious lies, "cost him the resignation of nearly half his Advisory Committee -- and, indirectly, cost him his marriage."
Mortellaro claimed to have two PhDs and that he'd been a marketing director for Hitachi, none of which could be confirmed. He professed to be part of a "major mainstream, scientific study of the medical evidence of alien abductions." However, Mortellaro assured them that the scientists involved were secretive, and he could not give out information. He was also, Rainey noted, likely abusing prescription drugs and constantly carried a gun, which she understated was "not a good combination." Mortellaro said he would have a Dr. Nancy call Hopkins to back up his claims. When she did, Hopkins was thrilled and had Rainey listen. Rainey immediately said Dr. Nancy was Mortellaro with his voice electronically altered.
How could Rainey be so sure? "Because I've spent twenty-plus years in post-production suites, with the editor or the mixer altering voices up, down, and sideways [...] It's certainly not rocket science and Jim knows electronics." Hopkins was incensed his wife would suggest such a thing.
More calls came from Mortellaro's neighbor and wife--also Mortellaro with the voice modifier. Dr. Nancy kept leaving messages but never seemed to speak to Hopkins directly. Not only did Hopkins believe Mortellaro, but his newest acolyte, Leslie Kean, totally supported Hopkins.
When Hopkins died, he was in a romantic relationship with Kean, an investigative journalist and author of books on UFOs and the afterlife. In 2017, she co-wrote an article with Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal that revealed that the Department of Defense had poured $22.5 million into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and (also with Blumenthal) reported on the United States Air Force officer David Grusch, who testified that American had retrieved vehicles containing non-human "biologics." She is no lightweight in the world of ufology, no matter her involvement in the Mortellaro case.
Mortellaro produced supposed medical forms saying he had "nearly miraculous healing of the contusions in the bladder--Very strange, indeed. Very strange," verbiage that Rainey observed having "never before seen emerge from a doctor's pen." The phrase "bizarre case" repeats in the documents, apparent forgeries.
Hopkins doubled down, appearing on paranormal shows with Mortellero, who claimed the aliens had savaged him. Hopkins played regression sessions of his subject wailing. The researcher promised stellar evidence but never delivered it and wouldn't share Dr. Nancy's voicemails.
As is the result with personalities like Mortellaro, enough is never enough. In 2004, he came to Rainey and Hopkins' home, claiming he had killed a burglar and had received a "police associations highest award by the town mayor and the head of the policeman's association." Perhaps he could fake medical records (he could not), but he did not realize such a story would be easily found in newspapers. (Mortellaro tried to subvert this in the extremely short term by saying there had been an article in the newspaper describing the event, "but his elderly mom and dad wanted to hold onto it." That he could have bought a second copy--that anyone who wished to could have--seemed not to have occurred to him.) Rainey and an office assistant went as far as calling the chief of police, who said that not only had there not been a shooting for at least five years, but there had been no break-ins for over a year. Also, the award is only given to deceased police officers.
The Intruders Foundation Advisory Committee finally had enough, demanding to listen to the voicemails and see the medical reports, all of which they identified as obvious hoaxes. They asked Hopkins to stop investigating and for more accountability from him by accepting their advice. Hopkins instead had Kean write a letter lambasting them for trying to rein him in.
Noted Hopkins in the 1987 article "About New York; Group Therapy For the Victims Of Space Aliens," "The abductees are veterans of a trauma [...] Some are in awe, some are bitter, others are ashamed and questioning their own sanity." Why, then, would anyone want to claim this tragedy for themselves?
Napolitano told many she was going to get half the royalties from Witnessed. Hopkins never agreed to this and had no idea where she got this idea, though they did share some of the advance.
Perhaps it was not a matter of Hopkins meaning to be deceitful, but that he and his crew were led by the unconscious bias. Once the ball started rolling, they may have mutually egged one another on. One must also consider that Napolitano's involvement was not innocent, that she was not led to believe impossible things, but instead perpetrated a hoax for reasons that are debatable. The case did little for her social or financial capital, which is often the outcome of public involvement in ufology. It gained her attention and involvement in something so much bigger than her, but that came with widespread ridicule and doubt.
Could it have been for a desire for community? Hopkins' support group meetings were not sober affairs, seeming more like lively cocktail parties. One wouldn't like to be nonconsensually probed, but one couldn't deny the company there was welcoming. Would being the belle of that ball feel like enough for Napolitano?
Napolitano became a mainstay of Hopkins' and Rainey's life, Rainey calling her
a friend, sometimes at the house being interviewed by the media, sometimes Budd's co-presenter at conferences. When the rest of Budd's people gathered in the living room for abductee support groups, Linda was always there. Many times, I schlepped my camera and lights to Lower Manhattan to interview Linda in her apartment, with her family, over her tomato sauce, in situ.
Hopkins felt Napolitano simply didn't have the intellectual savvy to create and maintain a story of this depth and breadth, though Rainey found her "quite smart. Not well educated (a different matter entirely), but quick on the draw. I've never met anybody, for example, who could get an unexpected phone call from an admirer and so effortlessly spin a spontaneously fabricated, intricate, family-related reason for not meeting him for coffee, all the while winking broadly at me."
Before this experience, how would Napolitano have described herself? Would it have been as a simple housewife? Could that have been enough for a woman with such a compelling personality and sharp mind? This is pure speculation, but it is not outside the realm of possibility that she was not as intellectually stimulated as she needed to be. This adventure considerably spiced up her life.
Napolitano was not the only person who claimed to have been abducted in the five boroughs in this era--nor the only one who didn't seem as upset about this as outsiders might expect.
Noted journalist William E. Geist in "Group Therapy for UFO Victims," "One would think New Yorkers have enough to worry about without being snatched by aliens from sidewalks, parks and rooftops." May Pang, who claimed she twice saw UFOs over midtown, said, "It's almost like a status symbol now in some circles. You say you've seen a UFO and people say, 'oh, so have I.' It's very in right now."
Rosemary Osnato claimed to have been beamed up from the roof of her apartment in the Bronx, saying, "[A] lot of people envy me. Some of them treat me like a saint. I tell them it was horrible and frightening, and they don't want to hear it. But they still wish it had happened to them!" Though she tried to convince people of the terror of the experience, that she felt dehumanized, "Fanatics want to form a church around [her] experience." Before this, her only interest in the phenomena was laughing at tabloid headlines.
Geist's article quoted others, all of whom report abductions that varied little from what Napolitano reported except in extremity and number of witnesses. Why did the aliens take such a sudden interest in one of the most populated cities in the world? And why did they stop?
As NOVA stated, "[W]hen Budd Hopkins' book, Intruders, was broadcast as a TV miniseries, abduction reports hit a new high." Was this a matter of people finally having a context for what they had experienced and the relief that they were not alone, or was it that they wished to hop on a bandwagon that would get them attention? Isn't this a more subdued version of the question put to Napolitano based on the same material? (Though the Intruders miniseries featured fictionalizations of cases rather than hewing too closely to what people had reported to Hopkins.)
Sixty miles away and five years before Linda Napolitano was reportedly abducted, the Hudson Valley in New York was beset by the Westchester Boomerang. This lighted triangle intermittently hovered over the gazing masses from 1983 to 1984. There were occasional and less spectacular sightings after, including a several-year stint in the then-sleepy town of Pine Bush, New York, now home of the annual Pine Bush UFO Fair. No one credibly suggested they were abducted by the Westchester Boomerang, but the object or objects did not bother keeping a low profile such that it is now acknowledged as one of the most consequential UFO flaps in the canon.
To NOVA, Hopkins said, "[W]hen you see something like [witnessing a UFO] [...] you realize that there's some factor in the world that you had previously been unaware of. And it could be an extraordinarily important factor."
He later said in the interview:
Even though I don't see the UFO occupants as evil or conquerors or anything of that sortâ€â€it's nothing that simple. Still, control would be absolute if this finally comes to making themselves obvious, ending the covert. [...] They're not here [...] to help us plug up the ozone layer hole. They're not here to take over our supermarkets. They're here for their own reasons. And I'm not sure what those are.
Hopkins was not incidentally an artist. His work, rife with geometric shapes and odd figures (which he said were more robots than aliens), had been in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim, the British Museum, and others. Most know him from his paintings rather than his sometimes dubious methodology with abductees.
Hopkins disagreed that there was any connection between his art and his ufological research. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he began to fixate on UFOs "after what he described as a chance sighting of something flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable," but he was an artist well before this experience.
Art critic Michael Brenson wrote of Hopkins' piece "Temple of Apollo With Guardian XXXXV:"
If the work is about sacrifice and violence, it is also about ecstasy and illumination. In the course of trying to re-establish the broadest meaning of the abstract geometry that has fascinated so many 20th-century artists, Hopkins makes us consider that ritual, worship, cruelty and superstition have always been inseparable.
This is a superb explanation of his approach to ufology. To Hopkins, aliens were creatures not simply beyond the stars but beyond our comprehension, worthy of our fear and awe, beings that do not care about our consent or autonomy. They are minor gods, and calling them cruel is more than justified. To Hopkins, "[t]he aliens were technically sophisticated and many spoke improbably good English," according to the New York Times. "They were short, bug-eyed, thin-lipped and gray-skinned, stripped their subjects naked and probed them with instruments, often removing sperm or eggs." They did not ask permission and did not see a need to apologize for performing what boils down to forced breeding and eugenics to create a master hybrid race to save their species. On the NOVA episode, Hopkins said, "I know this sounds crazy, and there are all sorts of biological reasons why this seems either impossible or highly unlikely, and yet we get this again and again and again."
As Hopkins stated in "Ethical Implications of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon:"
[T]here is a kind of awe or wonder at the power and seeming magic of the aliens' technology. This often translates itself into a kind of affection, even love, that an abductee might feel for the particular captor with whom he or she senses a special relationship. [...] On the other side of the same coin there is an almost universal anger - verging sometimes on hatred - that abductees feel towards their abductors because of their enforced helplessness, their sense of having been used, involuntarily, and even, upon occasion, of being made to suffer severe pain.
Hopkins pointed out how often aliens could have intervened to help humanity and did nothing, including the Holocaust. If they were benevolent, wouldn't they have stepped in? As divine beings, they would be abysmal. As Hopkins notes in "Ethical Implications..." "As a moral presence the UFO phenomenon seems sublimely indifferent to what we do to ourselves. [...] [W]e look to them in vain even for first aid, let alone salvation."
In some visitations, aliens talk a good game about how we need to save the planet, but their only method of helping this along seems to be terrorizing people whose only influence in the world is quaking during hypnosis.
Unlike some in this field, Hopkins didn't envy the abductees. They were victims and needed the height of sympathy, something they were unlikely to get given how most people perceived the phenomena as false or delusional.
In "Ethical Implications..." Hopkins stated, "Dr. Slater describes the psychological profiles of the nine abductees she tested as resembling those found with rape victims - a low self-esteem, a distrust of their bodies, their physicality, their sexuality, and a hesitancy to trust others." It is beyond the aegis of this to try to match Napolitano's behavior to this assessment, though the analogy would be sound. An abductee cannot consent to violation by creatures who could implicity and instantly murder them if they somehow fought back. Humanity is far from on an equal footing.
Noted Sagan on NOVA,
There's two stories. One is, we're being sexually abducted by beings from other worlds. And the other is that there is a pervasive common hallucination that at least thousands of humans share. Now, these are both disquieting possibilities, and neither alternative makes anybody happy.
Whatever the provenance of the experience, it cripples the afflicted--something researchers like Hopkins can only put in context but not abate. No matter his work, Hopkins could never stop an alien from doing as they wished to someone in his support group.
Hopkins claimed, among all the cases he has investigated, he knew three men who took their lives after being abducted, though they began "apparently somewhat depressed." These are not the only attempts Hopkins recorded. The pantheon is rife with the aliens abusing people, essentially serially sexually assaulting them, ripping away any sense of safety, indifferent beyond assuring their future abductees that they won't hurt them. How many abusers have told their victims this before the first punch?
Hopkins' research was the spark that ignited the involvement of major figures such as Dr. John E. Mack and Whitley Strieber--though the latter espouses having been repeatedly and extravagantly abducted, so one must assume he would have become interested independently.
On NOVA, Mack said, "And my reaction [...] was that [Hopkins] must be quite mad if he believes such stories, and he must be dealing with some contemporary sort of psychosis." One assumes he meant in the experiencers and not Hopkins himself. However, after reading letters from the afflicted, Mack revised his opinion. "I've been impressed with the consistency of the story, the sincerity with which people tell their stories, the power of the feelings connected with this, the self-doubt." In Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Mack wrote, "Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me" (1).
Mack claimed on NOVA:
I worked with people over hundreds and hundreds of hours, and have done as careful a job as I could to listen, to sift out, to consider alternative explanations. And none have come forward. No one has found an alternative explanation in a single abduction case.
Many have posited alternative explanations for abductions, including but not limited to mental illness, incomplete anesthesia, repressed abuse, attention seeking, birth trauma, nightmares, and hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations--the latter which follow so many of the earmarks of abductions that one would think the script is coded into our brains, and is the preferred excuse for hag attacks, ghosts, and incubi and succubi. This is not to discount all abduction reports. Still, it is disingenuous and ultimately counterproductive to pretend these reasoned explanations do not exist. Even Hopkins, vested in cultivating cases, agreed that some abductions were bunk or misunderstandings and would not pursue those. The Vanity Fair article stated, "Even Hopkins called Mack 'gullible.'"
On a 1994 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Mack asked, "Why are we so goofy about this? Why do we treat people like they're crazy, humiliate them, if they're experiencing some other intelligence?"
Mack's Center for Psychology and Social Change, which he founded in 1983, was largely tax-exempt, though initially intended to study the nuclear arms race. When the Cold War ended, they shifted focus to the psychology behind ecology and ethnic conflicts. Yet Mack threw his weight behind the mystery of abductions, stating, "If what these abductees are saying is happening to them isn't happening, what is?" Even for a dubious and misty realm, some of his proposed conclusions verge on religious, with experiencers describing beings more like angels than aliens (though there are the predictable theories that aliens are angels or vice versa). In Abductions, he shared one account from a woman who mentioned sexual assaults and whose experiences with the purported beings seemed like more of traumatic reenactments.
For all this work with abductees, Mack never claimed to have had firsthand experience; if the aliens wanted him, it was entirely on the ground with a tape recorder going.
Strieber eulogized Mack as having been "a great man who was willing to stand up for the scorned, at the cost of his own impeccable reputation." Mack could have enjoyed nothing but lifelong acclaim had he not decided to go down the road of ufology and do so as publicly as he could. Strieber applauded Mack for "dar[ing] to admit the truth about the abduction phenomenon: that it involves normal people describing true experiences, not neurotics, idiots and publicity seeking liars making up nonsense."
Ostensibly, Strieber never wrote, even obliquely, on the Linda Napolitano case.
Robert Allen Baker Jr., a psychologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Kentucky, as well as a skeptical paranormal investigator, was quoted by NOVA:
[Hopkins and Mack] are offering a haven for the people that claim they were abducted by aliens, because they are telling them, "You were a victim, and I'm here to help you." And the only problem with that is that people getting that kind of therapeutic help are not being really helped. They are not being told that it was all a dream, and that it was all imaginary, and it will probably never happen again. They're only left vulnerable to the possibility of an additional abduction, rape, and so on.
To some, the abduction phenomenon is a matter of excusing, if unconsciously. Richard Ofshe, sociologist and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkley, said, "[P]eople are revealing things about themselves that they clearly find embarrassing, defects in their lives, and [Hopkins is] helping them explain these things away as the product of the aliens coming to see them." Sneaky nocturnal goblins are a far more exciting narrative for the supposed abductee than that they are struggling with something significant but entirely personal. If one can offload a maladaptive reaction onto aliens rather than abusive parents--if one can be victimized by something so far beyond one's control and understanding--why keep the explanations mundane, especially when one has the ear of prestigious, plausive researchers?
Donna Bassett, then a 37-year-old Boston-based writer and researcher, explored her suspicions by contriving a family history of abductions going back to the eleventh century and sending it to Mack. He responded by setting up a meeting and, before that, sent her a box of documents that all but handed her a script for what she was supposed to say and how she was supposed to act, despite, as she said in TIME, "I've never seen a UFO in my life [...] and I certainly haven't been inside one." In the action of sending her this material, he primed a potential abductee, throwing her recollections into question.
According to the article "Mack Disputes NOVA Show" in The Harvard Crimson, Bassett had sent a letter to Whitley Strieber ten months before; she may have cast a wider net, and Mack was simply the one she caught.
Mack hypnotized Bassett three times, during which she made up stories about being probed by a cold object and the aliens telling her they wanted to bring world peace, which she knew was his perspective. She went so far as to say she met Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy, which Mack seemed to believe, even when she claimed she sat on a crying Khrushchev's lap "and I put my arms around his neck, and I told him it would be O.K."
Bassett had made such a positive impression on Mack that she ended up serving as the treasurer of his abduction support group.
She said, "[Mack] would believe the most far-fetched things. [...] The only time he got critical was when I tried to find alternate explanations for some of these experiences myself."
Mack contested this, saying, "I worked with Donna in good faith and she claims she was all a hoax. And people I know in the experienced community think that she did not hoax, that she's an experiencer who never came to terms with her experience."
Who are we to believe? The woman saying she faked it to prove Mack was behaving unethically, or the man who maintained she was abducted by aliens anyway and faked faking?
The article noted:
She found that Mack's work was riddled with scientific irregularities; it lacked a formal research protocol as well as legally required consent forms that advise research subjects of potential risks. She also discovered that Mack billed the insurance companies of at least some patient-subjects for what he described as therapy sessions.
These are dire accusations indeed, and ones that cannot be overlooked. When Bassett confronted him with this, Mack reportedly said, "That I can't do everything that each person needs does not mean that what I'm doing is not therapeutic [...] There are too many of you, and I'm also doing research."
Dave Duclos, who had been involved in Mack's experiments, left when he no longer believed in it, saying, "He was against anybody who said anything negative about the aliens. Once he said to me, 'If you think the aliens are bad, Mr. Duclos, keep thinking about it until you realize they are good.' "
Mack and his attorneys, Roderick "Eric" MacLeish Jr., former general counsel of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and Daniel P. Sheehan, of the Christic Institute, claimed NOVA did not accurately convey his opinions about extraterrestrials and sent the show's producers evidence, according to The Harvard Crimson. Mack said, "They set out to portray me and other people who work in this field as non-skeptical, non-questioning believers who influence their patients accordingly."
NOVA responded with a press release reading, "NOVA has not acceded to Dr. Mack's demand and with the exception of a handful of minor word changes made to avoid the possibility of misinterpretation, is broadcasting the program in its entirety."
Harvard had previously investigated Mack. A 1994 committee report stated, "To communicate, in any way whatsoever, to a person who has reported a 'close encounter' with an extraterrestrial life form that this experience might well have been real [...] is professionally irresponsible." Professor Emeritus Arnold Relman, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, sparked this inquest, writing, "If these stories are believed as literal factual accounts, they would contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends."
The committee met thirty times with Mack and his lawyers. After a fourteen-month investigation, Harvard issued a statement that the Dean had "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment [...] Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine." However, this was not a total clearing of his name. The committee report did ding him for errors in methodology, cautioning "not, in any way, to violate the high standards for the conduct of clinical practice and clinical investigation that have been the hallmarks of this Faculty." Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in an opinion piece for The Harvard Crimson, "Defining Academic Freedom," "Will the next professor who is thinking about an unconventional research project be deterred by the prospect of having to hire a lawyer to defend his ideas?" continuing "[i]f Dr. Mack had taught at the Divinity School, it is unlikely that any investigation would be tolerated, since divinity schools are not governed by the laws of science." We are not dealing with God but mysterious beings from the stars and the people they abuse, so this objection does not appear relevant. The exact standards of each department are specific to the discipline, as Dershowitz mentioned, and those of religion and medicine should have only minor overlaps. Per Dershowitz, "[I]t is at least as likely that space aliens exist as it is that God exists. The former is, however, a scientifically testable hypothesis (at least in theory); whereas the latter--for at least most theologians--is not." Mack could believe whatever he wished, but he did not have the ethical right to apply this to people who required therapy. It is a rare person who would feel wholly comfortable with how he treated those who came before him seeking help. Though this could be applied to both Hopkins and Jacobs, the former had a bachelor's in art history and the latter a doctoral degree in intellectual history (with a dissertation on the controversy around UFOs), one would not hold them to the same high professional ethics. Yet, Dershowitz continued, "If Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx or Martin Buber had been required to satisfy a committee before they could continue their research, the world might have been deprived of significant insights." This is not to suggest that Dershowitz is proffering his own opinion on the existence of aliens, let alone ones who rip people from their beds and hang them over Manhattan, as Napolitano and Hopkins claimed--it is immaterial what Mack believed, but how it manifested in his work. In fact, Dershowitz wrote, "[Mack] has certainly not convinced me, but surely that cannot be the criteria." Instead, it is a matter of academic freedom being chilled, so one must defend Mack so that the next person who steps out of academic line will be protected. "Unless challenged now, the precedent setting effect of the appointment of this committee will act as a sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of every professor who drifts outside the mainstream, especially in politically sensitive areas."
Dershowitz said Harvard ought to ease up and let Mack's ideas be tested by his peers in the "marketplace of ideas." However, ideas are tertiary at best in a scientific field, especially when dealing with vulnerable people. His priorities should have been the well-being of his subjects and the rigor of the scientific method, neither of which he appears to have adhered to sufficiently. Relman noted in his rebuttal of Dershowitz's defense, "The Motivation for the Mack Inquiry," "the issue of concern to the Medical School was not what Dr. Mack chose to study, but the way he did it. If Harvard did not challenge Dr. Mack's freedom to work on that subject and hold such views, how could any future maverick on our faculty have cause for concern?"
During this inquest, Mack was called to Zimbabwe to investigate the famous Ariel School UFO incident, the details of which could not have been more perfectly aligned to buoy him: a mass sighting by children of stereotypical aliens who telepathically told the kids the world might end soonâ€â€not far from the message a hypnotized Napolitano shared with Richard, Dan, and the Secretary General of the United Nations.
Hopkins stated in Witnessed (XIV), "[W]e are left here with only two options: either the events of November 30, 1989, took place as the many participants contend, or this is an intricate, cold-blooded hoax perpetrated by a large group of individual--a conspiracy theory for which there is not a shred of evidence." There is a third option--that it was primarily perpetrated by one woman and he had pinned too much of his hopes on her--but it is not one he faced directly.
How could Napolitano be a fabulist when other people reported her abduction? One uncomfortable concession might be that she was abducted, but built a fiction around this when Hopkins found it too pedestrian. No witness other than the duo and the third man witnessed her stint as the Lady of the Sands (and they did not recall this for months). From there, all the events are secondhand through Napolitano. Only she met Richard and Dan, and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar claimed complete ignorance.
Hopkins wrote, "I knew that Linda was a hopelessly inept dissembler and that she would only arouse suspicion if she tried to present some complicated story concocted to avoid telling the truth about the UFO. Reluctantly I came to the conclusion that the very essence of the incident could not be told to the authorities without Linda's losing all credibility."
Credibility with whom? Faced with the threat of rape and murder, one would imagine she would have different priorities. She later tries to evade the duo from capturing her again by running into traffic, whereupon she is hit by a car. No one--not even the driver--reports this, and Linda doesn't seem much worse for wear.
It is unclear why Hopkins believed she was an "inept dissembler" after turning in her manuscript. When he still expressed some hesitancy, Napolitano amped it up by saying:
What if the rumors are true [...] about how people are kept quiet? Is it worth the risk? Who would help my husband raise the children? If rumors aren't true, what helpful information could I give the police to enable them to find Richard and Dan? None! I only knew their first names. After I told them about this crazy situation would they believe me? It was hopeless. Unless God himself asked me, I wasn't about to go head-to-head with any government agency (66).
Noted Klass, "If some U.S. Government agency is eager to do away with Linda, it is surprising that she is still alive today. (Seemingly the Government is too dum-dum to hire the Mafia to do the job.) It seems surprising that Linda and her children have not moved out of Manhattan."
She would eventually have the story widely published and make the rounds at UFO conferences, but she would not have this investigated by someone less credulous or more authoritative than Hopkins. In short, she wouldn't have her story checked by people who might penalize her for inconsistencies.
Yet again, Napolitano's escalation is good enough for Hopkins, who doesn't pursue this line of thought further, as he feels that "she would only suffer more humiliation from yet another official source." Conversely, she wouldn't be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a ditch by men who call an alien an "ugly little squirt," which seems more important than being mocked.
Napolitano did tell her husband about Richard and Dan's initial crimes after a dinner where "Candlelight shone on our faces in a special way. Steve's face was calm and he seemed pleased in the anticipation of what lay ahead. We smiled at each other lovingly, and he gave a toast, to good health and happiness" (67). She then dropped what the duo had on the beach, at which point he "karate-chopped the table," sending the linguini against the wall and setting the tablecloth on fire from a fallen candle--which, in comic fashion, she tries to put out with wine.
The florid detailing of commonplace details, what Hopkins calls the "soda pop factor" (101), convinces the researcher of the veracity of Napolitano's story. Surely, this would be beyond her dull mind to imagine. How could someone who had not seen it recount how sand in hair under a bright light would sparkle?
Robert Bigelow offered to pay an off-duty officer to be Napolitano's bodyguard. "At first [Joseph, the bodyguard] seemed rather dubious; the story was so complex and so many people were involved in it that it was difficult for him to accept its validity" (83). Hopkins was pleased with this, as it might make the officer a more objective witness.
Napolitano tells Joseph that she is being pursued by a "Middle Eastern" man. At no point does this man move toward or even acknowledge them, and Joseph doesn't bother approaching this potential stalker, as one might expect of a man with his training. Instead, they run away. Granted, fleeing protects her from danger. Conversely, it's unclear if she was in any.
Joseph recounted:
I believe that had I not met Linda at the Seaport this particular day she would have been kidnapped again, taken against her will for something she had no control over. As we watched the van pull away, all I could see of the driver was his long arm holding on to the steering wheel. He was wearing a solid white dress shirt (p. 88).
The significance of this arm and man, who appears nowhere else in the story, is unclear. Napolitano reported that Dan and Richard were white, and Pérez de Cuéllar was Peruvian; it was not them.
Joseph acknowledges this might only be a series of coincidences and misunderstandings, but who ever heard of a Middle Eastern man driving a van in New York City in proximity to an edgy woman looking for conspiracies?
I can honestly say that something very bizarre is going on and Linda seems to be right in the middle of it. After this event I cautioned her about waiting for me or anyone else for that matter on a street corner. It's just too easy to be grabbed and thrown into a car or van (p. 89).
Hopkins extrapolates from this that the duo might have had more accomplices--at least two--or had even enlisted associates from their secretive and unidentified agency, which could bring the conspiracy to three or even four.
Outside the world of ufology, there were few people who bought into Napolitano's story. Even within ufology, she was hardly the convincing darling Hopkins made her out to be. According to the Strange Arrivals podcast, Napolitano also claimed to be spirited away by Pope John Paul II, who knew all about her case and asked her to enter his employ at the Vatican. She declined because she didn't want to move, though the Swiss Guard would provide better security against Richard and Dan. During another session, per Rainey, Napolitano claimed she was escorted to an underground chamber containing Grays palling around with Colin Powell and Ralph Nader and rubbed shoulders with mafioso John Gotti Jr. aboard a ship--all details Hopkins omits from his book and subsequent talks. Rainey noted, "The pending Hollywood movie deal fell through, largely because the story had been so publicly discredited."
If ufologists want to make a name for themselves, they need to constantly push boundaries, one-upping their colleagues. It isn't enough that your newest witness saw a row of lights in the sky. They need to see a ship on the ground and have an attestation from a doctor that they suffered from radiation burns and have an implant that is either made of unearthly metals or vanished during examination (which Napolitano claimed). As Rainey put it, "Unless they're to become quickly obsolete, alien abduction experts are expected to deliver the goods: newer, fresher, stranger, and ever more strange reports." Hopkins started believing aliens could make themselves and the abductees invisible--how else were they stealing people away during the day?--forming the foundation of his book with Rainey, Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility, and Transgenic Beings.
Despite the holes in the story, Hopkins spent six years devoted to Napolitano's case. If it could be proven as he wished, it would be one of the most important events in human history, and the sacrifice of the better part of a decade was justified. If he was in a vicious cycle of affirming a prevaricator, it was a tragedy of sunk cost.
Seven years after her 1989 abduction, Rainey filmed as Napolitano described to Hopkin and a dinner guest how Richard and Dan attempted again to kidnap her and her cousin Connie. Hopkins was horrified that Napolitano had not seen fit to mention this before and asked to speak to Connie as soon as possible for corroboration. Napolitano promised she would have Connie do this, which happened that night. "The usually voluble Hopkins was very quiet, mainly listening. After he thanked the caller and hung up, [Rainey] asked who that was. His smile was as tight and wry as a killer Martini: 'That was Linda, pretending to be her cousin Connie.'" Given that, one wonders how much credence Hopkins could give anything Napolitano said.
Rainey was working on a documentary about the Napolitano case, tentatively titled Something Hidden. It was due out in 2011, though it has yet to materialize--except perhaps in snippets in the 2024 Netflix miniseries The Manhattan Alien Abduction.
On October 3, 1992, Stefula, Butler, and Hansen met with Hopkins to clarify some of the sticking points in the case. Among these was the unlikelihood of the duo and the third man's witnessing Napolitano's abduction that night. It had nothing to do with the paranormal but the mundanity of bureaucracy. Moving a diplomat requires preplanning and coordination. If anything went wrong or the official failed to reach the checkpoint at the appointed time, departments would immediately spring to attention to figure out what had happened, and there would have been an investigation, which is not in evidence. Hopkins seemed startled by this. "The consultant listed several specialized terms used by the dignitary protective services and suggested that Hopkins ask Richard and Dan the meaning of those terms as a test of their knowledge, and thus credibility." As far as they know, Hopkins didn't bother.
"A Critique of Budd Hopkins' Case..." pointed out a few other curiosities, such as that Napolitano was a professional singer until she lost her voice in the shower--no evidence of this singing career seems to exist--and that a doctor had told her that her red blood cells did not die but instead "rejuvenated." When pressed to identify this doctor, she was unable and "seemed to imply that she now believed that [the doctor] was part alien or somehow worked with the aliens."
Hopkins said he had supporting evidence to Napolitano's claims that he would not share. Stefula, Butler, and Hansen wrote, "because of Hopkins' demonstrated failure to check even the most rudimentary facts, we place absolutely no credence in his undisclosed 'evidence.'"
Penelope Franklin, editor of IF--The Bulletin of the Intruders Foundation and coinvestigator of the Napolitano case with Hopkins, "asserted to Hansen that Linda was absolutely justified in lying about the case." Beyond this being an acknowledgment that Napolitano had lied, it shatters whatever credibility Franklin, Napolitano, or Hopkins could have had. If they lied about anything, why? What did they hope to gain? Weren't they aware that this effectively discredited them? Had Hopkins coached Napolitano to lie?
"A Critique of Budd Hopkins' Case..." noted:
The Napolitano case brings into stark relief symptoms of deep problems within ufology: major figures in the UFO community aggressively sought to suppress evidence of a purported attempted murder; Hopkins failed to obtain and verify even the most basic investigatory information; his coinvestigator, Penelope Franklin, approved of lying by the principal witness; and leaders in the field have willingly accepted and promoted the case despite its exotic features and lack of supporting evidence.
In the end, the Linda Napolitano case might be all too ordinary, falling to the same flaws that plague those touted as something like "the most important in recorded history," with erratic personalities, impossible and unverifiable details, people who want to believe more than they want to examine, and subsequent chagrin. It is only a matter of time before the next Linda Napolitano finds the next Budd Hopkins, for good or ill. Ufology needs to wait for only a little before a boisterous abductee claims to be the Second Coming or a researcher runs afoul of ethics.
Noted Carl Sagan on NOVA:
Humans have a well-documented capacity for self-deception. There's something interesting going on here, no question. This is not trivial and not instantly dismissible. But whether what's going on is in outer space or inner space, that's the question.
Though one may cast doubt on the researchers, some of whom made their reputations on the back of people having unfathomable experiences and some who ruined theirs by too facilely believing the witnesses' trauma, we should look with compassion on those who sought solace. Napolitano is not a spotless figure, but that should not detract from the mass of experiencers who want nothing from the aliens but to be left alone. They have not cast themselves as the stars of a psychodrama and would as soon get off the stage as they could, only the researchers assure them they cannot.
Comments? Questions? Concerns? Do you want to set the record straight? Are you Linda Napolitano? Contact me.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
