Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (36 page)

On the morning of 30 November 1989, she telephoned Hopkins to say that a small, grey-skinned alien had approached her bed in the early hours of the morning, and she had thrown a pillow at him.
Then she had become paralysed.
Two days later, under hypnosis, she described being taken to the window by three ‘greys’ and floated out to a UFO.
There she was made to lie on a table, and she recalled speaking to them in their own language.
One of them examined her nose, then ran his fingers through her hair with obvious tenderness, touched her cheek, and asked after her family.
Soon after that she found herself back in her own bed.

Fourteen months later, Hopkins received a letter signed ‘Police Officers Dan and Richard’, which informed him that at 3:30 a.m.
on 30 November 1989, they had seen a woman in a nightgown ‘floated’ out of a Manhattan apartment by ‘three ugly but humanlike creatures’, and into a large oval craft hovering overhead.
The craft turned reddish orange, then flew away and plunged into the river near Brooklyn Bridge.

Hopkins was delighted—this looked like undeniable evidence for Linda’s abduction, the positive proof that Earth was being invaded by aliens.
Two weeks later, Richard and Dan called on Linda Cortile.
She liked Richard, but Dan struck her as unfriendly and ‘freaked out’.
(Apparently the sight of the abduction had preyed on his mind.) Subsequently, Dan also wrote to Hopkins with his version of what had happened.

Now Hopkins learnt that Richard and Dan were not ordinary policemen, but the bodyguards of an important political figure.
(The name that eventually emerged was Perez de Cuellar, former secretary of the United Nations.) He had also witnessed Linda’s abduction from their car, which had broken down under Brooklyn Bridge.

The notion that an eminent politician had witnessed the abduction seemed wonderful—final proof not only of this abduction but of the abduction phenomenon in general.
And soon Hopkins was even more delighted when a woman wrote to him saying she had also seen the abduction; at 3:30 in the morning, her car had been one of many that had stalled on Brooklyn Bridge; the streetlights had also gone out.

This was as much as Hopkins described at the conference at MIT.
But, in his book
Witnessed,
it becomes clear that the story developed complications that make the reader wonder if he is having his leg pulled, or has gone mad.

First, Richard and Dan abducted Linda off the street to ask her if this was all some kind of trick, and insisted on looking at her feet to see if she was an alien.
(Through binoculars they had noted that the aliens had no toes.) Then Dan took a holiday to get over the shock.
Later, he wrote to Hopkins, disclosing more information about the night of 30 November 1989.
Immediately after the abduction, he said, they had found themselves—inexplicably—on the seashore.
And there on the sand was Linda, helping the ‘greys’ dig with shovels and putting their finds in rectangular boxes; she was talking to them in their own language.
Then Linda and the aliens crossed over to the policemen and their distinguished charge, and held up a dead fish, saying, ‘Look what you’ve done’.
When Dan asked who she was, an alien replied, ‘The lady of the sands’.

This obviously explained why the two policemen had abducted Linda and demanded to see her feet; they had every reason to believe she was acquainted with the aliens.
Understandably, Richard and Dan were both in a state of psychological turmoil.
Their transfer to the seashore meant that they were also abductees.

But what did the dead fish, and ‘Look what you’ve done’, mean?
Hopkins decided that it was meant as a reproach to Perez de Cuellar about the Earth’s ecology.

Incredibly, Linda confirmed this whole story at her next hypnotic session with Hopkins.
She also confirmed the ecological interpretation of her words.

In October 1991, Dan abducted Linda once more and took her to a beach house on Long Island, where he asked her to put on a white nightgown he had bought her.
He chased her across the beach, kissed her several times, and said he wanted her to go away with him and ‘make a family’.
Fortunately, Richard arrived and rescued her.

Richard later wrote to Hopkins confirming the abduction, as well as Dan’s story about being transported to the seashore after Linda’s original abduction.
Richard added that Linda had spoken to them ‘in their heads’, and had warned Dan—who was thinking of using his gun—to keep his hands down.
He also claimed that, the first time he and Dan had abducted her, Linda had again spoken to them ‘in their heads’, and said, ‘Be kind.
Don’t hurt me’.
She also made Richard turn his head away by some kind of telepathic order.

Hopkins was forced to conclude that, in some weird sense, Linda was ‘one of them’—without, apparently, consciously realising it.
It seemed that, as a long-time abductee, she had become a kind of dual personality, unaware of her alien alter ego.
Or was she merely under the total control of these aliens?

Mysteries multiplied.
Linda went to see her niece, a foot doctor, and had her nose X-rayed.
The X-ray showed some foreign body lodged in it.
A few days later, Linda woke to find she had had a bad nosebleed in the night.
And a further X-ray showed that the object had vanished.

Hopkins also received a letter from ‘the Third Man’ (de Cuellar?) verifying that he had been present when Linda was floated out of her apartment, and the seashore episode with the dead fish.

And now, as if the story were not complex and bewildering enough, it takes a twist worthy of Victorian melodrama.
Richard accosted Linda one morning and she agreed to go with him—to a place of her choice—and talk.
They wandered around New York—St.
Patrick’s Cathedral, the Rockefeller Center, Central Park—and he made it clear that he had a romantic interest in her.
On a bench in Central Park he suddenly kissed her, and she allowed it—in fact, participated with some enthusiasm.
She felt guilty about her husband, but enjoyed it.

Subsequently, Richard wrote to Hopkins, mentioning that Dan had now been interned in a ‘rest home’.
He mentioned the outing with Linda—then went on to tell Hopkins that, since the age of ten, he had been dreaming of a girl, who was introduced to him in a white environment by two tall, emotionless beings.
He called her Baby Ann; she called him Mickey.
They took an instant liking to each other.
Six months later, he dreamt of Baby Ann again.
It happened repeatedly over the years.
When he was sixteen, and Baby Ann was thirteen, he gave her her first kiss.
By the time he was twenty-five, he and Baby Ann wanted to marry, but since they knew each other only in dreams, this was obviously impossible.

When he saw—through binoculars—Linda being floated out of her apartment, he recognised Baby Ann.

Now he was inclined to believe that their love affair had not been a dream—it had happened in the ‘UFO reality’.
He even suspected that Linda’s second son Johnny was really his own child.
He and Linda had been abducted by aliens repeatedly from childhood, and had finally ‘bonded’ and become parents.

Hopkins’s next step was obviously to find out whether any of this could be confirmed by Linda.
He brought her to his apartment, and she told him that Richard had asked her if she had ever had imaginary playmates.
Pressed by Hopkins, she recalled an imaginary playmate called Mickey, who called her Ann.
And Hopkins was suddenly confronted with the incredible notion that Linda and Richard had been deliberately brought together by the aliens in a long-term psychological and breeding experiment.
Linda was obviously deeply shaken when Hopkins read her Richard’s ‘Baby Ann’ letter.

It was his first experience of this notion of the UFO occupants organising the lives of human beings like the mythical Fates.
Later, he was to come across other cases.
A couple called Jack and Sally kept having flashbacks to some earlier period together which, logically speaking, they knew they could not have shared.
Under hypnosis they recalled being abducted together many times; like Richard and Linda, they remembered their nicknames for each other without any possibility of communicating.

Sally was in tears as she said, ‘Jack and I love each other .
.
.
but is this something the aliens are doing to us?’

Another couple met at a UFO conference and gradually began to have flashbacks of meeting during abductions, and finally of becoming lovers.
But each was happily married to someone else.
She commented, ‘It’s not fair for the aliens to do this to anyone’.

Another couple lived as far apart as Scotland and the United States, yet, when they met, instantly recognised each other.
He recalled having had sexual intercourse with her during an abduction, which was unusual, since he was homosexual.

It is possible to see why Dan and Richard—and the ‘third man’—were so shaken by their experience.
They were top security men—Hopkins has a photograph of Dan standing with Reagan, Bush and Gorbachev—yet the aliens had made them feel like helpless children.
Dan found it particularly hard to adjust.
He felt that his answer to the problem was to marry Linda, who was the cause of all his insecurity, and planned to kidnap her.

In fact Dan escaped from the ‘rest home’, and made elaborate plans to kidnap Linda, drug her and fly with her to England.
These were foiled by security men, including Richard, and Dan apparently ceased to be an ‘official problem’—by which Hopkins understood Richard to mean either that Dan had been killed, or permanently incarcerated where there was no chance of escape.

There were still more strange twists.
Richard admitted that they were not alone when their car broke down under Brooklyn Bridge: they were in an official motorcade of at least five cars, full of security men and important political figures.
Their engines had simply stopped, and one security man later went on record as saying that he simply blanked out for an hour.
During that hour, Richard, Dan and the ‘third man’ were abducted by being somehow sucked out of the car.
They were taken to the seashore, and Richard put some sand in his pocket, which he later found.
After the episode of the dead fish, when they became convinced Linda was an alien, they found themselves back on FDR Drive
outside
the car—in fact, with the ‘third man’ on the roof.

The story still has some further twists, but no purpose would be served in detailing them all.
More witnesses to the abduction appeared.
The ‘third man’ was apparently convinced that
he
had been abducted with Linda in the past, and might be the father of her child Johnny.
He presented Johnny with a valuable sea-diver’s helmet and wanted to hug him.
Later, Hopkins succeeded in interviewing him at O’Hare Airport, but the third man (who was with his wife) professed to be bewildered by the strange story and to know nothing about it.

On a later occasion, Linda’s whole family woke up simultaneously with nosebleeds in the right nostril, and the same was true of a neighbour’s son who was staying the night.
Hopkins later learnt that this boy had been having strange dreams of alien abduction since he was small.

What, then, are we to make of it all?
The case has been attacked with a bitterness unusual even in ufological circles.
Some critics have claimed that Hopkins is a liar, others that Linda Cortile is a fantasist who has duped Hopkins.
It is pointed out that Hopkins has never met Richard or Dan—only corresponded with them and listened to tape recordings.
John Spencer, while rejecting the notion that Hopkins is ‘faking the case for money’, thinks it possible that Hopkins ‘oversold the case to himself, and then to the world’.
Dennis Stacy, author of
UFOs, 1947–1997,
has said mildly that the case ‘brings the abduction issue to a boil by raising the bar of believability’.

This may be regarded as one of the points in its favour.
The same comment applies to
Witnessed
as to Puharich’s
Uri:
that, if he had decided to tell lies, he would have made them believable.

In fact, there seems to be no good reason for assuming that Hopkins is lying, or even stretching the truth.
Missing Time
and
Intruders
are obviously sincere books, and Kathie Davis of
Intruders
has written her own book confirming it all.
So it is impossible to believe that Hopkins or Linda Cortile is fictionalising.