The Secretary General

know who I'm gonna be on with it. I walked in and somebody came over to me, one of the producers, and said Dr Carl Sagan is going to be on the program, and my heart sank. I felt I'd been ambushed, and so I was quickly thinking what am I going to do because I can't say anything against an authority quote unquote like Carl Sagan, because I know who's going

to be believed. And at some point I saw a man sitting over in the corner a couple of people who looked rather thin and frail, and I forgotten what Carl Sagan look like, and I said, well, that's not Sagan, and then in a moment, the man got up and came over to me, and it was Carl Sagan. He's been ill and he really doesn't look well. And he said, he said, you're about Hopkins, aren't you. And I practically went through the floor because I thought I was the enemy.

So he came over and we started talking and he said, he said, I read your book, which again astonished me. He said, Bud, you really have to have better evidence. And he said, you know, uh, in the fruit the slogan um extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And I said, what we should be saying here is that an extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation. It is not. And use that line because that's the point we have an extraor.

It isn't that an extraordinary phenomenal demands extraordinary evidence? Is if okay, busters all that's going on, come over here and give us a piece of the captain's log book and then we'll accept it. I said, Carl, if we had those pieces of things, we wouldn't need an investigation, would we? I said, we would have the answer. I said, it's it's in the absence of more information that we have to continue looking into it. And I said, you know, Carl, I don't defend my general ship. I said, I'm not

trying to be uh, George Washington. I said, but I am trying to be Paul Revere. And I said, Paul Revere was an artist, and uh, he just went around trying to get people to pay attention to this. And I said, you guys should be doing it, not me. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, Bud Hopkins, John mac and David Jacobs pioneered a major change in the study of alien abductions. UFO researcher Robert Schaefer refers to them

as the Troyka. They claimed their research showed that aliens were able to snatch people at any time, for anywhere, and there was nothing we could do about it. The question this raised was what were the aliens trying to accomplish. I'm Toby Ball, this is Strange Arrivals, episode ten, the Secretary General. Now, essentially, my take on this whole thing is not that they are evil, malevolent here to deliberately

hurt us. I haven't a single case where I could say it looks as if they're just sort of demons, like a motorcycle gang, to do the worst they possibly can do. There seems to be an objectivity about what they're doing. This is Hopkins speculating about the alien's intentions. They're not our space brothers either, and they're not quote unquote visitors. This is not what we're dealing with. We're

dealing with something we do not understand. Let's call them uf O occupants, so let's call them what we want to. But let's not try to make them overly friendly, because they're not, and let's not try to make them overly malicious. Essentially, their attitude is one of a kind of condescension, and they're trying to keep people comfortable, and they're not very deeply, deeply,

deeply interested, but they have certain needs. We know that they seem to need genetic material that they're taking sperm over. We know they're doing these reproductive experiments in attempt at hybridization and so forth. Too many cases have come to light, too many similar descriptions for this to be eliminated as possibility. It is very central. Since the very first abduction stories, alien interest in human reproduction has been a common theme.

Think back to the need plunged into Betty Hill's abdomen or the wild sexual encounter between Antonio Villis Bois and the beautiful red haired alien who screamed like an animal as they coupled. But Hopkins, mac and Jacobs took the next step. Why were the aliens interested in human reproduction because they wanted to breed human alien hybrids? And why would they want to do that. David Jacobs wrote a book called The Threat, expanding on the hybrid theory UFO

researcher Robert Schaefer. Basically, you know we are screwed is a message that Jakins gives. There is this superior intelligence that is moving, you know, at will in our skies invisibly, and is abducting us and sometimes doing terrible things to us, and we have absolutely no way of fight back, and we have absolutely no idea what their agenda is. The degree of paranoia in that book, it's amazing. This is David Jacobs from lecture. He begins by talking about what

abductees reports seeing aboard alien crafts. Every time a person walks down the hallway, when they look at the various rooms that they're walking by on their way to the room that they're going into, what do they see in those rooms? Tables for these on them? I mean, we are looking at a program that is still in every conceivable way for the idea of of doctu evil for that purpose. Well, the interesting thing is because that when they have docte evil, they have got loads of people.

Should they have got him one at a time into the small room, all of eceptom of table. But we see them as well with twenty people, fifty people, a hundred people, five hundred tables in a room them with people from them in an assembly line fashion. Yeah, and then do let's get them out, get our end? Do it? Get him out? Over and over again, And we think we are seeing this twenty four hours a day, seven

days a week. We get away the month after month, year after year, decade after decade, around the world, and here Jacob's vision diverges from Hopkins and becomes very bleak. So I think that this is ultimately a program of integration into the society. The fact is, I think that the answer to the Harem paradox is answered by the UFO phenomenon. Where are they? They aren't here, And the answer to the other problem of hagonomyham counter colonizes as well.

They probably are a colonized. This does appear to be integration or colonization program. John mac the third member of the troika, also acknowledged that creating hybrids was an integral part of the abduction phenomenon, but he had a much more optimistic, spiritual take on these encounters. Mac was somewhat new aging to help there here, to help us evolve, or something like that. Carol Rainey, a documentary filmmaker and the ex wife of Bud Hopkins, also noted the difference

in Max's theory. He was definitely more interested in an extraterrestrial outreach program and something that would be a welcoming program for any beings who might approach the Earth. In his book Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, Mac describes eight types of experiences that humans have with aliens. Each type

appears to be related to human growth or transformation. He then writes, the result of all these experiences for abductive ease is the discovery of a new and altered sense of their place in the cosmic design, one that is more modest, respectful, and harmonious in relation to the Earth and its living systems. Emotions of awe, respect for the mystery of nature, and a heightened sense of the sacredness of the natural world are experienced along with deep sadness

about the apparent hopelessness of Earth's environmental crisis. So you have Jacobs and Max staking out opposing ideas about the alien's intentions, with Howkins somewhere in the middle. But the one thing they do all agree on is that the alien program of producing hybrids is real. Author Terry matheson the whole notion of harvesting and creating an alien hybrid

offspring is scientifically preposterous. I mean, I've taught the scientists and they just laugh, and they say that David Jacobs is a history orient Bud Hopkins was an abstract expressionist artist. They're not medical people. They're not scientists. No scientists would believe anything like this was even possible, and even if it were, as Whitley Streamer even pointed out in one of his books, he said, we humans could do a much better job in a much shorter period of time.

We could grab a few people at random and study them and find out exactly how their systems worked and how they reproduced, and find out virtually all was to know about us physically in a fraction of the time. But these aliens are spending live an out of for over what fifty years? How did we get to this moment where a guy like David Jacobs is claiming that incredible numbers of people are being abducted and we are being colonized as we speak, by human alien hybrids. What

are the incentives to create these bombastic claims? I mean, the thing is, there's almost no money in working the UFO research field unless you're doing regular gigs. Like standard Stan Freedman, who was a friend of mine. He knew how to market himself and he got gigs all over the world. Actually he kept a modest income coming in. Bud didn't do that. The way he worked was to have a really strong concept in Missing Time, and then he was only interested in cases after that that broke

new ground. Missing Time was his first book published in In it, he presented the idea that there was a consistency among alien abduction claims, they granted them legitimacy and provided a basic common narrative. Six years later he published Intruders. The case in Intruders of all sorts of new ground

in terms of him claiming to have discovered patterns. I guess in that case it would be the breeding pattern of abductees who would feel their eggs had been taken or the sperm had been harvested, and years later they'll be taken aboard a craft and they will see what they believe are their children, half alien a half human. You know, it began to get so weird to me that I would push back even more on how that knowledge came to be. Carol and Budd contemplated writing a

book together. It would be based on her science background and research into how cutting edge technologies might illuminate the UFO phenomenon. We went to talk to a couple of editors at publishing houses. This must have been the early two thousand's. They said, don't come back unless you have a brand new, never seen before idea for a U a phone book. So the push is always for new, bigger, better, more outlandish. And I would say that Dave and Bud

definitely delivered on that in each of their books. This same logic applied to the lecture circuit and UFO conferences where Hopkins would present cases. People don't want to come there and you know, pay to hear the same thing they've heard before. He was wanting cases that would further develop the narrative, or, as he might say, cases that

would illuminate it further. This search for new cases that would advance the field led Hopkins to a woman whose story he would promote as the most complex ever investigated. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. The search for new, bigger, more outlandish cases reached its apex when Bud Hopkins was contacted by a woman he

identified by the pseudonym Linda Cortill. She had come across Hopkins book intruders in a bookstore, and it resurfaced hidden memories that she herself had been abducted from her Manhattan apartment. The case was unveiled at the Landmark Abduction Study Conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was organized

by Detroita. These guys still eve that they finally had all their ducks in a row and had lined up all their proof, and they had very basically, they invited the world in the invited journalists, They invited the different organizations that even invited the skeptics. And this was where they first announced or debuted, if you will, that big case, the case in all cases, which was the levitated Linda

Case Linda, he was saying, Linda Courtill. She's a woman who lived in Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, and supposedly the aliens abducted her outer window. From Carol Rainey's documentary and Progress, here's Bud Hopkins on the Brooklyn Bridge describing what happened. I'm standing at exactly the spot where this very strange event was seen on at three am really on November thirty nine. Woman is driving from Brooklyn to New York right down here in the outer lanes, with

car engine died. The lights were now and she looked over to this building. One of the distance was a little pointed roof, and at that point she saw a burst of light as a UFO hovering only a few feet above it turned out all of its lights. Two small figures blow her and one above her. The light was intense. The woman was terrified and thought they must

be making a movie. This is a film of some sort, and they the figures floated up into the UFO, and then the UFO changed its lights, zoomed out across the river and across the bridge. It disappeared, and the woman's car lights and engines started back up again, but this is the way it started for her that night. This is just the beginning. You can easily do an entire series on this story, so I'll try to lay out the basics. There's plenty on the internet if you want

a more complete picture. I'm not going to evaluate the claims. I just want to give a sense of how wild this story gets. The early morning event was apparently witnessed by about two dozen people whose cars had stalled on the Brooklyn Bridge. Among them were two men named Richard and Dan. Their last names have never been revealed. They were officers in the New York City Police Department or possibly the Secret Service or even the CIA. It's not

entirely clear. Regardless, there was a third person in the car, an important diplomat. They were escorting him down to a heliport in Lower Manhattan that night, and their car was stalled by the UFOs power train. A person whose name but didn't use was Perez the quay Are, the Secretary of the United Nations at the time. This was the story's biggest bombshell. Linda Cortillas abduction was actually witnessed by Javier Perez de Quare, a Peruvian diplomat who was the

Secretary General of the United Nations. From later, Richard would tell Hopkins that he and Quare were also both actually abducted. Are not surprisingly disputes this. In a note fact to the PBS program Nova, which was doing an episode on hopkins abduction investigations, he wrote, I cannot but strongly deny the claim that I have had an abduction experience at

any time. On several occasions, when questioned about the matter, I reiterated that these allegations were completely false, and I hope that this statement will definitely put an end to these unfounded rumors. Things got still stranger from there. Richard and Dan became cessed with Linda. Twice they kidnapped her off the streets of New York. The second time, Dan tried to drown her in the Atlantic Ocean and might have succeeded if Richard hadn't stopped him. Richard, you see,

was in love with her. There's plenty more in this vein. Quare gave Cortill's son an antique diving helmet as a gift. Linda found out that her red blood cells, or some of them at least, were immortal. It's worth noting that Hopkins never met Richard or Dan, communicating with them only by phone or letter. But despite the sensational nature of this story, Hopkins apparently held back even stranger material that he thought might undermine Linda's credibility. There was so much

cherry picking that Bud did. Let's say Linda meeting with the Pope and the Pope knew all about her story and abducted her in a in one of the popemobiles or a black car to take her down to wherever he was staying when he came to visit in yes the early nineties, but did not include that story because it was pretty over the top that Linda Cortilla was invited by the Pope to come be the ambassador to extraterrestrials and that she would have to live at the

Vatican and leave New York City. Blah blah blah. It's hard to imagine that Hopkins didn't harbor doubts about at least parts of this story. The fact that he withheld potentially embarrassing information seems to confirm this. It's the kind of incredible story that requires strong evidence if you want people to take it seriously. So why invest so much in Linda Cortilla. He wanted so badly to prove what he believed to be happening. He wanted to prove that

it was actually happening, and that he had evidence. This general credulous nous lead to more high profile embarrassments. A two thousand and one Time magazine article on John Mac featured the story of Donna Bassett, a Boston based writer. She made up a multi generational history of UFO interactions, sent it to Mac, and was brought in for hypnotic regression. She said that she faked a trance, that Mac asked

her leading questions that she answered to his satisfaction. From the Time magazine article, among other recollections, she told of an encounter with John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchoff on board a spaceship during the Cuban missile crisis. Bassett said Kruschof was crying and that I sat in his lap and I put my arms around his net and I told him it would be okay. Hearing her tale, Mac became so excited that he leaned on the bed too

heavily and it collapsed. Hopkins, too fell prey to hoaxer's A man named Jim Mortarello claimed to have been admitted to an emergency room with injuries from a harrowing abduction. He also convinced Hopkins that a group of doctors and Upstate New York, We're going to conduct a study of patients under their care who showed physical signs of abduction experiences. This was not true, nor were any of his other claims, including that he had been the marketing director for the

Japanese electronics company had Tachi. In the end, his lives became too much for the board of advisors that in theory oversaw Hopkins research for advisors resigned and those that remained forced Hopkins to post a letter acknowledging Mortarello's deception of the Linda Cortilla case. Schaefer says, just obvious, made up stories. It really had backfired on them in a big way. This story just grew so huge and so preposterous, and they basically had left the store on this thing.

From that point on, it was pretty hard for anyone to take the Troy get too terribly seriously. The hoaxes that followed cemented this judgment. Carol believes that hopkins refusal to allow oversight from the board of advisors was a

critical component of his eventual loss of credibility. It's just that but had a very strong tool he might have used, which was the Intruders Foundation Advisory Board, and they could have prevented him from going so far into the weeds with the Linda Cortilla case, with the Jim more Laro case. That more of advisors was amazing group of very diverse people, but smart people. A medical writer and engineer, someone in marketing,

a musician and astronomer. They were strong, smart people who had hoped that Bud was going to share what he learned about how to research this phenomenon. So there were people with a broad enough background that if he had allowed them to guide his research, it would have been so much better for everybody. But he would not permit any oversight of his cases, and of course Dave Jacobs didn't either. Each of those two men worked entirely on

their own. Occasionally they would have someone come sit in on a session or two, but that wasn't necessarily the standard way they did things when that person was there watching. It's just a missed opportunity and a sadness because after

a few other hoaxes, came down the pike. The advisory committee just said, we can't support you going around and speaking at conferences about cases that we believe are not valid, that we believe our hoaxes, and we would like to have one or two of our advisory board members work with you on cases. Bud was only willing to give them access to the tapes, but he would take a trip to the museum while they listened to it. In

Hopkins died from cancer. John mac was struck and killed by a drunk driver in two thousand and four while he was in London to give a lecture. David Jacobs is still alive and apparently continuing abduction research. He did not respond to my requests for an interview. I asked Carol what Hopkins believed the aliens wanted from us. I found her answer very poignant, and it made me think of how Betty Andreas inframed her abduction narrative to reflect

her personal beliefs. The beings who were coming to us either needed our resources, which were Bud certainly believed were our humanist resources, our ability to be empathetic, our ability to love our children and to love other people in our lives, and to take care of them. Bud was a humanist, abub all things. He really was, and that's

the quality I loved in him. I think about Hopkins an artist, looking at the way that technology was changing our world, making it into a colder, more dispassionate place, seemingly eroding the prominence of art and empathy and our humanistic culture. It's not hard to envision his concept of the abduction phenomenon as a kind of metaphor for the fear that this new reality might have provoked in him.

I don't believe that humans are being abducted by the thousands and used to create hybrids, but I do find this fear of the way our culture is changing very reasonable. With the Troika now largely out of the picture, what is the state of abduction research today? What does science tell us about the difference between the psychology of people prone to belief and people prone to skepticism? How should we evaluate extraordinary claims next time on the season finale

of Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by

Gina Rickike. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C h A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book. Learn more about the show over at Grimm

and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.