THE GREAT HIGH-RISE ABDUCTION

Whatever spin you put on it, it's definitely the case of the century

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. Scattered around the room are colorful, profile-shaped paintings he calls
``guardians'' 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, plucking 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
vernacular, to be a Very Important Person. ``The implication,'' Hopkins
speculates, ``is that this was deliberate, a demonstration of alien power and
intent.''

Hopkins has never had trouble drawing dramatic conclusions about UFO abductions,
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 abduction tales,
and, finally, the television broadcast of the Hills' own story before 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
abductions. 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
personal 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
phenomenon to public awareness. Even more to the point, no one has had greater
success in getting scientists and mental-health professionals to take a serious
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, Hopkins 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 California'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 appreciate why the aliens had decided to grab her through
the window. It certainly beats penetrating a locked gate and the scrutiny 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 blasted 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 stumped:
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 built-up cartilage left
over from a surgical scar. But she had never had any such surgery, 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, top-shaped 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
minutes 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 the kids?'' She called out the names 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 from her toes. After
months in the support group exploring her past abductions, she recognized 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.''
Hysterical, 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
husband 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-white 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 least.

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
apartment 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 first
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
possible.'' 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 figure, 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
screaming,'' 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
eventually 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
Linda's limited use of a bodyguard so she could go out.

Unfortunately, the bodyguard was not around for what Linda says 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
along, 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 children, 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 increasingly 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
ceased. 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
nightgown, 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 she'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
forward. 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
Kimble''--had been in Brooklyn at a retirement party for her boss. When she
headed 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. Suddenly,
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 ``children'' 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 Manhattan
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 involving 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 southern
end of Manhattan, ostensibly the one that abducted Linda.

The two cases, if believed and taken in concert, shed an ominous light 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 a 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 language.
``You'll make a beautiful bride,'' he teased. Linda, however, was not amused.

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
said public, though clearly he's 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
passenger 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
heliport 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
witnessed 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 Linda
spotted a man whom she identified as ``Dan.'' Despite the fact that the images
were taken from a distance, involved crowds and the bustling chaos that
accompanies visiting dignitaries, she apparently had no trouble making her
identification. 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
pictures of ``Dan'' in hand. They went to United Nations security and the State
Department, 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:
``Sometimes 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
surprisingly, has come under intense criticism. Curiously, two of those most
critical of the case initially became involved at Linda's request.

By early 1992, Linda was feeling so helpless at the hands of her human
kidnappers 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 for 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 questions 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 remembered 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 central
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 drivers 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 twofold reply: ``The unwillingness of people to
report such fantastic experiences is not new. People do not like to be
ridiculed,'' 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
things just don't,'' Hopkins explains.

But Hopkins can't explain everything. For instance, how could ``Janet Kimble''
know that the words Brooklyn 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 Nighteyes, a science-fiction novel by Garfield
Reeves-Stevens 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 California while a mother and daughter undergo a series of abductions
in and around 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 are
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 parallels goes on
and on.

``But similarity does not prove relationship,'' replies Hopkins. Without an
important 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
Jacobs, 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 merits.''

For Hansen, of course, those merits are slim. And, he says, the hoaxing he
believes 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
Andrus, and David Jacobs, the people who really control much of what people
actually 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
government 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
something else.''

Hoping to right the wrong, Hansen has, in fact, sent a letter to the
inspector-general's office, Department of the Treasury, requesting that Linda's
claims 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 Fleming
and her supervisor. Hopkins and Linda told Fleming the story and explained 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 office.
After reviewing the file on the case, titled ``Special Agent Alleged Misconduct,
February 10, 1993,'' Kaiser told me that Linda ``was, in fact, interviewed 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 mistaking 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 typewriters undoubtedly. It would not surprise me
if there were someone else hoaxing Hopkins as well.''

Hopkins flatly rejects the hoax scenario. ``An efficient 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 bridge not
only look like they might have been prepared by the same person, despite 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 Twilight 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
emotions--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
unfolded and who now knows Linda well, insists that ``there is nothing
unauthentic or devious'' about her.

Gibbs Williams, a New York psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a quarter century
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 conspiratorial
mentality of Richard Nixon and be able to think sixty-two moves ahead,''
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
Chinese in my neighborhood, and many of them even laugh at joggers,'' she says.
``Imagine 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
crackpot 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.

Poor Linda.