The Controversial Story Behind Netflix?s New Docuseries The Manhattan Alien Abduction

As the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote goes, "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

Netflix's new documentary The Manhattan Alien Abduction explores the latter possibility, but ultimately seems to err on the side of skepticism—at least in this particular case. The three-part series, helmed by Vivienne Perry and Daniel Vernon, investigates the alleged abduction of Linda Napolitano (previously known by the pseudonym Linda Cortile), a New York City housewife who claimed that in the early morning hours of Nov. 30, 1989, three extraterrestrial beings kidnapped her from her 12th-floor downtown apartment, beamed her through the sky to their spaceship, and performed experiments on her before returning her to her bedroom.

The case was previously documented from an apparent believer's standpoint in the 1997 book Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abduction by the late author Budd Hopkins, a prominent ufologist who had a close relationship with Napolitano prior to his death in 2011. However, the purported evidence put forth in Witnessed in support of Napolitano's claims is contested in The Manhattan Alien Abduction by Hopkins' late ex-wife Carol Rainey, a filmmaker who documented her then-husband's exploration of Napolitano's experience. Rainey gave her own side of the story—which was that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax orchestrated by Napolitano—to Netflix before she died in 2023.