Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abduction - Hardcover

Hopkins, Budd

3.82

234 ratings by Goodreads

9780747531937: Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abduction

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747531935 ISBN 13: 9780747531937

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1997

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In New York City, on 30 November 1989, at approximately 3:00 am, Linda Cortile, a married mother of two, was seen emerging from an apartment building window 12 storeys above the ground accompanied by three small alien figures. Suspended within a blue beam of light, Linda and her captors were lifted into a large reddish-orange glowing UFO, which then moved off in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Several witnesses, including a world political leader, saw - and later independently corroborated - this event. It is the evidence of numerous and influential eyewitnesses to this abduction that shatters all previous patterns of UFO encounters. But when Linda Cortile first reported her abduction, Budd Hopkins, an authority in the field of UFO research, conducted a thorough investigation, including a hypnosis session, and concluded that there was nothing unique about the incident among the hundreds of abductees he studied. That assessment changed dramatically when Hopkins later received a letter in which two men, identified as New York City police officers, described sitting helplessly in a car under the FDR Drive and watching three "creatures" escort a woman into a reddish-organge glowing oval hovering in the sky. Hopkins sensed he was now on the verge of a major breakthrough in providing evidence of the reality of UFO abductions. Whatever the aliens' motives, the details of this case - from an inexplicable metallic object implanted in Linda's body to the independent witnesses and their verified accounts of the abduction - challenge all preconceptions about UFOs and alien abductions. Budd Hopkins is the author of "Missing Time" and "Intruders".

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From Publishers Weekly:

It is 3 a.m. on November 30, 1989. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a motorcade carrying international diplomats, including a U.N. representative of the highest standing, stalls out and comes to a halt beneath the FDR Drive. An enormous reddish-orange UFO looms above an apartment building, where a pretty housewife is seen by the members of the motorcade to float out of a 12th-story window, accompanied by three ugly gray aliens, and into the spaceship. Because those involved, including the woman ("Linda Cortile"), the U.N. diplomat and his security men (probably "CIA or NSA"), eventually read Hopkins's bestselling last book, Intruders, they all end up contacting him. One of the security men becomes completely unhinged and is either assassinated or consigned to the back wards of a government insane asylum. He gets off easy. The other G-man falls in love with "Linda," only to discover that he has been trysting with her since the age of 10 under alien auspices. Hopkins contends that the "Brooklyn Bridge incident" is the most-witnessed UFO abduction of all time. Because he has changed the names of all the participants?allegedly to spare them ridicule?little in his text can be checked. In any case, according to Hopkins, "outing" abductees is done only by "vicious debunkers" who have "rigid belief systems." Even so, the author himself does everything but write the words "Perez de Cuellar" in describing the high-echelon U.N. diplomat with the tinted glasses and Spanish accent. Hopkins isn't the storyteller that Whitley Strieber is, but his last book rode high on the bestseller lists, and there's a creepy, nightmarish quality to his new one that may ensure it the same fate. Meanwhile, believers will believe and skeptics will remain skeptical. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

The long-awaited investigative report by artist and veteran UFO researcher Budd Hopkins (Missing Time, 1982; Intruders, 1987) details a remarkable abduction that took place in downtown Manhattan early on the morning of November 30, 1989. The case is unique for many reasons: several witnesses from vantage points on or near the Brooklyn Bridge saw the UFO and the abductee (Linda Cortile) floating 12 stories up in a blazing blue-white light; three of these witnesses (a highly placed United Nations diplomat and his security guards) later came to understand that they had been abducted at the same time. One of the security guards eventually realized that he had met Cortile years ago during a shared sequence of abductions in which each recalled the other as an "imaginary playmate." Hopkins does his best to document this bizarre series of events and at one point confronts the unnamed UN official with evidence of his involvement. Cases like this illustrate why there are no simple explanations for UFO abductions. George Eberhart

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