The Manhattan Alien Abduction

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Hey, weirdos, I'm Ash.

And I'm Elena.

And this bees Morbids.

This does be morbid.

It does be.

I got COVID from the meet and greet this week.

Yeah, she did.

I didn't.

I did.

And the thing is, I knew I would.

Yeah.

Something inside told me.

I walked out onto the stage on Sunday, like to the meet and greet.

And I was like, one of us is going to get COVID.

And it's probably going to be Elena.

Yeah, because COVID just thinks I'm the tits.

I'm great.

Like, COVID's like, oh my God, I love being there.

It's because you don't sleep.

It is because I don't sleep.

This isn't asking for unsolicited health advice i i know i i don't sleep well because i have children and stuff and family stress yeah my immune system is shit yeah i'm trying to fix it

but yeah i get covet a lot she does this is like her fourth time it happens you know i've only had it once she just knocked on the wall yeah i did i you better

knock on wood you're like the wall the wall although i do i know that you're like you're you have the good blood type but i want to know what my blood type is yeah Because I have a pretty rootant-tootin' immune system.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't think it has anything to do with blood type.

Who knows?

That was like a thing people said.

A past thing.

I don't know.

Um, my immune system is far too focused on my IBS.

It's gotta, it's got to deal with that.

Which you know what?

I'm on a again, like you don't need to tell me advice, but I am gonna start looking into how to cure.

I'm curing my IBS this year.

Quarter four.

Curing my IBS.

Quarter four.

It's October 1st today.

Mark my words.

Q4.

Buy Q1.

IBS gone.

Gone.

I'm done.

If I have to cut out cheese, so be it.

Oh, man.

I'm going to probably die a sad, unhappy death without cheese, but

that makes me sad.

I know.

I hate that for you.

I got to figure it out.

I got to figure it out because this life I'm living, not good.

Yeah.

I mean, I constantly feel bad for your tummy.

Yeah.

It's chronic.

And by association, you.

And it's so stupid.

Like anybody with IBS that's actually tried to figure out their IBS, you go to a GI doctor, they, you know, you have a colonoscopy.

You want to die in that moment.

And then you wake up and they say, you just have IBS.

And you're like, oh no, that's crazy.

Like, what do I do?

And they're like, I don't know.

And you're just like, okay.

It's so true that that's like all they've done so far.

Literally.

It's just like, yeah, I don't know.

They were like, you probably eat really shitty.

And I was like, no, I don't actually.

I eat pretty root and tooth.

And they're like, nah, you do.

And they were like, no, no, no.

I think you do.

And then you Google it and it's like, try to avoid potatoes.

And I'm like, what?

Never.

I'm an Irish.

Who's going to do that?

Not me.

Who's going to do that?

Although maybe I will

this quarter four.

Hey.

I believe in you.

Thanks.

I believe in you too.

Great pajamas over there.

Thank you.

I'm wearing silky pajamas right now because

I am sick.

So I'm wearing my pajamas.

Pajamas.

You know.

But my fancy ones.

They're nice.

The color, they're like a jewel-toed-toned emerald and they look very nice with big red hair over there.

Thank you.

I'm in a place of calling Elena Big Red.

She is in that place.

I can't be stopped.

I can't be sad.

And now other people are doing it.

Yeah.

You guys can do it too.

You guys can all do it.

Hey, weirdos.

I'm Ash, and that's big red.

I'm still big red.

Well,

anything else that we're doing quarter four?

Um, just healing from COVID.

COVID and various other things.

And various other things.

Um, but yeah, I think it's, it's, it's October 1st.

Rabbit, rubber.

Rabbit.

I'm, I'm really ushering it in with as much enthusiasm as I can muster.

You actually are, though.

I am.

I refuse to allow October 1st to happen and me just wallow in sickness.

I know.

I need to like, I want to go home and make a yummy meal tonight and do like a tarot pull.

I know.

That's all I want to do is make some food.

Let's do it.

Well, you shouldn't give anyone food, right?

Put on a mask and some gloves.

Yeah.

Or I'll just direct John.

Direct John.

Because John's like, I know you're not cooking.

And I'm like, I love it, though.

I love it.

I love it so.

Cook for yourself.

That's a labor of life.

There you go.

I'll do it for myself.

And I'll just tell him what to do for the other side.

Actually, don't because I made you Faustina.

Oh, yes, you did.

Yeah.

I'm so excited.

If you're ever sick, this is medical advice.

If you're ever sick.

Legit medical advice.

Pastina.

Yeah.

It's an Italian Nona recipe.

It's literally just like onions, celery, carrots, and garlic.

And you like

immersion, blend it all up in like broth.

And then you put it over that tiny little star pasta called pastina.

It's a cure-all.

And if you're me, you pack it with Parmesan cheese.

It's true.

And then I put extra Parmesan cheese on it when I make it.

Big cheese, like heat it up.

Big cheese heads for now over there.

It's true.

Big cheese heads.

For now.

Forever.

Aster.

That's sad.

All right.

Well, forever.

Forever.

It is officially spooky season if you're listening to this.

Happy, it's no longer Proctober.

No, it's not.

It's October.

October.

It's not goody Proctober.

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

That's my Halloween spit on the song.

The most wonderful time of the year.

Thank you.

I don't know what's happening.

Thanks.

You can't sing at Christmassy.

No, you can't.

Because it's Halloween-y.

I'm going to blow my nose really quick.

Do it.

Don't worry.

Mikey will cut it out.

That was like.

I couldn't breathe out of one side of my nose, and that was getting very

upsetting.

Okay, I'm back.

Hi.

Mikey cut that out.

What if he didn't?

What if he didn't?

And everybody across the nation just heard your yucky snarf into your tissue.

I don't care, but I would feel bad that you listened to it.

Okay.

But it doesn't bother me.

You don't care from a place of like self-conscious?

Yeah, I don't care at all.

Good for you.

The normal bodily function.

Yeah.

But I wouldn't want you guys to have to endure it.

Yeah.

No.

I care about you, okay?

But Greg cares for others.

I do.

Do you care about alien abductions?

I always care about alien abductions.

That's good because we're about to talk about one for a good amount of time.

Let's go, girl.

Today, we're talking about the Manhattan alien abduction.

This one, I know very little about, but I know of it.

I am excited.

I didn't know anything about this.

And Dave said, Hey, you want to talk about an alien abduction?

And I said, I sure do, partner, pal.

Partner, pal.

Partner, pal.

And he said, got it.

So,

got it.

So, in early May of 1989, UFO investigator, aka abductologist.

I didn't know that's what they were called.

I think that might be Bud's favorite term, Bud Hopkins.

He received a letter in the mail from Linda Napolitano.

Napolitano.

I have to say it like that because that's how my guy taught me how to pronounce it.

If you ever look up pronunciations and you get the French man telling you how to say things, he's right.

He's correct.

It doesn't matter if he's wrong.

Napolitano.

Napolitano.

So Linda, she was a local woman.

She lived in Manhattan, lower Manhattan, with her husband and her two kids.

Bud had never met, had never heard of Linda, but it wasn't that weird for him to get letters from strangers out of the blue because he was a pretty outspoken believer in extraterrestrial visitations.

Hell yeah, he was.

He was a known investigator of claims of alien abductions.

Heyo.

And two years before, he had actually published a book called Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods.

Whoa.

And that made him a regular on talk shows and conventions, like those kind of things.

So if somebody was looking up information on anything alien-related, his name was going to pop up.

So Linda probably did that, and then she found him.

That plane is crazy.

That plane is like, wait, I'm landing.

That plane is like, hold on, I'm an alien.

So Linda's letter to Bud was...

A lot like most of the other letters that he had gotten in the past, especially since his book had been published.

She wrote to him and she said, I'm a 41-year-old wife and mother.

I came across your book, Intruders sometime last year on a shopping trip.

I read only a portion of it and then I had to put it down.

I felt overwhelmed with fear because pieces of a 22-year-old puzzle may have come together.

I don't know.

I hope I'm wrong.

Wow.

So she went on to explain.

It's ominous.

It is ominous.

She went on to explain that since she was a kid living at home, she would regularly experience what she originally thought were night terrors.

She said, at night in my bed, my body became numb and too heavy to move.

And then she said, whenever the sensation would come over her, she'd close her eyes really tight, wait for it to pass.

But she always had what she said was the strange feeling that someone was there, a shrouded or hooded person.

You're having sleep paralysis.

Or maybe, I don't know.

Maybe, maybe.

There's crazy shit in this world and in others.

You are correct.

So she went to her parents, but they were like, yeah, you're having bad dreams.

And she just continued to have these experiences off and on for the next five years.

She even went to a doctor later.

She thought maybe she was having some kind of health problem that was causing the numbness.

Yeah, you don't know.

But after an examination, they determined she was in perfect health.

So she got married to her husband, Steve, when she was about 25.

And that's when the experiences kind of started to taper off until they just stopped altogether.

But then one day, a few months after she had her first baby, she was looking at a picture of herself and she noticed that her nose looked crooked, like it had been broken at some point.

And she was like, wait a second, why is my nose all crooked?

She said, I looked in the mirror and I touched that area of my nose and there was a small bump.

So that sudden discovery caused her to panic.

She hadn't had any health problems since she had been to the doctor a few years earlier.

And to her, it felt like everything had been going well for a while now.

Yeah.

So she immediately scheduled an appointment with a specialist to find out if she needed to be concerned about this bump.

And luckily, she was able to get an appointment in a couple weeks.

And she told Bud about this.

She said, he examined the inside and the outside of my nose, which was quite embarrassing to me.

And she said, she was incredibly relieved when the doctor told her the bump was just cartilage that built up after whatever surgery she had on her nose and there was nothing to worry about.

But that relief quickly turned to confusion because she said, I've never had any kind of surgery

on my nose.

And she said, I've actually never had any surgery at all, for that matter.

Interesting.

So that didn't make any sense.

And she said, he looked at me real funny and said, I definitely had had surgery.

So instead of going back and forth, she was just like, okay.

And then she left the office.

She's like, sounds good.

So in her letter to Bud, she laid out experiences like these.

And she told them she had pretty much come to believe that what she was dealing with was some kind of contact with extraterrestrials.

And she hoped maybe he would know how to help her.

Yeah.

Later, Bud said, virtually every detail Linda recounted in her 22-year saga of mysterious, disturbing events was familiar to me from other UFO abduction cases.

Damn.

So in his interviews with other abductees, the majority had described having long thin needles or metallic probes.

You've been probed!

You've been probed being inserted into their bodies and they felt like they had undergone some kind of like

exploratory surgery.

That sounds awful.

Yeah, it does.

So after reading Linda's letter, Bud wasted no time reaching out to her and he was like, we got to meet in person, girl.

We got to talk about this.

So, a few days after they spoke on the phone, Linda arrived at Bud's office where they met in person for the very first time.

She admitted to him that she only read the first 36 pages of Intruders, and she stopped when she got to the part where Bud described two abductees having a, quote, tiny ball only two or three millimeters in diameter, surgically implanted into their brains through their nasal cavity.

Oh, damn.

Yeah.

Given her experience with the ear, nose, and throat specialist, that description terrified her so much, she said she couldn't read any further.

Oh, I don't blame her on that one.

Because she's like, is that what I'm going for?

I don't want a picture that that happened to me.

So after 14 years of bizarre and very terrifying experiences in the night, she was now convinced that she had been experimented on and she was the victim of some unwanted surgery.

Holy shit.

At the time, Bud had been working with a pretty large group of abductees.

He was holding support group meetings in his apartment and he was doing one-on-one hypnosis sessions to kind of unblock locked memories.

I love Bud.

I do too.

I don't know anything about Bud.

Look up a picture of Bud.

He's an adorable man.

What is his name?

Bud Hopkins.

Bud Hopkins.

Yeah.

So he was doing these hypnosis sessions one-on-one.

He was doing support meetings all in his apartment.

Doesn't he have the sweetest face?

He really does.

Right?

Look at him.

I love him.

I hope he's good.

I think he is.

I think he really just.

If he's not, I just, I don't want to know.

Right at the top of this,

I think aliens are real.

Yeah.

I don't

know if they abduct us in the night and stick things in our brains.

I think

they're pretty uninterested in us as a whole.

But, you know, I don't know.

Yeah.

There's something else.

There's something else.

And I think it's a little crazy to think that that something else is one thing.

Oh, yeah.

There's not.

One part of me believe that believes one that we're alone in this universe or two that we have any

clue what is out there yeah like i think we have no clue and it's i don't think it's just aliens like you know like your typical picture of an alien i think there's many things that are probably in the universe and

probably other universe yeah i

so true

according to bud's wife carol rainey who's also beautiful google her picture their apartment was constantly filled with abductees all hoping that bud could provide some sort of psychological relief and he really wanted to i think his i think his quest was pure.

Love Carol.

Carol's a queen.

Yeah.

So most of the information about the abductions that informed Bud's work came from the hypnosis sessions that he was doing with these people.

And that's where he developed his theory about extraterrestrial abductions of humans.

Carol said, they were surveying humankind and intruding their lives in the same way that we intrude into the lives of wildlife that we want to track and follow.

Yeah.

Which at its core is pretty simple.

I was going to say very simple.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

Now Carol, Carol Rainey, was a documentary filmmaker at the time.

She mostly dealt with scientific subject matter.

And she said, before I met Bud, I was a UFO virgin.

I had almost no reason to understand what they were other than some mythical thing.

I mean, yeah.

We're all there.

That's pretty much how I feel.

Even though at the time she didn't really know much about aliens or abductions or anything like that, she had the mind of a documentarian.

So she obviously saw this as a pretty fascinating opportunity.

Yeah.

And so she started to document Bud's work with the abductees, and she would record whenever she was given permission.

Ah.

And because of that, Bud Hopkins' investigations and his research actually became some of the most well-documented in the entire field.

Good for them.

Yeah.

They really did the damn thing.

Sort of a power couple.

A little bit.

In later interviews, Carol remembered how excited Bud was after he met Linda and after he heard her story.

She said, Bud was very, very taken with Linda.

He described her as being an attractive woman in her 40s.

He believed that she was very, very credible and that she'd been traumatized.

Me, I would have started a fight over that.

Yeah.

If my mans came home and said, I met this lady today, she's so fascinating.

She got abducted by aliens.

She's attractive.

I'd be like, oh, because

therein lies the problem.

You want to, you come home and you say, I met this lady today.

She got,

I think she got abducted by aliens.

It's fascinating.

The story is wild.

Tell me, I believe she's genuine.

I think we can do something here.

I'd be like, let's go.

Yeah.

Ride or die.

Let's, where do we need to go?

Tell me what needs to happen.

As soon as you mention, and she's also wildly attractive, I'm going to be like, why'd you feel like that needed to be part of it?

Why did you feel like that needed to be part of it?

Yeah, be toxic.

Start a fight about that.

Like, feel what you want to feel, dude.

But that didn't.

That didn't need to be part of that.

Yeah.

I was really.

Nothing about the alien abduction requires her to be hot.

I was really rooting for Bud.

Yeah.

And I still am, but I am too.

We all make mistakes.

That's a little tick in his column.

That was a pretty, that was dumb.

That was a silly one.

Yeah.

And Carol, I hope she started to fight over it.

She's a real one if she didn't.

She probably did.

If I know Carol, I think she was like, back it up, back it up.

What was that?

So here's the thing.

He's very excited about this.

And unlike many of the abductees that Bud had interviewed in the past, Linda hadn't just been abducted once.

Bud actually suspected that she had a long history of

abductions dating back to childhood.

And he was hoping that maybe they could unlock some of those memories through one of his hypnotic regression regression sessions.

Yeah.

So they did that.

And during their first session together, Linda described a memory from childhood where she was in her bedroom at her parents' house.

Later, she said, What I saw at the age of eight, looking out the bedroom window, was perceived through a child's eyes.

To me, at the time, it was something like Casper the Ghost in Christmas lights or a large toy top.

Seeing it again during hypnosis as an adult, I saw a different picture.

It was a cone-shaped object, approximately 9 feet by 13 feet, that glided across and over the rooftops of a multiple dwelling complex.

This wasn't a dream, and I wonder what all the other people thought when they saw it.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

Interesting.

That

is

terrifying.

It's very interesting too, because it's like, what did everybody else think?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So in the months that followed, Linda went back to Bud's apartment tons and tons of times to continue these hypnosis sessions in an effort to unlock any kind of other memories that she had.

And it seemed like every time they did one of these sessions, a new piece of the puzzle revealed itself.

Eventually, Linda was recalling incidents where she was transported out of her bedroom by beings that she described as short, white, and dark with very intense eyes.

In other sessions, she remembered being examined by those entities in ways that made her feel very uncomfortable.

In one recorded hypnosis session, she says, I'm outside, my nightgown is above my head, and I wish they'd put it down.

They start saying things to me, and I'm yelling.

He puts his hand over my mouth and then I can't talk anymore.

Oh, I hate that a lot.

So scary.

I hate that a lot.

Finally, after multiple hypnosis sessions, Linda was able to recall an incident that would become critical to her years of experiences.

In the recording, she says, they're looking at my nose.

I can feel it.

And then they go to the right side and they're looking inside of there.

And in Hypnosis Till, she told Bud that the aliens were examining her eyes and nose with a strong light.

And then all of a sudden, she felt various parts of her body go numb all at once.

She said only her nose and her eyes had feeling and that they kept examining her.

And then they produced a tray of tools that looked like dental equipment.

She said one instrument had a long ball at the end of it or had a ball at the end of it, excuse me, and that the instrument was long.

She remembered them inserting this instrument.

with the ball on it into both of her nostrils and she said she didn't feel any pain.

She told Bud they seemed very pleased.

and after that she remembered being led down a series of hallways and the next thing she knew she was awake in her room at home and her husband Steve was asleep beside her.

I hate that a lot.

Yeah.

So

up to this point Linda's experiences were pretty similar to others that Bud had worked with in his career but that all changed on the night of November 30th 1989.

It was a little past 3 a.m.

and Linda woke up abruptly.

She was very terrified.

By that point, she had had actually put measures into place before she would go to bed to try not to get abducted.

Can you imagine having to do that?

No.

And like, I do feel for her having to like explain that to somebody that maybe I don't, I don't know how her husband felt about all this, but it's like you would feel a little crazy.

Yeah.

So, but she would double check the locks on the doors, double check the windows before she'd go to bed.

She actually slept with a stun gun on her bedside table.

But when she woke up in that moment, she said she felt like she forgot forgot something.

She said, then I realized I forgot to look behind the drapes.

Shut up.

I was like, that's a horror movie.

Shut up immediately.

She said, suddenly she felt her body go completely numb, like it always did when she was about to get abducted.

And she said she sensed a presence in the room, just like all the other times.

She said she...

felt herself rise off the bed like she was being lifted from a sleeping position.

And it seemed to her that she was floating toward the window, then through the window and out into the air.

The fuck.

Later, during hypnosis, she said, I'm outside.

It's weird.

I'm standing up on nothing.

And they take me up all the way up.

It opens almost like a clam.

Huh.

So for Linda, this experience wasn't super different from all the others.

She was taken into an unfamiliar aircraft, examined by the beings, and then she was returned to her bed.

This happened a lot before.

Yeah, you know.

And the next day, she called Bud first thing in the morning to tell him what happened.

And he was like, get your ass here immediately.

We are doing hypnosis.

Yeah.

Got a document what happens in hypnosis.

So she continues her hypnosis sessions with Bud.

She participated in his support group on a pretty regular basis in the year that followed.

And she was really like slowly building out her memories and expanding the narrative and becoming more informed about what was happening to her.

Yeah, she wanted to be a part of it.

Then in February of 1991, Bud got a letter that would elevate Linda's case to a level of legitimacy very rarely seen by UFO researchers

or abductologists.

If you're nasty.

If you're nasty.

So the envelope arrived at Bud's apartment with the note personal and important scrawled on the outside.

As somebody who dealt with controversial and a lot of times very personal subjects, it wasn't that strange for him to get a letter like that.

But it was clear once he opened the envelope that this one was different.

The letter read, Dear Mr.

Hopkins, my partner and I are police officers.

We have been in a serious dilemma because of our strict profession and our lack of knowledge on this subject.

Now, what followed was a two-page story that would forever change the lives of Bud, Linda, and Bud's wife, Carol.

Let's go.

The letter was signed, Police Officers Dan and Richard, and described what was to them a very baffling experience that they had had.

on November 30th, 1989.

Oh, excuse you.

If that date sounds familiar to you, that's the night that Linda woke up after all her precautions, but she had forgot looking behind the drapes and she drifted up outside of her window.

Oh my goodness.

I always wonder what the odds are of this, because when it's one story, you're like, all right, maybe.

It's one story, sure, like

fun to listen to, whatever.

But it's these mass ones where it's like a bunch of people.

Like what happened in the Berkshires and stuff, which we'll talk about eventually.

Or even the one that you covered, Betty and Barney Hill.

Yeah, Betty and Barney Hill incident.

It's like when more people are involved and see things,

you just wonder, like, how?

Yeah, how that's the thing, if not UFO, why a UFO shape?

Exactly.

That's the thing.

Like, it does make you think something.

I think there is.

That's the thing.

There's something.

There is.

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So according to the writers, they had been out on patrol near FDR Drive in Manhattan around 3:30 in the morning when they saw a quote strange oval hovering near or hovering over the top of an apartment building two or three blocks from where we were sitting.

They said they watched as the colors emitted by the shape changed from red to orange and then to blue.

And they said things got considerably stranger when the shape lowered towards a building and they watched as a quote quote little girl little girl or woman wearing a full nightgown was floating in mid-air in a bright beam of whitish blue looking like an angel

what the fuck when i first read that i got chills okay so we've taken it a step further oh bitch yeah we're not just seeing the same thing

We're seeing other people's experiences that they have already talked about.

Yeah.

So

they said from where they were standing, it looked like three smaller beings were directing the woman into the oval.

So they said once they were inside this massive object, the thing changed colors again.

And then it disappeared into the Hudson River and never came back out.

It disappeared into the river?

Into the Hudson River.

They wrote, on top of our fear of getting involved, we were also carrying a load of guilt because we didn't help her and we don't know what's become of her.

Oh my god, these poor people.

They felt guilty.

And that they were like, we don't know what's happened to her.

they were like help her is she in there we never saw her come out oh my god so according to the letter the officers had spent the previous 15 months debating what they should tell anybody or if they should tell anybody about what they'd seen.

And ultimately, they decided they needed to tell somebody what they saw.

Yeah.

So they sought out somebody who might actually believe them.

And that's what led them to Bud.

That's unbelievable.

So they also wanted to know if the woman that they had seen had survived the experience.

They said someone else had to see what happened that morning.

Yeah.

I mean, if they did.

Yeah.

By the time he got the letter, Bud had just become accustomed to hearing stories from supposed abductees that were unable to be verified by independent parties.

So it never occurred to him that Linda's abduction could have been witnessed by other people.

Yeah.

Even in New York City, the city that never sleeps, it shuts down for a little while.

And Linda's abduction happened in the very early hours of the morning.

So he was like, I don't know.

Like, I don't think anybody saw it.

Yeah.

But if these two police officers had witnessed the incident, Bud thought, well, then it's entirely possible that other people might have seen something.

Of course.

And if they were out there, he was going to find them.

Hell yeah, he was.

So after he got the letter from Richard and Dan, he called Linda, and the two of them met at his apartment later that afternoon.

The letter was remarkable for many, many reasons.

For one thing, it appeared to corroborate.

so many aspects from Linda's account that she'd given Bud a year and a half earlier at this point.

And they also correctly identified the approximate time and location of the abduction.

Wow.

And they do that.

Confirmed the color, the shape of the unidentified craft, the lights it admitted, and even the color of the nightgown that Linda was wearing then.

Yeah.

Like that's the part that gets me.

All the details are like, check, check, check.

So at first, Linda was like, I don't know what to make of this.

And she said, maybe they had seen somebody else who lived near her get abducted.

She like couldn't fathom that it was her.

She's like, I don't know.

Maybe my neighbor got abducted that night.

She's like,

maybe it wasn't me.

And Bud was like, I'm sure it's possible that maybe they saw something else, but it's equally possible and more likely that they saw you get abducted.

And if that was the case, these two were an invaluable asset in proving the validity of these experiences that people have.

So Bud insisted that it was incredibly important they do everything they could to keep their account of that night separate from Linda's.

And he laid out a strategy where if either man contacted him again, he would try to get their version of events on tape or at least written down.

And he urged Linda.

He said, if either of these guys reach out to you, don't speak to them.

Just call me or Carol.

Yeah.

Because that way they could ensure that neither of the stories were tainted.

That makes sense.

Which I was like, all right.

Look at him doing real like investigative work.

Yeah.

And I feel like that really proves to me that his intent was pure here.

Yeah.

Because otherwise he would be like, I don't know, you guys can talk to each other and figure it out.

Yeah.

He was really, like you just said, trying to do it like

a scientific way.

So despite having agreed to Bud's strategy, just two weeks after he got the letter, Bud got a call from Linda, who was very upset.

Richard and Dan, she said, had shown up at her house a few hours earlier and asked to speak with her.

And she told Bud that she asked to see their identification and they showed her gold badges through the peephole in her door.

So she was worried that since they were detectives, she couldn't turn them away.

According to Linda, one of them, Richard, was very nice, very polite.

And the other guy, Dan, seemed kind of angry and hostile.

And she was actually worried that he might assault her if she wasn't fully cooperative.

Oh, wow.

So

she was nervous.

Yeah.

So Richard explained to her that they wanted to know how she managed to levitate outside of her window, 12 stories up from the street.

Valid question, I think.

He said, we've been feeling pretty bad about what's happened.

And he asked if there was anything they could do to help.

And it was at that point that she said there was.

And she said, contact Bud Hopkins.

Yeah.

Apparently, she said that request changed the tone of the discussion.

They both made it very clear that their work was of very sensitive nature and they wanted to remain anonymous.

Celinda was like, okay, I understand.

And she suggested that maybe they could record their account of the event on an audio tape and send it to Bud at the address where they sent the letter.

Yeah.

And she said, Richard looked like he was going to break down and cry, but they agreed to make a recording and then they left the apartment.

Okay.

So the letter that Bud received in the mail was one thing, but a recording of the events in Richard and Dan's own voices would have been something else entirely.

Yeah.

And again, it would lend a great amount of credibility to this case.

But there were still nagging questions that would need to be resolved if their evidence was going to be believed.

Who were they was a big thing.

Yeah, that's a big thing.

Like, who are these two?

Who are you?

Who are you?

Carol said later, the entrance of Dan and Richard into Linda's story, that was like a shot of adrenaline.

Whether they were policemen or agents, nobody knew.

All they knew was that Richard had identified them both as police officers in his letter.

But then when they went and visited Linda, she said they were detectives.

Oh, okay.

That's different.

It is different.

And now they're like, who are these fucking guys?

So now determined to find out the identities of Richard and Dan, Bud spent the next few weeks just going from one precinct to the other, asking if they had officers or detectives or anybody that matched the descriptions that Linda provided of these two guys.

If the person at the desk said, yeah, they did, like somebody looks like that here, Bud left a note urging them to get in contact as soon as possible and just wrote how important the work was to humanity.

Which I was like, that's really sweet.

I mean, it's true.

It is, yeah.

Yeah, when you really think about it.

He said it's important to humanity and their participation was vital.

He cares so much about this.

He does.

I think he was.

it seems like he was afraid of what aliens wanted, like what he thought were aliens wanted with humans.

I mean, valid.

Which I understand.

Yeah.

So not surprisingly, he never got a response from any of the precincts where he left notes.

Not super shocked by that.

But just a few days after visiting one of the last precincts in Manhattan, an audio tape arrived in the mail.

Ooh.

Bud did not recognize the voice on the tape, but the man indicated he was Richard, the one who sent the letter and the one

who had visited Linda.

Oh shit.

He said, I suppose Linda's already spoken to you about our unexpected visit to her apartment one evening.

Indeed, it was very uncomfortable, to say the least.

The subject matter was the strangest ever in my line of work.

He was super sympathetic to Linda's situation and he said, I understand how important this is to you, but I can't get involved and neither can my partner.

He said, what happened left us all victims of circumstance.

After actually seeing her and speaking with her, we could see just how frightened and sincere she was.

Please respect the importance of our credibility at work.

We just can't be identified.

We'd be laughed at.

Wow.

So they're like scared.

Yeah.

They don't want like actual real consequences to this whole thing, which is also just like

shitty.

Everybody's just such a bummer.

Like that, that everybody like treats each other this way still.

Yeah.

Like if someone's enthusiastic about someone and really like believes or something,

like

let them them be enthusiastic about it mel robbins yeah let them just let them let them i feel like we all like especially adults everybody gets too up in everybody's like shit and like judges people for enthusiasm about something

just because it's not their thing right or because they think it's crazy yeah it's like i don't know i think we just need to stop sucking so much we probably should try that yeah let's give it a go let's try that we haven't tried that yet so not not collectively as a society we have yet to try not sucking so much.

I think we should give it a shot.

Yeah, I think it's just one of those things.

Give it a shot.

See what happens.

One, two, three, go.

All right, I'm trying.

All right, let's see if you all are.

So for Bud, the recording was an equal mix of excitement and frustration.

Yeah.

On one hand, it seemed to prove that Linda was telling the truth about her abduction and everything from November 30th.

But on the other hand, it was all pretty meaningless if these people, these guys weren't willing to come forward and identify themselves publicly and like go on record.

Of course.

What he needed were additional witnesses to corroborate Linda's story.

And to his great surprise, that's exactly what he got in the weeks that followed.

Oh, honey.

So, like I mentioned earlier, by the time he met Linda in 1989, Bud Hopkins had he already had like a fairly regular media presence, especially when it came to UFOs, the subject of them.

He did a lot of talk shows, he gave commentary about his work, and bringing Linda into the fold only made him a more compelling guest.

And soon they were appearing on Geraldo, Oprah,

big name talk shows.

The higher profile appearances resulted in several witnesses coming forward to Bud to report having witnessed Linda's abduction on November 30th.

Oh my gosh.

Ultimately, he collected, Bud collected 22 statements from what he believed to be independent, reliable witnesses from all walks of life.

Okay.

The statements managed to sway a lot of people who weren't sure what to think of Linda's story, including Bud's wife Carol, because at first she wasn't sure.

Yeah.

She said, the Linda case was fascinating to me because there were numerous people who had seen her be abducted out of her window and up into that craft.

Like the letter from Richard and Dan, one statement after another seemed to corroborate her story.

One woman told Bud, I don't believe in flying saucers, but it was a clear view.

It was glowing, shiny.

I just kept staring at it.

There you go.

Others recalled seeing a woman float out of her 12-story window and hover above the ground.

And some just kept it simple, saying, we were scared.

We didn't know what was going on.

I had no fucking clue what was going on.

I just knew it terrified me.

I would be in that category.

Truly.

Yeah.

Like seeing a woman float outside of her window would be unusual enough for a lot of people to remember.

Yeah, I think I'd just be like, I don't know what the fuck's going on, but I know I don't like it.

I hate it here.

Yeah.

And here's the thing.

Like, again, seeing a woman float outside of her window, most people would remember that no matter what.

Yeah.

But what also helped a lot of people remember with a lot of clarity was that the abduction actually coincided with a blackout across that specific neighborhood.

One witness called Janet remembered that she was driving toward the Brooklyn Bridge and she just stopped to light a cigarette when all the lights went out.

I was like, that's like some shit out of a movie.

That's terrifying.

She said, my first impression was they're making a movie.

And she said she remembered thinking, what did they do to the bridge?

It didn't look real.

But she said what she remembered most were the lights emanating from the object in the sky.

She said to bud, first it looked like an explosion almost because it was so red and white.

That's what caught me.

And then the red subdued and it got white.

Then I saw these balls.

They all just tumbled out.

And from the distance, I thought it was a little girl.

Oh.

Which is the second time now that somebody said that.

Absolutely.

Another witness who was delivering newspapers at the time also remembered the blackout, particularly because it allowed him to see also the craft of the lights in the sky with much more clarity.

He said, I'd been working at the New York Post delivering newspapers out in Queens for almost 20 years.

And on the way back I could take the bridge.

I was confronted with a blackout, the truck dying, and all of a sudden I saw a bunch of lights in front of me.

I didn't know what I was looking at and then I saw what it was.

It scared the heck out of me and then I saw a woman coming out a window.

It's like, what?

Like what the fuck?

For Bud, the witness statements were the latest piece of the puzzle that he believed would finally confirm beyond a reasonable doubt that aliens had visited the Earth and were abducting humans for some kind of experimental purposes.

Shit's going down at the very least.

Shit is going down in Manhattan.

Some shit is going down.

It is.

But little did Bud know the statements were just the beginning of a much stranger story that would end up having personal, very serious consequences.

Oh no, bud.

So after almost two years of working with Linda, Bud had collected a very thorough account of her history of abductions, mostly through those hypnotic regression sessions and the witness statements from Richard and Dan, and of course the other witnesses who had come forward.

But by 1991, the question that remained was, what now?

Yeah, what are we going to do with all this?

What now?

They still hadn't managed to fully identify their two most reliable and credible witnesses, Richard and Dan.

And the other witnesses

statements didn't seem like enough proof that would be able to sway skeptics and critics.

Those people wanted like verifiable proof.

Hardcore proof.

Exactly.

Now, that proof seemed elusive at best, but then one day in 1991, Linda remembered a particularly significant event that she somehow neglected to tell Bud in their two years of working together.

During their various interviews and casual conversation, she told Bud about how she noticed that bump on her nose that really kind of started this whole thing.

Remember, the specialist examined her, insisted it was something like scar tissue from a previous surgery.

Yeah.

But what she didn't mention before was that just a few weeks before her abduction on November 30th, Linda went to visit her niece, Lisa Baer, a podiatric surgeon in Poughkeepsie.

So that's like a foot doctor.

Foot doctor?

Foot doctor.

While she was there, Linda told her niece about what the doctor said about the nose surgery, and she also was telling her about frequent nosebleeds that she kept getting.

Dang.

So seeing that the situation was causing her aunt a lot of distress, Lisa suggested that she take an x-ray of Linda's nose so at the very least she could set her mind at ease about any potential illnesses.

And what they discovered was shocking.

Oh man.

According to Linda, she said the only x-ray machine she had in her office was the one she used to x-ray people's feet.

So she had to get down on the floor and stuck her head under the machine in order for Linda to capture the image.

And after Lisa took the x-ray, Linda had to leave to catch a train.

So she wasn't able to go over the results with her niece.

Okay.

A week passed without any word from Lisa.

So Linda just assumed that the image didn't show anything or, you know,

didn't amount to anything.

But years later, in discussing the x-ray with Bud, Lisa said, it's not a perfect picture, but when I developed it, I was stunned when I saw the thing in the side of her nostril.

That's Lisa said that.

I think I said, Linda.

Lisa said, I was even afraid to use the phone to call her and tell her about it.

Oh, man.

The x-ray shows what is very clearly a human head in the pro in profile with a focus on the front of the head.

And in one of the nasal cavities, there appears to be a small metal coil that almost looks like a spring with like a ball cap or a ball or like a cap on on both ends.

What the fuck?

In his book about the case, Bud describes the object as a complex

radiopic metallic object.

What?

So she like had some weird chicken yes.

To Bud, the x-ray was exactly the kind of irrefutable evidence that he thought would sway skeptics and prove his theory about aliens interfering with humanity.

Yeah, because why the fuck is that in her nose?

Yeah, what the hell.

But before they could celebrate the discovery or make make plans to go public, another incident with Richard and Dan set things off into a very frightening direction.

Or nor.

Since her first meeting with the mysterious Richard and Dan more than a year earlier, Linda was sure that they had actually been following her and like surveying her.

She even started carrying a gun for protection.

She was so scared.

Every now and then she'd be walking down the street or waiting for a bus and she would see a man resembling Dan following her or waiting behind her on the corner.

Ew.

And when she was at home, she said she was convinced they bugged her apartment.

Oh, fuck that.

Bud also started to believe that the FBI was watching the both of them and monitoring their movements.

And he went as far as borrowing what Carol Rainey described as high-end equipment from a friend who worked in security, which he used to sweep his and Linda's apartment for bugs, but they never found any bugs.

What the fuck?

So things came to an alarming head in late April of 91, not long after Bud first saw that x-ray of Linda's nose.

By that time, he insisted that Linda wear a wire and a recording device in case she had any run-in with Richard and Dan.

Damn.

And on the afternoon of April 29th, Bud was at home and he got a call from a very frantic Linda.

She said, Bud, Richard, and Dan abducted me.

What?

Abducted her.

Like, I've been kidnapped?

She said they...

Eventually they let her go, but yeah, they had abducted her.

They abducted her?

She said she had just put her son Johnny on the school bus that morning and was walking to the grocery store when she heard somebody call out her name.

She turned and she saw that it was Richard.

She said he was smiling as he walked toward her and that just behind him in a black Mercedes, she could see Dan.

She said Richard was pleasant and he asked if Linda would mind going for a ride so that they could talk.

She said there was no way I was going to get in a car with him, so she declined and she started to walk away.

And she said she barely stepped off the curb to cross the street when she felt a strong hand grip her arm and pull her in the direction of the car.

What the fuck?

She said, Richard sort of twirled me around with my back facing him and then marched toward the car and pushed me into the open door of the back seat.

I'm horrified.

Scary.

Yeah.

It's like also.

That's a crime, babe.

That is a crime, sort of.

And it's also very like men in black.

Yeah, you can't just abduct people in fucking broad daylight.

You really can't.

Or at night.

You shouldn't do it at all.

Ever.

Really?

Or even like midday sun.

Dusk, dusk.

Don't get anything in between, don't do it.

You just can't do that.

No.

So in her call with Bud immediately after the incident, she described very bizarre behavior that Richard and Dan exhibited.

She said, he told me to take my shoes off.

They wanted to see my feet.

I think they wanted to know how many toes I had.

And then she said she got the impression that they suspected she was some kind of alien-human hybrid, and they were looking for proof.

She said, in that moment, I'm trying not to yuck anyone's yum because I just told you all not to do it.

So don't yuck Linda's yum.

I'm just gonna go with this.

I don't even know if this is her yum.

I don't really know what this is.

So in that moment, she said she had the sense to start the recorder that Bud gave her.

And on the recording, you can hear a feigned argument between Linda and an unidentified man.

What the fuck?

On the tape, the man is accusing Linda of recording the conversation.

And she's like, no, this, it's not on.

It's not recording.

Like, I just have this.

But what's not caught on the tape is the moment where Linda pulled the gun from her purse and pointed it at both of them.

Shut up.

She said, this caused Dan to pull the car to the side of the road and they let Linda out and she just ran home and called Bud immediately.

What the fuck?

So after hearing Linda's story, Bud was like, oh my God, you need to come over here.

Like, are you okay?

Yeah.

And he said, we should also do a hypnosis session to see if we can document some details of the event that might help us finally identify these two farmers.

As luck would have it, during the hypnosis session, Linda did recall some details about the car.

during the session she realized it wasn't a mercedes but it was a rolls-royce with diplomatic plates

what she said she also remembered seeing a decal in the window with the united nations logo on it shut the up by that time

bud and linda had deduced that richard and dan were not police officers or detectives like they previously thought bud now strongly suspected that they held some kind of position of authority.

Yeah, even more.

So now he wondered if it was possible that they were like like private security for a diplomat or, or maybe a member of the United Nations, or they were, you know, like part of that themselves.

Yeah.

So in the days that followed, Bud and Linda reviewed video footage of recent events held at the United Nations building.

And in one, Linda claimed to recognize one of the men in the background as Dan.

What the fuck?

The man in question was in the company of,

I'm so sorry if I butcher this, I looked it up.

He was in the company of Javier Perez de Cuear, who was the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Damn.

Like, big fucking deal.

Like, big deal.

Like, big deal.

Big guy.

Huge.

Big.

So, in the weeks that followed, Bud, Linda, and now Bud's assistant, Peter, set about trying to find

the identities of the man in the video and what his relationship was to the fucking Secretary General of the United Nations.

Yeah, I'm curious.

But,

crazy.

Their inquiries at the UN and the UN security buildings, which included Bud and Linda posing as a married couple, ultimately went nowhere.

Wow.

The UN wasn't about to be like, yeah, that's exactly who this is.

Shocked.

Crazy.

Shocked.

But a short time later, Bud got a letter from Dan that shed some light on the situation.

Peter said they explained to Bud that they were not police officers, but federal agents acting as protection for a very high-ranking, well-known diplomat.

What the fuck?

So now they figured that the important man in question definitely was Perez D.

Cuear.

Of course.

You know?

Yeah.

For Bud.

You know, you better believe I know.

For Bud, he felt like all the pieces were falling into place.

He was finally onto something big.

And as a result, the relevant government agencies had taken notice and were now on their trail, making sure that Bud and his associates didn't expose anything that would create like mass hysteria or mass pandemonium, you know?

Which, like, at this point in today,

do we really could we is this so far-fetched?

Especially now, that's the thing.

I'm these here, streets in 2025.

I understand why Bud felt like this.

I understand it now.

Like, maybe back then, people were like, Yeah, no, that sounds crazy.

Like, the government doesn't do that.

Yeah.

Like, why would high-ranking officials want to quiet things?

You know, that's not what supernuts.

But now, yeah.

Yeah.

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So the knowledge that they were being followed and, you know, were probably potentially in danger probably should have put them off for a little bit.

Yeah.

But for Bud, it was exciting and it proved that he was on the cusp of making the biggest discovery of

his career and something that the modern world had never seen.

So Linda hadn't just been abducted and had a metallic device implanted in her nose.

Now she'd been experimented on, possibly sexually assaulted by the aliens, and now maybe they were trying to create some kind of hybrid species.

Which that's fucking horrifying.

Yeah.

And now there were like terrestrial threats to worry about.

They were scared about Richard and Dan and these high people in high positions trying to silence them.

I would be.

So as the years went by, Linda's story continued to expand.

And eventually she even incorporated her son Johnny, who she now believed was also abducted.

Oh, and over time, Bud got closer to Johnny and wanted to help him understand his experiences, just as he had with Linda.

Yeah.

But Carol, remember our girl Carol?

Of course, I remember Carol.

She remembered one night when it occurred to Bud that the aliens weren't only interested in individuals, but possibly bloodlines.

Oh,

which I'm into this.

I can kind of understand.

Yeah, when you really think about it.

Like, I kind, if you're really looking into like aliens and what they want from us, it would make sense that, yeah, maybe they would want to study our bloodlines to see what happens as we go on.

Hey, I get it.

But Carol said Bud was wiping his eyes in full understanding of what Linda had talked about, that the aliens were also traumatizing her children.

I became very concerned that he was so emotionally attached.

My alarm bells went off.

I felt that Bud risked losing his objectivity.

Which I get.

And remember,

Linda is like such a huge part of Bud's life now that I can understand why Carol was like, okay, like we're falling a little too far into this.

Yeah, I can understand that.

I'm like now a child is involved and like we got to really think about what we're doing here.

Yeah, she's just trying to be pragmatic.

She is.

I love that word.

I do too.

So Carol had never been a believer in the same way that Bud was, but she was always willing to give him and the people who came to them the benefit of the doubt.

Which is a, which is a good partner.

It is.

And she especially gave people the benefit of the doubt when there was evidence that popped up that seemed to support their claims.

Like really smart lady.

Yeah, I honestly think she really was.

But after years of working with Linda, Carol saw a change in Bud that was deeply concerning to her.

She said it seemed like he lost the ability to think critically when it came to interesting.

So she, Carol herself, she had grown up in a very heavily devout Christian sect that kind of bordered on being a cult.

Whoa.

So she saw the harm harm that blind faith can cause.

Yeah.

I mean, if anybody can.

Yeah.

She had serious experiences.

Yeah.

When she was a teenager, she actually got thrown out of her parents' house and excommunicated from her entire community because they told her she was asking too many questions about their religion.

Oh, there it is.

They were like, yeah, like you're threatening the structure.

Yeah, we don't want you asking questions or critically thinking.

Yeah, don't do that.

That's dangerous.

She said, after, you know, a year of my asking increasingly unwelcome questions, my father stood in the middle of the living room and he said, you're not my daughter anymore.

You gotta be a real piece of shit to do that.

Real piece of shit.

Well, you gotta be a real monstrous piece of shit.

Yeah.

There's nothing my kids could do that they wouldn't be my children anymore.

No, they're always your fucking kids.

And they're always welcome back here.

Yeah.

Like, what the fuck?

And like, I don't give a shit.

Like, that's fucked up.

That's a story for another day.

So just.

It's my opinion.

My opinion.

So despite that experience, or honestly, really probably because of it, Carol devoted her adult life to science and to reason, and she prided herself on her own skepticism.

Good for her.

Ask the fucking questions.

And here's the thing.

Nothing's wrong with that.

I honestly think she went about it in a very respectful manner.

It sounds like she did.

She was willing to hear people out and she wanted to hear their evidence.

And when there was evidence, she got even more interested and asked more questions.

But she also had a healthy amount of skepticism.

Exactly, you know, which I think is the smart way to go about everything.

I think so too.

So at first, she was obviously fascinated by Linda and Linda's story.

She found Linda to be, she said, dynamic, engaging, personable, exactly the kind of person a documentary filmmaker would want on camera.

Yeah.

But she said at the same time, her story did seem credible in the beginning.

There were nearly two dozen witnesses who corroborated the story.

Carol literally saw the letters herself from Richard and Dan that seemed to support the belief that Linda and Bud were being monitored.

But she said after a few years, there was something about the story that started to nag at her she said it felt like every time and she's talking about linda yeah she said it felt like every time she went out to grocery shop something strange happened to her the story just kept on rolling yeah which i get which i i would question that and you know if linda's story had been contained and maybe only affected her it probably wouldn't have bothered carol so much but bud was now drawn so deeply into like at this point a very bizarre conspiracy yeah that it wasn't just threatening his professional reputation, but also his physical health.

Yeah, and I get that.

And the thing that really pushed Carol to the edge, she said, was when Linda started incorporating Johnny, her son, into the conspiracy.

Yeah, see, that's where I would take a big step back.

Yeah.

So she didn't really have a clear plan or a strategy at first, but she did what felt most natural to her as a documentarian.

She went back to the very beginning and she reviewed all the evidence piece by piece.

Good for her, man.

From the moment Linda entered their lives, remember, Carol had been filming everything.

And Bud and Bud had actually been recording their calls, like with permission.

Yeah.

So there was countless hours of telephone conversations, group sessions, hypnosis sessions that documented almost every moment of Linda and Bud's relationship, which is kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Now, the first thing that jumped out at Carol was Linda's demeanor, she said, during the hypnosis sessions.

After years with Bud, Carol saw countless people hypnotized and she was familiar with like the drowsy, incoherent state that they usually got into during the process.

She said though that Linda's hypnosis sessions were different.

Carol said this is her words.

She didn't sound the way others did when they were deep down.

She had a clear coherent narrative.

I just didn't believe she was under hypnosis.

Interesting.

The other thing that emerged during her review of the years of the tapes was the way that Linda's story took shape throughout the years.

Yeah.

She said, to me, it began to seem almost too perfect.

And it occurred to Carol that whenever Bud started to direct his attention somewhere else, Linda always seemed to have a way of reeling him back in some outrageous detail or event or, you know,

going zombs.

She knew she could get him.

By the time that Bud's book about the incident was published in 1996, the story had become so outrageously unrealistic that it seemed impossible that anybody would believe it, Carol thought.

Damn.

She said, it was paced like a thriller, full of otherworldly treachery, forbidden love, UFOs over Manhattan, lusty and dangerous Secret Service agents, a prince from afar, more forbidden love, an x-ray alien implant, and her abduction into a spacecraft accompanied by a famous mafia dog.

Like she was, Carol really got to.

Carol got to a place of, come on.

Of, come on.

Come on.

And, and, this is her husband, so I can see why she's a little bit like.

Miffed.

Oh, I'd be pissed.

I'd be far past miffed at this point.

Well, listen, during the early phase of her investigation, while she's gathering this all up and starting to be like, yeah, right, she kept her thoughts and her activities, of course, to herself.

She didn't want to upset her husband.

She didn't want to interfere with his work.

She had a respect for him.

But after going over the tapes and kind of coming to some pretty convincing conclusions, she finally decided that she couldn't keep this quiet any longer.

Especially remembering now that there was a kid involved.

Yeah.

But unfortunately, if Carol was expecting Bud to be receptive even a little bit to her critique, she was about to be very disappointed.

Oh no, Bud, I was rooting for you.

I know.

She said, at that point, I was kind of seeing a lot of these stories as being made up, invented.

Bud didn't pick up on it because she was delivering material that he so badly wanted for his new book.

Bud had invested years of time, money, emotion into Linda's story.

And as far as Carol could tell, he needed the story to be true at this point.

Yeah.

Not only for the book, but because he had built so much of his theory about everything else on things that happened to Linda.

You never want to put all your eggs in one basket.

And he very much was.

And Carol was honestly like, I think Carol

not only like loved her husband and respected her husband so much, but also respected the way he went about his work.

So when she saw him kind of veering off his path of like pure, let's look at this scientifically and let's do this the right way.

And like you just said, kind of putting all his eggs in one basket, she was like, you're veering off course here.

Yeah, like, look, you're losing yourself.

Exactly.

You're losing who I know in this like smart guy in this story.

Yeah.

So she knew that if she wanted to convince Bud to be more skeptical of Linda's claim, she was going to have to attack the evidence that corroborated the story.

Yeah.

Especially those witness statements and specifically the letters from Richard and Dan, because those were the thing that really sent Bud like.

Yeah.

Into orbit.

Which like you get why he got so excited and, you know,

encouraged by that.

Linda is saying, and here's the thing, I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know her life.

I'm just telling you all sides of the story.

Yeah.

But like, I get why Bud believed what Linda was saying.

And she's got things to back it up and letters are coming in and this, that, and the other.

Exactly.

So we're on Carol's side right now, though.

So to Carol, it seemed unlikely that all 22 witnesses were lying.

But when she went back and reviewed the interviews that Bud had conducted with them, it occurred to her that maybe Bud had a larger influence on their statements than he meant to.

She said, most of the witnesses admitted that they hadn't got a direct look at what they later claimed was a UFO, and a lot of them weren't really reliable to begin with.

For instance, there was an elderly woman who said she saw the abduction from her window, but she also said her view would have been obscured by multiple large objects.

So like,

she really wasn't able to select what.

And all at the same time, Bud's enthusiasm could have easily acted as confirmation bias.

Oh, 100%.

Which would drive interviewees to provide him with what they thought he wanted to hear.

Yeah, they're just trying to make this guy happy.

Exactly, rather than what they saw.

And finally, there was the source of the witnesses themselves.

All of the witnesses had only reached out to Bud after more, like at least two years or more after the supposed abduction took place and only after the story had gone public and they'd seen it on like Oprah and Geraldo.

Yeah, and that's always.

That's not great.

That you have to take with a green, a giant grain of salt.

And there was also the matter of the letters from Richard and Dan.

Their position in the story, remember, it gave credence to Bud's belief that these large government agencies were working to undermine his research, and he thought that the agents had been harassing him and Linda for years.

Yeah.

The problem for Carol, when she started looking back into this, though, all the letters had been typed out on a typewriter.

So there was no way of knowing where they came from or who'd written them or anything like that.

But one day she was sorting through evidence and she found that one letter claiming to have been written by Javier Perez de Cueyar, the Secretary General of the United Nations, of course, included a handwritten signature that she could use to compare to a sample of Linda's handwriting, which they obviously had.

Oh man.

And she brought it to a handwriting specialist.

Oh man.

Among other things, the handwriting analyst concluded that the sample from Linda and the supposed signature of the Secretary General of the United Nations were virtually identical.

Oh,

no, Linda.

Linda.

Oh, no, Linda.

But remember, just to play Devil's Advocate here, I don't know why I said devils and not devils.

To play devil's advocate.

To just sit here, apply devil's advocate.

Handwriting analysis is not...

It can be a little bit of junkie science.

That's the thing.

Like, I'm not saying it's not real but it's not always real but it's just like

maybe

so in 2023 carol told a documentary crew the person who replicated de Coyar's signature is the same person who's written the letters from Richard and the letter and the letters from Dan and that is Linda.

Richard is an invention of Linda's and so is Dan.

Oh no.

You know in my heart of hearts, I wondered.

You wondered.

I didn't want it to be true.

I I wanted it to be that they were real and they saw her flying up into an UFO.

You just wanted that so bad.

I wanted it really big.

It's exciting.

Every part of it.

You can see why a lot of people would want it so bad.

It's fucking exciting.

Yeah.

After all she learned, though, Carol came to the conclusion that Linda had read Bud's books and knew exactly what he was looking for.

That made her easy to manipulate him, especially after he became very emotionally and also financially invested in the case.

So Carol confronted Bud with everything, including the handwriting analysis.

But she said he refused to believe anything she brought to him.

And years later, after the book was published, he continued to support Linda and defended her story.

Here's my question:

We're about to, yeah, I think we're about to answer it.

Okay, I think we're about to answer it.

Okay, because I'm sitting here and going, No way, no way.

Carol got there too.

Okay, so after the publication of Witnessed in 1996,

which obviously was the whole like Linda abduction story and everything,

Bud and Linda continued working together to promote the book.

They appeared on talk shows, conventions, all around the country.

And during that period, Bud and Carol's relationship continued to decline until they finally got divorced in 2006.

But they held on for like 10 more years.

Damn.

I mean, who knows how long like the divorce took to become final, but damn.

Yeah.

Carol said, I felt that bud had lost his objectivity.

I don't know if it was through the Linda case or earlier than that.

I couldn't respect what I heard him do to people who were vulnerable.

I was literally sick of the whole business.

And the only thing I could do was to speak out about it.

Carol.

Carol.

Fucking Carol.

Carol.

Honestly, Carol's a bad bitch.

She really is.

She's for science.

I love Carol.

I love Carol too.

I really love Carol.

She's a writer.

We should look more into her.

We should.

Carol.

writing.

Carol

and a documentarian.

Carol?

Yeah.

And a scientist.

Forever.

She rocks.

Queen Bee.

So after his divorce from Carol, Bud started a relationship with

UFologist.

UFO.

Ufologist.

Ufologist.

That's what last podcast I left Carl for.

Ufologist.

Ufologist.

I don't know if that's right or not.

Shout out to the boys.

But that's what they say.

And it makes me laugh every time.

And or abductologist.

Yeah.

He started a relationship with a woman named Leslie Keene who shared his interests.

Ah, okay.

And they remained together until Bud passed away in 2011 from cancer.

Aw.

So for more than a decade, Bud touted the major significance of Linda's case, but he did eventually move on to other subjects and Linda just kind of faded back into regular life.

Wow.

Yeah.

In the years since, she's been on a handful of TV shows about, you know, alien objections and she gives interviews every now and again.

And to this day, she stands by her story and she maintains that every aspect of it is true to the best of her memory.

Okay, hey, I'm not here.

I wasn't there.

So I'm not going to sit here and tell her she's wrong.

I am going to inquire

about what was going on with Bud.

I don't know.

I'm like, what was going on?

I don't know.

I don't know because I wasn't there.

Maybe that's just my question.

Good besties.

Yeah, it's just my question of like, what was what was going on there?

I don't know.

But again, I know nothing.

Me either.

So.

Well, after her divorce from Bud in 2006, our girl Carol continued working to debunk Linda's story, and she really wanted to expose Linda as a fraud.

Which, like, you couldn't imagine.

She harbored some fucking resentment.

I kind of get it.

She published her investigation of the story on her own website, and since it's been republished on many, many internet platforms.

And in the years after, she became a regular speaker at skeptic events, and she frequently gave interviews on the subject of alien abduction hoaxes.

Wow.

Including those where her husband was involved, or her former husband.

On September 17th, 2023, though, after a period of illness, Carol passed away from natural causes at St.

Anne's Hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts.

No.

Recently, when asked why Carol worked so hard to undermine her claims, Linda told a reporter, she's a bitch.

She used my case and me and my family as a tool to get even with Bud.

And that is the story of the Manhattan alien abduction.

Firmly team Carol over here.

I just gonna say, I'm not saying anything wasn't true.

No, I'm not saying that you guys were doing anything illicit together.

But I'm done, budged.

But I just find myself firmly on Team Carol.

Same.

Because that was mean to say.

It was mean to say, especially after she died.

If she died and she couldn't respond to it, that's not cool.

Yeah, you just say no comment.

You just say, you know what?

I don't have anything to say.

But also at the same time, if I was Linda and that had happened to me and I did get abducted by aliens, I probably wouldn't like Carol either.

That's very true.

And again, we don't know.

And we don't know.

So

we can't come from either side, you know?

We just can't.

I just really like Carol.

That's all.

I felt drawn to her.

I felt drawn to Carol.

Yeah.

It's the same thing on Carol from Housewives of New York.

I think I just love a Carol.

Yeah.

And you know what, Linda?

I, you know, if it really happened to you, I hope you can prove it.

And I hope you're okay because that's a lot of trauma.

That's a lot of trauma if that really happened to you.

It's like the fourth kind.

Exactly.

The third kind?

What kind?

So many kinds.

all you've ever seen that really it's really bad uh so yeah i'm on coal medicine so i'm out

i'm in outer space right now i'm one of the fourth kinds and you're wearing green and i'm wearing green i'm an i'm an actual extraterrestrial i actually think i am yeah i don't think i'm from this planet Every day I feel more and more like I'm not either.

Okay, cool.

Felt that since I was little.

I don't think we're of this earth.

Always felt that.

Feel it more every day.

No.

Yeah.

I like this universe.

I think we just need to,

I don't know what we need to do.

Everybody just.

You said that so calm.

I was sad.

I had to do that.

I was like, what do we need to do?

And then I was like, no.

Because at first I was like, I think we need to just like let people, if they believe in aliens, like, which I believe, if you believe in aliens, because I think there's something out there.

I don't know what it is.

Yeah.

But

I think we should let people believe what they want to believe with that.

But it's, I understand that, like, it can become messy when other people get involved and it becomes bigger than just

a personal belief of this is what's happening.

Yeah, it's sad though.

It is really sad that

Bud's marriage kind of like got fucked up because of a project he was working on.

And then like the mention of like kids being involved.

I think it just like it can be messy very quickly.

I hate that too.

Women were fighting.

I always hate that.

Yeah, I hate seeing that because like let's ladies support ladies.

That's the thing.

Women supporting women.

Humans support humans.

That's the thing.

We're not good at that right now.

So that's something we do need to get better at, everybody.

I know.

Women start supporting women.

Yeah, and people support people.

Yeah, I just think this is a wild story.

It is a wild story.

It's fascinating.

It's one we'll never really have full.

And you know what, though?

Here, I was just thinking.

Sorry, I completely interrupted.

I just cut this out.

I'm literally in outer space.

You said, I'm just rolling.

Yeah, I'm just going.

I'm rolling with the homie.

Seeing what comes up.

Here's the thing.

People abduct people.

Yeah.

Why wouldn't aliens abduct people?

Yeah.

You You know, like maybe they do.

They probably just want to know what the fuck's going on now.

We abduct each other.

They're probably wondering why we have such a sick-ass planet and why we're completely shitting all over it.

So they're like, what's going on down there?

Oh, um, uh, you guys, it's like political.

So if you don't want to, you don't have to.

But I subscribe to Aaron Parnas's sub stack and he does this thing where once a week he only gives you good news.

Oh, that's nice.

So I love that part of it.

And I found out that a part of the Earth's atmosphere healed itself.

Oh, I found that out too.

Yeah, that is great.

I was so happy.

That's really nice to see.

Yeah.

I just thought of that.

It doesn't mean we can keep fucking it up, though, and that's going to keep healing itself.

No, we have to.

Let's take this one as a W and let's keep moving

directions.

It healed itself because of like practices that we took.

Like, it's like, good job, everybody.

We stopped doing yucky things.

Yeah.

So let's continue.

Stop doing, but let's continue to.

Let's continue to not do yucky things.

Yeah, don't litter all that shit.

And that's our message to you.

That is.

Very eloquently said message.

So we hope you keep listening.

And we hope you keep it.

Wee!

But not so worried that you get abducted by aliens because I don't want any of you to float up into the sky in your nightgown and be all upset and have to get in a fight with everybody about whether it happened or not.

And if the government gets involved, I don't really know what I can do to help you.

So you know what?

Don't get probed.

I don't want you to get probed.

Hey listeners, I'm Ash.

And I'm Elena.

And we are so excited to have joined the SiriusXM family.

And you know what?

If you want to keep hearing new episodes of Morbid ad-free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, or visit seriousxm.com/slash podcasts plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

Ooh, ooh, let's go!