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1 {n8}The truth is the truth.

{n8}You can't change it. You have to deal with it.

It takes a lot of courage to be able to talk about this without...

without feeling strange, but it's the truth.

I'd been working at the New York Post

delivering newspaper out in Queens

for over 20 years.

{n8}And on the way back, I could take the bridge.

{n8}♪ There's no turning back ♪

{n8}♪ Even while we sleep ♪

♪ We will find you ♪

♪ Acting... ♪

I was confronted with a blackout,

the truck dying.

And then 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 outta me.

And I saw a woman coming out a window...

...and just disappear.

I realized exactly what I saw, and I could not just let it go.

Who was the woman in the white gown?

I don't know what the big secret is.

I don't know why they're keeping it from the public.

But we're not alone.

We're not alone.

I think a good documentary has to be, first and foremost, honest...

with intimate access to the people that you're interested in.

I moved to Manhattan to make a film about the alien-abduction phenomenon.

And I was making it with someone who was damn good on camera.

This was the first time I'd ever seen those things.

This thing was standing at the foot of my bed.

The Linda case was fascinating to me

because there were numerous witnesses

who had seen her be abducted out of her window and up into the craft.

- Right where the building is. - Uh-huh.

Right there. It was so lit up, you could see them perfectly.

That's when I got scared.

When I looked out the window, the courtyard was lit.

Like, it's the middle of the night.

Twenty-three witnesses.

Jesus Christ. This is real.

No other abduction case had this many witnesses.

They didn't know each other,

but they were all reporting the same thing.

Honey, don't point.

- Just look at it. - Okay.

Put the Coke down and just look.

{n8}This Linda case consumed my husband.

I'm looking exactly at the building Linda Cortile floated out.

He believed this was an amazing opportunity

to prove aliens were a very, very real phenomenon.

But it's absolutely shocking.

In the world of investigating alien abduction,

{n8}he was a well-known, respected person,

but he was not being taken seriously by the general public.

You've heard this audience laughing throughout the show. It's... The...

Well, you presented this program

with the funniest aspects of it to begin with,

and naturally that's gonna be funny.

I would see Budd was being mocked.

And that made me just furious, and furiously on his side.

The reason I went to Budd

is because Budd is looking into these experiences seriously,

trying to find out what's going on.

I always felt that he was doing something valuable and brave,

and I loved him for that.

Budd called the Linda case

the most important UFO-abduction case in history.

We both had that buzz that tells you this might be the one.

I'm not gonna presume to know what it is,

but there's something going on out there.

I found Linda to be very believable.

And we became good friends.

I thought it was going to be a really exciting story.

But I had no idea that it was about to become entirely insane.

Um, I'm gonna try to start up and tilt down.

{n8}Now, when did things start to change for you?

Carol told me that she was a producer.

And, uh, she took some, uh, film footage of me with her little camera.

Why don't we do that, Carol? Make it exciting.

She had pretty, blue eyes and fine features.

She was charismatic and friendly.

I'm sorry.

That's... No, no, no, that's fine. Just do whatever you want to do.

Linda trusted me

'cause we were both interested in exploring this mystery,

which had become part of her everyday life.

This place is the place to go to shop.

- We got the best... - Especially if you're Italian.

We got the best...

I was raised in the old neighborhood in Little Italy.

My father, he was a Golden Gloves boxer.

They called him Kid Lightning.

He taught me not to take any crap from anybody.

My mom, she was a stay-at-home mother,

like me.

She told me you get married,

you have children,

go to church on Sundays...

and then you die.

But no one told me about these... the creatures and UFOs,

and that... is part of life.

Linda was in and out of our house quite often

having a regression session with Budd.

As you fall asleep and rest.

One, you're lying in bed.

Two, right on the edge now.

He believed an alien abduction went into your consciousness

and it would be like a tape recorder.

You could just replay it, and it would all be there.

Three.

Did you see behind the curtain?

It's all right, Linda. It's all right. It's all right.

I can't move.

I can't breathe.

That night, thanks to Budd, I understood the truth.

They numb you.

You can't even move.

You can't... you can't fight back.

They are intruders.

I would like to think

that, uh, what I saw during hypnosis was maybe a dream.

Sure, I'd... I'd give almost anything to have it that way.

But it isn't.

Everything that I saw under hypnosis was verified by the witnesses.

As the case started to go forward and unfold, uh,

it got pretty bad.

Pretty bad in my life.

It was a living nightmare, definitely, and then,

after a while, I started to get paranoid.

And not just about aliens.

Government documents indicate that UFO researchers

have been routinely spied upon by intelligence agencies.

We knew that there was interest in the abduction phenomena

within the intelligence community.

There's no doubt that the government is aware.

The government has spent a huge amount of money investigating cases.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, we have received many, many documents.

The FBI, the CIA, the Army, they... Everything.

This is law-enforcement culture, intelligence-community culture.

This is dark stuff.

I had a very strange feeling that somebody was following me around.

I'd be home, and the phone would ring.

It would be someone I didn't know.

10:19 a.m.

Budd, the whole thing is strange. I just picked up the phone.

I was about to dial, and the voice said, "Can I help you?"

I hope my phone isn't bugged.

- You don't talk around this area here? - No.

And that's the only phone in this room here?

Budd had a friend with high-end detection equipment.

Any telephones we'll make you take off of the hook.

He wanted to see if anyone had planted bugs in her house.

He believed the FBI were interested in Linda's case.

This was another level of the game.

And my first thoughts were,

"Were these men planning to take Linda away?"

"Wipe her memory?"

Could they shut down Budd's case before he really got started?

The phrase that went through my mind was, "Just because you're paranoid

doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

- Hello? - Linda?

I can't believe this.

So tell me what happened.

They came over around a quarter after ten.

What did they say?

"Police."

He says, "But, you know, we just wanna know,

how did you manage to get out of the building the way you did?"

What in the name of God is going on here?

Did they try to get you to tell 'em anything?

I told them I didn't wanna talk about it.

Oh God, Linda.

Where they came from, how they learned,

what the connection was, we were completely in the dark about.

But they left about maybe ten minutes ago.

- So... - My hands are shaking.

They tell you their names?

He says, um, "My name is Richard, and this is my partner, Dan."

The entrance of Dan and Richard into Linda's story,

that was like a shot of adrenaline.

You know what I'm gonna do? I'm just gonna start shooting.

Whether they were policemen or agents, nobody knew the truth.

Let me just get some focus here.

So I took my camera back to Linda, and I just asked her...

What happened when they came over?

They told me that I was responsible for something that they saw happen.

When they were sitting in their cars under the FDR Drives,

they saw me hanging outside my window 12 stories up in a beam of light.

One seemed, uh, very nice.

Uh, the other one seemed very nervous.

A little on the angry side.

I couldn't believe the look on Dan's face.

He looked terr... It didn't look right.

But what frightened me more was when Dan stood up,

got up from the couch, and stood up in front of me.

I thought he was gonna beat me up.

I mean it.

And that's when Richard got in between us.

What was the... the basis for his emotion?

I was answering him back.

This, uh, authoritative, uh, figure.

He didn't like it.

I don't want to get these big fellows angry at me.

So I told 'em, "You have to leave."

I shut the door,

peeked through,

and I could see Richard and Dan out in the hallway.

Come on. I'll show you.

Dan grabbed on to Richard's lapels and started to bang him.

Now, these are two big guys.

He's banging him on the wall with his lapels and saying,

"Jesus Christ, Rich. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ."

These two men seemed to be very upset.

Seemed suspicious of her.

Did you feel endangered after that visit?

Yes. Yes.

So for me, there was a big question about who they represented.

Who do you think he was?

Well, I believe he was an, uh, an intelligence, uh, agent or something.

An intelligence, uh, agent or something.

But that's just what I thought.

I didn't know what to believe. I didn't know what was going on.

I don't know that they're detectives, but they may be.

Who knows what's going on?

But we're gonna try to find out.

The primary focus had shifted

to learning who these two individuals were.

This was incredibly compelling for Budd 'cause he was a really good detective.

And Budd had developed, over the years,

a number of contacts within law enforcement.

Look, there's... there's a matter of... of speed here, urgency.

Okay, but it's also, like I said, delicate

because if we start knocking on the wrong doors,

we got big problems.

We went to every station in New York.

I've got two goals. I... I wanna meet these guys,

and I wanna stop this screwing around that they're doing with Linda.

They hide their identities really well

in this situation for their protection.

And especially, you know the subject of this is, uh, you know,

something the government don't like to talk about.

He would leave notes for them,

telling them how important this work was for the future of humanity,

and they really needed to come forward.

Linda, did anybody else see them come into your place?

- No. - Any way to establish they were there?

See... See, a skeptic would say you made it all up.

I don't really give a damn.

- Okay. Bye-bye. - Bye-bye.

One day, I came into the office

and learned from Budd

that he had received this tape recording in the mail.

Budd called me and said, "I think you ought to hear it."

We listened very carefully.

And there's a voice.

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.

That's Richard.

That's Richard.

Through my binoculars,

I could see Linda was there in this beam of light.

My partner screamed. I felt as though I had lost my breath.

Oh my God.

Here was one of these two men speaking directly to Budd Hopkins.

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.

You have to think critically. Is this some kind of prank or fraud?

But nothing was in conflict with anything we had learned from Linda.

Please respect the importance of our credibility at work.

We just can't be identified. We'd be laughed at.

People wanted tangible proof.

And that's the proof.

It's not even evidence. It's proof.

As time progressed, a piece of mail arrived at the office.

That was a letter from Richard and Dan that they wrote together.

They explained to Budd they were not police officers

but federal agents acting as protection

for a very high-ranking, well-known diplomat.

The Secretary General of the United Nations,

Pérez de Cuéllar.

That night, he was in the car with Richard and Dan.

He witnessed Linda being taken as well.

{n8}We went to look at videotape of scenes around the United Nations,

hoping to find Richard or Dan.

There you go. Oh boy.

That's Dan guarding the secretary general.

I would recognize him... ten blocks away.

Here he is coming right through that door now.

We're now dealing with

an extraordinarily delicate political situation

that totally changed the game, that totally changed the story.

You can't be dispassionate about it.

This is fucking mind blowing.

To me, the involvement of government officials felt massive.

It was almost addictive, that sense of excitement.

You knew there was enough validity in that story

that you were soon going to know some large truth about human existence.

I've taken video of you in bed in London, in Paris, in Rome.

This was life with Budd as I'd always imagined it.

Working in love and harmony.

Trying to find the answer, the truth, the culmination of what this mystery was.

Budd called the Linda case

the most important UFO abduction case in history.

And he wanted to tell that story to the public.

I went to my first UFO conference

to listen to Budd make the case public.

And he took me by the hand and coaxed me up to the podium.

I'm saying to myself, "What am I gonna say to these people?"

I felt a numbness creeping up from my toes.

And, um, well, you know about that, I guess.

She got up and spoke without reservation.

And I thought, "Linda's a natural at this."

Thank you.

And the audience loved her.

They thought that she was a heroine.

Linda's life changed markedly.

She was doing talk shows.

Thanks for holding. Jay Diamond Show.

She was being interviewed.

{n8}When people hear this, do they tell you you're nuts?

{n8}I'll tell you, Jay, I wish I were psychotic.

{n8}At least there's treatment for that.

It was fun. It was exciting.

But it meant that she had much less time with her family.

I think it's very difficult to fully appreciate

the forces pulling at this woman.

She is a mother of two young boys.

She also has her husband, Steve,

who is now caught up in this... madness.

Just to set the scene of that night

and why this is so extraordinary,

it was really that you were lifted out of your window...

When she used to go, I used to stay at home, watch the kids.

- Were you aware of what happened? - Well, I had, uh...

She was famous. I was not.

{n8}No, but, you know, that's the way it was.

I couldn't tell my husband much of anything about the case.

We had a hard time.

He felt helpless.

He had no control over it.

None of us did.

She was, uh... not herself.

She suddenly was edgy.

You know, if I'd say somethin', she'd snap.

The madness that is part of the reality of your life

has bled into the reality of your family.

And in early summer,

an event happened

that added a whole new dimension to what we were dealing with.

We all went to bed late.

Suddenly, I felt something going down my throat,

and I started to choke.

So I went outside into the hallway.

The whole family was standing in the living room with nosebleeds.

What happened? You know, all at once?

I said, "It's... It's crazy."

I had this awful feeling

the aliens were back.

Only this time, they had come back for my family.

When I first started to work for Budd,

we thought that alien abduction was probably like being hit by lightning.

If it happened to you, it was random and certainly wasn't gonna happen again.

But as Budd continued his research,

we learned that these other intelligences weren't just interested in the individual.

Entire families were involved.

People are abducted, uh, through different stages of their lives,

and then their children are sometimes abducted,

suggesting that there was a kind of interest in a bloodline.

They're interested in our DNA, in our personalities,

our affection for our children, our love for one another,

what we think of almost the most human characteristics we have.

My grandmother had something strange happen to her.

She used to see spirits walking around her house.

And then I started having experiences, and my sister too.

We started to see things in the apartment.

Well, that was... It was frightening.

At first, uh, my parents said, uh, to my sister and I,

"Oh, you must've had a bad dream."

But we knew we weren't dreaming. It was too real.

And then, of course, my parents started to see what we were seeing.

Then that was a different story.

And that's when she decided

to... to have the priest come and bless the home.

And so that's what she did, but apparently, it never worked.

We kept seeing them.

What were you seeing?

Aliens.

I'm almost embarrassed even to say that.

It sounds so ridiculous.

But I didn't know at that time that's what they were.

I thought they were ghosts.

We knew that when Linda was taken,

the aliens put a device up her nose.

And now you have your husband and your son and your other son,

all of you bleeding from your right nostril.

Could it be one or a number of individuals in the family

had also been abducted?

Linda had a really smart, quick little boy called Johnny.

And I think the two of them were very, very close.

He was... Dare I say it? He was the favored son.

Listen, John, we're all... all of us,

your dad, your mom, me, you,

all involved in a very strange business.

Budd had already developed a rapport with both of Linda's sons.

And following the night of the nosebleeds,

Johnny and he had a call.

I'm gonna record this if you don't mind.

'Cause I'd like to hear what you have to say.

Do you remember anything at all about that night?

Did you have any dreams at all?

Oh, yes.

In the dream, where were you?

In a room.

It was all white.

And there were two really tall men.

Were these, you know, nice guys, bad guys, or...?

They... they were very, very mean.

I was scared. I didn't know what was happening.

Next thing is you wake up, and you got the nosebleed?

Yes.

Budd, I... I went into the bathroom,

and I felt like I was going to completely throw up.

And I'm scared about it.

You're scared?

Is something wrong with me because I keep having nosebleeds?

Yeah.

Johnny told Budd about his own experiences of being taken.

Experiences not unlike his mother.

When he said that he'd had this dream,

I felt, obviously, an immediate kinda shock.

Here's a little boy who's going to school, and he's a happy little kid.

He's nine years old. He's as smart as he can be.

And, uh, he's having a good, happy little young life.

And yet, here's this whole thing

where he's an unwitting, uh, participant in something.

To confirm it, Budd called Linda in

for a hypnosis session

to understand what she was saying and if it had validity.

Okay, now let's go to the thing that happened recently with Johnny.

I count to three.

One.

Two.

Three.

Ragú, America's tastiest spaghetti sauce, tops everything...

I'm just sitting on the couch.

I worked so hard that day.

So tired.

...rice is delicious topped with Ragú...

And I said, "Oh, Johnny, you're up again."

"Mommy," he says.

"They're here."

Three of 'em in my living room.

Johnny was... was begging not to let this happen.

But I couldn't cry.

I couldn't yell.

I couldn't move.

And then it was silent.

That's awful.

That was awful.

Johnny, at that time, must have...

He must've thought I was a... coward or something.

I just... couldn't move.

I couldn't fight for him.

He must've thought I didn't care anymore.

That's horrible.

Three, almost awake.

Two, one, fully awake.

Wow.

It's been some time since I've had a hypnosis.

Yeah.

That was a bad one.

Yeah.

Why do that to my kids? Or anybody else's kids, for that matter.

Somebody better do something.

Let me get a Kleenex.

Budd was wiping his eyes

in full understanding of what Linda had talked about,

that the aliens were also traumatizing her children.

And they were both weeping.

I became very concerned that he was so emotionally attached.

My alarm bells went off.

I felt that Budd risked losing his objectivity.

I had access to all of Budd's original source material,

so I started building a library of hypnosis sessions

that Budd was doing with people.

I want my mommy.

No, it's so ugly. No!

When I would hear people go under hypnosis,

they would sound like they were a little drunk.

Get me out.

And they were, like, struggling to pull it all together.

It really hurts.

But when Linda was hypnotized...

They push me in the room,

and... and I don't wanna go, and I see that... that table.

I see the...

Uh, I think it's a table.

Can you see all four of its legs?

It has no legs.

It looks like a big, long block.

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

She had a clear, coherent narrative.

Oh. Oh, I feel like electricity went through me.

I just didn't believe that she was under hypnosis.

That hurt.

So then I thought, "What is going on here?"

I'm gonna record this if you don't mind.

I'd like to hear what you have to say.

I listened to the phone call that Budd had with her son Johnny,

and I could hear a couple of points where he pauses,

and you're not sure why.

I was looking out the window one day, and then something, like...

No, wait.

Yeah. Then something was pulling me out of the window.

She could have coached him to get aligned with her own story.

I didn't think that I was mad or wrong to have doubts.

I became very concerned.

I thought Linda was going to be the case of the century.

But was I actually making a film

about an extremely practiced hoax?

I was going into the spaceship,

uh, through the window,

and I asked myself, "Doesn't my mommy love me anymore?"

Because she just walked, and she was just frozen there.

She didn't do anything.

Did Linda convince her son he had been abducted by aliens?

You don't lie about things like that to children.

Don't lie about it.

It would have been traumatizing for him.

I feel sorry for him

because, you see, he's young, and he has his whole life ahead of him.

But as a mother, how can you sit there and say that calmly?

Calmly?

It's not new to me anymore.

I wish I could do something about it, but there isn't anything anyone can do.

By going out and speaking about it,

Budd had backed himself into a corner.

Because if it wasn't true,

it would be the end of his career as a UFO investigator.

Basically, what I wanted to ask you about is Johnny.

So I took a deep breath,

and I just suggested the possibility that Linda may have coached Johnny.

That made Budd very unhappy.

{n8}I don't think there's any remote possibility

{n8}of this child doing anything here

{n8}but trying to remember what happened to him.

{n8}Uh, you can't take a nine-or ten-year-old and train them to... to remember

{n8}some enormously complicated story or series of stories.

Budd would not support me questioning things like that.

He found that very offensive.

Either his mother is controlling him in a sociopathic manner

{n8}and has drilled this into him and so on and so forth.

{n8}Or the other, he's remembering what happened to him.

{n8}There's no other alternative here.

My questions were putting him off.

That was the bottom line of it.

And that I should keep those to myself.

If that was your daughter,

would you be doing anything differently from what you're doing right now?

If it were my daughter...

Well, I don't really know if I can answer that.

It's so enormous a question and so hypothetical.

Um...

It's simpler to believe that he's just like a little boy

remembering what happened.

Honey, I want you to eat.

I don't wanna eat.

I was very angry because I didn't know what I should do.

I knew I could not question my husband,

the person who was doing the investigating,

because I didn't wanna lose my marriage.

But I needed to find out the truth.

And I can't stop doing that

'cause I don't know what kind of a marriage you can have

if your own self is lost in it.

So I decided to keep the camera rolling...

until I could prove Linda's case was a hoax.

How... how could she say the things she said

after what my family and I went through?

Johnny was just a little boy.

But he's grown up.

He's different. He's an adult now.

Do you think Johnny'll talk to us about it?

No, he won't.

Uh, no, he won't. Uh, John... John won't... won't talk about it.

I don't know if he's afraid or if he's angry about it.

But he really despises the subject.

It's gotta be the most terrifying and hopeless thing that I've ever felt.

Yeah.

So I was very reluctant to even start talking about this again.

{n8}It's been, uh, over 30 years, really,

{n8}since I sat down and seriously talked about this

{n8}with anybody but my therapist.