This obviously explained why the two policemen had abducted Linda and demanded to see her feet; they had every reason to believe she was acquainted with the aliens. Understandably, Richard and Dan were both in a state of psychological turmoil. Their transfer to the seashore meant that they were also abductees.
But what did the dead fish, and ‘Look what you’ve done’, mean? Hopkins decided that it was meant as a reproach to Perez de Cuellar about the Earth’s ecology.
Incredibly, Linda confirmed this whole story at her next hypnotic session with Hopkins. She also confirmed the ecological interpretation of her words.
In October 1991, Dan abducted Linda once more and took her to a beach house on Long Island, where he asked her to put on a white nightgown he had bought her. He chased her across the beach, kissed her several times, and said he wanted her to go away with him and ‘make a family’. Fortunately, Richard arrived and rescued her.
Richard later wrote to Hopkins confirming the abduction, as well as Dan’s story about being transported to the seashore after Linda’s original abduction. Richard added that Linda had spoken to them ‘in their heads’, and had warned Dan—who was thinking of using his gun—to keep his hands down. He also claimed that, the first time he and Dan had abducted her, Linda had again spoken to them ‘in their heads’, and said, ‘Be kind. Don’t hurt me’. She also made Richard turn his head away by some kind of telepathic order.
Hopkins was forced to conclude that, in some weird sense, Linda was ‘one of them’—without, apparently, consciously realising it. It seemed that, as a long-time abductee, she had become a kind of dual personality, unaware of her alien alter ego. Or was she merely under the total control of these aliens?
Mysteries multiplied. Linda went to see her niece, a foot doctor, and had her nose X-rayed. The X-ray showed some foreign body lodged in it. A few days later, Linda woke to find she had had a bad nosebleed in the night. And a further X-ray showed that the object had vanished.
Hopkins also received a letter from ‘the Third Man’ (de Cuellar?) verifying that he had been present when Linda was floated out of her apartment, and the seashore episode with the dead fish.
And now, as if the story were not complex and bewildering enough, it takes a twist worthy of Victorian melodrama. Richard accosted Linda one morning and she agreed to go with him—to a place of her choice—and talk. They wandered around New York—St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Rockefeller Center, Central Park—and he made it clear that he had a romantic interest in her. On a bench in Central Park he suddenly kissed her, and she allowed it—in fact, participated with some enthusiasm. She felt guilty about her husband, but enjoyed it.
Subsequently, Richard wrote to Hopkins, mentioning that Dan had now been interned in a ‘rest home’. He mentioned the outing with Linda—then went on to tell Hopkins that, since the age of ten, he had been dreaming of a girl, who was introduced to him in a white environment by two tall, emotionless beings. He called her Baby Ann; she called him Mickey. They took an instant liking to each other. Six months later, he dreamt of Baby Ann again. It happened repeatedly over the years. When he was sixteen, and Baby Ann was thirteen, he gave her her first kiss. By the time he was twenty-five, he and Baby Ann wanted to marry, but since they knew each other only in dreams, this was obviously impossible.
When he saw—through binoculars—Linda being floated out of her apartment, he recognised Baby Ann.
Now he was inclined to believe that their love affair had not been a dream—it had happened in the ‘UFO reality’. He even suspected that Linda’s second son Johnny was really his own child. He and Linda had been abducted by aliens repeatedly from childhood, and had finally ‘bonded’ and become parents.
Hopkins’s next step was obviously to find out whether any of this could be confirmed by Linda. He brought her to his apartment, and she told him that Richard had asked her if she had ever had imaginary playmates. Pressed by Hopkins, she recalled an imaginary playmate called Mickey, who called her Ann. And Hopkins was suddenly confronted with the incredible notion that Linda and Richard had been deliberately brought together by the aliens in a long-term psychological and breeding experiment. Linda was obviously deeply shaken when Hopkins read her Richard’s ‘Baby Ann’ letter.
It was his first experience of this notion of the UFO occupants organising the lives of human beings like the mythical Fates. Later, he was to come across other cases. A couple called Jack and Sally kept having flashbacks to some earlier period together which, logically speaking, they knew they could not have shared. Under hypnosis they recalled being abducted together many times; like Richard and Linda, they remembered their nicknames for each other without any possibility of communicating.
Sally was in tears as she said, ‘Jack and I love each other . . . but is this something the aliens are doing to us?’
Another couple met at a UFO conference and gradually began to have flashbacks of meeting during abductions, and finally of becoming lovers. But each was happily married to someone else. She commented, ‘It’s not fair for the aliens to do this to anyone’.
Another couple lived as far apart as Scotland and the United States, yet, when they met, instantly recognised each other. He recalled having had sexual intercourse with her during an abduction, which was unusual, since he was homosexual.
It is possible to see why Dan and Richard—and the ‘third man’—were so shaken by their experience. They were top security men—Hopkins has a photograph of Dan standing with Reagan, Bush and Gorbachev—yet the aliens had made them feel like helpless children. Dan found it particularly hard to adjust. He felt that his answer to the problem was to marry Linda, who was the cause of all his insecurity, and planned to kidnap her.
In fact Dan escaped from the ‘rest home’, and made elaborate plans to kidnap Linda, drug her and fly with her to England. These were foiled by security men, including Richard, and Dan apparently ceased to be an ‘official problem’—by which Hopkins understood Richard to mean either that Dan had been killed, or permanently incarcerated where there was no chance of escape.
There were still more strange twists. Richard admitted that they were not alone when their car broke down under Brooklyn Bridge: they were in an official motorcade of at least five cars, full of security men and important political figures. Their engines had simply stopped, and one security man later went on record as saying that he simply blanked out for an hour. During that hour, Richard, Dan and the ‘third man’ were abducted by being somehow sucked out of the car. They were taken to the seashore, and Richard put some sand in his pocket, which he later found. After the episode of the dead fish, when they became convinced Linda was an alien, they found themselves back on FDR Drive outside the car—in fact, with the ‘third man’ on the roof.
The story still has some further twists, but no purpose would be served in detailing them all. More witnesses to the abduction appeared. The ‘third man’ was apparently convinced that he had been abducted with Linda in the past, and might be the father of her child Johnny. He presented Johnny with a valuable sea-diver’s helmet and wanted to hug him. Later, Hopkins succeeded in interviewing him at O’Hare Airport, but the third man (who was with his wife) professed to be bewildered by the strange story and to know nothing about it.
On a later occasion, Linda’s whole family woke up simultaneously with nosebleeds in the right nostril, and the same was true of a neighbour’s son who was staying the night. Hopkins later learnt that this boy had been having strange dreams of alien abduction since he was small.
What, then, are we to make of it all? The case has been attacked with a bitterness unusual even in ufological circles. Some critics have claimed that Hopkins is a liar, others that Linda Cortile is a fantasist who has duped Hopkins. It is pointed out that Hopkins has never met Richard or Dan—only corresponded with them and listened to tape recordings. John Spencer, while rejecting the notion that Hopkins is ‘faking the case for money’, thinks it possible that Hopkins ‘oversold the case to hims
elf, and then to the world’. Dennis Stacy, author of UFOs, 1947–1997, has said mildly that the case ‘brings the abduction issue to a boil by raising the bar of believability’.
This may be regarded as one of the points in its favour. The same comment applies to Witnessed as to Puharich’s Uri: that, if he had decided to tell lies, he would have made them believable.
In fact, there seems to be no good reason for assuming that Hopkins is lying, or even stretching the truth. Missing Time and Intruders are obviously sincere books, and Kathie Davis of Intruders has written her own book confirming it all. So it is impossible to believe that Hopkins or Linda Cortile is fictionalising.
Although it is true that Witnessed seems to demand a suspension of disbelief that is well beyond the average reader, this is largely due to the fact that ‘its implications exploded almost exponentially’, as Stacy puts it. What looks like a highly convincing case of a well-witnessed abduction begins to look more and more incredible when we learn that the witnesses were also abducted, and that one of them had known Linda—in some spacecraft—since she was four years old, and later impregnated her.
But then, we have already encountered something of the sort in the case of Beth Collings and Anna Jamerson, who met by chance as children, and came to believe that they had been abducted together in childhood. And, in this case, we are being asked to believe that the abductions took place over several generations, and are still going on.
The ‘aliens’ told Patrolman Herb Schirmer as long ago as 1967 that they were conducting biological experiments with human beings, and six years earlier they had taken a sperm sample from Barney Hill, and, four years before that, taken sperm from Antonio Villas-Boas. So it seems fairly clear that—assuming we accept the reality of aliens—the UFO beings are interested in human reproduction.
It also seems clear, from the number of abductees who have been shown scenarios of the end of the world, that the aliens are interested in warning us about the dangers of destroying ourselves. In a hypnosis session of October 1993, Anna Jamerson foretold a ‘holocaust’, and said that it had already started. It would get ‘really bad’ in 1997. I am writing this in August 1997, and have not noticed any holocaust that began in 1993 and has got worse recently. So it seems possible that, where these prophecies of doom are concerned, the aliens are, as Jacques Vallee suggests, ‘messengers of deception’. On the other hand, pollution of the sea and atmosphere means that there is deep and immediate cause for concern, and adds plausibility to the notion that aliens may be warning us to take thought before it is too late.
Hopkins, oddly enough, rejects this notion:
Everything I have learned in twenty years of research into the UFO abduction phenomenon leads me to conclude that the aliens’ central purpose is not to teach us about taking better care of the environment. Instead, all of the evidence points to their being here to carry out a complex breeding experiment in which they seem to be working to create a hybrid species, a mix of human and alien characteristics. A careful reading of the various witnesses’ accounts suggests that here, as in many earlier cases, reproductive issues appear far more frequently than alien ecological concerns. Indeed, apart from the suspicious Lady of the Sands scenario, references to the environment are virtually nonexistent in the Linda Cortile case. But the possibility Richard raised—that the aliens may need a safer environment on Earth in order to carry out their own central agenda—is not to be dismissed. Crudely put, one wants the hotel one stays in to be clean.
(Intruders, 1987)
John Spencer, on the other hand, has written:
The somewhat reductionist and simplistic view that alien astronauts are capturing literally thousands of people all over the world, over long periods of time, and performing genetic and sexual acts on them, as part of a programme of genetic engineering, seems to be the product of the science-fiction culture that gave us flying saucers in the first place. It is my view . . . that this scenario is created by the mostly accidental misuse of hypnosis . . . [1]
Yet such a view—which amounts to dismissing the whole abduction phenomenon as some kind of mass hysteria—is hardly consistent with the facts: such facts as women finding themselves pregnant, having their pregnancy confirmed by a doctor, then suddenly being no longer pregnant; or such facts as a whole family waking up at the same time with a nosebleed from the right nostril.
In any case, many abductees recall their experience without hypnosis. This wholesale attempt to make the abduction phenomenon go away has much in common with the attempt in the 1950s and 1960s to make the UFO phenomenon go away by talking about temperature inversions and weather balloons. We have already seen what happened to that attitude in the 1960s, with the Condon Committee, Hynek’s ‘conversion’, and the seminal books of Jacques Vallee. The explanation, whatever it turns out to be, is certainly not that everybody was suffering from delusions. In fact, John Spencer undermines his own case in the long section on ‘The Abduction Phenomenon’ in his important book Perspectives. After a long and critical account of Budd Hopkins’s Intruders, he goes on to describe his own investigation of a case in Vallentuna, Sweden.
On Saturday, 23 March 1974, a man Spencer calls Anders left a political celebration and decided to walk home, about five kilometres (three miles) away. He had drunk a few glasses, but was still sober. It was a starry, moonlit night, and he decided to take a short cut that led over a hill. As he was climbing, a bright light came from behind, and, thinking it was a fast car, he moved off the road on to the grass and flung himself down—and realised that it was not a car: the light was right over him.
Then he found himself outside his home at a place called Lindholmen, and his wife opened the door to his frantic ringing. He was bleeding from a wound in the forehead, and his cheek was burnt.
The next day he called the National Defence and was advised to contact a man called Hardy Brostrom, of the Home Guard, who was later to impress Spencer as a sober and thorough investigator. A UFO investigator called Stan Lindgren advised Anders to try hypnotic regression.
Under hypnosis, Anders remembered that he did not actually hit the ground. Some force lifted him into the air. He was then sucked into a vehicle by four ‘semi-transparent entities’ looking a little like Indians, but with no nose or ears. (He thought they could have been wearing hoods.) They were surrounded by a hazy glow. They approached him with some kind of ‘instrument’, which Anders would not describe, and he gathered that they intended to pierce him, and fought hard. In spite of that, the instrument was placed against his forehead, and caused a burning pain. After that, the aliens delivered him to his home.
There was no ‘missing time’: the walk would have taken him three-quarters of an hour, so the lift home meant that he arrived there about when he intended to.
Anders objected to the hypnotic sessions. But Brostrom found a way of overcoming his increasing unwillingness to help the investigation by introducing him to a man called Bertil Kuhlemann, who was on the staff of a scientific institution (and who later introduced Spencer to the case). And Bertil unearthed other witnesses.
A woman cyclist had seen the light at exactly the time Anders had been abducted. Two men independently saw a metal object in the field where Anders had his encounter. A woman and her fiancé, driving towards the spot, saw what they thought was a new water tower with lights shining out of its windows; later they saw that there was no water tower at the spot. There were numerous other sightings of a bright light the following night, including one of a bright yellow-white object that travelled over the forest and lit up the sky, moving off at a great speed. Televisions blacked out or showed interference, and telephones misfunctioned. And there were many more sightings over the next two years.
What is clear is that, in spite of the fact that Anders submitted to hypnotic regression, there was abundant evidence to show that the abduction was genuine.
Anders and investigator Arne Groth were inclined to believe that Anders was somehow under the influence of the ‘aliens
’ from the moment he left the political celebration. This may or may not be so. What is significant is that Anders felt that the encounter had, according to Spencer, ‘given him a feeling of one-ness, of unity, with the Earth itself’.
The ‘instrument’ used by the aliens had left a scar on Anders’s forehead. When he placed his left hand over the scar he felt a pricking, stinging sensation inside his head.
Groth had been studying the theories of Baron von Reichenbach, who discovered that certain people—particularly ‘sick sensitives’—were responsive to magnets and crystals; one girl could tell when a magnet was uncapped even through a thick wall. (Reichenbach thought he had discovered a so-far unknown ‘odic force’.) Groth found that Anders was sensitive to magnets at a distance of eight inches to a foot, and to rock crystal from six or seven feet. They gave Anders a stinging or sucking sensation in his head.
Anders clearly had some kind of paranormal talent, and felt that it had been heightened by his UFO experience.
A year later, Anders had a dream in which he heard the words, ‘Search in yttrium’. He thought yttrium was a place, but Groth knew it was a rare metallic element. Groth obtained some and tried it on Anders; the effects were very powerful, and Anders felt something like an electric current.