I Want to (Want to) Believe

Welcome back, extraterrestrial enthusiasts!

If you’re based in the U.S. like those of us here at We Have to Go Back HQ, you’re probably ready to hitch a ride off-planet following the recent election results. In that spirit, we’re going back to 1996, the year that UFO investigator Budd Hopkins published Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions. The book, which chronicled the alleged alien abduction experiences of a Manhattan woman who claimed a UFO crew whisked her out of her apartment building in view of dozens of witnesses, is now the basis for The Manhattan Alien Abduction, a new Netflix documentary that reexamines the case and presents some opposing theories from Carol Rainey, Hopkins’s ex-wife and former collaborator.

After decades in the liminal worlds of tabloids, talk shows, and call-in radio shows, UFOs and their alien occupants were having a moment in the 1990s. Communion, Whitley Strieber’s memoir about his alleged alien abduction experiences, hit shelves in 1987 and then hit theaters with a very unsettling film adaptation (starring Christopher Walken) in 1989. In 1992, CBS aired Intruders, a TV mini-series that dramatized the alien abduction accounts presented in Budd Hopkins’s 1987 book of the same name. Then came Fire in the Sky, a feature film about the Travis Walton abduction case, in 1993—the same year that The X-Files hit airwaves and made aliens and menacing Men in Black mainstream.

There was a wealth of UFO material to dive into, both fictional and "true,” and like a lot of folks at the time, I ate it up. By the mid-1990s, I was a Certified UFO Nerd: I had the requisite shelf full of UFO books and newspaper clippings, of course, but I was also a card-carrying member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and even “served” as the New Hampshire “state associate director” for MUFON’s Associate Members Auxiliary—basically, the tweens-and-teens wing of the UFO organization.¹ 

By 1996, the latest wave of UFO mania was at its height and Budd Hopkins was one of the most recognizable faces in alien abduction research. We’ve got Hopkins to thank for popularizing some of the standard alien abduction tropes—”missing time” (the title of his first book on alien abductions, in 1981), alien implants secreted away in abductees’ bodies, and the use of hypnotic regression to dredge up buried memories of extraterrestrial encounters.

Witnessed was Hopkins’s third book based on his abduction research. The book presented a rarity: an alleged alien abduction in an urban setting with actual witnesses, some of whom described seeing a woman floating out of her Manhattan apartment building and into an apparent alien craft. The abductee in question was Linda Napolitano (known in the book as Linda Cortile), a stay-at-home mother of two who lived in New York City. Linda’s story, already cause for excitement among UFO enthusiasts, grew stranger, with visits from sinister government agents, harrowing hypnosis sessions, an alleged implant in her nose, and evidence that the aliens were also targeting her son.

Wild stuff to be sure, but in the context of the overall UFO scene at the time, Witnessed was squarely within the realm of the believable. It was a strange time for ufology (although what time hasn’t been a strange time for such a strange field)—the late 1970s and 1980s were a turbulent time for UFO research, with lots of public squabbling about who could be trusted, who was a government spook running a disinfo op, and who was a useful dupe for either side.² The 1990s, however, were a bit more…credulous; with pop culture’s eyes turned toward the field, ufology presented itself as both scientifically rigorous and willing to wave away concerns about circumstantial evidence and dubious stories.

Like Fox Mulder on The X-Files, a lot of us just wanted to believe, and who could blame us? A world in which aliens were absconding with unsuspecting citizens and whisking them away to shimmering spacecraft was preferable to whatever was happening in the real world. And for me, alien abduction was extremely plausible—as someone adopted at infancy and placed in a home full of strange people with whom I didn’t quite fit in, it made sense. Why wouldn’t aliens be doing the same sort of thing humans were already doing?

Which brings us to The Manhattan Alien Abduction. The three-part series, which hit Netflix in late October, looks at the Linda Napolitano case from two perspectives: that of Napolitano herself and that of Carol Rainey, Hopkins’s ex-wife and former collaborator. (Hopkins died in 2011, while Rainey died in 2023.) Initially on board with how Napolitano described her abduction ordeal, Rainey eventually suspected that the woman’s story was a little too good, with too many of the usual abductee tropes and too few confirmable details—despite all the eyewitnesses.

The series is fairly balanced, though it’s unclear if the seemingly oppositional relationship between Napolitano and Rainey is true to life or simply a feat of dramatic editing. Under the fantastical abduction story is something deeper—both women’s view of the truth is informed by their own personal histories, and both seem to sincerely believe that their version of events are correct. Hopkins comes across as similarly credulous—he believes what his research subjects are telling him and believes in his own abilities as an investigator and hypnotist (even though archival footage of him leading subjects through hypnotic regression is fairly cringe-worthy).

For those of us who were around for the peak alien abduction-era of ufology, the series also functions as a sort of time capsule and counter-point to the current era of UAP (“unidentified aerial phenomena”) videos from the Air Force and ongoing discussions about “disclosure” and when/how “the government” will reveal the “truth.” (As always, in this context, these words are doing a lot of work to make flimsy claims stand solidly.) We still want to believe—or at least, we want to want to believe there’s a better, or at least more advanced, civilization out there that cares about us, because we’re doing a fairly bad job of it ourselves.

Watching/Listening

A quick rundown of what I’m watching and listening to this week.

Watching: Spooky Season continues (at least for me) with God Told Me To, a 1976 Larry Cohen flick about a Manhattan cop investigating a series of mass murders that all have one thing in common: the perps claim “God told them to” commit their crimes. Fittingly, there’s an alien abduction/ancient astronauts subplot that helps make this movie supremely bonkers. (Available on Tubi.)

Listening: The new albums from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Bad Plus have been doing some heavy lifting in getting me through post-election malaise.

1. “Served” is doing a lot of work here. The position was largely ceremonial, although I did receive a letter about a local UFO sighting, which I then dutifully passed on to the actual volunteer investigators. But, I did feel like a real-life Fox Mulder for all of 30 minutes, which was a priceless experience for teenage me.

2. If you’re into this stuff, Adam Gorightly’s book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks presents a fascinating history of this era—highly recommended.