Encounter Atlas
In August 1976, four young men, three of them art students from Massachusetts and one their guide, were canoeing the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. On the night usually given as August 26, they built a large bonfire on the shore of Eagle Lake and paddled out to fish. They said a huge sphere of coloured light, about 80 feet across, rose over the cove. When the guide signalled at it with a flashlight, it moved toward them and shone a cone-shaped beam on the canoe.
Their next memory, they said, was being back on shore watching the object leave, with the bonfire, which they had expected to burn for hours, reduced to embers. They reported the light to a park ranger, who suggested it was a searchlight from a store opening many miles away.
Years later, after Jack Weiner had suffered nightmares, his twin Jim approached ufologist Raymond Fowler at a conference, and Fowler arranged hypnosis sessions for all four. Under hypnosis they described being taken aboard the craft, examined and sampled by long-necked, large-eyed beings, and they made sketches of them. Fowler's 1993 book The Allagash Abductions presented the case, noting that the men passed polygraph tests. The story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries and other TV shows.
In 2016 Chuck Rak told a Maine newspaper that the abduction never happened. He said they did see an unexplained light, but that the hypnosis did not produce real memories for him, that he had backed the story to make money, and that the group had been smoking marijuana. The other three rejected his account and stand by the story. Critics also point to well-known problems with memories recovered under hypnosis.