23 People Say They Witnessed Linda’s Alien Abduction – And She’s So Sure It Happened That She’s Sueing Netflix For Making Her ‘Ridiculous’

On November 30, 1989, around 3 a.m., housewife Linda Napolitano says she woke up in her New York apartment to discover that she, her husband and their two young sons were not alone.

Three gray-skinned bipeds with large heads and large black eyes stood at the foot of her bed.

The former singer felt a bolt of lightning “like electricity” that left her paralyzed as a “brilliant, bluish-white beam of light” shone through the window of her twelfth-floor apartment and transported her into the red glow of a UFO.

“They take me all the way up, way above the building,” Linda remembers. “The UFO opens, almost like a clam, and then I’m in.”

Once aboard the spacecraft, she claims, she was taken to a big room with “all these lights and buttons and a big long table” where one of the aliens prodded her with “a needle as long as a turkey baster.”

“All three of them are standing in front of me and staring at me. I feel like I could drown in their eyes,” she says. ‘I find them very frightening.’

Linda claims her memory was blank at the time. The next thing she remembers is waking up, back in her apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, next to her snoring husband Steve.

It’s a barely believable alien abduction story that sounds like something out of a science fiction novel.

Housewife Linda Napolitano claims she felt a bolt of lightning ‘like electricity’ that left her paralyzed as a ‘beam of light’ carried her into the red glow of a UFO

‘Kidnapped’ Linda says she was taken from her New York apartment on November 30, 1989

But Linda’s bizarre story did not take place in a remote location, far from the eyes of witnesses.

No fewer than 23 people claimed to have seen Linda in her white nightgown floating toward a UFO as it hovered over the Brooklyn Bridge that night before disappearing into the East River.

A newspaper delivery man on his way to work said: ‘It scared me to death. I saw a woman come out of a window and just disappear.”

Accountant Cathy Turner also said she saw an object like “a large Christmas bauble – glowing and shining” in the sky.

And the story got stranger and stranger. After the kidnapping, Linda became convinced she was being followed, and one evening two large men knocked on her door to say they had also seen her floating out of her bedroom window.

The pair – who identified themselves only as Dan and Richard – later wrote a letter explaining that they were federal agents who had protected UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar that evening. He had also seen Linda, they claimed.

The case became a media sensation after it attracted the interest of celebrated UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, whose 1996 bestseller Witnessed: The True Story Of The Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions helped immortalize the case.

These witnesses – 23 in total – were interviewed and quoted in his book, with their names omitted to “spare their shame.” Linda herself was given the pseudonym ‘Linda Cortile’. Of course, there were always skeptics. But as Linda reasoned to Vanity Fair magazine in 2013, “If I was hallucinating, the witnesses saw my hallucination. That sounds crazier than the whole kidnapping phenomenon.’

That indeed happened – until now. A new Netflix documentary series, The Manhattan Alien Abduction, suggests that this bizarre case was a ‘massive hoax’ – and possibly one of the most convincing UFO hoaxes ever.

Strangely enough, the claim comes from none other than Carol Rainey – Budd’s ex-wife and a former friend of Linda’s. And Linda is so furious about it that she is suing Netflix and the documentary makers for defamation and fraud.

Budd’s interest in the extraterrestrial went back to the 1960s, when the researcher, who died in 2011, saw something “flat, silver-colored, airborne and inscrutable” flying off the coast of Cape Cod.

The case became a sensation after it attracted the interest of UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, shown here with Linda

It is featured in a new Netflix documentary series, The Manhattan Alien Abduction

But the program suggests the bizarre case was a ‘massive hoax’, with the claim coming from Carol Rainey, Budd’s ex-wife and a former friend of Linda.

The chance sighting led to a lifelong interest in UFOs, with him being called “the father of the alien abduction movement” in a New York Times obituary. Although he was a prominent artist, Budd struggled to be taken seriously as a ufologist – until Linda contacted him.

She first reached out in April 1989, saying she believed she had had an alien encounter in the Catskill Mountains thirteen years earlier, which left her with a strange, coiled object under her skin.

Budd, who believed that aliens were monitoring humans via electrical implants and experimenting with them to create a human-alien hybrid, suspected this was a tracking device.

Linda began attending the group meetings he held at his home for fellow “kidnapping victims” – until her more famous encounter occurred seven months later.

Carol, a filmmaker, claimed that she initially liked Linda and had helped her ex-husband by filming some witnesses. But over time she started to become suspicious.

She feared that Budd was “beginning to lose his objectivity,” while Linda — a “natural in front of the camera” — was simply enjoying the attention.

After studying Budd’s interviews, Carol expressed fears that he had deliberately misled – desperate to make his book a success, which a major Hollywood producer wanted to make into a film.

“Budd picked out compelling details but ignored anything that raised tough questions,” Carol said, referring to an interview with a “witness” who said she simply saw a bright light through her curtains.

Her fears were compounded the following summer when Linda became convinced that her nine-year-old son, Johnny, had also been abducted by three aliens while she stood frozen nearby.

Carol suspected he had been coached by his mother – a claim Johnny has denied, although he admits he had a terrible nightmare at a young age, which Linda told him was ‘most likely a real experience’.

Budd reacted defensively when Carol approached him, insisting that Linda wasn’t smart enough to have faked everything.

However, Carol brought in a forensic document expert to analyze the letters from the two “federal agents,” with the expert saying that “Dan’s handwriting matched Linda’s.”

As for the late Pérez de Cuéllar, he told an American broadcaster in 2020 that he had never had any experience with an alien abduction.

Carol died last year after speaking to the documentary makers, but her claims have not gone unchallenged by the now 77-year-old woman she accused.

Linda continues to insist that she and her son were abducted by aliens. She and Peter Robbins – a UFO researcher who worked with Budd – claim the documentary producers tricked them into speaking at length on the show by promising to tell Linda’s “true story.”

Documents filed with the New York State Supreme Court show that the documentary makers wanted to submit [Linda] to shame and ridicule’, while Carol is scathingly described as ‘a bitter, alcoholic ex-wife’.

Linda’s lawyer, Robert Young, told the Mail that the lawsuit is not about whether or not she was abducted by aliens, but about whether the documentary makers treated her fairly.

Linda, who is seeking undisclosed damages, has been unable to stop Netflix from airing the documentary but now wants it removed from the streaming service, which has declined to comment.

One remaining puzzle for Linda, who now lives in the small town of Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, is why Carol was so eager to pursue her.

However, a clue may lie in her legal complaint, which claims Carol was “out for revenge.”

It’s impossible to watch the new documentary without getting the feeling that Carol thought something was going on between Linda and Budd. A source involved in the case told the Mail they believe the pair were in a romantic relationship.

Ultimately, Carol’s case is compelling, but it doesn’t fully explain all 23 witnesses who spoke to her ex-husband, with many viewers saying they still believe Linda.

Despite Carol’s best efforts, it seems her rival’s astonishing story didn’t come completely out of the blue.