Review: The Manhattan Alien Abduction
Bronwyn Rideout - 22nd December 2025
Netflix’s “The Manhattan Alien Abduction” was released in October 2024, a month shy of the 35th anniversary of the alleged abduction of Linda Napolitano from her Manhattan apartment. Unlike the more credulous alien abduction fare available to watch on streaming, the hook of this 3-episode series is that they had a skeptic on board who believed that the abduction was a hoax. That she was skeptical may be a ho-hum descriptor, and I would say that this person wasn’t a skeptic in a way that our card-carrying members would understand it - as an approach to life. Rather, they had become skeptical of what had unfolded in their eventual home years before their arrival.
It’s a story of three big personalities - Budd Hopkins, his ex-wife Carol Rainey, and Linda Napolitano.
Budd Hopkins. Source: Wikipedia
Budd Hopkins is to UFOlogy as Ed Warren is to Demonology. Both were artists, although Hopkins was an objectively better painter, and had received a Guggenheim Fellowship and had his paints in the permanent collection of prestigious institutions like the Whitney Museum, The British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Budd Hopkins, Pamet Rise, 1967
Also, neither man was professionally trained in the services they provided (Warren in exorcisms, and Hopkins in hypnosis). As it stands, Hopkins’ work in UFOlogy has overshadowed his legacy as an artist. He was never an alien abductee himself, but did claim to have seen a UFO. It seems that the trauma he experienced after listening to the original airing of the radio play, The War of the Worlds, led Budd to develop a cynical attitude towards aliens; he was the last person I would expect to be a member of Share International. Budd referred to aliens as intruders, or sometimes UFO occupants, and believed that our outer space “visitors” were here for their own, possibly nefarious, purposes (such as human hybrid breeding programmes) instead of helping us prepare for the next stage in human evolution.
After writing about George O’Barski’s alien encounter for The Village Voice, UFO witnesses and abductees started to reach out to Budd. Between 1981 and 1987, he collected and analysed these stories and published his findings into two books, Missing Time and Intruders. In 1989, he started the Intruders Foundation and hosted free, monthly group therapy sessions for abductees. Scenes from these sessions, as well as the hypnotic regression that the untrained Hopkins facilitated, are included throughout the series.
It was after reading Intruders, in April 1989, that Linda Napolitano wrote to Budd. Linda is married, and a mother of two sons. She worked as a receptionist at a printing company, but as we find out in the series she was a decent crooner in her youth, and was even signed to Mercury Records in 1965. She rubbed shoulders with celebrities, but believed that she could not have it all and gave up her show business career to start her family.
Linda Napolitano, 1989. Source: El Pais
In her initial correspondence with Budd, Linda shared a series of experiences from her 20s. Her early 20s appear to have been plagued by frequent incidents of sleep paralysis. At 25, she noticed a bump on her nose and had it examined by a doctor. The doctor found nothing but a buildup of cartilage that indicated a previous scalpel incision. Linda’s receipt for this visit convinced Budd of her sincerity, although her additional recollections of UFO encounters as a child were also fascinating. Linda began attending Budd’s support group, which detractors later believed helped her push the boundaries of her future reports.
It started with a claim of an audacious alien abduction on November 30th, 1989, in which Linda was extracted from her 12th-floor window in her nightgown by a beam of light and into a spaceship - an event that was visible from the Brooklyn Bridge. Supposedly there were 23 witnesses to this abduction, although no one came forward until February 1991. That was when Budd began receiving a mysterious series of correspondence from two “police officers” named Dan and Richard. As the story unfolds in the docuseries, Dan and Richard are not part of the NYPD but are members of the protection team of then-United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Netflix just hints at this, but in Hopkin’s 1996 book about the case, “Witness: The true story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO abductions”, Dan becomes dangerously obsessed with Linda and even kidnaps her or threatens to kidnap her more than once.
Richard, on the other hand, would reveal to Hopkins via letter that he believed that 1) Linda may be an alien hybrid with special abilities, 2) they had been abducted together and spent time together as children, and 3) they were likely part of a breeding programme, and that Linda’s youngest son John was his. Mind you, as far as can be discerned, Budd never met Richard or Dan; Linda, however, had reported meeting them several times, and had even had a pash with Richard before all the alien breeding malarky was revealed. The Dan and Richard plot is a far bigger and ludicrous part of the story than the directors would have you believe, and I’m curious about whether it was excluded from the TV show because of the implications it might have had for Linda’s family.
In 1993, Joseph Stefula, Richard Burlet, and George Hansen published their critique of Budd’s handling of the Napolitano case, going so far as to suggest that it has numerous parallels with the April 1989 novel Nighteyes by Garfield Reeves-Stevens. They also questioned why Hopkins and supporters suppressed evidence of Dan’s attempted murder of Linda. A Grunge article from 2021 also provides an excellent summary of all the twists and turns that Linda (and Budd’s) story took.
The final figure of this debacle, the skeptical champion if you will, is Carol Rainey. Carol grew up in a family with deep roots in the Plymouth Brethren, and eventually found herself shunned for her questioning. She had a long and successful career as a documentarian, filmmaker, and grant writer. Her achievements with the latter were especially impressive, as her grants totalled $16.8M to institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the New York State Department of Health, the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.
Carol Rainey, undated. Source
Carol and Budd. Source: Netflix/Forbes
Carol met Budd by 1994 at the latest; she moved in with him in 1995, and they married in 1996. During their 10 years of marriage, they collaborated on Budd’s work. She edited Witness and participated in investigations, they co-authored their own book together, and she captured much of the footage that exists of his work. Still, she was a relative latecomer to Hopkins’ world of alien abductees, and I think that puts a different spin on her story. All of the videos Carol shot that were shared in the Netflix series were recorded several years after the original abduction. By that time, credible witnesses were not forthcoming. As Jeffrey King wrote in his review of Witness for the Skeptical Inquirer in 1997, witnesses were already dying or going silent as early as 1994 (if they even existed); the only way Budd was able to scrounge up an independent, corroborating witness was to conduct hypnotic regression on other abductees to see if they saw Linda during their own abductions. The footage that was shared of Linda looking through a 1991 video taken at the UN was itself recorded in approximately 1996.
Carol often opines that she regularly worked with scientists and understood the scientific process and what makes good evidence. But as we’ve seen with Ky Dickens and the Telepathy Tapes, the thrill of a good story can overtake a person. Linda was also an established figure in Budd’s life, and would remain so until he died in 2011. Carol and Budd were both on their third marriages. Budd often struggled, as seen in the series, when Carol questioned him, his methods, or his informants. Still, Carol (or the editor) is reticent as to when the rose-tinted glasses came off regarding Linda and Budd. Snippets of her unpublished memoir, shared online in 2016, indicate that doubts arose early on. A case involving a former country musician named Arlene Love (aka Phoebe Snow) and her allegedly ‘alien-hybrid’ daughter (read parts 1 and 2) was a stark lesson in how Budd’s methods could be harmful and how people were ignored once they no longer served a purpose. In particular, Budd’s peculiar belief that aliens were interested in the sexual acts of humans led him to persuade Arlene not to get a genetic test done on her child. Carol admits in the second snippet that when she made this discovery, she did nothing and continued on with her marriage and work with Budd. It makes Carol’s final words in Episode 3, where she acknowledges her part in perpetuating Budd’s work, a lot less cryptic, but her attempts to portray Budd as someone who was bamboozled by Linda rather than a collaborator ring hollow.
One of my favourite summaries of the series comes from Joel Keller at Decider: “Despite all the archival footage and dark-toned reenactments that set the scene for The Manhattan Alien Abduction, the docuseries is essentially two now-senior citizens litigating a decades-old beef via the camera they’re talking into and the producer that’s asking them questions”. On a recent episode of our NZ Skeptics podcast, Mark asked if I thought Carol was jealous of Linda, and I would say that no, she wasn’t. Carol has said many things about Linda and Linda’s integrity, but unlike the men interviewed (or videoed), Carol never thought Linda was stupid. Given what Budd did believe, he should’ve kept his thoughts to himself. That doesn’t mean that Linda was a mastermind. There was one incident where Linda claimed that Richard and Dan kidnapped her and her cousin Connie; after Budd finished speaking to Connie, he told Carol that it was just Linda pretending to be her cousin. The love lost between Carol and Linda is not bewildering, and their conflict may have stung more due to the money. In 2011, Carol revealed that Budd and Linda shared in the advance money for the book, and had agreed that they would also share in the earnings from any movie that was optioned. Of course, when Carol began whistle-blowing, talk of the movie dried up.
Carol and Budd would divorce in 2006, although it was said that they had separated in 2003. Budd died in 2011, and Carol had a heart attack on August 11, 2023, which led to a bout of pneumonia that significantly worsened her pulmonary fibrosis. Carol would pass on September 17th, 2023. She did become more vocal with her criticisms about Budd’s methods after his death, but social media posts from recent years demonstrated that she still had some affection for her ex-husband. Besides the memoir, she was developing a documentary about the UFO abductee community called Something Hidden, in 2013, that was never released.
Carol Rainey
A couple of social media posts allege that Carol’s heart attack was a few days after filming for the Manhattan Alien Abduction, although I cannot find evidence of a shooting schedule to confirm that. If true, I wonder if this contributed to the production’s overall unfinished feel. It felt as if Carol had more to say - I think her statements about Hopkins being complicit especially needed more fleshing out. There were also key pieces of information omitted, and I wonder if this was done to up the mystery, and maybe also to increase sympathy for Linda. One particularly glaring omission has to do with the X-ray. In 1991, after Dan’s attempted kidnapping, Linda and her family experienced serious nosebleeds (this is dramatised in the series). In Witness, Linda later told Budd that the week before that incident she went and had an X-ray done - this is the so-called radiographic smoking gun that allegedly showed a spiral implant. What is in the book, but doesn’t make it to the screen, is that the X-ray was taken at the clinic rooms of a podiatrist she knew, Lisa Bayer (maybe a pseudonym) who was also Linda’s niece. Hopkins wrote that Aliens know when their implants are being x-rayed, and likely removed them. Thus, when the family nosebleed session happened the following week, Budd presumed that it was because the implant had been removed.
Linda’s implant on x-ray
Linda attempted to sue Netflix just days before the series’s release, claiming she was defamed. Although she failed to prevent the series’s release, the lawsuit is believed to be ongoing, with no further updates.
Linda during the filming of Manhattan Alien Abduction. Source: NY Post
Peter Robbins, Hopkins’ co-investigator, made a similar statement, and further implied that the archival materials used were stolen by Carol.
While I may have watched this series twice for this review, I think it would be a skip for everyone else. This abduction story, and the personal dramas around it, are far more interesting than the producers allowed. The passing of Carol meant that a golden opportunity to learn more about how her thinking went from skeptical to believer and back to skeptic has been lost.