ALLAGASH.

On the evening of August 26, the four men paddled their canoe out to a lake to fish. Above them, a large, glowing, oval craft appeared and descended. Foltz signalled the craft with a flashlight; in response, a beam of light enveloped the canoe. The next conscious memory the men had was of being on the lake shore, the craft departing in the distance, with the campfire they had left burning down to coals — far more time having passed than they could account for.

In the years following the trip, all four men experienced disturbing dreams and recurring health issues. Jim Weiner suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which began after a separate head injury and was unrelated to the encounter. He was advised by a neurologist to consult Dr. Herbert Hopkins, a UFO researcher he had heard speak. Through Hopkins, the Weiners were referred to Boston-based abduction researcher Raymond Fowler, who became the principal investigator of the case.

Fowler arranged independent hypnotic regression sessions with each of the four men, conducted by clinical psychologist Anthony Constantino. Without prior coordination, the four men gave separate hypnotic accounts that contained substantial overlapping detail: a circular room with a central platform, multiple spindly humanoid beings with elongated arms and four-fingered hands, an examination involving a fluid sample and a probing instrument, and a beam of light returning them to the canoe. All four passed polygraph examinations administered for the case.

The Allagash case is unusual for the four-witness corroboration of the initial UFO sighting and the four-witness independent hypnotic recall. Critics have noted the limitations of hypnotic recall and have pointed to potential cross-contamination across years of friendship. Fowler's books and the History Channel's UFO Hunters investigation in 2008 — during which the four men returned to the lake — have kept the case in the public record.