In these times of breath mint shaped UAPs and Congressional hearings about alleged ‘crash saucer retrieval programs’ and whatnot, watching a documentary focused on alien abductions on a major streaming platform has a certain retro nostalgic vibe to it; like playing your favorite 80’s arcade game on your PlayStation 5.
Abductions, the belief that nonhuman entities capture hapless citizens from time to time, to perform painful medical examinations unto them—along with sexual experimentations closer to animal husbandry than current-state genetic engineering—became for a while the fodder of live TV talk shows. They take us back to an era of pop culture entertainment when accusations were made, insults were yelled, chairs were thrown, and blows were sometimes exchanged in front of a thrilled audience that were often times passionate participants of the unfolding drama broadcasted to millions of people directly to their home screens; a sort of post-modern mix between a witch trial and a gladiator match, regularly interrupted by the witty remarks of the presenter followed by sponsor ads.
And in the middle of that electronic circus full of pastel carpets and over-padded suits, sat the people claiming to have experienced irruptions into their lives by a strange reality; accompanied by the only individuals who didn’t laugh at them and offered a safe haven of comfort amid a sea of derision and rejection: the researchers attempting to unravel the mystery of this parallel dimension, and the seemingly sinister intentions of its denizens,
The most prominent of those abduction researchers, Budd Hopkins—coiner of the term “missing time” and the one who paved the way (for better or worse) to David Jacobs and John Mack to study the most confounding aspect of the UFO enigma—was probably fuming between commercial breaks, wondering: just what would it take to convince the Doubting Oprahs and Geraldos of the world? What would it take, to shake their entranced viewers out of their microwaved dinner stupor and make them realize this was real, dammit! It was not a fantasy, or a lie concocted for attention, this personal encounter with an Other presence, that defied all our cherished notions about how the world is supposed to be?
Physical evidence has always been a scarce commodity in the UFO field. In the abduction subfield, even more so. But that didn’t deter Hopkins from searching for a silver bullet —the ‘perfect’ case with enough substantial corroboration, that would finally shut the mouth of skeptics demanding proof instead of just anecdotal testimonies.
And with the “Linda Cortille” case (as he originally promoted to protect the identity of the witness) he thought to have finally found it. Here was the account of a New Yorker woman (Linda Napolitano was her real name) with anecdotes of life-long encounters with alien presences, like hundreds of others he had interviewed—and hypnotically regressed—as part of his research. Unlike those others, though, Budd and his colleague Peter Robbins had found independent witnesses claiming to have observed this average American housewife being ‘beamed up’ out of her lower Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night on November 30th, 1989; into a giant disk-shaped object hovering above the city skyline.
An actual, corroborated abduction, taking place in the middle of one of the biggest capitals in the world! If true, this was indeed the coveted silver bullet vindicating Hopkins’ efforts, which would finally allow him to sound the alarms on this insidious alien presence in our planet.
But as the Netflix three-part The Manhattan Alien Abduction docuseries shows, things are never as simple as we would like them to be…
[Spoilers Alert]
The Manhattan Alien Abduction runs a bit like a detective ‘cold case’ story with an almost noir ambiance, warning viewers what they are about to watch is based on “the most credible and contested alien abduction in recent history” (whatever that even means!).
The story’s main characters are given single names with big bold letters as they appear, alongside their role to identify them: “Linda (Napolitano) the abductee;” “Budd (Hopkins) the researcher;” “Peter (Robbins) the assistant;” “Carol (Rainey) the skeptic*” (Budd’s ex-wife, who at the time was helping him document the case). Possibly this stylistic choice was made by the producers, because in this particular story two of the most important characters’ identities have never been uncovered beyond a simple alias—“Richard and Dan”—if they ever existed at all, that is… but we’ll get to that later.
There’s no denying the top-notch production values you would expect of a Netflix-backed series: The lighting, the editing, the music (a bit too resemblant of Unsolved Mysteries IMO) and the special effects: the giant saucer coming out of the cloudy night sky over New York like a dark floating island, flawlessly mimicking the scenes of the movie Independence Day Budd himself once wanted to emulate, when he tried to turn Witnessed (the book he wrote about the Napolitano case) into a major motion picture.
Like all mass media products trying to bring UFOs to the big (or little) screen, though, TMAA indulges in artistic licenses countering the original account. The silhouette of Linda’s wavy hair and flowing night gown gently floating upward as if she was caught into some kind of gravity vortex is an iconically beautiful, albeit inaccurate, portrayal of how the event (supposedly) took place: With Linda hunched into a fetal position while surrounded by two spindly gray aliens.
In fact, it is so obvious the series decided to focus on the worldly drama aspects of the story, instead of its otherworldly implications, that the actual aliens—the least important characters in this story—are given less than 30 seconds of airtime in the whole three episodes combined(!) shown as horror-like snapshot glimpses of naked limbs of unnatural hue and proportions.
I mean, I get it: Abductions have always been the embarrassing ‘ugly duckling’ of the UFO field, because those studying the phenomenon would rather focus on “safe” distant observations of these anomalous objects by dispassionate credible observers—especially if they have official/military credentials! — rather than entertaining the “up close and personal” interactions that salt-of-the-earth abductees allegedly have with the actual occupants piloting them. So to watch a documentary focusing on abductions which ends up showing more of the UFO hovering over New York than the aliens themselves, is quite telling of the times we live in, and how most people think about the subject —even if they take the reality of UFOs for granted.
Indeed, the people involved in the Napolitano case would even agree the value of this case lied not on Linda’s memories per se, but by the corroboration given by third-party witnesses—and once again, the allure of official credentials also played a role in how the story unfolded…
Another thing the documentary failed to avoid, either by design or accidentally, is the shock value sought after by the producers of those same TV talk shows already mentioned, when they booked Hopkins and his abductees in their slots. The close-ups shots as the two women are reacting to the accusations they’ve been making to each other for the last 30 years—(Carol) “You are a liar!”/(Linda) “Bring it on!”— produce the same type of Springer-like human drama; albeit virtually and with no flying chairs, since the interviews were all conducted separately.
Because of it, the viewer might initially be tempted to judge the whole affair as an alien-tinged love triangle between Linda, the earthily attractive Italo-American middle-aged woman —even after having a scary encounter she would make sure to wear makeup before going to see Budd(!) and she always drank coffee from a straw to avoid stained teeth— who slowly became more and more unhealthily dependent on this elderly (and married) artist-turned-therapist, who despite whatever good intentions he might have had to genuinely help his research subjects/patients, held no medical degrees and had no proper professional counseling training.
But tried to help he did, there’s no question in the mind of those who knew him about it (some of whom I’ve talked prior to writing this review), and so he would spend many hours consoling Linda and even crying alongside her, after a troubling hypnosis regression session conducted on his own bedroom (“He was my rock,” Linda confesses to the camera).
…And then there was Carol, the estranged wife who was propelled into the UFO whirlwind once she went to live with the #1 abduction researcher in the world, but who was never able to find a proper balance between her husband’s peculiar work with abductees like Linda, and whatever time remained in his busy schedule for a normal marriage life.
Indeed, abductions are known to bring a considerable amount of strain to interpersonal relationships, especially of the romantic kind (even amongst researchers, I presume); many abductees are actually afraid to ‘come out of the alien closet’ with their own partners and prefer instead the solidarity of support groups like the one fostered by Budd—or nowadays they might resort to the virtual camaraderie brought by Internet connectivity. In fact, what perhaps surprised me the most from the documentary was learning that—after all these years, and the media circus which ensued once the case became national news— Linda is still married to Steve, her lifelong husband. Talk about Italian resilienza, ma che cosa!
But as the documentary progresses, though, the viewer will slowly realize the situation behind these human conflicts were—like the phenomenon which entangled them in the first place—much more complex than what is initially perceived.
Carol, she reluctantly confesses to the camera in the final episode, had a very troublesome upbringing in a deeply conservative fundamentalist household. Her life story went from rebelling from her father who disowned her for questioning the family’s beliefs, to marrying a much older man than she was, who was turning before her eyes into the leader of another religion; only one with brightly lit saucers and alien hybrid programs, instead of pyres of fire over the Red Sea and lascivious incubi (“The apostle crying in the wilderness that danger was right overhead,” in her own words).
She rebelled once again against the dogma and the father figure, but instead of just joining the ranks of doubting Thomases booing at her former spouse in the live TV audiences, she actively turned into a Judas, in the eyes of faithful followers like Peter, seeking to expose and discredit the life’s work of his friend and mentor.
Carol’s reformist crusade aimed most of her batteries on Linda, who in her eyes chose the unlikely path of UFOs to rekindle her craving for the spotlight (she once recorded a single under the Mercury label, which you can still find on Youtube). Linda, who had not only bamboozled Hopkins but also somehow managed to fake an X-ray showing a strange wormlike implant on her nose, indoctrinate her whole family to back her claims of strange happenings and sudden nose bleeds, and even recruit the twenty-three other witnesses who had come forward with stories of seeing something truly bizarre that night of November 1989. If we were to take sides here, like the audience on Ricki Lake’s show, we would have to concede that the only two people the producers of TMAA manage to find and still corroborate Linda’s version after all these years are his husband and Johnny, her son; who was just a little boy when he too began to report the same type of night intrusions as his mom. Johnny appears in the series wearing a hoody and with his face concealed, but he is still confirming his mom’s side of the story—Italian loyalty to la famiglia, or true coping with trauma? The viewer is left to decide.
Oh, and then there is the issue of Richard and Dan, the two secondary characters in this tragicomedy play that, much like Hamlet’s Rosenkratz and Guildenstern, just refuse to remain behind the curtain when their time is up. Richard and Dan were both the strongest asset and the Achilles’s heel of this abduction case from the get-go: two anonymous individuals who purportedly began gaslighting Hopkins with letters and taped recordings which seemed to not only confirm Linda’s abduction account but to propel it to a whole new level of importance, when they revealed to be attached Secret Service personnel guarding not other than the Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuellar, who had (according to them) witnessed the whole event from his official limousine during the night of Linda’s abduction.
If there is one thing that is constant in the history of the UFO phenomenon, aside from its unfathomable nature, is the allure that official ranks and government connections have on those trying to prove its authenticity. Hopkins excitedly followed the dangling carrot that were Richard and Dan through a sinuous, spiky road… which ultimately led to nowhere. Despite Linda’s claims of harassment and even kidnapping one night by these two shadowy figures, to this day they remain as elusive and mythological as Keyser Soze in the movie The Usual Suspects.
Like Kevin Spacey, was Linda the unassuming mastermind behind this grand delusion? An uneducated yet brilliant woman who was perhaps underestimated by archaic New England prejudices toward the descendants of Italian immigrants that might still be present in New York society? The documentary chooses to leave the question open; but it has to be pointed out Linda would have had every opportunity during the last three decades to make a career in the UFO lecture circuit (such as it is) and yet she never did.
As a person who’s been interested in the subject of abduction for over thirty years, watching TMAA leaves me with a bittersweet taste in the mouth. Over the decades I eventually grew up to question the claims and methodology of researchers like Hopkins, and I would agree with Carol’s opinion that in his work with abductees he never exercised enough of a dispassionate detachment necessary to retain a sense of objectivity with the information he was apparently retrieving from them. How could he, when he was never trained as a scientist or a clinician, but as an artist? And artists always approach their work with passion.
But the same could be said of Carol, who was not a scientist either and turned the Napolitano case into a conflict of passions between Budd and her—the Apostle against the Zealot.
Take for instance Johnny’s account: Either a young, malleable boy was maliciously indoctrinated by his mother to tell a lie or an induced fantasy that would reinforce her own (Carol’s position) or he was simply telling the objective truth (Budd’s position). Neither of them could entertain a third or a fourth option, like that perhaps a young kid ended up being influenced on his own to interpret his dreams and make believe worlds under a certain framework accepted (rightly or wrongly) by the grownups in charge of him; or perhaps he was a lonely boy in search of attention and wanting to feel special like his mommy, who surely was special enough to not only be interviewed in television but also being visited by aliens from another planet.
Like Budd and Linda, I am not a psychologist either so I am only guessing. I can only tell with a modicum of confidence that in my years of studying UFOs, I have slowly come to learn that the role of hoaxes and deception is not as clearcut as believers or skeptics would like to believe. In paranormal cases, researchers sometimes find that witnesses who were otherwise truthful and honest about their experiences would nevertheless engage in deception after a while, for various reasons: Due to the volatile nature of the phenomenon, for example, and a ‘desire not to disappoint’ the nice researchers who’ve patiently come to study them and prove what they’re saying is true; other times to ‘boost’ their original experience and make them more grandiose than they really were (was that the case of Richard and Dan, the ‘spooks’ who brought Pérez de Cuellar into the mix, if there were indeed concocted by Linda to make her case stand out from the rest of the other ones studied by her hero?).
And other times, the deception comes from the phenomenon itself. Such is the ‘self-negating’ nature of UFOs, as researcher Jacques Vallée exposed in his seminal book The Invisible College. Vallée also knew that a well-publicized hoax had a chance of having more influence over the culture than a real event.
Whether totally or partially hoaxed, the Linda Napolitano case had the effect of ending the public interest in alien abductions by the late 1990s. Sure, The X-Files and Dark Skies would make sure the mythology of these experiences would be firmly cemented in XXth century pop culture, but Budd Hopkins’s dreams of turning “the case of the century” (as he once called it) into a Hollywood movie fizzled out. The invitations to primetime television shows eventually dried out as well, and Hopkins had to content himself with podcast appearances and interviews to Coast to Coast for the remainder of his life, which ended in 2011—six years before he could have witnessed the reacceptance of the UFO phenomenon by the general public and mainstream media (Carol Rainey also passed away in 2023, and the documentary makes it clear this was her attempt to have the last word over her ex-husband. The only ones left to defend their positions are Linda and Peter, who acts as the steward of Budd’s legacy**).
In less than a week there will be a new Congressional hearing on UFOs in Washington, D.C. Despite what will be shared (and not shared) by whatever ‘whistleblowers’ they gather to testify under oath, it would be a safe bet to predict none of them will bring forth the uncomfortable subject of alien abductions before the representatives of the US government—at least it is a safer bet than the one made by Hopkins with the Napolitano case, in which he poured in all of his reputation into this shiny ‘silver bullet’ he thought he’d found… and lost.
But if there is one thing The Manhattan Alien Abduction docuseries proves, is that UFOs are not werewolves that require silver bullets to take down. UFO stories are vampires, and sooner or later all of them resurface from their grave to sink their teeth and rekindle our nostalgia of an era in which we had less questions… and more hair mousse.
The Manhattan Alien Abduction is available on Netflix.
(*) Later changed to ‘filmmaker’ for some reason.
(**) Incidentally, both Napolitano and Hopkins’s estate are suing Netflix. Seems these two women are not done fighting with each other, even after death…
