The Allagash Wilderness Waterway is a long chain of lakes, streams and river through the forest of northern Maine, roadless for most of its length and popular with canoeists who want to be a long way from anyone. In August 1976 four men from the Boston area set out to paddle it: Jack and Jim Weiner, identical twins, their friend Chuck Rak, all three enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art, and Charlie Foltz, a Navy veteran who served as the group’s guide. What they said happened on one night of that trip became one of the best-known multiple-witness abduction claims in the United States.
What happened
By the account the men later gave, the first odd thing came a couple of nights in, at a campsite called Mud Brook, when a light that looked like an unusually bright star turned out through binoculars to be something hovering above the trees a few miles off. It blinked out and they thought little more of it. Two nights later they were camped at Smith Brook on Eagle Lake. Wanting to fish after dark, they built a large fire on shore as a landmark and paddled out.
Rak said he felt watched, turned, and saw a huge globe of light above the cove, shifting through white, red and green. Foltz flashed a signal at it with his flashlight. The globe moved toward them and put out a cone of light that swept the water; the men paddled hard for shore. Their next clear memory was of the canoe grinding onto the beach while the object hung nearby, then shot off over the trees. The fire, which they had stacked to burn for hours, was down to embers. The next day, Rak said, a ranger told them they had probably seen a searchlight from a store opening in Millinocket, an explanation he rejected as absurd at that distance.
The investigation
Nothing more was made of the night for years. The trigger, according to Rak, was Jim Weiner’s health: after a bad fall he began having seizures and frightening visions of beings standing over his bed. Jack Weiner had nightmares of his own about long-necked creatures examining him. Jim eventually took the story to Raymond Fowler, a veteran investigator who had worked for NICAP and had already written about the Betty Andreasson case. Fowler brought in a hypnotist, Tony Constantino, and the men went through regression sessions under the umbrella of the Mutual UFO Network.
Under hypnosis the Weiners and Foltz described being drawn up into the craft and given what they took to be medical examinations by small gray beings with large heads and eyes. The men produced drawings of their captors, and later took polygraph tests that, in Jim Weiner’s words, supported an abduction scenario. Fowler published the whole investigation in 1993 as The Allagash Abductions, with a foreword by Budd Hopkins. The four went on The Joan Rivers Show and appeared in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
The recantation
In two articles published in September 2016, the reporter Jessica Potila of The County, a Bangor Publishing paper in Aroostook County, interviewed Rak by phone. He said the four did see a strange light, on Eagle Lake and two nights before, but that no one was abducted. He had supported the story at first because he wanted to make money, he said; the group had talked of millions and earned very little. He also said his own hypnosis had produced no memory of an abduction, although he had previously claimed in public that it had. He dismissed the burned-down fire as unremarkable for wood of the size they had used, and said the men had smoked hashish before going out on the water. He stopped short of the word hoax, calling it storytelling instead.
The others answered in the same article. Foltz denied any drug use and said some of the logs were as thick as his leg. Jim Weiner said Rak had been cut off by the group after proposing that they publicly attack Fowler’s investigation to stir up controversy, and that his claims were driven by resentment. Fowler said Rak had never had detailed recall under hypnosis and resented it. The Weiners and Foltz said they still accepted the hypnosis and polygraph results.
Where it stands
The sighting of a light is the one part all four men agree on, and it is the only part recorded close to the event. The abduction rests on hypnotic regression conducted more than a decade later by investigators who expected abductions, a method psychologists have long warned can produce vivid and sincere false memories. Rak’s turnabout settles nothing on its own, since he admits changing his story before and the dispute between the men is bitter. With no physical evidence and no independent witness, the case stays where most abduction claims stay: sincere testimony from three of the four, and no way to confirm it.