In August of 1976 four young men set out on a canoe trip through the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. Twin brothers Jim and Jack Weiner, Chuck Rak and Charlie Foltz were art students, not thrill seekers. They wanted fish and quiet.
On the second night, fishing after dark on Eagle Lake, they lit a big bonfire on shore so they could find their way back. Then a light rose over the trees. It was huge and silent, shifting color, and when Charlie flashed a signal at it with his flashlight, it answered by moving straight toward them. A beam of light came down and swept across the water.
The next thing any of them remembered, they were standing on the shore. The bonfire they had built to burn for hours was down to coals. Hours had passed that none of them could account for.
The men went on with their lives. Years later the nightmares started, the same for all four. In 1988 they underwent separate hypnotic regression sessions and each described being taken aboard the craft and examined. By the early 1990s the Allagash case had become one of the most talked about abduction reports in America.
Chuck Rak later said he thought parts of the story had been embellished. The other three stood by every word until the day they died.
Is it possible that four men saw the same thing on that lake, and lost the same hours, for no ordinary reason.
Shared memory under hypnosis, or a shared encounter in the dark?
