At around 3am on November 30, 1989, housewife Linda Napolitano says she woke up in her New York apartment to find that she, her husband and their two young sons were not alone.

Three grey-skinned bipeds with large heads and huge black eyes were standing at the foot of her bed.

The former singer felt a bolt ‘like electricity’ that left her paralysed as a ‘brilliant, bluish white beam of light’ shone through the window of her 12th-floor flat and carried her towards the red glow of a UFO.

‘They take me out all the way up, way above the building,’ Linda recalls. ‘The UFO opens, almost like a clam, and then I’m inside.’

Once aboard the craft, she claims, she was taken into a large room with ‘all these lights and buttons and a big long table’ where one of the aliens prodded her with ‘a needle the length of a turkey baster’.

‘The three of them just stand in front of me and stare at me. I feel I can drown in their eyes,’ she says. ‘I find them very frightening.’

Linda claims her memory then went blank. The next thing she recalls is waking up, back in her apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, next to her snoring husband, Steve.

It’s a scarcely believable tale of alien abduction that sounds like something out of a pulp science fiction novel.

But Linda’s outlandish story did not take place in a remote location far from the eyes of witnesses.

No fewer than 23 people claimed they’d seen Linda, in her white nightgown, float towards a UFO as it hovered over the Brooklyn Bridge that night before disappearing into the East River.

A newspaper delivery driver, who was on his way to work, said: ‘It scared the heck out of me. I saw a woman coming out of a window and just disappear.’

Book-keeper Cathy Turner also said she’d seen an object like ‘a big Christmas ball – glowy and shiny’ in the sky.

And the story just kept getting weirder. After the abduction, Linda became convinced she was being followed, and one night two burly men knocked on her door to say that they, too, had seen her float out of her bedroom window.

The pair – who identified themselves only as Dan and Richard – later wrote a letter explaining they were federal agents who’d been protecting UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar that night. He’d seen Linda, too, they insisted.

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

These witnesses – 23 in all – were interviewed and quoted in his book, their names withheld to ‘spare their embarrassment’. Linda herself was given the pseudonym of ‘Linda Cortile’. Of course, there were always sceptics. But as Linda reasoned to Vanity Fair magazine in 2013: ‘If I was hallucinating, then the witnesses saw my hallucination. That sounds crazier than the whole abduction phenomenon.’

Indeed it did – until now. For a new Netflix documentary series, The Manhattan Alien Abduction, has suggested this bizarre case was an ‘enormous hoax’ – and possibly one of the most compelling UFO deceptions ever.

Curiously, the claim comes from none other than Carol Rainey – Budd’s ex-wife and a former friend of Linda’s. And it has so enraged Linda that she’s suing Netflix and the documentary makers for defamation and fraud.

Budd’s interest in the extra-terrestrial stretched all the way back to the 1960s when the investigator, who died in 2011, saw something ‘flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable’ flying off the coast of Cape Cod.

The chance sighting sparked a lifelong interest in UFOs, with a New York Times obituary dubbing him ‘the father of the alien-abduction movement’. Although a distinguished artist, Budd had struggled to be taken seriously as a ufologist – until he was contacted by Linda.

She first got in touch in April 1989 to say she believed she’d had an extra-terrestrial encounter in the Catskill mountains 13 years earlier, leaving her with a strange coiled object under her skin.

Budd, who believed aliens were monitoring humans via electric implants and experimenting on them to create a human-alien hybrid, suspected this to be a tracking device.

Linda began attending the group support meetings he held at his home for fellow ‘abduction victims’ – until her more famous encounter occurred seven months later.

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

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

After examining Budd’s interviews, Carol raised her fears that he had been intentionally misleading – desperate to make a success of his book which a major Hollywood producer was looking to turn into a film.

‘Budd cherry-picked compelling details but ignored anything that presented difficult questions,’ Carol said, referencing one interview with a ‘witness’ who said she had simply seen a bright light through her curtains.

Her fears were compounded the following summer when Linda became convinced that her nine-year-old son, Johnny, had also been abducted by three aliens while she stood frozen nearby.

Carol suspected he had been coached by his mother – a claim Johnny has denied although he admits that he had a terrible nightmare when he was young, which Linda informed him was ‘most likely a real experience’.

Budd was defensive when Carol approached him, insisting that Linda wasn’t smart enough to have faked everything.

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

As for the late Pérez de Cuéllar, he told a US broadcaster in 2020 that he’d never had any experience of an alien abduction.

Carol died last year after talking to the documentary makers but her bombshell claims have not gone unchallenged by the now 77-year-old woman she accused.

Linda continues to insist that she and her son were abducted by aliens. She and Peter Robbins – a UFO researcher who worked with Budd – claim that the documentary producers tricked them into speaking at length on the show by promising they would tell 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’ while witheringly describing Carol as ‘an embittered, alcoholic ex-wife’.

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

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

One remaining puzzle posed by Linda, who now lives in a Tennessee town called Soddy-Daisy, is just why Carol was so keen to go after her.

However, a clue may lie in her legal complaint, which claims Carol was ‘hellbent on revenge’.

It’s impossible to watch the new documentary and not get the feeling that Carol thought there was something going on between Linda and Budd – and a source involved in the case told the Mail they believe the pair did have a romantic relationship.

Ultimately, Carol’s case is compelling but it doesn’t entirely explain away all 23 witnesses who spoke to her ex-husband, with many viewers saying that they still believe Linda.

Despite Carol’s best efforts, it appears that her rival’s astonishing story hasn’t been completely blown out of the sky.