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1 Is this being faked, or is this real?

Witnesses have seen me levitate outside my window.

Is this person a liar

or telling the truth to the best of their ability and understanding?

Up there, on the other side of the building.

If she's so intent on convincing the world that she's been taken by aliens,

is there anything she wouldn't do to advance that notion,

including mess with one of her own children?

And how would she have gone about creating the impression in this boy

that he had been abducted by aliens?

Would she have instructed him to lie?

Would he have been convincing if he had?

What kind of human being would do this?

By this point, we've established some basic character references

for this woman,

and she's a decent person,

a caring person who would probably much rather hurt herself

than hurt one of her children, as any decent parent would.

Is she putting on an act?

Creating a persona?

And you've gotta come to an informed decision one way or the other.

Roll one, take one.

Starting to feel some feelings maybe I haven't felt in... in a while.

I just tried to erase it from my... my life.

{n8}And you're sure you can't see my face?

{n8}I really don't want to have my face seen on camera.

{n8}No. It's fine.

It happened a long time ago.

I was quite young.

I say to myself, you know, "Why did they pick me?"

"Why couldn't they pick, you know, somebody else?"

Obviously, as a kid, you don't know what to think.

You hope and pray that it's a nightmare.

But the better part of me knows that it was a real experience.

Mom was in the kitchen. I don't really know what she was doing.

I looked out the window.

And... the next thing, I... I remember turning around.

I remember seeing three... beings

in the living room.

The most vivid memory is of calling out

to my mom for help,

and it was almost as if she was standing still.

She wasn't moving. She wasn't responding.

And I know I was screaming as loud as I could.

It was almost as if she wasn't even there. It was just an image of her.

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

Because she was just frozen there, and she didn't do anything.

When I think about it, I think, "Are they gonna come back,

and are they gonna do something worse?"

I know it was terrifying for me, and I can only imagine

the terror and anger that my mom felt.

I felt it was my fault because it happened to me.

{n8}But, uh, when it happens to your own, you know,

that's a different story.

Yeah.

Can you train a little child to lie?

Because if Johnny's telling the truth,

then the whole story holds together and is true.

Now, there's no doubt about that.

So, in a strange way, Johnny is quite key.

Well, I know my mom better than anybody else.

I'll tell you right now, there's no way I believe

she would wanna make anything like this up.

From what I'm told, a lot of witnesses.

So either she planted a seed in all those people's heads and mine,

or this is a real experience.

So I can't imagine

that she would wanna perpetuate something involving so much terror and agony.

How do we know what's real?

How do we know what's true?

I was becoming increasingly suspicious of Linda's story.

{n8}I felt that she was

{n8}pulling the wool over Budd's eyes,

and he couldn't see what was happening.

He believed that he was about to unfurl

the most comprehensive abduction case that has ever been known about

with all of those witnesses.

To me, it began to seem almost too perfect.

Almost too perfect.

But Budd was always certain that this was a good enough story

to be a bestseller and be made into a movie.

He needed to stay with that all the way to the end.

{n8}- This will be... - I know.

{n8}...the most important UFO book ever.

I like it. There's tons of interest.

Everyone is interested in UFO and... and X-Files stuff, period.

My guests this morning say that they have been abducted by aliens,

taken aboard spaceships, and examined by beings from outer space.

The Linda case elevated the subject of abduction

to something that had gone kind of mainstream.

Oprah, she took it seriously.

What the aliens, quote, unquote, are... are interested in

is their agenda, and they're doing it their way for their reasons.

{n8}At the time, one of the big chat shows in America

{n8}was Geraldo Rivera's show.

{n8}I'd never been on a chat show that large.

We don't have a problem with skepticism.

Um, we do have a problem with ridicule.

What in the world were these little creatures after?

The focus of the whole thing seems to me

to be on some kind of genetic experimentation that's taking place.

Now, are they taking sperm and eggs

to make little humans on their home planet or...

The implication is that they are trying to create a hybrid.

A mix of their stock and our stock.

Budd was never trying to fool anybody with that.

He had a very, very pessimistic concept

of why aliens were here,

which he believed in wholeheartedly.

The aliens were up to no good for humankind.

And you had no way to stop it.

We won't see it happening. It'll come invisibly in the night.

Another civilization coming from somewhere else.

Breeding us out of existence.

This was an endgame for the aliens.

Budd Hopkins told me what was going on.

Every woman that was abducted

had their ova taken.

So I looked at Budd. I says, "Oh," I says, "wait a minute."

I says, "What are you saying?"

So Budd regressed me, and I remembered everything.

I'm in this strange place.

Everything that happened to me when I went into the craft.

One of them picks up a stick, a long stick.

- Mm-hmm. - Looks like a rod.

There were these creatures ar... around me,

and they were examining my stomach.

One of them came after me

with a needle the length of a turkey baster.

That isn't friendly.

I didn't wanna believe that I was a lab rat

being experimented on.

But after a while,

I just couldn't deny it anymore.

{n8}Hi, everybody. Thank you, guys, and welcome.

Joining us now is Linda. She says she's been abducted by extraterrestrials.

She's in silhouette today because she fears her family will be in danger

if she reveals her identity.

I was invited on The Ricki Lake Show,

but I told her, "The only way I'll appear is if you put me in shadow."

Because of what happened to me and what was going on besides the...

the aliens.

The government has lied to us about UFOs,

has withheld information, has spied on UFO witnesses.

It's going into a whole nother world of fear, of drama,

of not knowing where this is all leading.

She was visited at her home

by a man identifying himself as a government agent.

Linda had a sense that she was being observed...

by the two men who had originally come to the apartment.

Richard and Dan.

I was abducted by aliens.

As foolish as it sounds, that's what's goin' on.

- But... - And then they showed up.

And it wasn't just that they showed up.

They kept showing up and... and harassing me.

Budd was concerned that Linda was being harassed on a regular basis

and never felt safe going out of her home.

It felt like every time she went out to grocery shop,

something strange happened to her.

The story just kept on rolling.

I wouldn't mess with Linda, my mother.

She can be the sweetest thing in the world,

but... if you try to hurt her or anybody that she loves,

you better watch out.

I was raised not to take any crap from anybody.

So I borrowed an old gun from a friend of mine,

and I said to her, "I just don't feel safe."

"I feel like I'm going to be attacked."

Because of the things that were happening to her,

Budd came up with this idea of wiring her for sound.

Testing. Testing.

The microphone was in my pocket. The speaker was in my ear.

One day I was walking up Cherry Street,

and I see this black car.

And who's standing outside the car was Richard and Dan.

He's standing across the street, watching.

God. I gotta get the hell outta here.

Oh God. He's coming!

I don't see him anymore. Where the hell is he?

Oh God, oh God!

You're not going anywhere. Get in the car.

Go, go, go!

I didn't wanna get into the car.

I didn't wanna have anything to do with them, period.

But here I was sitting in the car,

and we just took off.

A tape recorder? You wired?

No, I'm not wired. It's not on.

I need help.

You know I need help.

No. Stop it.

No. No.

He told me to take my shoes off.

They wanted to see my feet.

I think they wanted to know how many toes I had.

What?

Come here, half-breed.

That bastard, Dan, used to call me a half-breed.

What? Stop it. Stop.

He actually thought I was half-human, half-alien.

It just kept getting wilder and crazier.

I wanna go home. Why don't you let me out of the car?

And I took out the gun.

I says to him, "I'm holding a gun, and you better watch out

'cause I'm gonna shoot your balls off."

And he stopped the car,

and I ran away and called Budd.

- Hello? - Linda?

They grabbed me by Pier 17.

Oh, Linda. Tell... God, tell me what happened.

He went nuts. He grabbed me by my shoulders

and started to shake me until I was dizzy.

Oh, Linda.

And I have this son of a bitch on tape.

Okay. Okay, Linda. Get off the phone. Come on over, okay?

- Okay. - Okay. Bye-bye.

I've got to know these things when they happen.

Has there been anything else lately that I don't know about?

No, really not. Nothing dangerous.

- Everything's okay. - Okay.

I was lucky to have Budd.

He was my rock.

He was always there. He was protective.

I'm worried about you saying you don't know who to trust.

- Mm-hmm. - I don't.

Linda, there are lots of people you know you can trust.

At that point, I kind of was

seeing a lot of these stories as being made up, invented.

Budd didn't pick up on it

because she was delivering material that he so badly wanted for his new book.

These are two little children's drawings done by little Johnny.

Linda was offering him new elements, new stories, every few days.

That's an extremely dramatic chapter. It's like...

It sounds like a mystery. It sounds intriguing.

- It makes you wonder... - When you read this...

I hope you'll read it.

I think I've shown you the picture of the, uh, really creepy detective.

Of course, the skeptics will say Linda made all this up. I mean...

Who's that creative? She'd be doing something more than she's doing now.

I mean, Linda is not unintelligent.

- Right. - But Linda is...

- She's your average working-class person. - Exactly.

Budd said that Linda wasn't smart enough

to be able to manage anything like this.

She couldn't plan things that far ahead and make this whole great story happen.

I thought she was smart.

She's not well educated, but she was smart.

If the Linda case was a hoax,

it was done masterfully well.

The whole case was built on 23 witnesses.

Basically, all the lights went out.

In the city, on the bridge.

I had to stare at it for at least two minutes.

I mean, I was looking at it.

But listening to Budd's interviews with some of the witnesses,

I couldn't help wonder if they had really seen

what they thought they had seen.

Uh-huh.

The yard was lit. It wasn't bright white light.

It wasn't moonlight. It was lit.

Francesca remembered being terrified by a bright light.

What freaked me...

But she never lifted the curtain to see what was causing the light.

I just felt that if I would've pulled open that shade,

I would have really seen something I didn't want to see.

It was roundish, even though it was, uh, sort of glowing.

Cathy Turner was an elderly woman whose eyesight was failing.

- I didn't say I was on the bridge. - Yeah. No, I know.

The confusing thing was she couldn't remember

where she had seen the abduction.

You think you were on the Brooklyn side?

It's possible.

What is going on here,

and how much is being generated by Linda herself?

And out of the corner of my eye I saw, you know, this light.

Janet Kimball was a key witness.

I thought hers was perhaps the most convincing testimony.

But when I first heard it,

I thought, "Oh my God, that sounds just like Linda."

At first, you heard car doors slamming and all that

and everybody yelling.

Then I didn't hear anything.

Uh-huh.

I wanted to meet her and have her let me interview her on camera.

So I actually got Budd to call her.

- You have the recorder on, right? - Okay.

Uh, Budd Hopkins.

Uh, from New York. I'd just like to speak to her for just a moment.

She's in the shower? Uh-huh.

Uh, can I try, uh, what, in about, uh, half an hour?

This is Budd Hopkins calling again. Is she out of the shower?

Oh, she did?

- What? Where'd she go? - Went straight to bed.

What are you gonna do with a book called Witnessed

when you don't have witnesses who'll come forward?

Well, that's, of course...

Well... Shit.

I saw that Budd was accepting as true

things that there was no evidence to support that they were true.

But that didn't seem to stop him.

Joining us is Budd Hopkins, one of America's top ufologists,

who heard Linda's story

and made her the subject for his latest book,

Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions.

When Witnessed was published,

a major Hollywood producer picked up the option.

The thought that this might actually become a movie

was, for me, very exciting.

Independence Day was a big, splashy movie,

and I think that was the model

that Budd had in his mind for how Witnessed would look.

A Hollywood feature film based on this extraordinary story

had the dual ability to entertain as well as educate.

Would you like a cigarette, Nick?

Budd used to say that "Sharon Stone should play you

if there should ever be a movie."

- No. - We all used to giggle and laugh.

And I said, "No, I don't look anything like Sharon Stone,

that's for sure."

I thought Linda was a natural actress.

She was a dramatic person.

She said, "Because of this alien-abduction business,"

she said, "I had talents that I never fully developed."

♪ When I need somebody to rely on ♪

♪ Don't let me down ♪

♪ You're the only one Means anything to me ♪

♪ No one else ♪

♪ Could ever be ♪

♪ So don't let me down... ♪

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a singer when I grew up.

♪...before me ♪

♪ And this whole world Seems to ignore me ♪

In high school, I had friends who also wanted to sing,

and so we made a singing group, and they decided I should be lead singer.

And, uh, Mercury Records took us on.

They gave me the name Lynn Long.

♪ Don't let me down ♪

♪ I don't know If I could face it all alone ♪

♪ I can't make it ♪

♪ On my own ♪

♪ So don't let me down ♪

It was putting something out into the world

and people hearing my voice.

That was good.

Oh, look at that. That's Mia Farrow and me.

I was about 17 years old there.

The Duke, John Wayne.

We were invited to... to sing for them.

It was a different world. It was a better world.

It was where I wanted to be.

But then I met Steve,

and it was either a music career or marriage and a family.

So I chose marriage and a family.

She was good at it, I'll tell you.

She was definitely a great mom.

When I was about six, I had a... a nightmare.

I went right to my mom, and I... I do remember how shocked she looked.

She was very quick to let me know

that she had had some of the same experiences.

She basically told me that it was m... most likely a real experience.

And that's hard, as a six-year-old, to wrap your head around.

I can't begin to explain the absolute terror you feel.

It definitely fucked me up a little bit.

I'm glad that I went into therapy when I did

to stop it from fuckin' me up even more.

But when you experience something like that at that age,

it's... it's gonna do damage.

What Linda is not willing to do is to say,

"I had a role in this entire story."

"I fed it. I dreamed it up."

"I manipulated my family."

"And I deceived Budd Hopkins, my friend."

That's what Linda should be saying.

Linda is simply telling the truth. It's as easy as that.

The only way that she can be attacked, the case can be attacked,

is, of course, if people say she's a... a... a liar, a hoaxer,

she's hired all these people,

every one of these people is an actress or actor that she's hired,

she's trained her son, etc. etc.

It was a hoax with a thousand moving parts,

but I needed definitive proof.

So I started going through primary resources,

documents and stacks of letters.

I was really shocked

that half of the book is comprised of letters from Richard and Dan,

two key witnesses to Linda's abduction.

Even though Budd never could get them to agree to meet.

I'm the only one that sees these guys.

Well, yeah, but I get the letters from them,

and I'm gonna insist that they contact me.

It's ridiculous. Why would they not?

I felt strongly that they were an invention of Linda's,

and then I found a letter forwarded to Budd by the agent Richard.

And on it was a signature of Javier Pérez de Cuéllar,

who was the head of the United Nations at that time

and who was in the car with Richard and Dan

the night of Linda's abduction.

And then when I saw the handwriting on the envelope,

I just wondered if that handwriting matched Linda's.

So I went to a forensics document examiner.

I was looking at the "Hopkins" on the manila envelope.

There was a virtually identical "H" in the letter signed "Linda."

It is fairly clear to me

that they were executed by the same person.

Now, I am going to produce a transparency of the signature.

I asked him to compare it

with a trusted copy of de Cuéllar's signature

because no one ever writes their own signature exactly the same way.

Voilà! That is an exact replication of the signature.

The person who replicated de Cuéllar's signature

is the same person who's written the letters from Richard

and the letters from Dan.

And that is Linda.

Richard is an invention of Linda's.

And so is Dan.

They were both actors.

I suppose Linda has already spoken to you

about our unexpected visit to her apartment.

And de Cuéllar is brought in as the credibility character.

It was so layered, so detailed,

so generative of new elements, new stories.

She learned about the elements of alien abduction

by reading Budd's own books

and then being invited into support groups

and having hypnosis sessions with Budd.

She would have known what Budd was looking for.

She would have known what the typical abductee pattern was.

All the ingredients were there.

I almost had a reluctant admiration for Linda for doing that,

except for the fact I was really pissed that she made a fool out of my husband.

I hoaxed the whole thing, that's what she said, and Budd was a dupe,

and Budd fell for it.

Yeah.

Well, if that was the case, tell me who operated on my nose.

Next slide, please.

Budd called it the radiological smoking gun.

An X-ray of the alien implant that was said to be in her nose.

That was an interesting piece of physical evidence.

In that white drawer full of original source material

that Budd used for the book,

I found the actual X-ray.

It did look like some squiggly little thing

inside her nose.

But when you get down to it,

you could get the same effect

by taping something to the outside of a nose.

There's always gonna be people that can talk it away.

That obviously somehow she stuck this thing up her nose.

Or worse, that Hopkins was involved in doing it.

These are... I mean, that's just beyond creepy.

I was in a place that was utterly uncomfortable.

I loved Budd.

He seemed to be so full of integrity, so full of honesty.

But if this was a hoax,

I wanted to know if my husband was part of it.

And then I started to realize what Budd had put forward in Witnessed

was not the full story.

Budd cherry-picked compelling details

but ignored anything that presented difficult questions.

And that's when my alarm bells went off.

I began to fear it wasn't just Linda who was doing the misleading.

There was a lot of misleading by Budd himself.

What's the matter?

I just felt that I had to challenge him.

Well, I would like to have a case that's absolutely provable

and where there were unimpeachable witnesses.

Uh, I've got many, many such cases.

Many such cases.

But what... but what's a scientist gonna say to that?

I don't care about things like that.

- Sure, you've got all that. We don't... - They're stories.

We... we don't count... Yes.

Uh, stories are, of course, eyewitness accounts.

A story sounds like fiction.

An eyewitness account sounds like evidence.

I find it... I find it disgusting. I find it repellent.

I find it demeaning of... of one's normal humanity.

This is not the way we operate in the real world.

This is not the way we treat one another.

Oh boy. That was a repeat of history I did... hadn't planned on.

Your questions aren't welcome here.

To me, that resonated way, way back.

I didn't wanna talk about this.

These are traumatic memories,

things I'd not thought about for a long time.

We were Plymouth Brethren,

and... Plymouth Brethren are a fundamentalist...

almost a clan now of people.

We were to keep the world separate from us.

"This is a dangerous place. Don't go there."

So we didn't go to movies.

We didn't have television, magazines, or newspapers.

We believed that every word in the Bible was true.

But as I got older,

I was less able to accept things that were not scientifically valid.

Questions were considered the tip of the iceberg of your doubt.

After, you know, a year of my asking increasingly unwelcome questions,

my father stood in the middle of the room and he said,

"You're not my daughter anymore."

There were 72 members of my family in the group.

I lost everybody in one fell swoop, really.

That was terribly wounding.

And it also made me furious.

I have this little skeptical doobie, doubting Thomas inside me

that keeps coming up and poking at things.

And I get in trouble.

I lose things. I lose people.

I started to see a very different side to Carol.

Angry, frustrated,

and increasingly vindictive.

She seemed to be more and more formulating an attack on Budd's work.

He had shaped for himself a particular belief system.

I often think of myself

as a very religious person without a religion.

And, uh, maybe I'm inventing my own.

As I started thinking about it,

his dogma was as strong as my father's.

Each man wholeheartedly believed they were the truth.

And you shot down anybody who didn't believe your truth.

She was particularly critical

about the way he conducted his hypnotic regressions.

Putting my hand back on your forehead.

That they were manipulative,

and that his intention was to lead people.

Let's go to that. Let's move to that.

No. It's so ugly. No.

I felt that Budd had lost his objectivity.

I don't know if it was through the Linda case...

...or earlier than that.

I couldn't respect what I heard him do to people who were vulnerable.

Very vulnerable.

I want my mommy.

You're gonna be with her in just a little bit.

I had to try to protect other people

from being tormented this way.

I don't wanna see these things.

I was sick.

I was literally sick of the whole business.

And the only thing that I could think to do

was to speak out about it.

So I wrote an essay and posted it online.

I mean, really, what the fuck?

She is a bitch.

She used my case and me and my family

as a tool to get even with Budd.

She had a new cause in life of destroying this man.

All you have is your reputation, and it's over.

Budd's book Witnessed wasn't republished.

It didn't ultimately become a movie.

This is very disappointing for any writer.

I have such a deep dislike and lack of respect for this woman.

She's a son of a bitch.

No doubt about it.

She tried to hurt a lot of people.

I think Linda does try to take me down

at every opportunity she gets.

I never confronted Linda about the things that she did.

Well, Carol Rainey, no one believes you.

And no one believes you is because you are a liar.

And it's as simple as that.

Everybody has your number.

Your ex-husband has been dead for 12, 13 years.

And it wasn't enough for you to try, make the attempt to ruin his reputation.

Now you're trying to ruin his legacy.

But, oh, but you can't.

All you've succeeded in doing was to discredit yourself.

You did lie, and I will say you're a liar,

and I'm sorry about that.

But I will tell the truth.

It... It's best not to mess with Linda or her family.

Because, uh... there'll be no warning.

Wow.

Is that what you expected to hear?

It was crushing.

And it was hurtful.

And I think I've acknowledged my part in the things going wrong.

I don't see any point regretting a... a part of your life.

There... there were elements of it that were very exhilarating.

Linda's was the most complex hoax that I'd ever seen.

But that doesn't make the whole phenomenon all a lie.

You'd have to be silly not to know that there are other beings

that are out there in this unbelievably dense universe

that we're only beginning to see right now.

A Pentagon report is detailing

a dramatic increase in UFO sightings.

The government is investigating

more than 650 potential sightings.

Last year, NASA put together this team to study the phenomenon.

Things have changed.

Every day, more and more people realize this is real.

We had witnesses in the American Congress

talking about biological entities and crashes and recoveries.

Do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?

Absolutely. Based on interviewing, uh, over 40 witnesses.

Perhaps we'll get to a time where people look back on Budd...

and see that he was a real pioneer in this work

and a case like Linda's

will be taken more seriously by more people.

Quite frankly, at this stage in my life,

I don't care.

It's not easy to believe, let's face it.

That's the truth.

Unless you have experienced this yourself.

Sometimes I watch all the people walking and talking and smiling.

I wonder how many have had the same experience I have had...

and they just don't know it.

I'm nothing special.

I'm just... one out of all those millions.

Before I go to bed,

the first thing I do is look behind the drapes.

In the closet.

You never know when it's going to happen.

But I don't feel any safer.

Not at all.

These aliens, these creatures,

if they want you, they're gonna get you.

♪ When I need a shoulder to cry on ♪

♪ And I need somebody to rely on ♪

♪ Don't let me down ♪

♪ You're the only one Means anything to me ♪

♪ No one else ♪

♪ Could ever be ♪

♪ So don't let me down ♪

♪ When I see there's trouble before me ♪

♪ And this whole world Seems to ignore me ♪

♪ Don't let me down ♪

♪ I don't know If I could face it all alone ♪

♪ I can't make it ♪

♪ On my own ♪