SUBJECT: THE GREAT HIGH RISE ABDUCTION FILE: UFO2116
ARTICLE BY PATRICK HUYGHE - OMNI
It was cold and clear, about 3:00 a.m., when the car stalled near the South
Street seaport in Manhattan. Glimpsing up, the passengers - a major political
figure, who will remain unnamed, and two government agents - spied a glowing
oval object hovering over a building a couple of blocks away. As lights on the
heavenly vision changed from red-orange to a bright bluish-white, a woman in
a nightgown floated out of a twelfth-story window and hovered midair. The awe-
struck witnesses watched as the woman, surrounded by several small creatures,
ascended effortlessly into the bottom of the craft. The object zipped over the
Brooklyn Bridge and finally plunged into the East River. Or so the story goes.
It's an extraordinary case, says Budd Hopkins, a world-class modern artist who
has recently become known for his books, Missing Time and Intruders, detailing
his 18 years of investigation into claims that thousands of people have been
abducted by UFOs. A trip to Hopkins studio on Manhattan's West Side reveals
the profound influence these so-called abductions have had on his art. Scatt-
ered around the room are colorful, profile-shaped paintings he calls "guard-
ians" that evoke nothing if not the aliens in question. Indeed, as Hopkins
describes his work, his dark, thick eyebrows dance with enthusiasm; these days
it is the bizarre tales of UFOs and the nasty creatures who inhabit them, pl-
ucking innocents from their homes in the middle of the night, that consume
most of his time.
If Hopkins seems excited, he explains, it's because he has found a case that
might convince the army of skeptics who have hounded him for years. Unlike the
thousands of other abduction cases on record, he explains, this is the first
time independent witnesses have come forward claiming to have seen the event
take place. Even more significant, one of these witnesses is said, in the ver-
nacular, to be a Very Important Person. " The implication," Hopkins specu-
lates," is that this was deliberate, a demonstration of alien power and in-
tent."
Hopkins has never had trouble drawing dramatic conclusions about UFO abduct-
ions, a phenomenon that emerged , it should be noted, without him. The first
bizarre story came to public attention in 1966 and involved the now-notorious
New England couple, Betty and Barney Hill. Under hypnosis, the Hills recalled
being snatched from their car and examined by small creatures aboard a flying
saucer. But it would take another decade, a few more headline-grabbing abduc-
tion tales, and finally, the television broadcast of the Hill's own story be-
fore tales of alien encounters became embedded in the popular consciousness
at large.
The stage was now set for Hopkins to emerge as the leading authority on ab-
ductions. It happened in 1981 with the publication of his book, Missing time,
in which he suggested that the abduction experience was much more widespread
than anyone had imagined For Hopkins, the plight of the abductee became a per-
sonal crusade, and before long, he would be lecturing on the subject across
the country, appearing on one talk show after another, and finally writing
Intruders, a 1987 best seller that was turned into a television miniseries in
1992. Clearly, no one has done more than Hopkins to bring this strange phen-
omenon to public awareness. Even more to the point, no one has had greater
success in getting scientists and mental-health professionals to take a ser-
ious look at abductions.
So it's no surprise that when Hopkins began touting his latest case as the
strongest. evidence yet for UFOs, their alien occupants, and their systematic
abduction of human beings, people listened. But as the pieces of the puzzle
were revealed, critics began charging that rather than prove his point, Hop-
kins had fallen victim to the elaborate fantasy of a bored housewife or a
complex hoax. Indeed, said his detractors, so outrageous was the tale and so
fragile the evidence for it, it had backfired, destroying his credibility and
bringing down his body of work like a house of cards.
The story certainly is a humdinger, with more twists and turns than califor-
nia's Highway 1 and more mystery characters than a Le Carre spy thriller. It's
a crazy, endless saga, says Hopkins, including such elements as secret agents,
attempted murder, and two high level political figures, Mikhail Gorbachev one
of them.
The central character in the case is Linda. She does not want her last name
revealed. she lives in Lower Manhattan, and on the very hot spring day I went
to meet her, I came to appreciated why the aliens had decided to grab her
through the window. It certainly beats penetrating a locked gate and the
security of a guard, then taking an elevator up 12 stories and winding your
way through a corridor to her place. When I knocked on the door, I was greeted
by an attractive, fortyish woman with brown, almond shaped eyes and long,
flowing brown hair. We sat down on her couch, and as her air conditioner blast-
ed arctic air and she smoked a dozen cigarettes, I was treated to one mind
boggling tale.
It started early in 1988. Linda had just bought Kitty Kelly's biography of
Frank Sinatra and another book, which she took to be a mystery. The other book
was Intruders by Budd Hopkins. By the end of the first chapter, she was stum-
ped: Aliens had left mysterious implants in people's brains and noses, and
that last little bit bothered her. Thirteen years before, she had found a lump
on the side of her nose and had gone to a specialist who said it was builtup
cartilage left over from a surgical scar. But she had never had any such surg-
ery, even as a child, she said. Linda then took my finger and put it on her
nose: Yes, I could feel a very slight bump on her upper right nostril. But
there had to be more than this, I thought. There was.
A year later, Linda finally contacted Hopkins, who decided to explore Linda's
past with his favorite tool - hypnosis. It felt kind of strange, Linda says.
I'm just a wife and mother. I'm just Linda. UFOs? Naw.
Hopkins says he learned otherwise. He regressed LInda to age 8, enabling her
to recall an episode in which she thought she glimpsed the cartoon character
Casper, of Casper the Friendly Ghost fame. But under hypnosis, her memory of
Casper turned out to be a large, topshaped object that she'd seen flying above
the apartment building across the street from her childhood home in Manhattan.
Hopkins came to suspect that she had been abducted by aliens and by June of
1989 had invited her to join his support group for abductees.
I remember sitting there bug eyed listening to these people, says Linda. I
felt strange the first time, but after that I felt better.
Finally, on November 30, 1989, a very agitated Linda called Hopkins to report
she had been abducted again. She had gone to bed quite late, at about ten min-
utes before 3:00 a.m., because she'd been up doing the laundry. Towels and
blue jeans for four take eons to dry in her small dryer, she explained. Her
husband, who normally worked nights, was on jury duty that week and so was
home and asleep in the bedroom. She showered, got into bed, and lying on her
back, clasped her hands and began reciting "Our Father" to herself, a habit
she carried over into adulthood from her Roman Catholic upbringing. Then she
felt a presence in the room.
I was awake but had my eyes closed, she recalls. I was afraid. I knew it wasn-
't my husband; he was snoring away. Then I lay there wondering, Did I lock the
door? Is it one of her two boys and finally reached out for her husband. Wake
up, she said, there's somebody in the room.
He didn't answer, and she began to feel a numbness crawl up form her toes.
After months in the support group exploring her past abductions, she recogniz-
ed what that meant. It's now or never, she thought and opened her eyes. At the
foot of the bed, says Linda, stood a small creature with a large head and huge
black eyes. I screamed and yelled, she says, and then threw my pillow. The
creature fell back. After that, she has only fragments of conscious memory - a
white fabric going over her eyes; little alien hands pounding up and down her
back; suddenly falling back into bed.
It was a quarter to 5:00 in the morning when Linda jumped out of bed, ran into
the kids room, and discovered, she says that they weren't breathing. Hysteric-
al, she retrieved a small mirror from the bathroom and placed it under their
noses. Suddenly, a mist formed on the mirror, she says, and she heard her hus-
band snoring in the other room. They were all alive. Linda, in shock, sat on
the floor in the hallway between the two bedrooms until dawn. Later she called
Hopkins.
Under hypnosis, Linda revealed that there had actually been five creatures in
the apartment. They had led her from the bedroom through the living room and
out a closed window, she declared, where, floating in midair, she saw a bright
bluish whit light. She was afraid of falling and embarrassed, thinking her
nightgown had gone over her head. She moved up into the craft and then found
herself sitting on a table. The creatures around her, she says, were scraping
her arms - like taking skin samples, she speculates, and pounding with an
instrument up and down her spine - all typical abduction fare, to say the lea-
st.
Quite atypical is what allegedly happened 15 months later. In February 1991
Hopkins received a typewritten letter from two people claiming to be police
officers. Late in 1989, the letter said, the two had witnessed a little girl
or woman wearing a full white nightgown floating out of a twelfth floor apart-
ment window, escorted by three ugly but small humanlike creatures into a very
large hovering oval that eventually turned reddish orange. The object, the
letter added, flew over their heads, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and plunged
into the East River. They wondered if the woman was alive, though they wished
to remain anonymous to protect their careers. They signed the letter with fir-
st names only - Richard and Dan.
Hopkins was astonished. I realized immediately that the woman they had seen
was none other than Linda, he said. The account seemed to corroborate the time
date, and details of her abduction. Here, finally, were independent, seemingly
reputable witnesses to an abduction.
When Hopkins first called Linda to tell her, she replied, That can't be possi-
ble. then she wondered if she and Budd were the victims of a cruel joke. But
all suspicions vanished one evening a few weeks later, she says, when Richard
and Dan showed up at her door.
Police, they announced. Linda looked through the peephole and saw two men in
plain clothes flashing a gold badge. So I let them in, said Linda, and they
looked at me kind of funny. When they introduced themselves as Dan and Richard,
my stomach dropped to the floor. Both were tall, well built, attractive men
in their forties, she says. Dan sat on the couch, put his head in his hand,
and said, My God, it's really her. Richard had tears in his eyes and hugged
her, expressing relief that she was alive.
Budd had warned me not to discuss the incident with anyone, Linda says now,
so all I could do was tell them to talk to Budd.
In the year that followed, Linda claims, she had numerous encounters with the
mystery duo - at bus stops, outside her dentist's office, even at church.
Hopkins himself never had the pleasure of meeting the pair, though, he says,
he did eventually receive three more letters from Dan and four letters and
an audiocassette from Richard. In one letter, says Hopkins, Dan explained his
need to remain anonymous: He and Richard were not New York City cops, he said
nor on that fateful November night had they been alone. They were, in fact,
government security agents and had been escorting an important political fig-
ure, who they would not name, to a downtown heliport; suddenly their car's
engine died and the headlights went out. They had seen Linda's abduction
unfold after they pushed the car to safety under the elevated FDR Drive.
Dan and Richard just couldn't stay away. One morning, after Linda had walked
her youngest son to the school bus at 7:15, she claims she was approached by
Richard, who asked her to take a ride in his car. She refused, but Richard's
grip firmed on her shoulder. You can go quietly or you can go kicking and scr-
eaming, Linda claims Richard told her. As he dragged her to the open rear door
of his black Mercedes, he tickled her, Linda states. That's how he got me in
the car.
They drove me around for about three hours, says Linda, asking me all sorts
of questions. Did she work for the government? Was she herself an alien? They
even demanded she prove herself human by taking off her shoes. Aliens, they
would claim in a letter to Hopkins, lacked toes. She called Hopkins as soon
as they dropped her off at home.
Hopkins told me to call the police, Linda now explains, but i refused. Who
would have believed me? The notion of surveillance by Richard and Dan eventu-
ally spooked her so much that she quit her secretarial job and simply stayed
home. To ease Linda's isolation, Hopkins found a benefactor who paid for Lind-
a's limited use of a bodyguard so she could go out.
Unfortunately, the bodyguard was not around for what Linda sys was her second
major encounter with Richard and Dan. On October 15, 1991, Linda reports, Dan
accosted her on the street and pulled her into a red Jaguar. As they drove al-
ong, he sometimes put his hand on her knee - to distract me, Linda suggests,
from following the route to a three story beach house which I assume was on
Long Island. Inside, Dan started a pot of coffee and gave Linda a present: a
nightgown, she says, the kind a woman might wear if she didn't have any child-
ren, especially sons. Dan asked her to put it on so he could photograph her
in it as she appeared mid abduction, floating over New York. She refused but
finally agreed to put it on over her clothes. As Dan's behavior became incre-
asingly strange, she decided to flee, running out the door and onto the beach.
Dan caught me and picked me up, shaking me like a toy, she says. There was mud
on my face, so he dunked me in the water once, twice, three times. I don't
think he was trying to drown me, but he kept me under too long. This behavior,
which critics of this strange tale have termed attempted murder, finally ceas-
ed. Instead, Dan pulled off Linda's wet jeans and, she says, pulled her down
on his lap in the water, rocking her like a baby. Shortly after, Linda reports,
Richard showed up, apologized for Dan, and drove me home.
Linda went straight to Hopkins. She left sand all over my house, Hopkins says.
A few weeks later, I received a half dozen photographs of Linda, in the night-
gown, running along the beach.
That November, the saga became stranger still. While lunching with Linda, a
relative who was also a doctor insisted she go to the hospital to x-ray the
lump in her nose. The x-ray Linda now presents shows a profile of her head;
clearly visible is a quarter inch long cylinder apparently embedded in her
nose.
It was weird, says Hopkins friend Paul Cooper, professor of neurosurgery at
New York University, who has examined the x-ray. I've never seen anything like
it. But even Cooper admits the x-ray could have been faked by taping a little
something to the outside of Linda's nose.
Moreover, as usually happens in UFO stories, this tantalizing bit of evidence
vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Soon after getting the x-ray, Linda
told Hopkins he'd awakened with a bloody nose. Under hypnosis, Hopkins says,
Linda revealed that the aliens had again whisked her away. Later, with Cooper-
's help, Hopkins had further x-rays taken, but the implant was nowhere to be
seen.
Meanwhile, another alleged witness to LInda's spectacular abduction came for-
ward. That same month, Hopkins received a large manila envelope from a woman
living in upstate New York. On the outside, in large letters, appeared the
words, Confidential, Re: Brooklyn Bridge.
On the evening of November 29, 1989, the woman - Hopkins calls her "Janet Kim-
ble" - had been in Brooklyn at a retirement party for her boss. When she head-
ed home via the Brooklyn Bridge around 3:00 a.m., she told Hopkins, her car
came to a dead stop in the middle of the bridge and her headlights blinked out.
The same thing, she states, happened to the cars coming up behind her. Sudden-
ly, she saw what she thought was a building on fire about a quarter of a mile
away. The light was so bright that she had to shield her eyes, she said. Then
she realized what she was seeing: Four "balls" had floated out of an apartment
window and, midair, unrolled into three rickets-stricken children and a fourth,
taller, normal girl child wearing a white gown. While I watched, she wrote, I
could hear the screams of the people parked in their cars behind me. The chil-
dren were then whisked up into the object, whereupon it flew over the Brooklyn
Bridge and disappeared when her view was obscured by a walkway.
Hopkins says he telephoned Janet Kimble immediately and later had lunch with
her. The tale told by this widow of about sixty who once worked as a telephone
operator corroborates stories told by Richard and Linda, he says, ruling out
the possibility of a hoax.
In fact, if Hopkins is to be believed, another witness to the Linda abduction
was actually the first. That person, he states, is a UFO abductee as well,
a woman in her early thirties who claims to have been abducted from her Man-
hattan bedroom in the middle of the night. She consciously remembers being
outside at some point, moving along the streets involuntarily, and seeing 15
to 20 other women all moving zombielike toward a UFO on the banks of the East
River.
When Hopkins tells me this, I CAN't help but guffaw. He finds my reaction
perfectly understandable. "What can I say?" he says. For Hopkins, who is
in the midst of investigating another mass abduction in New York City involv-
ing a hundred humans, this woman's story is only " a little more bizarre than
most."
In any event says Hopkins, this woman at one point looks down the East River
and sees two other UFOs in the sky, one a bright orange object at the south-
ern end of Manhattan, ostensibly the one that abducted Linda.
The two cases, if believed and taken in concert, shed an ominous lightly on the
humorous name that some critics have bestowed on the Linda case. "Manhattan
Transfer." Were the aliens out that night abducting Manhattanites like Linda
in droves?
By December of 1991, the end of Linda's saga was nowhere in sight. She was now
struggling with an obviously disturbed and persistent human named Dan, who,
according to Richard, had been admitted to a rest home. At Christmas, she
received a card and note from Dan. It was love letter actually. He told her
he planned to leave the rest home soon and asked her to pack her toothbrush-
he was coming for her. He wanted to learn her alien ways and her special lang-
uage. You'll make a beautiful bride, he teased. Linda, however, was not amush-
ed.
Dan apparently tried to get Linda in February of 1992, but she was rescued
from this dragon by Richard, whom Linda now regards as a knight in shining
armor. Linda says that Richard, upon returning from a mission abroad, had
gone to visit Dan at the rest home, found him missing, and had come looking
for him in New York. When he learned that Dan had prepared a passport for
Linda and booked two tickets to England, he immediately sought out Linda and
managed to spirit her away just in time.
Linda's last contact with the aliens occurred a few months afterward. On
Memorial Day 1992, she, her husband, two sons, and one of their guests all
awakened at about 4:30 in the morning with nosebleeds. Hopkins says he has
subsequently confirmed, through hypnosis, that the incident was UFO related.
I really don't try to convince anybody, says Linda, having come to the end
of her story. I don't expect anyone to believe this because, to tell you the
truth, if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't believe it either. But
it happened. It happened.
If it really did, I thought, the independent witnesses would confirm it. The
prize witness obviously was the VIP,and the word in the UFO community is that
Hopkins thinks it was Javier Perez de Cuellar, secretary general of the United
Nations from 1982 to 1991. I will not deny or confirm that, says Hopkins. I
won't say who he is but I can say this: All the letters from Richard and Dan
refer to the fact that there was a third man in the car. And he's written one
letter to me, which was signed, The Third Man. I can't make the things he
letting me know between the lines who he is.
Actually, rumor has it that this third party may be central to the Linda case.
according to anonymous sources close to Hopkins, Richard, Dan, and their pass-
enger were all abducted on that fateful day of November 30, 1989, right along
with Linda. Their delayed recall of this event supposedly would explain why
it took 15 months for them to write to Hopkins, why they were so interested
in Linda, and why they are so reluctant to come forward now.
But all that is certain about Perez de Cuellar is that he was in New York City
on the days in question. Did he really witness the Linda abduction?
Joe Sills, spokesman for the secretary general at the United Nations, was nice
enough to check with the security people but came up empty handed. No one that
I spoke to, he says, was aware of him ever being in that part of town at that
hour of the morning. It's just not in the kind of schedule that he kept. What-
's more, he added , Perez de Cuellar could not have been heading for the heli-
port since he always went to the airport via limousine. U.N. spokesperson Juan
Carlos Brandt checked with Perez de Cuellar directly. He says he never witnes-
sed any incident, says Brandt.
And adding insult to injury, Hopkins can't even prove that the two government
security agents, Richard and Dan, are real. He has never met or spoken to them
and all efforts to identify them have proven fruitless. In March of 1991, for
instance, Linda looked through six hours of clips of news programs showing
security agents at events in New York City. The clips belong to one of Hopkins
contacts in government law enforcement. Near the end of the six hours, while
watching a network broad identified as Dan. Despite the fact that the images
were taken from a distance, involved crowds and the bustling chaos that acco-
mpanies visiting dignitaries, she apparently had no trouble making her ident-
ification. Those who have viewed the tapes have seen a man who appears to be
taking part in official business, and who is in no way out of place or unusual.
In the months that followed, Hopkins and Linda made the rounds with their pic-
tures of dan in hand. They went to United Nations security and the State Dep-
artment, Secret Service, and Russian delegation offices in New York. At times,
Hopkins and Linda would use a cover story so as not to arouse suspicion: Some-
times we said we were husband and wife and that this was a friend we had met
a couple of years ago in Cape Cod and he had said to look him up here when we
came to New York, Hopkins explains. But the ploy didn't work. I've been all
over with these pictures, says Hopkins, and nobody recognizes him.
Then there is the woman on the bridge, Janet Kimble. She is a real person but
apparently, after being ridiculed by her own family, wants no part of Hopkins
story. When Hopkins tried to arrange an interview for me, she told him, I
can't help you anymore with this. The final independent witness is the woman
up the East River who claims to have participated in the mass abduction of
women that very night. But she's another abductee and not truly impartial in
the matter.
With no independent witnesses willing to come forward, the case, not surprisi-
ngly, has come under intense criticism. Curiously, two of those most critical
of the case initially became involved at Lind's request.
By early 1992, Linda was felling so helpless at the hands of her human kidnap-
pers that she decided to seek additional expert help. At the suggestion of
New York journalist and UFO researcher Antonio Huneeus, she contacted Richard
Butler, a former law enforcement and security specialist for the Air Force
and a fellow abductee, whom Linda had met at Hopkins support group. Butler
met with Linda on February 1, 1992, and brought with him Joe Stefula, a former
special agent for the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigations Command and current
head of security of a drug company in New Jersey. During the meeting, Linda
asked for safety tips on how to protect herself from the dangerous duo, and
Butler and Stefula, in order to give useful advice, asked Linda a few questio-
ns of their own.
Several months later, after Hopkins made the case public at the 1992 Mutual
UFO Network annual meeting in Albuquerque, Stefula, Butler, and a friend of
theirs, parapsychologist George Hansen, decided the case needed a thorough
investigation and began poking around Linda's neighborhood. They spoke to the
security guard and supervisor at Linda's building, went to the offices of the
New York Post nearby, and simply interviewed residents to see if they rememb-
ered anything amiss. No one did.
Afterward, Hansen, already the author of a number of stinging critiques of
both psi research and its critics, wrote a lengthy skeptical report. The cent-
tral issue, say the skeptics, is the lack of large numbers of witnesses to
this spectacular event. After all, New York never sleeps; there are people
out and about even in the middle of the night. Why did none of the truck driv-
ers at the loading dock of the New York Post just a short distance from Linda-
's apartment see this blindingly bright object? Why haven't all those other
people whose cars were supposedly stalled on the Brooklyn Bridge come forward?
To such questions Hopkins has a two fold reply: The unwillingness of people
to report such fantastic experiences is not new. People do not like to be rid-
iculed, he says. Then there's the invisibility issue, which just seems to be
part of the phenomenon. Many people who you think should have seen these thin-
gs just don't, Hopkins explains.
But Hopkins can't explain everything. For instance, how could Janet Kimble
know that the words Brookly Bridge written on the outside of her envelope
would attract Hopkins attention unless she knew or was related to one of the
people in the Hopkins support group, all of whom had heard about the case?
The answer, replies Hopkins, is ridiculously simple: She saw the abduction
from the Brooklyn Bridge and thought that the others who had been stalled on
the bridge that night might have contacted me about it.
But Butler says the likelier explanation is that Linda fabricated the whole
story after reading Nigheyes, a science fiction novel by Garfield Reeves Stev-
ens published in April of 1989, just months before her alleged abduction. The
novel charts the abductions of an FBI team staking out a beach house in Calif-
ornia while a mother and daughter undergo a series of abductions in and aroun-
d New York City. It concludes with an apocalyptic finale. Butler claims that
Linda was very intrigued when the book was brought up at the Hopkins support
group meetings. I guarantee you that's where she got the basis for her story,
he says.
Butler admits the book's storyline is different from Linda's but says there
too many parallels to be coincidence. Both Linda and the novel's Sarah were
abducted into a UFO hovering over a high rise apartment building in New York
City. LInda was kidnapped and thrown into a car by Richard and Dan; one of
the novel's central characters, Wendy, was kidnapped and thrown into a van by
two mystery men. Dan is supposed to be a security and intelligence agent,
while one of the book's central characters is an FBI agent. Both Dan and an
agent in the novel were hospitalized for emotional trauma. Both Linda and the
novel's Wendy were taken to a safe house on the beach. The list of such paral-
lels goes on and on.
But similarity does not prove relationship, replies Hopkins. Without an impor-
tant political figure witnessing the abduction - the very essence of the Linda
case, he notes - the comparison with the book is meaningless.
Hopkins is not alone. Walt Andrus, international director of the Mutual UFO
Network (MUFON), is absolutely convinced the case is authentic. And David Jac-
obs, a history professor at Temple University and another researcher on the
abduction scene, says the critics debunking the case have twisted the facts.
Over the past several years, I have been a confidant of Hopkins and, at times,
of Linda's. I can tell you that when Hopkins report comes out, the inaccuracy
of the critics will be apparent and the case will stand or fall on its own me-
rits.
For Hansen, of course, those merits are slim. And, he says, the hoaxing he be-
lieves occurred is the least of it. For me, he says, the worst infraction is
the reaction of the leadership of UFOlogy. I think this has given us great
insight into the mentality - and the gullibility - of Budd Hopkins, Walt And-
rus, and David Jacobs, the people who really control much of what people act-
ually read about UFOs.
Hansen is particularly upset that, given charges of kidnapping and attempted
murder, the leadership did not go to the police. I recognize there is govern-
ment cover-up on UFOs, he says, but covering up a so called attempted murder
and kidnapping, as these guys apparently say they've done - that's quite some-
thing else.
Hoping to right the wrong, Hansen has, in fact, sent a letter to the inspecto-
rgeneral's office, Department of the Treasury, requesting that Linda's claims
of of kidnapping and attempted murder by federal agents be investigated. In
February of 1992, the Secret Service contacted Linda and she and Hopkins went
down to their World Trade Center offices to speak to Special Agent Peggy Fle-
ming and her supervisor. Hopkins and Linda told Fleming the story and explai-
ned that they didn't know who Hanson was or why he was involved. Linda also
objected to what she perceived as Hansen's insinuation that she was against
the government. She was not, she said: I'm a Bush Republican.
When I called the Secret Service about their investigation, I was referred
to Special Agent James Kaiser, media representative in the New York field off-
ice. after reviewing the file on the case, titled Special Agent Alleged Mis-
conduct, February 10, 1993, Kaiser told me that Linda was, in fact, intervie-
wed at our office, and it was determined that her allegations regarding U.S.
Secret Service agents having any contact with her whatsoever prior to that
day were unfounded and baseless. It never happened. She may have been mistak-
ing us for some other agency or organization. Case closed.
The case is also closed as far as Hansen, Stefula, and Butler are concerned.
They truly believe that Linda is involved in a hoax. I think she started out
with a small lie, speculates Hansen, a tall tale that grew in the three years
that followed. She's been a typist and temporary secretary, so she has had
access to a lot of different type writers undoubtedly. It would not surprise
me if there were someone else hoaxing Hopkins as well.
Hopkins flatly rejects the hoax has a minimum of moving parts, he says. You
don't want to go into too many details. This has more moving parts that one
could possibly imagine.
As for Linda, when asked if she had made up this whole scenario, she replied
simply, No. How could this be a hoax? There are too many people involved. In
fact, she added, I take the suggestion as a compliment. They must think I'm
pretty intelligent to pull off such a thing.
Some details of the case frankly do make me suspicious. For one, the drawings
of the abduction that Hopkins received from Richard and the woman on the bri-
dge not only look like they might have been prepared by the same person, des-
pite the stylistic and perspective differences, which Hopkins has duly noted,
but more importantly, both were done in crayons and used the same colors.
What's more, to actually meet Linda and hear her talk is to be transported to
a world where reality is inverted, where all we have ever known is flipped
on its head. Strain your ears, and you can almost hear the chords from Twili-
ght Zone kick in as the underlying chaos of the universe takes control. Fact
is, outrageous as I find Linda's story, Linda herself seems sincere. Her emo-
tions - fright, anxiety, and anger - appear genuine.
I'm not alone in these impressions. John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at
Harvard University Medical School, whom Hopkins confided in as the story un-
folded and who now knows Linda well, insists that there is nothing unauthen-
tic or devious about her.
Gibbs Williams, a New York psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a quarter cen-
tury of experience, has tested Linda and also dismisses any notion that Linda
might be hoaxing the whole affair. You would have to have the kind of consp-
iratorial mentality of Richard Nixon and be able to think sixty two moves ah-
ead, Williams says. Quite frankly, Linda doesn't appear to have that kind of
mind; she does not have that kind of abstracting capacity. He notes further
that her emotive capacity - her anger, crying, and tendency to get carried
away - is not consistent with the psychopathic cool mentality of the hoaxer
and liar. My conclusion, he says, is that from her perspective, she is telling
her truth.
Perhaps Jerome Clark, vice president of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and
editor of the International UFO Reporter, sums up the controversy best: This is
an absolutely extraordinary claim, and the evidence that you need to marshal
to support such a claim simply is not there.
Hopkins promises it will be when his book appears. Until then, Linda stands
alone, ambivalent about her fame. On the one hand, she seems to revel in the
notoriety. She attends national UFO meetings obviously dressed to impress. To
tell you the truth, it wouldn't be that bad if I didn't have a family, she
admits to me.
Yet she also feels victimized. There are a lot of Italian Americans and Chin-
ese in my neighborhood, and many of them even laugh at joggers, she says. Im-
agine if anyone in the area heard that I was abducted by aliens.
Worst of all, she continues, those critics took away the safety of my family
by taking my real name and publishing it. We are sitting ducks for any crack-
pot in the UFO community. They know where I live. They know what I look like.
She has already taken her name off her intercom system, and she fully expects
to move when Hopkins book on the case comes out. I don't know what's worse,
she says finally, what Richard and Dan did, what these three stooges from
New Jersey did, or what the aliens did. Or what Hopkins has done, I might add.
After all, he promised so much and has delivered so little.
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