June 2, 2020 • 28 mins
The search for ever-more-incredible stories led to strange theories about the purpose of alien abductions and eventually to the bizarre case of Linda Cortile. Budd Hopkins considered it to be the most compelling abduction case ever investigated. But was it real?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky that was to be
on the television program in Boston and last summer and
with another woman who was an abductee, and we got
to the station. It was one of those morning talk
shows where you're usually sandwiched in between a somebody's written
(00:24):
a cookbook and somebody with writing about divorces, and then
there's you with UFOs again. But any rate, I never
know who I'm gonna be on with it. I walked
in and somebody came over to me, one of the producers,
and said Dr Carl Sagan is going to be on
the program, and my heart sank. I felt I'd been ambushed,
and so I was quickly thinking what am I going
(00:46):
to do because I can't say anything against an authority
quote unquote like Carl Sagan, because I know who's going
to be believed. And at some point I saw a
man sitting over in the corner a couple of people
who looked rather thin and frail, and I forgotten what
Carl Sagan look like, and I said, well, that's not Sagan,
(01:07):
and then in a moment, the man got up and
came over to me, and it was Carl Sagan. He's
been ill and he really doesn't look well. And he said,
he said, you're about Hopkins, aren't you. And I practically
went through the floor because I thought I was the enemy.
So he came over and we started talking and he said,
he said, I read your book, which again astonished me.
(01:30):
He said, Bud, you really have to have better evidence.
And he said, you know, uh, in the fruit the
slogan um extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And I said,
what we should be saying here is that an extraordinary
phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation. It is not. And use
(01:52):
that line because that's the point we have an extraor.
It isn't that an extraordinary phenomenal demands extraordinary evidence? Is
if okay, busters all that's going on, come over here
and give us a piece of the captain's log book
and then we'll accept it. I said, Carl, if we
had those pieces of things, we wouldn't need an investigation,
would we? I said, we would have the answer. I said,
(02:13):
it's it's in the absence of more information that we
have to continue looking into it. And I said, you know, Carl,
I don't defend my general ship. I said, I'm not
trying to be uh, George Washington. I said, but I
am trying to be Paul Revere. And I said, Paul
Revere was an artist, and uh, he just went around
trying to get people to pay attention to this. And
I said, you guys should be doing it, not me.
(02:36):
In the nineteen eighties and nineties, Bud Hopkins, John mac
and David Jacobs pioneered a major change in the study
of alien abductions. UFO researcher Robert Schaefer refers to them
as the Troyka. They claimed their research showed that aliens
were able to snatch people at any time, for anywhere,
(03:01):
and there was nothing we could do about it. The
question this raised was what were the aliens trying to accomplish.
I'm Toby Ball, this is Strange Arrivals, episode ten, the
(03:26):
Secretary General. Now, essentially, my take on this whole thing
is not that they are evil, malevolent here to deliberately
hurt us. I haven't a single case where I could
say it looks as if they're just sort of demons,
like a motorcycle gang, to do the worst they possibly
can do. There seems to be an objectivity about what
(03:49):
they're doing. This is Hopkins speculating about the alien's intentions.
They're not our space brothers either, and they're not quote
unquote visitors. This is not what we're dealing with. We're
dealing with something we do not understand. Let's call them
uf O occupants, so let's call them what we want to.
But let's not try to make them overly friendly, because
(04:11):
they're not, and let's not try to make them overly malicious. Essentially,
their attitude is one of a kind of condescension, and
they're trying to keep people comfortable, and they're not very deeply, deeply,
deeply interested, but they have certain needs. We know that
they seem to need genetic material that they're taking sperm over.
(04:36):
We know they're doing these reproductive experiments in attempt at
hybridization and so forth. Too many cases have come to light,
too many similar descriptions for this to be eliminated as possibility.
It is very central. Since the very first abduction stories,
alien interest in human reproduction has been a common theme.
(04:59):
Think back to the need plunged into Betty Hill's abdomen
or the wild sexual encounter between Antonio Villis Bois and
the beautiful red haired alien who screamed like an animal
as they coupled. But Hopkins, mac and Jacobs took the
next step. Why were the aliens interested in human reproduction
(05:20):
because they wanted to breed human alien hybrids? And why
would they want to do that. David Jacobs wrote a
book called The Threat, expanding on the hybrid theory UFO
researcher Robert Schaefer. Basically, you know we are screwed is
(05:40):
a message that Jakins gives. There is this superior intelligence
that is moving, you know, at will in our skies invisibly,
and is abducting us and sometimes doing terrible things to us,
and we have absolutely no way of fight back, and
we have absolutely no idea what their agenda is. The
degree of paranoia in that book, it's amazing. This is
(06:05):
David Jacobs from lecture. He begins by talking about what
abductees reports seeing aboard alien crafts. Every time a person
walks down the hallway, when they look at the various
rooms that they're walking by on their way to the
room that they're going into, what do they see in
(06:26):
those rooms? Tables for these on them? I mean, we
are looking at a program that is still in every
conceivable way for the idea of of doctu evil for
that purpose. Well, the interesting thing is because that when
they have docte evil, they have got loads of people.
(06:47):
Should they have got him one at a time into
the small room, all of eceptom of table. But we
see them as well with twenty people, fifty people, a
hundred people, five hundred tables in a room them with
people from them in an assembly line fashion. Yeah, and
then do let's get them out, get our end? Do it?
Get him out? Over and over again, And we think
(07:10):
we are seeing this twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. We get away the month after month,
year after year, decade after decade, around the world, and
here Jacob's vision diverges from Hopkins and becomes very bleak.
So I think that this is ultimately a program of
(07:31):
integration into the society. The fact is, I think that
the answer to the Harem paradox is answered by the
UFO phenomenon. Where are they? They aren't here, And the
answer to the other problem of hagonomyham counter colonizes as well.
They probably are a colonized. This does appear to be
integration or colonization program. John mac the third member of
(07:57):
the troika, also acknowledged that creating hybrids was an integral
part of the abduction phenomenon, but he had a much
more optimistic, spiritual take on these encounters. Mac was somewhat
new aging to help there here, to help us evolve,
or something like that. Carol Rainey, a documentary filmmaker and
(08:20):
the ex wife of Bud Hopkins, also noted the difference
in Max's theory. He was definitely more interested in an
extraterrestrial outreach program and something that would be a welcoming
program for any beings who might approach the Earth. In
(08:41):
his book Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, Mac describes eight
types of experiences that humans have with aliens. Each type
appears to be related to human growth or transformation. He
then writes, the result of all these experiences for abductive
ease is the discovery of a new and altered sense
(09:03):
of their place in the cosmic design, one that is
more modest, respectful, and harmonious in relation to the Earth
and its living systems. Emotions of awe, respect for the
mystery of nature, and a heightened sense of the sacredness
of the natural world are experienced along with deep sadness
(09:24):
about the apparent hopelessness of Earth's environmental crisis. So you
have Jacobs and Max staking out opposing ideas about the
alien's intentions, with Howkins somewhere in the middle. But the
one thing they do all agree on is that the
alien program of producing hybrids is real. Author Terry matheson
(09:47):
the whole notion of harvesting and creating an alien hybrid
offspring is scientifically preposterous. I mean, I've taught the scientists
and they just laugh, and they say that David Jacobs
is a history orient Bud Hopkins was an abstract expressionist artist.
They're not medical people. They're not scientists. No scientists would
(10:08):
believe anything like this was even possible, and even if
it were, as Whitley Streamer even pointed out in one
of his books, he said, we humans could do a
much better job in a much shorter period of time.
We could grab a few people at random and study
them and find out exactly how their systems worked and
how they reproduced, and find out virtually all was to
(10:31):
know about us physically in a fraction of the time.
But these aliens are spending live an out of for
over what fifty years? How did we get to this
moment where a guy like David Jacobs is claiming that
incredible numbers of people are being abducted and we are
being colonized as we speak, by human alien hybrids. What
(10:53):
are the incentives to create these bombastic claims? I mean,
the thing is, there's almost no money in working the
UFO research field unless you're doing regular gigs. Like standard
Stan Freedman, who was a friend of mine. He knew
(11:13):
how to market himself and he got gigs all over
the world. Actually he kept a modest income coming in.
Bud didn't do that. The way he worked was to
have a really strong concept in Missing Time, and then
he was only interested in cases after that that broke
(11:35):
new ground. Missing Time was his first book published in
In it, he presented the idea that there was a
consistency among alien abduction claims, they granted them legitimacy and
provided a basic common narrative. Six years later he published Intruders.
(11:57):
The case in Intruders of all sorts of new ground
in terms of him claiming to have discovered patterns. I
guess in that case it would be the breeding pattern
of abductees who would feel their eggs had been taken
or the sperm had been harvested, and years later they'll
(12:18):
be taken aboard a craft and they will see what
they believe are their children, half alien a half human.
You know, it began to get so weird to me
that I would push back even more on how that
knowledge came to be. Carol and Budd contemplated writing a
(12:41):
book together. It would be based on her science background
and research into how cutting edge technologies might illuminate the
UFO phenomenon. We went to talk to a couple of
editors at publishing houses. This must have been the early
two thousand's. They said, don't come back unless you have
a brand new, never seen before idea for a U
(13:03):
a phone book. So the push is always for new, bigger, better,
more outlandish. And I would say that Dave and Bud
definitely delivered on that in each of their books. This
same logic applied to the lecture circuit and UFO conferences
where Hopkins would present cases. People don't want to come
(13:27):
there and you know, pay to hear the same thing
they've heard before. He was wanting cases that would further
develop the narrative, or, as he might say, cases that
would illuminate it further. This search for new cases that
would advance the field led Hopkins to a woman whose
(13:48):
story he would promote as the most complex ever investigated.
After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment.
(14:21):
The search for new, bigger, more outlandish cases reached its
apex when Bud Hopkins was contacted by a woman he
identified by the pseudonym Linda Cortill. She had come across
Hopkins book intruders in a bookstore, and it resurfaced hidden
memories that she herself had been abducted from her Manhattan apartment.
(14:45):
The case was unveiled at the Landmark Abduction Study Conference
held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was organized
by Detroita. These guys still eve that they finally had
all their ducks in a row and had lined up
all their proof, and they had very basically, they invited
(15:07):
the world in the invited journalists, They invited the different
organizations that even invited the skeptics. And this was where
they first announced or debuted, if you will, that big case,
the case in all cases, which was the levitated Linda
Case Linda, he was saying, Linda Courtill. She's a woman
(15:27):
who lived in Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, and supposedly
the aliens abducted her outer window. From Carol Rainey's documentary
and Progress, here's Bud Hopkins on the Brooklyn Bridge describing
what happened. I'm standing at exactly the spot where this
(15:49):
very strange event was seen on at three am really
on November thirty nine. Woman is driving from Brooklyn to
New York right down here in the outer lanes, with
car engine died. The lights were now and she looked
over to this building. One of the distance was a
little pointed roof, and at that point she saw a
(16:12):
burst of light as a UFO hovering only a few
feet above it turned out all of its lights. Two
small figures blow her and one above her. The light
was intense. The woman was terrified and thought they must
be making a movie. This is a film of some sort,
and they the figures floated up into the UFO, and
then the UFO changed its lights, zoomed out across the
(16:35):
river and across the bridge. It disappeared, and the woman's
car lights and engines started back up again, but this
is the way it started for her that night. This
is just the beginning. You can easily do an entire
series on this story, so I'll try to lay out
the basics. There's plenty on the internet if you want
(16:58):
a more complete picture. I'm not going to evaluate the claims.
I just want to give a sense of how wild
this story gets. The early morning event was apparently witnessed
by about two dozen people whose cars had stalled on
the Brooklyn Bridge. Among them were two men named Richard
and Dan. Their last names have never been revealed. They
(17:22):
were officers in the New York City Police Department or
possibly the Secret Service or even the CIA. It's not
entirely clear. Regardless, there was a third person in the car,
an important diplomat. They were escorting him down to a
heliport in Lower Manhattan that night, and their car was
(17:44):
stalled by the UFOs power train. A person whose name
but didn't use was Perez the quay Are, the Secretary
of the United Nations at the time. This was the
story's biggest bombshell. Linda Cortillas abduction was actually witnessed by
Javier Perez de Quare, a Peruvian diplomat who was the
(18:08):
Secretary General of the United Nations. From later, Richard would
tell Hopkins that he and Quare were also both actually abducted.
Are not surprisingly disputes this. In a note fact to
the PBS program Nova, which was doing an episode on
(18:31):
hopkins abduction investigations, he wrote, I cannot but strongly deny
the claim that I have had an abduction experience at
any time. On several occasions, when questioned about the matter,
I reiterated that these allegations were completely false, and I
hope that this statement will definitely put an end to
(18:52):
these unfounded rumors. Things got still stranger from there. Richard
and Dan became cessed with Linda. Twice they kidnapped her
off the streets of New York. The second time, Dan
tried to drown her in the Atlantic Ocean and might
have succeeded if Richard hadn't stopped him. Richard, you see,
(19:14):
was in love with her. There's plenty more in this vein.
Quare gave Cortill's son an antique diving helmet as a gift.
Linda found out that her red blood cells, or some
of them at least, were immortal. It's worth noting that
Hopkins never met Richard or Dan, communicating with them only
(19:36):
by phone or letter. But despite the sensational nature of
this story, Hopkins apparently held back even stranger material that
he thought might undermine Linda's credibility. There was so much
cherry picking that Bud did. Let's say Linda meeting with
(19:56):
the Pope and the Pope knew all about her story
and abducted her in a in one of the popemobiles
or a black car to take her down to wherever
he was staying when he came to visit in yes
the early nineties, but did not include that story because
(20:17):
it was pretty over the top that Linda Cortilla was
invited by the Pope to come be the ambassador to
extraterrestrials and that she would have to live at the
Vatican and leave New York City. Blah blah blah. It's
hard to imagine that Hopkins didn't harbor doubts about at
(20:38):
least parts of this story. The fact that he withheld
potentially embarrassing information seems to confirm this. It's the kind
of incredible story that requires strong evidence if you want
people to take it seriously. So why invest so much
in Linda Cortilla. He wanted so badly to prove what
(20:59):
he believed to be happening. He wanted to prove that
it was actually happening, and that he had evidence. This
general credulous nous lead to more high profile embarrassments. A
two thousand and one Time magazine article on John Mac
(21:19):
featured the story of Donna Bassett, a Boston based writer.
She made up a multi generational history of UFO interactions,
sent it to Mac, and was brought in for hypnotic regression.
She said that she faked a trance, that Mac asked
her leading questions that she answered to his satisfaction. From
(21:42):
the Time magazine article, among other recollections, she told of
an encounter with John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchoff on
board a spaceship during the Cuban missile crisis. Bassett said
Kruschof was crying and that I sat in his lap
and I put my arms around his net and I
told him it would be okay. Hearing her tale, Mac
(22:04):
became so excited that he leaned on the bed too
heavily and it collapsed. Hopkins, too fell prey to hoaxer's
A man named Jim Mortarello claimed to have been admitted
to an emergency room with injuries from a harrowing abduction.
He also convinced Hopkins that a group of doctors and
(22:24):
Upstate New York, We're going to conduct a study of
patients under their care who showed physical signs of abduction experiences.
This was not true, nor were any of his other claims,
including that he had been the marketing director for the
Japanese electronics company had Tachi. In the end, his lives
(22:46):
became too much for the board of advisors that in
theory oversaw Hopkins research for advisors resigned and those that
remained forced Hopkins to post a letter acknowledging Mortarello's deception
of the Linda Cortilla case. Schaefer says, just obvious, made
(23:08):
up stories. It really had backfired on them in a
big way. This story just grew so huge and so preposterous,
and they basically had left the store on this thing.
From that point on, it was pretty hard for anyone
to take the Troy get too terribly seriously. The hoaxes
that followed cemented this judgment. Carol believes that hopkins refusal
(23:31):
to allow oversight from the board of advisors was a
critical component of his eventual loss of credibility. It's just
that but had a very strong tool he might have used,
which was the Intruders Foundation Advisory Board, and they could
have prevented him from going so far into the weeds
(23:54):
with the Linda Cortilla case, with the Jim more Laro case.
That more of advisors was amazing group of very diverse people,
but smart people. A medical writer and engineer, someone in marketing,
a musician and astronomer. They were strong, smart people who
(24:17):
had hoped that Bud was going to share what he
learned about how to research this phenomenon. So there were
people with a broad enough background that if he had
allowed them to guide his research, it would have been
so much better for everybody. But he would not permit
(24:38):
any oversight of his cases, and of course Dave Jacobs
didn't either. Each of those two men worked entirely on
their own. Occasionally they would have someone come sit in
on a session or two, but that wasn't necessarily the
standard way they did things when that person was there watching.
(25:00):
It's just a missed opportunity and a sadness because after
a few other hoaxes, came down the pike. The advisory
committee just said, we can't support you going around and
speaking at conferences about cases that we believe are not valid,
that we believe our hoaxes, and we would like to
(25:21):
have one or two of our advisory board members work
with you on cases. Bud was only willing to give
them access to the tapes, but he would take a
trip to the museum while they listened to it. In
Hopkins died from cancer. John mac was struck and killed
(25:44):
by a drunk driver in two thousand and four while
he was in London to give a lecture. David Jacobs
is still alive and apparently continuing abduction research. He did
not respond to my requests for an interview. I asked
Carol what Hopkins believed the aliens wanted from us. I
(26:05):
found her answer very poignant, and it made me think
of how Betty Andreas inframed her abduction narrative to reflect
her personal beliefs. The beings who were coming to us
either needed our resources, which were Bud certainly believed were
our humanist resources, our ability to be empathetic, our ability
(26:30):
to love our children and to love other people in
our lives, and to take care of them. Bud was
a humanist, abub all things. He really was, and that's
the quality I loved in him. I think about Hopkins
an artist, looking at the way that technology was changing
our world, making it into a colder, more dispassionate place,
(26:55):
seemingly eroding the prominence of art and empathy and our
humanistic culture. It's not hard to envision his concept of
the abduction phenomenon as a kind of metaphor for the
fear that this new reality might have provoked in him.
I don't believe that humans are being abducted by the
thousands and used to create hybrids, but I do find
(27:19):
this fear of the way our culture is changing very reasonable.
With the Troika now largely out of the picture, what
is the state of abduction research today? What does science
tell us about the difference between the psychology of people
prone to belief and people prone to skepticism? How should
(27:40):
we evaluate extraordinary claims next time on the season finale
of Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. This
episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced
(28:00):
by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams,
Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by
Gina Rickike. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special
thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at the
University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C h
(28:22):
A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary,
the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project
blue Book. Learn more about the show over at Grimm
and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky that was to be
on the television program in Boston and last summer and
with another woman who was an abductee, and we got
to the station. It was one of those morning talk
shows where you're usually sandwiched in between a somebody's written
(00:24):
a cookbook and somebody with writing about divorces, and then
there's you with UFOs again. But any rate, I never
know who I'm gonna be on with it. I walked
in and somebody came over to me, one of the producers,
and said Dr Carl Sagan is going to be on
the program, and my heart sank. I felt I'd been ambushed,
and so I was quickly thinking what am I going
(00:46):
to do because I can't say anything against an authority
quote unquote like Carl Sagan, because I know who's going
to be believed. And at some point I saw a
man sitting over in the corner a couple of people
who looked rather thin and frail, and I forgotten what
Carl Sagan look like, and I said, well, that's not Sagan,
(01:07):
and then in a moment, the man got up and
came over to me, and it was Carl Sagan. He's
been ill and he really doesn't look well. And he said,
he said, you're about Hopkins, aren't you. And I practically
went through the floor because I thought I was the enemy.
So he came over and we started talking and he said,
he said, I read your book, which again astonished me.
(01:30):
He said, Bud, you really have to have better evidence.
And he said, you know, uh, in the fruit the
slogan um extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And I said,
what we should be saying here is that an extraordinary
phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation. It is not. And use
(01:52):
that line because that's the point we have an extraor.
It isn't that an extraordinary phenomenal demands extraordinary evidence? Is
if okay, busters all that's going on, come over here
and give us a piece of the captain's log book
and then we'll accept it. I said, Carl, if we
had those pieces of things, we wouldn't need an investigation,
would we? I said, we would have the answer. I said,
(02:13):
it's it's in the absence of more information that we
have to continue looking into it. And I said, you know, Carl,
I don't defend my general ship. I said, I'm not
trying to be uh, George Washington. I said, but I
am trying to be Paul Revere. And I said, Paul
Revere was an artist, and uh, he just went around
trying to get people to pay attention to this. And
I said, you guys should be doing it, not me.
(02:36):
In the nineteen eighties and nineties, Bud Hopkins, John mac
and David Jacobs pioneered a major change in the study
of alien abductions. UFO researcher Robert Schaefer refers to them
as the Troyka. They claimed their research showed that aliens
were able to snatch people at any time, for anywhere,
(03:01):
and there was nothing we could do about it. The
question this raised was what were the aliens trying to accomplish.
I'm Toby Ball, this is Strange Arrivals, episode ten, the
(03:26):
Secretary General. Now, essentially, my take on this whole thing
is not that they are evil, malevolent here to deliberately
hurt us. I haven't a single case where I could
say it looks as if they're just sort of demons,
like a motorcycle gang, to do the worst they possibly
can do. There seems to be an objectivity about what
(03:49):
they're doing. This is Hopkins speculating about the alien's intentions.
They're not our space brothers either, and they're not quote
unquote visitors. This is not what we're dealing with. We're
dealing with something we do not understand. Let's call them
uf O occupants, so let's call them what we want to.
But let's not try to make them overly friendly, because
(04:11):
they're not, and let's not try to make them overly malicious. Essentially,
their attitude is one of a kind of condescension, and
they're trying to keep people comfortable, and they're not very deeply, deeply,
deeply interested, but they have certain needs. We know that
they seem to need genetic material that they're taking sperm over.
(04:36):
We know they're doing these reproductive experiments in attempt at
hybridization and so forth. Too many cases have come to light,
too many similar descriptions for this to be eliminated as possibility.
It is very central. Since the very first abduction stories,
alien interest in human reproduction has been a common theme.
(04:59):
Think back to the need plunged into Betty Hill's abdomen
or the wild sexual encounter between Antonio Villis Bois and
the beautiful red haired alien who screamed like an animal
as they coupled. But Hopkins, mac and Jacobs took the
next step. Why were the aliens interested in human reproduction
(05:20):
because they wanted to breed human alien hybrids? And why
would they want to do that. David Jacobs wrote a
book called The Threat, expanding on the hybrid theory UFO
researcher Robert Schaefer. Basically, you know we are screwed is
(05:40):
a message that Jakins gives. There is this superior intelligence
that is moving, you know, at will in our skies invisibly,
and is abducting us and sometimes doing terrible things to us,
and we have absolutely no way of fight back, and
we have absolutely no idea what their agenda is. The
degree of paranoia in that book, it's amazing. This is
(06:05):
David Jacobs from lecture. He begins by talking about what
abductees reports seeing aboard alien crafts. Every time a person
walks down the hallway, when they look at the various
rooms that they're walking by on their way to the
room that they're going into, what do they see in
(06:26):
those rooms? Tables for these on them? I mean, we
are looking at a program that is still in every
conceivable way for the idea of of doctu evil for
that purpose. Well, the interesting thing is because that when
they have docte evil, they have got loads of people.
(06:47):
Should they have got him one at a time into
the small room, all of eceptom of table. But we
see them as well with twenty people, fifty people, a
hundred people, five hundred tables in a room them with
people from them in an assembly line fashion. Yeah, and
then do let's get them out, get our end? Do it?
Get him out? Over and over again, And we think
(07:10):
we are seeing this twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. We get away the month after month,
year after year, decade after decade, around the world, and
here Jacob's vision diverges from Hopkins and becomes very bleak.
So I think that this is ultimately a program of
(07:31):
integration into the society. The fact is, I think that
the answer to the Harem paradox is answered by the
UFO phenomenon. Where are they? They aren't here, And the
answer to the other problem of hagonomyham counter colonizes as well.
They probably are a colonized. This does appear to be
integration or colonization program. John mac the third member of
(07:57):
the troika, also acknowledged that creating hybrids was an integral
part of the abduction phenomenon, but he had a much
more optimistic, spiritual take on these encounters. Mac was somewhat
new aging to help there here, to help us evolve,
or something like that. Carol Rainey, a documentary filmmaker and
(08:20):
the ex wife of Bud Hopkins, also noted the difference
in Max's theory. He was definitely more interested in an
extraterrestrial outreach program and something that would be a welcoming
program for any beings who might approach the Earth. In
(08:41):
his book Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, Mac describes eight
types of experiences that humans have with aliens. Each type
appears to be related to human growth or transformation. He
then writes, the result of all these experiences for abductive
ease is the discovery of a new and altered sense
(09:03):
of their place in the cosmic design, one that is
more modest, respectful, and harmonious in relation to the Earth
and its living systems. Emotions of awe, respect for the
mystery of nature, and a heightened sense of the sacredness
of the natural world are experienced along with deep sadness
(09:24):
about the apparent hopelessness of Earth's environmental crisis. So you
have Jacobs and Max staking out opposing ideas about the
alien's intentions, with Howkins somewhere in the middle. But the
one thing they do all agree on is that the
alien program of producing hybrids is real. Author Terry matheson
(09:47):
the whole notion of harvesting and creating an alien hybrid
offspring is scientifically preposterous. I mean, I've taught the scientists
and they just laugh, and they say that David Jacobs
is a history orient Bud Hopkins was an abstract expressionist artist.
They're not medical people. They're not scientists. No scientists would
(10:08):
believe anything like this was even possible, and even if
it were, as Whitley Streamer even pointed out in one
of his books, he said, we humans could do a
much better job in a much shorter period of time.
We could grab a few people at random and study
them and find out exactly how their systems worked and
how they reproduced, and find out virtually all was to
(10:31):
know about us physically in a fraction of the time.
But these aliens are spending live an out of for
over what fifty years? How did we get to this
moment where a guy like David Jacobs is claiming that
incredible numbers of people are being abducted and we are
being colonized as we speak, by human alien hybrids. What
(10:53):
are the incentives to create these bombastic claims? I mean,
the thing is, there's almost no money in working the
UFO research field unless you're doing regular gigs. Like standard
Stan Freedman, who was a friend of mine. He knew
(11:13):
how to market himself and he got gigs all over
the world. Actually he kept a modest income coming in.
Bud didn't do that. The way he worked was to
have a really strong concept in Missing Time, and then
he was only interested in cases after that that broke
(11:35):
new ground. Missing Time was his first book published in
In it, he presented the idea that there was a
consistency among alien abduction claims, they granted them legitimacy and
provided a basic common narrative. Six years later he published Intruders.
(11:57):
The case in Intruders of all sorts of new ground
in terms of him claiming to have discovered patterns. I
guess in that case it would be the breeding pattern
of abductees who would feel their eggs had been taken
or the sperm had been harvested, and years later they'll
(12:18):
be taken aboard a craft and they will see what
they believe are their children, half alien a half human.
You know, it began to get so weird to me
that I would push back even more on how that
knowledge came to be. Carol and Budd contemplated writing a
(12:41):
book together. It would be based on her science background
and research into how cutting edge technologies might illuminate the
UFO phenomenon. We went to talk to a couple of
editors at publishing houses. This must have been the early
two thousand's. They said, don't come back unless you have
a brand new, never seen before idea for a U
(13:03):
a phone book. So the push is always for new, bigger, better,
more outlandish. And I would say that Dave and Bud
definitely delivered on that in each of their books. This
same logic applied to the lecture circuit and UFO conferences
where Hopkins would present cases. People don't want to come
(13:27):
there and you know, pay to hear the same thing
they've heard before. He was wanting cases that would further
develop the narrative, or, as he might say, cases that
would illuminate it further. This search for new cases that
would advance the field led Hopkins to a woman whose
(13:48):
story he would promote as the most complex ever investigated.
After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment.
(14:21):
The search for new, bigger, more outlandish cases reached its
apex when Bud Hopkins was contacted by a woman he
identified by the pseudonym Linda Cortill. She had come across
Hopkins book intruders in a bookstore, and it resurfaced hidden
memories that she herself had been abducted from her Manhattan apartment.
(14:45):
The case was unveiled at the Landmark Abduction Study Conference
held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was organized
by Detroita. These guys still eve that they finally had
all their ducks in a row and had lined up
all their proof, and they had very basically, they invited
(15:07):
the world in the invited journalists, They invited the different
organizations that even invited the skeptics. And this was where
they first announced or debuted, if you will, that big case,
the case in all cases, which was the levitated Linda
Case Linda, he was saying, Linda Courtill. She's a woman
(15:27):
who lived in Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, and supposedly
the aliens abducted her outer window. From Carol Rainey's documentary
and Progress, here's Bud Hopkins on the Brooklyn Bridge describing
what happened. I'm standing at exactly the spot where this
(15:49):
very strange event was seen on at three am really
on November thirty nine. Woman is driving from Brooklyn to
New York right down here in the outer lanes, with
car engine died. The lights were now and she looked
over to this building. One of the distance was a
little pointed roof, and at that point she saw a
(16:12):
burst of light as a UFO hovering only a few
feet above it turned out all of its lights. Two
small figures blow her and one above her. The light
was intense. The woman was terrified and thought they must
be making a movie. This is a film of some sort,
and they the figures floated up into the UFO, and
then the UFO changed its lights, zoomed out across the
(16:35):
river and across the bridge. It disappeared, and the woman's
car lights and engines started back up again, but this
is the way it started for her that night. This
is just the beginning. You can easily do an entire
series on this story, so I'll try to lay out
the basics. There's plenty on the internet if you want
(16:58):
a more complete picture. I'm not going to evaluate the claims.
I just want to give a sense of how wild
this story gets. The early morning event was apparently witnessed
by about two dozen people whose cars had stalled on
the Brooklyn Bridge. Among them were two men named Richard
and Dan. Their last names have never been revealed. They
(17:22):
were officers in the New York City Police Department or
possibly the Secret Service or even the CIA. It's not
entirely clear. Regardless, there was a third person in the car,
an important diplomat. They were escorting him down to a
heliport in Lower Manhattan that night, and their car was
(17:44):
stalled by the UFOs power train. A person whose name
but didn't use was Perez the quay Are, the Secretary
of the United Nations at the time. This was the
story's biggest bombshell. Linda Cortillas abduction was actually witnessed by
Javier Perez de Quare, a Peruvian diplomat who was the
(18:08):
Secretary General of the United Nations. From later, Richard would
tell Hopkins that he and Quare were also both actually abducted.
Are not surprisingly disputes this. In a note fact to
the PBS program Nova, which was doing an episode on
(18:31):
hopkins abduction investigations, he wrote, I cannot but strongly deny
the claim that I have had an abduction experience at
any time. On several occasions, when questioned about the matter,
I reiterated that these allegations were completely false, and I
hope that this statement will definitely put an end to
(18:52):
these unfounded rumors. Things got still stranger from there. Richard
and Dan became cessed with Linda. Twice they kidnapped her
off the streets of New York. The second time, Dan
tried to drown her in the Atlantic Ocean and might
have succeeded if Richard hadn't stopped him. Richard, you see,
(19:14):
was in love with her. There's plenty more in this vein.
Quare gave Cortill's son an antique diving helmet as a gift.
Linda found out that her red blood cells, or some
of them at least, were immortal. It's worth noting that
Hopkins never met Richard or Dan, communicating with them only
(19:36):
by phone or letter. But despite the sensational nature of
this story, Hopkins apparently held back even stranger material that
he thought might undermine Linda's credibility. There was so much
cherry picking that Bud did. Let's say Linda meeting with
(19:56):
the Pope and the Pope knew all about her story
and abducted her in a in one of the popemobiles
or a black car to take her down to wherever
he was staying when he came to visit in yes
the early nineties, but did not include that story because
(20:17):
it was pretty over the top that Linda Cortilla was
invited by the Pope to come be the ambassador to
extraterrestrials and that she would have to live at the
Vatican and leave New York City. Blah blah blah. It's
hard to imagine that Hopkins didn't harbor doubts about at
(20:38):
least parts of this story. The fact that he withheld
potentially embarrassing information seems to confirm this. It's the kind
of incredible story that requires strong evidence if you want
people to take it seriously. So why invest so much
in Linda Cortilla. He wanted so badly to prove what
(20:59):
he believed to be happening. He wanted to prove that
it was actually happening, and that he had evidence. This
general credulous nous lead to more high profile embarrassments. A
two thousand and one Time magazine article on John Mac
(21:19):
featured the story of Donna Bassett, a Boston based writer.
She made up a multi generational history of UFO interactions,
sent it to Mac, and was brought in for hypnotic regression.
She said that she faked a trance, that Mac asked
her leading questions that she answered to his satisfaction. From
(21:42):
the Time magazine article, among other recollections, she told of
an encounter with John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchoff on
board a spaceship during the Cuban missile crisis. Bassett said
Kruschof was crying and that I sat in his lap
and I put my arms around his net and I
told him it would be okay. Hearing her tale, Mac
(22:04):
became so excited that he leaned on the bed too
heavily and it collapsed. Hopkins, too fell prey to hoaxer's
A man named Jim Mortarello claimed to have been admitted
to an emergency room with injuries from a harrowing abduction.
He also convinced Hopkins that a group of doctors and
(22:24):
Upstate New York, We're going to conduct a study of
patients under their care who showed physical signs of abduction experiences.
This was not true, nor were any of his other claims,
including that he had been the marketing director for the
Japanese electronics company had Tachi. In the end, his lives
(22:46):
became too much for the board of advisors that in
theory oversaw Hopkins research for advisors resigned and those that
remained forced Hopkins to post a letter acknowledging Mortarello's deception
of the Linda Cortilla case. Schaefer says, just obvious, made
(23:08):
up stories. It really had backfired on them in a
big way. This story just grew so huge and so preposterous,
and they basically had left the store on this thing.
From that point on, it was pretty hard for anyone
to take the Troy get too terribly seriously. The hoaxes
that followed cemented this judgment. Carol believes that hopkins refusal
(23:31):
to allow oversight from the board of advisors was a
critical component of his eventual loss of credibility. It's just
that but had a very strong tool he might have used,
which was the Intruders Foundation Advisory Board, and they could
have prevented him from going so far into the weeds
(23:54):
with the Linda Cortilla case, with the Jim more Laro case.
That more of advisors was amazing group of very diverse people,
but smart people. A medical writer and engineer, someone in marketing,
a musician and astronomer. They were strong, smart people who
(24:17):
had hoped that Bud was going to share what he
learned about how to research this phenomenon. So there were
people with a broad enough background that if he had
allowed them to guide his research, it would have been
so much better for everybody. But he would not permit
(24:38):
any oversight of his cases, and of course Dave Jacobs
didn't either. Each of those two men worked entirely on
their own. Occasionally they would have someone come sit in
on a session or two, but that wasn't necessarily the
standard way they did things when that person was there watching.
(25:00):
It's just a missed opportunity and a sadness because after
a few other hoaxes, came down the pike. The advisory
committee just said, we can't support you going around and
speaking at conferences about cases that we believe are not valid,
that we believe our hoaxes, and we would like to
(25:21):
have one or two of our advisory board members work
with you on cases. Bud was only willing to give
them access to the tapes, but he would take a
trip to the museum while they listened to it. In
Hopkins died from cancer. John mac was struck and killed
(25:44):
by a drunk driver in two thousand and four while
he was in London to give a lecture. David Jacobs
is still alive and apparently continuing abduction research. He did
not respond to my requests for an interview. I asked
Carol what Hopkins believed the aliens wanted from us. I
(26:05):
found her answer very poignant, and it made me think
of how Betty Andreas inframed her abduction narrative to reflect
her personal beliefs. The beings who were coming to us
either needed our resources, which were Bud certainly believed were
our humanist resources, our ability to be empathetic, our ability
(26:30):
to love our children and to love other people in
our lives, and to take care of them. Bud was
a humanist, abub all things. He really was, and that's
the quality I loved in him. I think about Hopkins
an artist, looking at the way that technology was changing
our world, making it into a colder, more dispassionate place,
(26:55):
seemingly eroding the prominence of art and empathy and our
humanistic culture. It's not hard to envision his concept of
the abduction phenomenon as a kind of metaphor for the
fear that this new reality might have provoked in him.
I don't believe that humans are being abducted by the
thousands and used to create hybrids, but I do find
(27:19):
this fear of the way our culture is changing very reasonable.
With the Troika now largely out of the picture, what
is the state of abduction research today? What does science
tell us about the difference between the psychology of people
prone to belief and people prone to skepticism? How should
(27:40):
we evaluate extraordinary claims next time on the season finale
of Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. This
episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced
(28:00):
by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams,
Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by
Gina Rickike. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special
thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at the
University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C h
(28:22):
A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary,
the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project
blue Book. Learn more about the show over at Grimm
and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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