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.
Hopkins notes (111):
recollection of the beach scene was blocked for Linda and the three men for many months, even though she had undergone hypnosis on the events of that night. Then, somehow, Dan, Richard, and the third man are allowed to "spontaneously" recall the Lady of the Sands. A letter is sent to me about their recollections, I bring Linda in for another hypnosis session, and she, too, recalls the scene. There is an unsettling—and unearthly—precision in all of this.
Hopkins' suggestion was not that the story only existed once Napolitano created it as much as that the aliens had triggered memories on her schedule. "My ace in the hole was the fact that she had no idea the three men also recalled the scene at the beach" (112). When he read Dan's letters about the Lady of the Sands incident to Napolitano, Hopkins recorded her reactions, which he considers entirely convincing and in no way practiced, as she would have no idea what they would contain. Except, of course, if she had a hand in writing them--something Hopkins barely considers.
Napolitano again underwent hypnosis, recalling the beach, scoop and pails, dying sea creatures, and ecological message--all factors she had not alluded to in earlier sessions. For the first time, she also recalled seeing "three [men] sitting on the sand" and showing them a bluefish to explain how people like them had done this (p. 95). On Hopkins' prompting, described in Witnessed: The True Story Of The Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions, Napolitano remembered they were Richard and Dan.
Hopkins said he was pleasantly surprised by "the extraordinary and highly detailed consonance between Dan's letter and Linda's recollections of her seaside experience" (p. 110), seeing this as evidence of its reality and not that Napolitano and Dan/Richard might have a closer relationship than they let on--possibly because they were all in some way Napolitano. Instead, he admired the alien's ability "to erase [from abductees' memories] any time period they choose and 'spontaneously' to reinstate memories on command" (p. 111), thus why all four of them suddenly recalled the "Lady of the Sands."
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On November 30, 1989, aliens stole Linda Napolitano from her sleep, setting off one of the most extraordinary and harrowing cases in the abduction canon. This event promised to upend all that researchers thought they knew. As Budd Hopkins put it in his book on the case, Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions, "This abduction event so drastically alters our knowledge of the alien incursion in our world that it is easily the most important in recorded history." (p. XIV-1)
Alternately, Napolitano was a quick-witted attention-seeker and/or was enabled by some of the biggest names in ufology, which is no less important.
Amber's coworker at the garden center moved a rodent nest. When the babies crawled over his hand, he reacted with a terror only fractionally removed from pesticide.
Amber says, "The mother" -- a fiend who had nibbled the heads of the sunflowers in the greenhouse -- "won't be able to find them if I move them, right?" They meant this as a question but only wanted me to assure them it was true. My spouse is not one given to questions for which they have already established the answer.
I tell them I can't know that, but I have my doubts the mother would bother recovering missing pups (or whatever the proper term for baby mice is) when she exists in a world of month-long gestation; there is always another brood to rear, and most baby rodents in the wild do not make it to their quick adulthood.
They ask if they should leave the babies there or catch them and bring them to our home. I cannot tell my spouse to leave babies to die of starvation.It is beyond their character to allow nature to be apathetically cruel.
Beatty is a short, blonde woman with a welcoming voice and demeanor. She runs a local bait shop, Hook Line & Sinker, when she is not investigating the local Bigfoot population, being interviewed, or attending Bigfoot events -- which are much less of a rarity than the hoi polloi might anticipate. Her fieldwork only sometimes requires her to hike into the dark of strange wood, as she has a habitation site in the undeveloped property behind her house. The shop, also the headquarters of Bigfoot Researchers of the Hudson Valley, is not far from neighbors, down the road from the Red Hook Elks Lodge #2022 and within a mile of the elementary, middle, and high school, as well as Market Street, the main road that crosses Route 9 and which turns into Route 199. The site is likewise close to Bard College, though, to my knowledge, no liberal arts major has mentioned a run-in with ape-men.
