August 20, 1976
It began like Deliverance and ended like The Interrupted Journey.
Chuck Rak, a budding artist from Vermont, canoed the Allagash waterway in northern Maine during the summer of 1975, and loved it so much that he wanted to do it again. So, the next summer, he called three of his friends from the Massachusetts College of Art - Charlie Foltz, and the twins Jim and Jack Weiner - and the four planned to go there in August 1976.
The place and the time were ripe for a UFO event. The Allagash Wilderness Waterway in Maine is between the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where Betty and Barney Hill were abducted in September 1961, and Loring AFB in Maine, which was plagued by strange lights over the weapons storage area in October 1975. October 1975 was also notable because that was when NBC television telecast a dramatization of the Hills' abduction titled The UFO Incident and starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty. The next month, in November 1975, Travis Walton was purportedly abducted by aliens in Arizona.
On Saturday, August 21, 1976, the four friends loaded up Chuck Rak's Chevy Vega and drove eight hours up Route 95 from Boston to Baxter State Park in Maine. They set up camp at the campground and, after a night's sleep, they climbed Mount Katahdin. Mount Katahdin was held to be sacred by the native Americans of the area, who believed it to be the home of Pomola, a spirit with the head of a moose, the wings of an eagle, and the body of a man. Henry David Thoreau climbed Katahdin alone in 1846 and spoke later of having a profound spiritual experience there. Thoreau also explored the Allagash waterway in 1857.
The next day, Monday, they drove to the town of Shin Pond. Here they left their car and were flown to their Telos Lake starting point by a Scotty's Flying Service pontoon plane. Roads in this area consisted mainly of private logging roads, and with such limited access, pontoon planes were the best way in.
Next morning, they headed up to Chamberlain Lake and camped at the Mud Brook campground on Tuesday night. That evening, they and several other campers saw an odd light in the sky that appeared suddenly and then winked out. On Wednesday, the four made their way leisurely up Chamberlain Lake and by Thursday they had portaged around the locks into Eagle Lake and paddled to the Smith Brook Campsite. That night, all four of them piled into one of the two canoes to try some night fishing. Before they left camp, however, they built a large bonfire to help them find their way back.
"That's a hell of a case of swamp gas."
- Chuck Rak |
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When they were about a quarter-mile from shore, they suddenly saw "a large, bright, pulsing spherical light." rising over the treetop. With his flashlight, Charlie flashed three short, three long, and three short flashes at the object. The object immediately responded by moving silently towards them, and they panicked, paddling for shore. They reached shore and watched as the object then hovered for a few moments and then winked out.
Their greatest shock was to come when they reached their campsite. Their bonfire, which should have blazed for 2 to 3 hours, was inexplicably burned down to coals, although they had only been gone for what seemed to be about a quarter of an hour.
What did they see? Could it have been a planet? Checking an astronomy program, the only visible planet that night was Jupiter, which rose on the eastern horizon at about 11:00 PM EDT, with a -2.00 magnitude. The Allagash four went fishing just after dinner, and they said the light was to the …southeastern rim of the cove (Chuck) or …the southern shoreline. (Jim Weiner).
The next day, they reported their experience to a forest ranger, who apparently didn't believe them. The remainder of the trip was without incident, and the experience became just an unexplained memory.
However, in 1986, Jack Weiner began to have nightmares that related back to the Allagash trip. In these nightmares, he and the other three were being examined by some sort of strange insect-like beings. Jim, his twin, also began having nightmares and unusual symptoms that had begun in approximately 1978, some of which could be traced back to an injury that he suffered in that year that caused him to develop TLE, a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. Jim went to Raymond Fowler of MUFON and in 1989, a series of hypnotic regression sessions was initiated with a qualified hypnotherapist named Anthony Constantino. Although the Allagash four were living in different areas by then, Fowler and Constantino managed to hypnotize all four of them.
A surprisingly consistent story began to emerge. Under hypnosis, all four of the men told of being taken on board an alien craft, examined, and then placed back into their canoe on Eagle Lake. The entire story is documented by Ray Fowler in his book The Allagash Abductions.