I was abducted by aliens who probed me with a giant needle - and 23 people say they saw it including FBI agents. But it's what happened next where the story gets truly bizarre...

At astir 3am connected November 30, 1989, housewife Linda Napolitano says she woke up successful her New York flat to find that she, her hubby and their 2 young sons were not alone.

Three grey-skinned bipeds with ample heads and immense achromatic eyes were lasting astatine the ft of her bed.

The erstwhile vocalist felt a bolt ‘like electricity’ that near her paralysed arsenic a ‘brilliant, bluish achromatic beam of light’ shone done the model of her 12th-floor level and carried her towards the reddish glow of a UFO.

‘They instrumentality maine retired each the mode up, mode supra the building,’ Linda recalls. ‘The UFO opens, astir similar a clam, and past I’m inside.’

Once aboard the craft, she claims, she was taken into a ample country with ‘all these lights and buttons and a large agelong table’ wherever 1 of the aliens prodded her with ‘a needle the magnitude of a turkey baster’.

‘The 3 of them conscionable basal successful beforehand of maine and look astatine me. I consciousness I tin drown successful their eyes,’ she says. ‘I find them precise frightening.’

Linda claims her representation past went blank. The adjacent happening she recalls is waking up, backmost successful her flat connected Manhattan’s Lower East Side, adjacent to her snoring husband, Steve.

It’s a scarcely believable communicative of alien abduction that sounds similar thing retired of a pulp subject fabrication novel.

But Linda’s outlandish communicative did not instrumentality spot successful a distant determination acold from the eyes of witnesses.

No less than 23 radical claimed they’d seen Linda, successful her achromatic nightgown, interval towards a UFO arsenic it hovered implicit the Brooklyn Bridge that nighttime earlier disappearing into the East River.

A paper transportation driver, who was connected his mode to work, said: ‘It frightened the heck retired of me. I saw a pistillate coming retired of a model and conscionable disappear.’

Book-keeper Cathy Turner besides said she’d seen an entity similar ‘a large Christmas shot – glowy and shiny’ successful the sky.

And the communicative conscionable kept getting weirder. After the abduction, Linda became convinced she was being followed, and 1 nighttime 2 burly men knocked connected her doorway to accidental that they, too, had seen her interval retired of her chamber window.

The brace – who identified themselves lone arsenic Dan and Richard – aboriginal wrote a missive explaining they were national agents who’d been protecting UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar that night. He’d seen Linda, too, they insisted.

The lawsuit became a media sensation aft it sparked the involvement of celebrated UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, whose 1996 bestseller Witnessed: The True Story Of The Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions helped to immortalise the case.

These witnesses – 23 successful each – were interviewed and quoted successful his book, their names withheld to ‘spare their embarrassment’. Linda herself was fixed the pseudonym of ‘Linda Cortile’. Of course, determination were ever sceptics. But arsenic Linda reasoned to Vanity Fair mag successful 2013: ‘If I was hallucinating, past the witnesses saw my hallucination. That sounds crazier than the full abduction phenomenon.’

Indeed it did – until now. For a caller Netflix documentary series, The Manhattan Alien Abduction, has suggested this bizarre lawsuit was an ‘enormous hoax’ – and perchance 1 of the astir compelling UFO deceptions ever.

Curiously, the assertion comes from nary different than Carol Rainey – Budd’s ex-wife and a erstwhile person of Linda’s. And it has truthful enraged Linda that she’s suing Netflix and the documentary makers for defamation and fraud.

Budd’s involvement successful the extra-terrestrial stretched each the mode backmost to the 1960s erstwhile the investigator, who died successful 2011, saw thing ‘flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable’ flying disconnected the seashore of Cape Cod.

The accidental sighting sparked a lifelong involvement successful UFOs, with a New York Times obituary dubbing him ‘the begetter of the alien-abduction movement’. Although a distinguished artist, Budd had struggled to beryllium taken earnestly arsenic a ufologist – until helium was contacted by Linda.

She archetypal got successful interaction successful April 1989 to accidental she believed she’d had an extra-terrestrial brushwood successful the Catskill mountains 13 years earlier, leaving her with a unusual coiled entity nether her skin.

Budd, who believed aliens were monitoring humans via electrical implants and experimenting connected them to make a human-alien hybrid, suspected this to beryllium a tracking device.

Linda began attending the radical enactment meetings helium held astatine his location for chap ‘abduction victims’ – until her much celebrated brushwood occurred 7 months later.

Carol, a filmmaker, claimed that she had initially liked Linda and had helped her ex-husband by filming immoderate of the witnesses. But, implicit time, she started to get suspicious.

She feared that Budd had started to ‘lose his objectivity’, portion Linda – who was a ‘natural successful beforehand of the camera’ – simply enjoyed the attention.

After examining Budd’s interviews, Carol raised her fears that helium had been intentionally misleading – hopeless to marque a occurrence of his publication which a large Hollywood shaper was looking to crook into a film.

‘Budd cherry-picked compelling details but ignored thing that presented hard questions,’ Carol said, referencing 1 interrogation with a ‘witness’ who said she had simply seen a agleam airy done her curtains.

Her fears were compounded the pursuing summertime erstwhile Linda became convinced that her nine-year-old son, Johnny, had besides been abducted by 3 aliens portion she stood frozen nearby.

Carol suspected helium had been coached by his parent – a assertion Johnny has denied though helium admits that helium had a unspeakable nightmare erstwhile helium was young, which Linda informed him was ‘most apt a existent experience’.

Budd was antiaircraft erstwhile Carol approached him, insisting that Linda wasn’t astute capable to person faked everything.

However, Carol recruited a forensics papers adept to analyse the letters from the 2 ‘federal agents’ – with the adept saying that ‘Dan’s’ handwriting matched Linda’s.

As for the precocious Pérez de Cuéllar, helium told a US broadcaster successful 2020 that he’d ne'er had immoderate acquisition of an alien abduction.

Carol died past twelvemonth aft talking to the documentary makers but her bombshell claims person not gone unchallenged by the present 77-year-old pistillate she accused.

Linda continues to importune that she and her lad were abducted by aliens. She and Peter Robbins – a UFO researcher who worked with Budd – assertion that the documentary producers tricked them into speaking astatine magnitude connected the amusement by promising they would archer Linda’s ‘true story’.

Papers filed with the New York State Supreme Court said the documentary makers wanted to ‘subject [Linda] to shame and ridicule’ portion witheringly describing Carol arsenic ‘an embittered, alcoholic ex-wife’.

Linda’s lawyer, Robert Young, told the Mail that the suit isn’t astir whether oregon not she was abducted by aliens but whether the documentary makers treated her fairly.

Linda, who is seeking undisclosed damages, failed to halt Netflix from airing the documentary but present wants it taken disconnected the streaming service, which has declined to comment.

One remaining puzzle posed by Linda, who present lives successful a Tennessee municipality called Soddy-Daisy, is conscionable wherefore Carol was truthful keen to spell aft her.

However, a hint whitethorn prevarication successful her ineligible complaint, which claims Carol was ‘hellbent connected revenge’.

It’s intolerable to ticker the caller documentary and not get the feeling that Carol thought determination was thing going connected betwixt Linda and Budd – and a root progressive successful the lawsuit told the Mail they judge the brace did person a romanticist relationship.

Ultimately, Carol’s lawsuit is compelling but it doesn’t wholly explicate distant each 23 witnesses who spoke to her ex-husband, with galore viewers saying that they inactive judge Linda.

Despite Carol’s champion efforts, it appears that her rival’s astonishing communicative hasn’t been wholly blown retired of the sky.