True story behind Netflix’s The Manhattan Alien Abduction: photos, 23 witnesses and a bombshell lawsuit
- A courtroom showdown could end this New York UFO mystery once and for all
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UFO sightings and alien abductions are often reported by folks in the boondocks without any witnesses around to back up their stories.
Not for Linda Napolitano, who was in 1989 taken from her New York City apartment and beamed onto a spaceship by extraterrestrials, as 23 onlookers bore witness, it is claimed.
Napolitano’s story has gripped UFO enthusiasts for decades. Now, the incident has exploded onto the small screen — and into the courtroom.
A Netflix show presents the abduction as an ‘elaborate hoax,’ and Napolitano has fought back with a lawsuit accusing the streamer of defamation.
Her complaint reopens a rift between a husband-and-wife duo of alien researchers and raises tough questions about those who say they’ve encountered visitors from space.
As millions of viewers stream The Manhattan Alien Abduction, and lawyers duke it out in court, concerns about who is being honest will doubtless intensify.
While the US government is increasingly open to discussing aliens, it’s unclear whether those with abduction stories are telling the truth, or suffering from false memories, mental health issues or just making it up.
Napolitano, a stay-at-home mom, stands by her story that on the night of 30 November 1989, three aliens kidnapped her outside her 12th-floor Lower Manhattan apartment.
They made her levitate out her window and into a spacecraft hovering above the city, where they carried out experiments on her, before returning her to her bedroom, she says.
But this astonishing event wasn’t her first brush with aliens, she claims.
Thirteen years prior, upstate in the Catskills, she recalls finding a strange bump on the side of her nose.
This was later identified as a mystery foreign object.
Several months before the 1989 incident, Napolitano says she wrote to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins about that incident in the Catskills, and joined his support group for abductees.
Hopkins believed the object in her nose was implanted by aliens.
An X-ray purportedly shows the object, but, when a specialist came to check Napolitano’s nose, it could not be found.
After the 1989 incident, Hopkins scoured downtown for people to corroborate Napolitano’s story.
About 20 people witnessed it; some even said they saw Napolitano floating above her building, it is claimed.
Hopkins documented this in his book Witnessed: True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abduction.
But he used pseudonyms for the witnesses, casting doubt on their authenticity.
Among the purported witnesses were two guards for then-UN chief Javier Pérez de Cuéllar — but these testimonies have also been questioned.
Napolitano insists they were all genuine onlookers who saw the night’s mind-boggling spectacle.
‘If I was hallucinating, then the witnesses saw my hallucination,’ she told Vanity Fair in 2013.
‘That sounds crazier than the whole abduction phenomenon.’
Hopkins’ then-wife, Carol Rainey, a filmmaker and UFO researcher, was also embroiled in the case.
She initially believed Napolitano and they became friends, she said, but over time she grew skeptical.
Rainey says Hopkins interviewed abductees under hypnosis in search of suppressed memories.
But the results of his sessions with Napolitano were not credible, she said.
The three-part Netflix docuseries features interviews with Napolitano, 77, who now lives in Tennessee, and Rainey, who died in 2023.
It also features archive footage of Budd, who died in 2011.
In the show, Rainey, then divorced from Budd, said her ex-husband had ‘lost his objectivity’ and may have guided Napolitano’s comments under hypnosis.
She vowed to ‘continue to ask questions’ about the suspect abduction story.
In her appearances, Napolitano maintains she told the truth.
Only a ‘sociopath’ would fabricate such a grand narrative, she says, while accusing Rainey of debunking her in a bid to ‘get even with Budd.’
She’s in part backed up by her son Johnny, who appears in the documentary, though his likeness is obscured.
‘There’s no way I believe she would want to make anything like this up,’ he says.
He recalls seeing three ‘beings’ in the family living room, in what he calls a ‘terrifying’ experience that left him feeling ‘hopeless.’
‘I just try to erase it from my life,’ he says.
According to Napolitano, the aliens were not done with her family after that night in 1989. She says they came back years later and targeted her family, giving them nosebleeds.
Napolitano, Hopkins’ estate, and others filed the lawsuit against Netflix, Rainey’s estate, and others at New York Supreme Court, two days before the show started streaming on October 30.
The complaint seeks an undetermined amount of monetary damages for six claims, from fraud to defamation, and breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
Another request to stop the show from screening was not granted in time.
The complaint says Napolitano ‘was not remotely close to be like or appear as the person that is on screen’ and that she ‘never had any bone to pick’ with Rainey.
Napolitano ‘was set up as such a villain for purposes of controversy and conflict, all of which was a patently and deliberately false portrayal to support the false narrative of the truth,’ it adds.
Netflix did not answer our request for comment.
Napolitano told DailyMail.com that she could not ‘take any risks’ by discussing her abduction amid the lawsuit.
‘I don’t talk about the case at all,’ she said.
