Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: The Backwoods Cryptid road trip is taking a short break.
Speaker 1: Don't worry. The road trip isn't over, not even close.
Speaker 1: We've still got plenty of states left on the map
Speaker 1: and plenty of monsters waiting in them, and we'll be
Speaker 1: back on the highway soon enough. But every once in
Speaker 1: a while, a story comes along that doesn't fit neatly
Speaker 1: into the route, and it pulls at you until you
Speaker 1: finally give in and tell it this is one of
Speaker 1: those stories. Tonight, we're heading deeper into the wilderness than
Speaker 1: this show has ever gone, up into the North Main Woods,
Speaker 1: to a chain of black lakes and unbroken timber, where
Speaker 1: the roads quit and the floatplanes take over, and the
Speaker 1: thing waiting out there isn't leaving tracks in a creek
Speaker 1: bed or screaming from a ridgeline. It doesn't walk the
Speaker 1: woods at all. It comes down out of the sky.
Speaker 1: In August of nineteen seventy six, four young men paddled
Speaker 1: into the Alligash Wilderness Waterway for two weeks of fishing.
Speaker 1: What found them on Eagle Lake one night, and what
Speaker 1: they say happened inside a beam of light while their
Speaker 1: bonfire burned down to coals on the shore became one
Speaker 1: of the most famous and most fiercely argued cases in
Speaker 1: American history. Four witnesses, one story, and fifty years later,
Speaker 1: no explanation that holds so settle in because we're leaving
Speaker 1: the pavement behind either way, same deep woods, same dark,
Speaker 1: just a different kind of visitor. This is the story
Speaker 1: of the Aligaish abductions. The fire was the whole plan.
Speaker 1: Four young guys on the edge of a wilderness lake
Speaker 1: in northern Maine about to paddle out into the kind
Speaker 1: of darkness that erases the line between the water and
Speaker 1: the sky, and their entire safety net was a bonfire.
Speaker 1: They dragged heavy logs into a pile on the bank
Speaker 1: at a spot called smith Brook, stacked it tall and
Speaker 1: lit it up. Chuck Rack figured the flame stood about
Speaker 1: ten feet high. Jim Winer set a fire like that
Speaker 1: would burn for a good two or three hours, and
Speaker 1: that was the point.
Speaker 2: It was a beacon.
Speaker 1: They'd catch some trout in the dark and then follow
Speaker 1: the glow home. They pushed the canoe out onto Eagle
Speaker 1: Lake a little after nightfall on August twenty sixth, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six. When they came back to shore, the fire
Speaker 1: was gone, not burning low, gone a bed of collapsed coals,
Speaker 1: the kind of thing you'd expect to find at dawn
Speaker 1: after a long night. And every one of those four
Speaker 1: men would have sworn on anything you put in front
Speaker 1: of them that they'd been on the water for maybe
Speaker 1: fifteen or twenty minutes. Somewhere in the gap between a
Speaker 1: roaring bonfire and a pile of embers, something happened to
Speaker 1: Jim Winer, his twin brother, Jack Charlie Foltz and Chuck Rack.
Speaker 1: It would take twelve years before any of them worked
Speaker 1: up the nerve to go looking for it, and what
Speaker 1: they say they found under hypnosis in a quiet office
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts turned into one of the most famous abduction
Speaker 1: accounts in American history. Four witnesses, separate sessions, and the
Speaker 1: same story coming out of all of them. At least,
Speaker 1: that's how what stood for twenty years. Then one of
Speaker 1: the four picked up a phone in a motel room
Speaker 1: in Missouri and tore the whole thing down the middle,
Speaker 1: and the Allagash case became something even stranger than an
Speaker 1: abduction story. It became a story about memory and money
Speaker 1: and what happens to four friendships when they get chained
Speaker 1: to the strangest night of their lives and can never
Speaker 1: put it down. So let's take it from the beginning
Speaker 1: Boston summer of nineteen seventy six. The country was hip
Speaker 1: deep in its bicentennial tall ships in the harbor, flags
Speaker 1: on every porch, Gerald Ford in the White House, and
Speaker 1: in the city's art scene. Four young men in their
Speaker 1: early twenties were finishing up or just coming out of
Speaker 1: the Massachusetts College of Art Painters and sculptors, guys who
Speaker 1: worked with their eyes for a living, which ends up
Speaker 1: mattering more to this story than almost anything.
Speaker 2: Else about them.
Speaker 1: Jim and Jack Winer were identical twins, and anybody who
Speaker 1: spent time around identical twins knows the shorthand They run
Speaker 1: on the half sentences, the arguments that start in the middle,
Speaker 1: because both parties already know the first half. The Winers
Speaker 1: had all of that. They'd also had growing up, a
Speaker 1: shared streak of odd experiences that neither one talked about much,
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that gets filed under weird childhood
Speaker 1: things and left alone. Ray Fowler would go digging through
Speaker 1: all of it years later in seventy six. It was
Speaker 1: just background noise. Charlie Foltz was the steady one, a
Speaker 1: Navy veteran with older energy even when he wasn't the
Speaker 1: oldest guy in the room, the friend who checks the
Speaker 1: gear list twice and knows which knights hold.
Speaker 2: And Chuck Rack was the wild card.
Speaker 1: Opinionated, a little abrasive by his own admission, a painter
Speaker 1: with strong ideas about everything. Four personalities that didn't always
Speaker 1: sand smooth against each other, And honestly, that's part of
Speaker 1: what made them believable to me from the first time
Speaker 1: I read up on this case. Vacation groups that get
Speaker 1: along perfectly exist mostly in commercials. The plan was simple enough.
Speaker 1: Two weeks in the Alligash Wilderness Waterway, that great chain
Speaker 1: of lakes and river running up through the North main Woods. Canoes, tents, rods, coolers,
Speaker 1: no phones, obviously, and no radios because this was nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, and when you went into the Alligash back then,
Speaker 1: you were gone. The nearest real town was a long,
Speaker 1: rough haul away, and everything between you and it was water,
Speaker 1: timber and black flies. They left Boston on Friday, August
Speaker 1: twentieth and drove north through New Hampshire and up into Maine,
Speaker 1: into that country where the towns get smaller and farther
Speaker 1: apart until they quit all together and the logging roads
Speaker 1: take over. At the staging point, they hired a pontoon plane,
Speaker 1: one of those workhorse float planes that stitched the North
Speaker 1: Woods together, loaded up their canoes and gear, and flew
Speaker 1: into Telos Lake at the southern end of the waterway.
Speaker 1: From the passenger seat of a plane like that, it's
Speaker 1: green to every horizon, with lakes scattered through the timber
Speaker 1: like broken glass, and not a road worth the name
Speaker 1: anywhere below you.
Speaker 2: The pilot sets.
Speaker 1: You down on the water, helps you unload onto the shore,
Speaker 1: and then climbs back out, and the engine noise fades
Speaker 1: and dies, and what's left behind is a silence that
Speaker 1: people from cities genuinely don't believe until they've stood in it.
Speaker 1: That's where these four men were, and that's the stage.
Speaker 1: The first several days were exactly what they'd paid for.
Speaker 1: They worked their way north through the waterway, paddling by
Speaker 1: day and camping on the shores at night. And anybody
Speaker 1: who's done a multi day canoe trip knows the rhythm.
Speaker 1: Your shoulders ache for the first two days and then
Speaker 1: quick complaining, your hands pick up the smell of fish
Speaker 1: and wood smoke and never quite lose it. The group
Speaker 1: settles into jobs without ever discussing them, because one guy
Speaker 1: always ends up on fire duty, one guy cooks, and
Speaker 1: one guy appoints himself in charge of picking camp sites
Speaker 1: and defending his choices. They were also paddling through country
Speaker 1: with a long memory, though I doubt any of them
Speaker 1: was thinking about it at the time. Henry David Threau
Speaker 1: came through these same woods in eighteen fifty seven with
Speaker 1: a Panobscot guide named Joe Pollas crossing the infamous mud
Speaker 1: pond carry into the Chamberlain Lake country, and the account
Speaker 1: he left behind describes a wilderness that genuinely rattled him,
Speaker 1: which is saying something for the patron saint of American
Speaker 1: nature riding. The lumbermen came after him, and for the
Speaker 1: better part of a century, the Alligash was a working
Speaker 1: forest that got driven hard. There was a steam tramway
Speaker 1: hauling logs between the watersheds, and when the timber economy shifted,
Speaker 1: the machinery just got walked away from boilers left standing
Speaker 1: in the trees, cables sinking into the moss, not far
Speaker 1: from where our four men would eventually camp. Two full
Speaker 1: sized steam locomotives still sit rusting in the woods near
Speaker 1: Eagle Lake, hauled in over the winter ice back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties to pull pulp wood, and abandoned in
Speaker 1: the early thirties because there was no longer any way
Speaker 1: to get them out. The wilderness took its railroad back
Speaker 1: the way it takes everything back, and by nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: six the state had drawn a protective line around the
Speaker 1: whole corridor and named it the Aligish Wilderness Waterway. No development,
Speaker 1: no lights, close to one hundred miles of dark. The
Speaker 1: fishing on the trip was hit and miss, which is
Speaker 1: normal for late August, when the hot days pushed the
Speaker 1: trout down deep. So the men started thinking the way
Speaker 1: fishermen think about going out after dark instead, when the
Speaker 1: fish come up and the bugs die down, and the
Speaker 1: lake belongs to whoever's on it, and the Aligish at
Speaker 1: night is its own subject. There's no ambient light.
Speaker 2: Out there, none, And.
Speaker 1: On a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way comes down
Speaker 1: so hard and close that first timers have been known
Speaker 1: to get uneasy about it, like the sky is standing
Speaker 1: too near. Sound carries for miles across the water, so
Speaker 1: a loon calling from the far end of a lake
Speaker 1: sounds like it's sitting in the canoe with you.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful, and it.
Speaker 1: Also strips away every comfortable illusion you carry around about
Speaker 1: being at the top of the food chain. Out there
Speaker 1: after dark, you're small, and the dark doesn't care about
Speaker 1: you one way or the other. Two nights before the
Speaker 1: main event camped along Chamberlain Lake, they got their first
Speaker 1: look at it a light, bright and round, hanging in
Speaker 1: the night sky where no light had any business being.
Speaker 1: It wasn't running an aircraft pattern, no red and green wingtips,
Speaker 1: no strobe, and no engine sound crossing the water, just
Speaker 1: a luminous something that held there long enough for the
Speaker 1: men to stand and stare at it, roughly half a
Speaker 1: minute by their later estimates. And then it was gone.
Speaker 1: Not gone like it flew away, gone like somebody threw
Speaker 1: a switch. They kicked it around for a few minutes,
Speaker 1: tossed out the usual candidates, a satellite, something military, some
Speaker 1: atmospheric oddity none of them could name, and when nothing stuck,
Speaker 1: they went to bed.
Speaker 2: That was the whole event.
Speaker 1: Four guys saw a strange light, shrugged at each other
Speaker 1: and went to sleep, and nobody.
Speaker 2: Lost a mint of rest over it.
Speaker 1: They kept paddling north, and on Thursday, August twenty sixth
Speaker 1: they reached Eagle Lake and put their camp at Smith Brook.
Speaker 1: Eagle Lake is big water by canoe standards, and the
Speaker 1: locals sometimes call it Big Eagle to keep it separate
Speaker 1: from the other Eagle Lake up in a Roostook County,
Speaker 1: miles of open surface ringed by unbroken forest, with the
Speaker 1: drowned history of the logging days scattered around its edges,
Speaker 1: and those two dead locomotives sitting in the trees like
Speaker 1: the set of a dream. It's the kind of place
Speaker 1: where things get left behind and swallowed. And I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm reaching when I say the lake earned this story.
Speaker 1: The daytime fishing on the twenty sixth was poor, so
Speaker 1: that evening they made the call that put them in
Speaker 1: the history books. Night fishing and a bonfire on the
Speaker 1: beach to guide them home.
Speaker 2: They built the.
Speaker 1: Fire at dusk, and it wasn't a cook fire, it
Speaker 1: was a navigation aid. Once full dark came down, the
Speaker 1: shoreline of Eagle Lake would turn into a single, unbroken
Speaker 1: wall of black, where every cove looks like every other cove,
Speaker 1: and without a fixed light, four men in a canoe
Speaker 1: could paddle right past their own camp fifty feet out
Speaker 1: and never know it. So they hauled big pieces of
Speaker 1: wood for this thing, heavy logs banked to burn for
Speaker 1: hours ten feet of flame by rax estimate, And when
Speaker 1: it was roaring, they climbed into the canoe and pushed
Speaker 1: off into the dark to find some trout. It was
Speaker 1: a good night to be out there. The canoe rode
Speaker 1: low with four grown men aboard, rocking gently while the
Speaker 1: reels clicked and the lures plopped somewhere out in the black.
Speaker 1: The stars ran bank to bank overhead and reflected right
Speaker 1: back up off the still water, so the canoe seemed
Speaker 1: to float in the middle of a sphere of them,
Speaker 1: and behind the men on the beach, the fire snapped
Speaker 1: away their one warm anchor to the world. They were
Speaker 1: twenty two, twenty three years old, strong, a little sunburned,
Speaker 1: a week of wilderness already behind them, and there wasn't
Speaker 1: one reason on earth to think this was different from
Speaker 1: the last five. Chuck Rack felt it before he saw it.
Speaker 1: That's his account, and it's a piece of the story
Speaker 1: he never backed away from, even decades later, when he
Speaker 1: walked away from everything else. He was sitting in the
Speaker 1: stern when he got the feeling of being watched, that
Speaker 1: pressure on the back of the neck that every hunter knows,
Speaker 1: and everybody who's ever crossed a dark parking lot alone
Speaker 1: knows too. It's the oldest alarm system we own, and
Speaker 1: it predates language. Rack turned around, rising over the tree
Speaker 1: line behind them, out where nothing but forest ran for
Speaker 1: miles was a sphere of light, a big one. The
Speaker 1: men would later put its size at around eighty feet across,
Speaker 1: which is a four story building turned on its side,
Speaker 1: and it made no sound at all, and its surface
Speaker 1: didn't behave like anything with a bulb and a housing.
Speaker 1: They described colors moving on it, liquid and slow, like
Speaker 1: the whole thing was wrapped in glowing gas that swirled
Speaker 1: and shifted while they watched red flowing into green, flowing
Speaker 1: into yellow, never still. The other three turned and the
Speaker 1: fishing stopped. For a moment.
Speaker 2: It was pure spectacle.
Speaker 1: Four artists in a canoe staring at something none of
Speaker 1: their training could sort into a category. It just hung
Speaker 1: there over the trees, silent and immense and alive with
Speaker 1: moving color. And Jim Winer said later that his mind
Speaker 1: kept reaching for explanations and coming back with nothing. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a helicopter because helicopters are the loudest things in
Speaker 1: a quiet wilderness. It wasn't a plane because planes cross
Speaker 1: the sky, they don't perch on it. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: flare or a balloon or the moon behind haze. The
Speaker 1: catalog just ran out. Then Charlie Folts did the thing
Speaker 1: everybody always asks about He picked up his flashlight and
Speaker 1: blinked an sos at it dot dot dot dash dash
Speaker 1: dash dot dot dot. He was a navyman, and signaling
Speaker 1: an unidentified light is practically reflex for a navyman. I'd
Speaker 1: also bet that, And in the half second before he
Speaker 1: thumbed that button, some part of him still believed the
Speaker 1: boring explanation was on its way, that the light was
Speaker 1: about to resolve into something with the tail number and
Speaker 1: a board pilot at the stick. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods big Foot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: The object answered. It came off the tree line and
Speaker 1: moved out over the water, straight toward the canoe, still
Speaker 1: without a sound. A beam came on from its underside,
Speaker 1: a cone of light that dropped to the surface of
Speaker 1: the lake and lit the water up, and then the
Speaker 1: beam started to travel toward them. Whatever curiosity had been
Speaker 1: holding those four in place burned off in about a second.
Speaker 1: Somebody yelled to paddle, and four paddles hit the water,
Speaker 1: and that canoe surged for the shoreline with everything four
Speaker 1: scared young men could put into it. Jack Winer glanced
Speaker 1: back as they ran for the beach, and what he
Speaker 1: saw stayed with him for the rest.
Speaker 2: Of his life.
Speaker 1: The beam was eating up the distance behind them faster
Speaker 1: than they were closing, and the thought landed in his
Speaker 1: head with total clarity, that they were never going to
Speaker 1: outrun it.
Speaker 2: He was right.
Speaker 1: The light swallowed the canoe, and right there the tape cuts.
Speaker 1: That phrase, the tape cuts is the closest I can
Speaker 1: get to what all four men described, because there was
Speaker 1: no transition, no fade, no blur, nothing. One instant they
Speaker 1: were paddling for their lives with light flooding over the gunwales,
Speaker 1: and the next instant with no sense of anything in between,
Speaker 1: they were at the shore, calm, the panic gone, like
Speaker 1: somebody had unplugged it. The canoe was near the beach
Speaker 1: and the men were climbing out of it in a slow, dazed,
Speaker 1: underwater sort of way, and the object was still there.
Speaker 1: It hung over the lake, maybe fifty to seventy five
Speaker 1: yards out twenty or thirty feet above the surface by
Speaker 1: Jack's estimate, and the beam now pointed straight down beneath it,
Speaker 1: so that the whole silent mass looked like it was
Speaker 1: resting on a column of light. Stood on the beach
Speaker 1: and watched it, and nobody ran and nobody spoke. Jim
Speaker 1: described the group as being in a state of shock,
Speaker 1: unable to move or talk, and Chuck Rack never even
Speaker 1: got out of the canoe. He sat in the stern
Speaker 1: with the paddle still in his hands, staring. Charlie raised
Speaker 1: his flashlight and signaled again, and this time the answer
Speaker 1: was departure. The beams swung up off the water and
Speaker 1: pointed at the sky, and the object rose, slid away
Speaker 1: toward the southwest, and then accelerated in a way that
Speaker 1: nothing airborne in nineteen seventy six could accelerate a standing
Speaker 1: start to a vanishing point among the stars in about
Speaker 1: a second. The strange anesthetic calm let go of them, slowly,
Speaker 1: like cold water draining out of clothing. Chuck finally climbed
Speaker 1: out of the canoe, and the four of them walked
Speaker 1: up the beach toward their camp site, and Jim used
Speaker 1: the word dreamily to describe that walk. Four men moving
Speaker 1: through their own camp like sleepwalkers. Then they saw the fire,
Speaker 1: the bonfire they'd built to burn for two or three hours,
Speaker 1: The ten foot beacon of heavy logs they'd lit right
Speaker 1: before shoving off, was a bed of embers collapsed, smoldering,
Speaker 1: burned all the way down and through the way a
Speaker 1: big fire looks after a long night when nobody's fed it.
Speaker 1: And when they added up their own evening, the fishing
Speaker 1: and the siding and the chase and the shore, they
Speaker 1: got fifteen or twenty minutes of experience. The fire set hours.
Speaker 1: And here's the part of that night I find stranger
Speaker 1: than the object itself. They went to bed. They didn't
Speaker 1: sit up dissecting it. They didn't break camp in a
Speaker 1: panic and paddle for the ranger station. At first light,
Speaker 1: four men stood in front of physical evidence that a
Speaker 1: piece of their evening had gone missing, registered it, said
Speaker 1: almost nothing about it, and crawled into their tents and slept.
Speaker 1: Jim remembered thinking the fire was odd, and then just
Speaker 1: not thinking about it anymore, his mind sliding off the
Speaker 1: subject the way your eyes slide off a bright light.
Speaker 1: The next morning tells you nearly as much as the
Speaker 1: night did. There was no council of war over the coffee.
Speaker 1: By every account we have, the four of them worked
Speaker 1: around the subject the way you'd work around a down
Speaker 1: power line, aware of it, giving it room, not touching it.
Speaker 1: They cooked, They broke camp on schedule. Somebody probably made
Speaker 1: a joke, because somebody always makes a joke, and it
Speaker 1: probably didn't land. When the thing did come up in
Speaker 1: the days that followed, it came up small and got
Speaker 1: put away fast. Four men who between them could talk
Speaker 1: for hours about paint and politics and fishing had found
Speaker 1: the one topic none of them could hold. The trip
Speaker 1: didn't end that night, which surprises people. They had days
Speaker 1: left on their itinerary, and they used them, paddling and
Speaker 1: camping their way onward through the waterway, and the object
Speaker 1: never came back. By the time the logging roads gave
Speaker 1: way to pavement and they rolled south toward Boston, the
Speaker 1: whole event had already started its long burial. They told family,
Speaker 1: and they told friends, and they got the reaction you expect,
Speaker 1: the raised eyebrows, the jokes about what was in the canteen.
Speaker 1: Each man learned the same lesson at the same speed,
Speaker 1: that this story cost you something every time you told it,
Speaker 1: so they mostly stopped telling it. It didn't vanish completely,
Speaker 1: because stories like this never do. It lived on in
Speaker 1: a couple of diaries from the trip. The once Fowler's
Speaker 1: team would eventually collect and comb through It came up
Speaker 1: at the occasional family dinner when somebody's cousin wanted to
Speaker 1: hear the flying saucer thing again, and each man developed
Speaker 1: his own way of handling that moment. You give the
Speaker 1: short version, you keep your voice flat, you let the
Speaker 1: laughter happen, and you change the subject. The twins at
Speaker 1: least had each other one person on earth who nod
Speaker 1: instead of smirk. Charlie had his Navy issue stoicism, and
Speaker 1: Chuck had his contrarian streak, which let him treat the
Speaker 1: whole thing as one more subject he had strong opinions about,
Speaker 1: but none of them had an explanation, and a story
Speaker 1: without an explanation is a heavy thing to carry around,
Speaker 1: So mostly they set it down and left it there,
Speaker 1: And for twelve years that's where it sat. A weird
Speaker 1: night in Maine, a fire that burned too fast, a
Speaker 1: thing none of them could name, folded up small and
Speaker 1: stored in the attic of four separate lives. The twins
Speaker 1: pursued their art. Charlie settled into his work, Chuck painted,
Speaker 1: and the seventies became the eighties. Then the way buried
Speaker 1: things do it started coming back up. It came back
Speaker 1: first through Jim Winer's skull. Literally around nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: Jim took a serious fall and suffered a bad head
Speaker 1: injury damage that would eventually be diagnosed as temporolmbic epilepsy.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with it, that seizure activity rooted
Speaker 1: in the temporal lobe and the limbic structures, the deep
Speaker 1: machinery of memory and emotion, and it's a condition with
Speaker 1: a documented talent for producing strange experiences, vivid deja vous
Speaker 1: dream like states, and that powerful, crawling sin of a presence,
Speaker 1: the certainty that someone's in the room with you. Jim
Speaker 1: was treated in Boston, and his doctors did something perfectly
Speaker 1: responsible that ended up having enormous unintended consequences. They told
Speaker 1: him to keep track of any unusual experiences and report them,
Speaker 1: which is standard practice when you're mapping what a seizure
Speaker 1: disorder is doing to a patient. Because Jim was having
Speaker 1: unusual experiences. He'd surface from sleep or into some layer
Speaker 1: between sleep and waking and find himself unable to move
Speaker 1: anything but his eyes. He'd feel with total certainty that
Speaker 1: there were figures in the room, and he'd hear a
Speaker 1: churn of voices he couldn't resolve into words. And these
Speaker 1: episodes came with the setting that kept repeating, a bright
Speaker 1: white room, a table he was lying on, and bizarrely
Speaker 1: familiar faces because off to one side his brother Jack
Speaker 1: was there, and Chuck and Charlie sitting on some kind
Speaker 1: of bench, and all of them were naked, and none
Speaker 1: of them were helping him. A neurologist has a ready
Speaker 1: explanation for a good chunk of what he was experiencing.
Speaker 2: Sleep paralysis is real.
Speaker 1: And common and terrifying, and it comes bundled with intruder
Speaker 1: hallucinations as a standard feature. And if you layer temporal
Speaker 1: lobe epilepsy on top of it, you've got a brain
Speaker 1: with every excuse to produce exactly these movies. Jim knew
Speaker 1: that his doctors knew that, and for a while, that's
Speaker 1: the shelf it all stayed on. The problem was Jack
Speaker 1: Jack Winer, the identical twin with no head injury and
Speaker 1: no epilepsy, living his own life with his wife Mary
Speaker 1: had been quietly coming apart at night, too, and he
Speaker 1: told almost nobody, But the nightmares he eventually described weren't
Speaker 1: generic bad dreams. It was the bright room, the table,
Speaker 1: a bench off to the side, with Jim and Chuck
Speaker 1: and Charlie on it, naked, sitting there while something came
Speaker 1: toward him out of the glare, a dark, thin figure
Speaker 1: whose face he'd eventually describe in detail no brother wants
Speaker 1: to hear. Jack would wake from these with his heart slamming.
Speaker 1: And they kept coming, and they kept getting worse. Two men,
Speaker 1: one brain injury between them and the same room. There
Speaker 1: was one more thing, a physical detail, Ray Fowler would
Speaker 1: later put a spotlight on. At some point a lump
Speaker 1: appeared above Jack shn over the tibia, and by the
Speaker 1: family's account, it showed up essentially overnight. It got looked at,
Speaker 1: and eventually surgeons removed it, and nothing about it settled
Speaker 1: the case in either direction. So I'm not going to
Speaker 1: inflate it the way some retellings do. A lump on
Speaker 1: a leg is a lump on a leg. But Jack
Speaker 1: had been dreaming specifically and repeatedly about spindly hands taking
Speaker 1: a sample from his leg, and you can imagine what
Speaker 1: it did to the inside of his head when his
Speaker 1: own body produced that. By nineteen eighty eight, Jim had
Speaker 1: reached the point everybody in this field eventually reaches where
Speaker 1: the cost of looking finally drops below the cost of
Speaker 1: not looking. Through the orbit of his treatment and the
Speaker 1: people around it, he ended up at a UFO conference
Speaker 1: where a veteran investigator named Raymond Fowler was speaking. Fowler's
Speaker 1: worth a minute here because his name carries a lot
Speaker 1: of weight in this story. He was a director of
Speaker 1: investigations for the Mutual UFO Network, a former defense industry man,
Speaker 1: methodical and prolific, and by the late eighties, one of
Speaker 1: the most respected casemen in the field. He was also
Speaker 1: the investigator behind the Betty andreas An Affair, one of
Speaker 1: the most elaborate abduction narratives ever assembled, built in large
Speaker 1: part through hypnotic regression. Fowler believed in the phenomena, and
Speaker 1: he believed in hypnosis as the tool for reaching it.
Speaker 1: So when Jim Winer walked up to him after that
Speaker 1: lecture and laid out the lake, the light, the beam,
Speaker 1: the fire, and twelve years of nightmares running in two
Speaker 1: separate households, Fowler recognized the shape of the thing. Immediately
Speaker 1: he took the case and the machinery started to turn.
Speaker 1: It's worth understanding what that machinery was in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: because abduction research had become a genuine cottage industry by then.
Speaker 1: Bud Hopkins had published Missing Time in eighty one and
Speaker 1: Intruders in eighty seven, books that laid out a whole
Speaker 1: methodology for cases exactly like this one. The Unexplained Sighting,
Speaker 1: the Gap the Nightmares years later, the regression that fills
Speaker 1: in the blank. Muffon had investigators and forms and protocols.
Speaker 2: There were support groups.
Speaker 1: For experiencers, conferences, questionnaires, a shared vocabulary. Whatever you think
Speaker 1: of all that, and I'll get to what I think.
Speaker 1: The point is that Jim Winer didn't wander into a vacuum.
Speaker 1: He walked into a fully built system that knew exactly
Speaker 1: what to do with a man like him, and the
Speaker 1: system did it. The investigation that followed is a big
Speaker 1: part of why Aligosh got the reputation it did, because
Speaker 1: Fowler didn't just book a hypnotist and a tape recorder.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the inquiry, his team ran background
Speaker 1: checks on all four witnesses, pulled meta records, collected diaries,
Speaker 1: and cross checked the men's accounts of the trip against
Speaker 1: each other and against the physical realities of the waterway,
Speaker 1: They arranged psychological evaluations, and at the center of it
Speaker 1: all sat fifteen hypnosis sessions spread across fourteen months, run
Speaker 1: by a certified hypnotherapist out of Beverly, Massachusetts named Anthony Constantino.
Speaker 1: The ground rules mattered because Fowler understood the obvious objection.
Speaker 1: Four friends who've had twelve years to talk to each
Speaker 1: other are contaminated witnesses by definition. So the men were
Speaker 1: regressed separately, and they agreed not to discuss the content
Speaker 1: of their sessions with each other. While the work was
Speaker 1: going on. Each man went under a loan with no
Speaker 1: audience of buddies nodding along, and told his story to
Speaker 1: the tape. If you've never seen a regression session, it's
Speaker 1: nothing like the stage version. There's no swinging. Watch the
Speaker 1: subject reclines, The hypnotist talks him down into deep relaxation,
Speaker 1: and then walks him backward through time toward the target event,
Speaker 1: asking open questions, where are you, what do you see?
Speaker 1: What happens next? Done?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: It's quiet and slow and tedious right up until it isn't.
Speaker 1: With these four men, it stopped being tedious fast. Constantino
Speaker 1: would later call the aligish sessions the most intense experience
Speaker 1: of his career as a hypnotist, and the tapes back
Speaker 1: him up. These weren't calm recitations. The men wept, they shook,
Speaker 1: they begged, grown men in a Massachusetts office in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, reliving something with their bodies, whatever their minds
Speaker 1: had or hadn't manufactured. Here's the account that came out
Speaker 1: of those fifteen sessions, assembled from four separate chairs. The
Speaker 1: memory picks up where the conscious version cuts out. In
Speaker 1: the canoe inside the light, The men described being taken
Speaker 1: up the beam, not climbing, rising, drawn up out of
Speaker 1: the canoe and into the underside of the object into
Speaker 1: a place. None of them had words for it first,
Speaker 1: so they reached for the words they had. Charlie Folt
Speaker 1: said it was like a doctor's office, and cold, the
Speaker 1: way a doctor's office is cold. Chuck Rack said it
Speaker 1: reminded him of a vet's office. Hard surfaces and a
Speaker 1: silvery table, everything bright with light that didn't seem to
Speaker 1: come from anywhere, and they weren't alone in it. The beings,
Speaker 1: as all four described them, were slender and gray skinned,
Speaker 1: with oversized heads on thin necks, long, languid limbs and
Speaker 1: hands with four digits. The eyes were the detail that
Speaker 1: broke everybody's composure, large and dark, with no pupils anyone
Speaker 1: could find, and Jack compared the way they caught the
Speaker 1: light to glass, no hair, nothing you'd call a nose,
Speaker 1: and a slit where a mouth should be that never moved,
Speaker 1: because when they communicated, the words just arrived inside the
Speaker 1: head without sound. Jack repeated, under hypnosis, what got pressed
Speaker 1: into him while their faces hung inches from his own.
Speaker 1: Don't be afraid, do what we say, Just do what
Speaker 1: we say. Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. The men were made to
Speaker 1: undress and they were seated together on a bench, which
Speaker 1: is the image that had been surfacing in the twins'
Speaker 1: nightmares for years before anyone ever went under the bright room.
Speaker 1: The bench, the four of them naked and not helping
Speaker 1: each other. Under hypnosis, that picture finally got its context.
Speaker 1: They weren't refusing to help, they couldn't. Each man described
Speaker 1: a controlled passivity watching what happened to his friends with
Speaker 1: his own will, idling and neutral. One at a time,
Speaker 1: they were taken to the table the examinations as they
Speaker 1: came back were methodical and cold, a curved silvery instrument,
Speaker 1: a panel positioned over the chest, scrapings taken from the arms,
Speaker 1: the chest, the legs, and the thighs. Samples of fluids, blood, urine,
Speaker 1: and semen. That last one collected by a device. Men
Speaker 1: could describe but couldn't explain. Charlie on the table kept
Speaker 1: coming back to one small human thought running on a
Speaker 1: loop underneath the whole procedure, that he just wanted to
Speaker 1: be back in the canoe. Chuck, watching from the bench,
Speaker 1: described some kind of device on Charlie's body and his
Speaker 1: own complete inability to do anything about it. Jim Session
Speaker 1: produced the line that, for my money, is the most
Speaker 1: human thing on any of those tapes. It's not a description,
Speaker 1: it's a judgment, delivered with the anger of a man
Speaker 1: who's finally located the source of twelve bad years. I
Speaker 1: don't like these things. I don't care where they come from.
Speaker 1: They shouldn't be doing this to people. Chuck Rack's account
Speaker 1: had a wrinkle all its own, and it's a strange one.
Speaker 1: He reported that he had trouble seeing the beings at
Speaker 1: all when he tried to focus on them directly. The
Speaker 1: image wouldn't resolve, and he compared it to trying to
Speaker 1: tune in a fuzzy radio station, the signal there but
Speaker 1: never locking in. Believers have read that as some perceptual
Speaker 1: of effect of the beings themselves. Skeptics have read it
Speaker 1: as a man whose imagery simply wasn't producing, And that
Speaker 1: detail gets very interesting later in this story, because Chuck
Speaker 1: Rack isn't done surprising anybody. The sessions themselves stretched across
Speaker 1: more than a year, and by the accounts of the
Speaker 1: people in the room, they had to be paced carefully
Speaker 1: and sometimes eased back when the distress ran too high.
Speaker 1: Through all of it, the men kept their agreement not
Speaker 1: to compare notes while the work was live, and that's
Speaker 1: a harder promise than it sounds. Four friends carrying the
Speaker 1: worst material of their lives forbidden to hand any of
Speaker 1: it to the only three people on earth who'd understand it,
Speaker 1: and the pact held anyway. Whatever else turns out to
Speaker 1: be true about the Aligosh four, they took the process seriously.
Speaker 1: Fowler's investigation also concluded that the beings showed a particular
Speaker 1: interest in the twins, and whatever you make of the case,
Speaker 1: you have to admit the logic hangs together in a
Speaker 1: cold sort of way. If your project is sampling as
Speaker 1: species identical twins are a gift. Two organisms running the
Speaker 1: same genetic code down two separate lives, a natural experiment
Speaker 1: delivered to your table in one canoe. That thread runs
Speaker 1: through the whole file, from the attention Jim and Jack
Speaker 1: described during the exams, to the fact that it was
Speaker 1: both brothers and only the brothers at first, whose nights
Speaker 1: came apart in the years afterward, and the language the
Speaker 1: men used for the beings never went where the movies
Speaker 1: would take it. Nobody described menace exactly or faces you
Speaker 1: could read anger or appetite. In what came through on
Speaker 1: those tapes over and over was something worse in its
Speaker 1: own way, a total absence of anything to negotiate with
Speaker 1: Jack groping for a comparison reached for insects, the hands,
Speaker 1: the movement, the indifference, and you don't plead with the mantis.
Speaker 1: Charlie's doctor's office line lands the same way once you
Speaker 1: turn it over. Not cruelty procedure. Jim's fury on the
Speaker 1: tape is the fury of a man who understands that
Speaker 1: the things he's angry at wouldn't even recognize the complaint
Speaker 1: when it was over. By their account, they were returned
Speaker 1: down the beam, into the canoe, and deposited back into
Speaker 1: the ordinary night, with their memories already sealed. Over four
Speaker 1: men standing on a beach, feeling nothing but a heavy,
Speaker 1: wrong calm, looking at a fire that had burned down
Speaker 1: hours too soon. That was the story on the tapes,
Speaker 1: four versions of it, taken separately. And the claim that
Speaker 1: made Alligash famous is that they matched, not word for word,
Speaker 1: because real corroboration never works that way, and word for
Speaker 1: word agreement is what rehearsal looks like. These accounts matched,
Speaker 1: agreeing on the structure and the substance, while differing in
Speaker 1: vantage and detail. The beam, the rising, the cold room,
Speaker 1: the bench, the undressing, the table and the curved instrument.
Speaker 1: The scrapings and the samples and the beings got described
Speaker 1: consistently enough that when the four of them sat down
Speaker 1: and drew what they'd seen trained artists, all the sketches
Speaker 1: lined up, the heads, the eyes, the hands. Fowler put
Speaker 1: those drawings side by side, and they read like four
Speaker 1: witnesses describing the same suspect. That's the other thing Aligosh
Speaker 1: had that most cases don't. These men could draw. When
Speaker 1: a truck driver tells you the entity had strange hands,
Speaker 1: you get an adjective. When a sculptor tells you, you
Speaker 1: get a rendering. And the Alligash file filled up with
Speaker 1: detailed sketches of the beings, the instruments, the interior of
Speaker 1: the craft, and the object over the trees. Fowler pushed
Speaker 1: the work past the tapes too. The four men sat
Speaker 1: for polygraph examinations and all four passed. They sat for
Speaker 1: psychiatric evaluation, and the finding was that all four were
Speaker 1: mentally stable, with none of the pathologies that would have
Speaker 1: offered an easy exit from the case. No psychosis, no
Speaker 1: fantasy prone profiles, four sane, functional, employed adult men. Fowler
Speaker 1: also went digging through their histories and surfaced claims of
Speaker 1: odd experiences running back into the twins childhoods, and he
Speaker 1: weighed Jack's overnight lump. And he ran the whole account
Speaker 1: against a survey of some two hundred and seventy abduction
Speaker 1: reports compiled by the folklors Thomas Bullard at Indiana University,
Speaker 1: checking Alligash against the patterns that kept recurring across the
Speaker 1: literature the interest in reproduction, the sampling, the paralysis, the
Speaker 1: missing time. By Fowler's scoring, Aligash.
Speaker 2: Hit the marks. When the work was done.
Speaker 1: The case file ran to ten volumes and more than
Speaker 1: seven hundred pages, and in nineteen ninety three, Fowler published
Speaker 1: it all as a book called the Alligash Abductions, and
Speaker 1: the four quiet art school friends from Boston stopped being
Speaker 1: quiet forever. The book landed at the absolute high tide
Speaker 1: of abduction culture in America. Whitley Strieber's Communion had spent
Speaker 1: months on the bestseller lists back in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: with that gaunt, almond eyed face staring off the cover
Speaker 1: from every airport book rack in the country. Bud Hopkins
Speaker 1: was filling lecture halls. A Pulitzer winning Harvard psychiatrist named
Speaker 1: John Mack was about to carry the whole phenomenon into
Speaker 1: the Ivy League at real cost to his own career,
Speaker 1: because Harvard would eventually convene a committee to review his work,
Speaker 1: and he'd spend years defending his right to take these
Speaker 1: patients seriously. Mac himself took an interest in the Alligash
Speaker 1: case because it posed his favorite question in its purest form,
Speaker 1: what do you do with sane, stable, credible people who
Speaker 1: report impossible things and carry real trauma over them. He
Speaker 1: never claimed to have the answer, but he insisted to
Speaker 1: the end of his life that the suffering was genuine
Speaker 1: and the people weren't crazy. And Aligash let him make
Speaker 1: that argument with a straight face, because the psychiatric workups
Speaker 1: were already sitting in the file and they were clean.
Speaker 1: The Alligash four, as the press started calling them, got
Speaker 1: the full ride. There was the Unsolved Mystery segment with
Speaker 1: the re enactment that burned this case into a whole generation,
Speaker 1: the Canoe on black Water, the Cone of Light, the Bench.
Speaker 1: There was the daytime television circuit, including a sit down
Speaker 1: on the Joan Rivers Show, which is a sentence I
Speaker 1: still enjoy saying out loud. Four men who'd spent over
Speaker 1: a decade afraid to bring this up at parties were
Speaker 1: now describing Semen extraction to a national audience between commercial breaks.
Speaker 1: Their sketches took on a life of their own in
Speaker 1: those years too, because these four could actually draw their
Speaker 1: renderings of the beings in the craft traveled far beyond
Speaker 1: the case file, reproduced in books, flashed on television, pinned
Speaker 1: up at conferences. Jack's drawings, in particular, the long hands,
Speaker 1: the domed heads, those eyes became reference images, the pictures
Speaker 1: other people pointed at when they said, that's what I saw,
Speaker 1: which creates a genuine chicken and egg problem that both
Speaker 1: sides of this debate have to live with. Believers say
Speaker 1: the drawings match the wider phenomenon because the phenomenon is
Speaker 1: real and consistent. Skeptics say the wider phenomenon matches the
Speaker 1: drawings and communions cover and the Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: reconstructions because the imagery was feeding on itself by then
Speaker 1: every famous case, quietly teaching the next witness what to remember.
Speaker 2: Either way, four.
Speaker 1: Art students from Boston helped paint the face that now
Speaker 1: stares out from every gas station Alien keychain in America.
Speaker 2: There's a version of.
Speaker 1: This story where that's their whole legacy, and there's another
Speaker 1: version where.
Speaker 2: It's the least of it.
Speaker 1: It's easy from the outside to look at all those
Speaker 1: television appearances and think payday, and we're going to get
Speaker 1: to the money because one of the four eventually put
Speaker 1: the money at the center of everything. But going public
Speaker 1: as an abductee in the early nineties bought you a
Speaker 1: very specific life. Strangers at your art shows asking about
Speaker 1: the ship instead of the work, neighbors doing the eyebrow
Speaker 1: thing job, interviews where you could watch the moment the
Speaker 1: interviewer placed your name, your kids, friend's parents, having quiet
Speaker 1: conversations you weren't part of the word. Abductee is a tattoo,
Speaker 1: and these four men took it in an era when
Speaker 1: there was no polite cultural category for what they were claiming,
Speaker 1: just the tabloid one. Charlie Foltz, years down the road,
Speaker 1: boiled his whole position down to a shrug. And I
Speaker 1: find it more persuasive than most sworn testimony.
Speaker 2: I've ever heard. If you believe it, that's all right.
Speaker 1: If you don't believe it, I don't care, because it
Speaker 1: did happen. For about two decades. That's where Alligash stood.
Speaker 1: Four witnesses, one story, no cracks. If you were building
Speaker 1: the argument for the abduction phenomenon in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: this case was a load bearing wall. Betty and Barney
Speaker 1: Hill were two witnesses who were married to each other.
Speaker 1: Travis Walton's logging crew saw a craft, but only Walton
Speaker 1: went aboard Aligash had four separate men, four separate regressions,
Speaker 1: four matching accounts, four past polygraphs, and a seven hundred
Speaker 1: page file. But after the wave crested, the four went
Speaker 1: back to their lives or tried to. The art careers continued.
Speaker 1: The story became a permanent line in each of their biographies,
Speaker 1: wheeled out every August by anniversary features and every few
Speaker 1: years by another documentary crew. Jim stayed the most engaged
Speaker 1: with the research world, and the others drifted out to
Speaker 1: their own distances from it, and somewhere in those years,
Speaker 1: quietly out of the public eye, the friendship at the
Speaker 1: center of the whole thing began to rot. Money that
Speaker 1: never materialized, grievances over who said what to which, producer
Speaker 1: the ordinary corrosion that sets in when four people are
Speaker 1: chained together by the strangest night of their lives and
Speaker 1: can never ever put it down. By the twenty tens,
Speaker 1: Chuck Rack and the other three were done with each other.
Speaker 1: Then came twenty sixteen. In late August of that year,
Speaker 1: forty years almost to the week after the night on
Speaker 1: Eagle Lake, a reporter for a main newspaper got Chuck
Speaker 1: Rack on the phone. Raq was in a motel room
Speaker 1: in Bethany, Missouri, a long way from the Alligash in
Speaker 1: every sense, and he decided he was done. The abduction
Speaker 1: he said didn't happen. His words from that interview detonated
Speaker 1: a twenty three year old case in two sentences, the
Speaker 1: reason I supported the story at first was because I
Speaker 1: wanted to make money, And then describing the mindset of
Speaker 1: the group during the flush years of the book and
Speaker 1: the television circuit, we were compelled to stay together, all
Speaker 1: speculating that this thing could go into the millions of
Speaker 1: dollars for each of us. But the fact is we
Speaker 1: made very little money. Now, a recantation is evidence too,
Speaker 1: and it's exactly as messy as original testimony. So it's
Speaker 1: worth slowing down and looking at what RAC actually took back,
Speaker 1: because it's narrower than the headlines made it sound. He
Speaker 1: didn't say the trip was fake. He didn't say the
Speaker 1: sighting was fake. In that same interview, he specifically affirmed
Speaker 1: that the group witnessed an unidentified object on the night
Speaker 1: in question, and another one two nights earlier over Chamberlain Lake.
Speaker 1: The lights, according to the man tearing the story down,
Speaker 1: were real. What Rack withdrew was the abduction, and even
Speaker 1: there his claim was oddly specific. He said his own
Speaker 1: hypnosis sessions had produced no abduction recall at all. Nothing
Speaker 1: came up for him, and he'd spent years publicly claiming otherwise,
Speaker 1: writing along on the recovered memories of the other three,
Speaker 1: remember the fuzzy radio station. Even inside the original case file,
Speaker 1: back when everybody was still on the same team, Rack's
Speaker 1: regression material was the thin one, the account of a
Speaker 1: man who couldn't quite bring the beings into focus, who
Speaker 1: sat in the story as the watcher on the bench
Speaker 1: rather than the subject on the table. Fowler's own records
Speaker 1: preserved that scene, and in twenty sixteen, Rack reached down
Speaker 1: and tore the case open along it. There's context you
Speaker 1: shouldn't skip, though. Rack and the other three had fallen
Speaker 1: out badly well before the recantation, and he said so
Speaker 1: himself by his telling. The split came first and the
Speaker 1: truth telling followed, and you're free to run that causality
Speaker 1: in either direction. Maybe a man freed from loyalty finally
Speaker 1: said what he'd always known, or maybe a man estranged
Speaker 1: and broke took a swing at the thing his former
Speaker 1: friends still held sacred. Both versions of that movie look
Speaker 1: identical from the cheap seats. And then there's the money itself.
Speaker 1: Because Rack's stated motive for the original support was financial,
Speaker 1: and his stated grievance was that the money never came.
Speaker 1: We made very little. Here's what's strange about that. If
Speaker 1: money was the engine, it was the engine for a
Speaker 1: story that mostly generated ridicule, a modest book, some television
Speaker 1: scale fees, and four permanently strange reputations. Whatever the alligash
Speaker 1: for expected what they actually got wouldn't cover a used truck.
Speaker 1: And that fact sits just as awkwardly under the other three,
Speaker 1: the ones who kept telling the story for decades after
Speaker 1: it was obvious there were no millions in it. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. People maintain lucrative lies all the time. Maintaining
Speaker 1: an unprofitable one for forty years takes something other than greed.
Speaker 1: The other three, for the record, didn't budge, not in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen and not after. Jim Winer, Jack Winer, and
Speaker 1: Charlie Folts have held their account through the recantation, through
Speaker 1: the skeptical pylon that followed it, and through every anniversary,
Speaker 1: retelling sense and their position has stayed right where Folts
Speaker 1: planted his flag.
Speaker 2: It happened.
Speaker 1: Believe what you want, So, as of today, the Aligosh
Speaker 1: abductions is a case with a three to one split
Speaker 1: among its own witnesses, which makes it, depending on where
Speaker 1: you already stand, either fatally compromised or more honest than
Speaker 1: any case where four p people agree perfectly. For forty years,
Speaker 1: the reaction to the recantation split the same way, and
Speaker 1: watching it play out told you more about the audience
Speaker 1: than the case. Skeptics treated it as the confession that
Speaker 1: closed the book, one of the four finally saying the
Speaker 1: quiet part out loud, and plenty of headlines ran exactly
Speaker 1: that way. The research community pushed back that Rack had
Speaker 1: always been the outlier, the man on the bench the
Speaker 1: fuzzy radio station, and that his own words confirmed the
Speaker 1: sighting even while he was torching the rest. Both sides
Speaker 1: claimed the same interview as a win, which is about
Speaker 1: the most twenty sixteen thing I can think of. And
Speaker 1: underneath the arguing sat three men in their sixties reading
Speaker 1: in the newspaper that their old friend had just called
Speaker 1: them liars or fools, and declining one more time to blink.
Speaker 1: Strip the case down to its load bearing structure, and
Speaker 1: everything extraordinary in it, everything beyond lights over a lake,
Speaker 1: rests on one foundation. Hypnotic regression performed twelve to thirteen
Speaker 1: years after the event, and the history of that tool
Speaker 1: is not a happy one. Back in the seventies, police
Speaker 1: departments across the country embraced forensic hypnosis with real enthusiasm.
Speaker 1: Los Angeles trained officers in it. Investigators used it to
Speaker 1: sharpen witness recall in kidnappings and homicides, and for a
Speaker 1: while it looked like a miracle because hypnotized witnesses produced
Speaker 1: so much plate, numbers, faces, dialogue, all of it flowing
Speaker 1: like water from a tap. Then the science caught up
Speaker 1: and the news was bad. Memory, it turns out, isn't
Speaker 1: stored footage that hypnosis can rewind. It's a reconstruction, rebuilt
Speaker 1: fresh every time you recall it, and hypnosis is a
Speaker 1: state of heightened suggestibility in which that reconstruction process runs hot.
Speaker 1: Hypnotized subjects generate more detail true and false alike, and
Speaker 1: they can't tell the difference. The act of recalling under
Speaker 1: hypnosis welds the new material into the memory with the
Speaker 1: confidence it never earned, so the subject comes out more
Speaker 1: certain than he went in, regardless of accuracy. The courts
Speaker 1: looked at that research and slammed the door through the eighties.
Speaker 1: State after state restricted or flat out barred hypnotically refreshed testimony,
Speaker 1: and the California Supreme Court put it about as bluntly
Speaker 1: as courts ever put anything, ruling that once a witness
Speaker 1: has been hypnotized about an event, that witness's testimony on
Speaker 1: it is compromised.
Speaker 2: Period.
Speaker 1: The Aligash regressions were conducted in the late eighties, squarely
Speaker 1: inside the era when the legal system was throwing this
Speaker 1: tool out of the building. And the contamination problem here
Speaker 1: isn't hypothetical because it comes with dates. The men went
Speaker 1: under in nineteen eighty eight and eighty nine. Communion had
Speaker 1: been a number one best seller in eighty seven. Close
Speaker 1: Encounters had been a cultural monument for a decade. The Hillcase,
Speaker 1: with its beam and in its Missing time and its
Speaker 1: medical exam, had already been a book, a magazine serial,
Speaker 1: and a television movie by the time Anthony Constantino said
Speaker 1: relax and go back to the lake. Every American with
Speaker 1: a library card and a television set already owned a
Speaker 1: complete template for what happens after the light hits the canoe,
Speaker 1: the bench, the table, the samples, the grays. Skeptical researchers
Speaker 1: who work this case put names on that mechanism too.
Speaker 1: A psychologist named William Cole argued the recovered material was
Speaker 1: assembled from media the men had absorbed, and skeptics of
Speaker 1: that era liked to trace the whole iconography back even
Speaker 1: further to a nineteen fifty three picture called Invaders from Mars,
Speaker 1: the first film to put aliens and their craft in
Speaker 1: front of American audiences in color. You don't have to
Speaker 1: buy that specific family tree to take the underlying point,
Speaker 1: which is that by nineteen eighty eight, nobody in America
Speaker 1: was walking into a regression session with a blank imagination.
Speaker 1: The memory science kept getting worse for cases like this
Speaker 1: one as the years went on. Through the nineties, researchers
Speaker 1: like Elizabeth Loftis demonstrated in controlled settings that entire false
Speaker 1: autobiographical memories, rich detailed emotional ones could be planted in
Speaker 1: ordinary adults with nothing more exotic than suggestion and repetition.
Speaker 1: Subjects wept while recalling childhood events that never happened. The
Speaker 1: clinical world was living through the recovered memory catastrophe at
Speaker 1: the same time, families destroyed by therapy excavated accusations that
Speaker 1: later collapsed, and the lesson of that era got written
Speaker 1: in ruined lives. Sincere recall, vivid recall, tearful recall is
Speaker 1: not evidence of an event. The tears on the Allagash
Speaker 1: tapes are real, and that was never the question. The
Speaker 1: question is what they're attached to. Even the famous matching
Speaker 1: account shrink under this light. Yes, the sessions were separate,
Speaker 1: but the men had twelve years of shared life between
Speaker 1: the life and the tapes, twelve years in which the
Speaker 1: twins traded nightmare descriptions, in which the group talked over
Speaker 1: the siding in which Jim researched his own night episodes.
Speaker 1: The independence that makes corroboration means something was gone before
Speaker 1: Session one and four. People who've talked don't need to
Speaker 1: collude in order to converge. They just need to be human.
Speaker 1: The polygraphs don't rescue it either, and I'll keep this short.
Speaker 1: A polygraph measures physiological arousal against questioning. It doesn't measure truth.
Speaker 1: It measures what you believe and what you fear. So
Speaker 1: four men who sincerely believed their recovered memories would pass
Speaker 1: cleanly while telling you things that never occurred. Passing the
Speaker 1: box proves the Aligosh four weren't consciously lying in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three. It can't prove the memories were real. And
Speaker 1: those are different claims, and the entire case turns on
Speaker 1: the difference. Then there's the fire, the one piece of
Speaker 1: physical evidence in the whole account, and I'll be honest,
Speaker 1: it's softer than i'd like it to be. The missing
Speaker 1: time rests entirely on the men's estimate of how long
Speaker 1: that bonfire should have burned versus how long they were
Speaker 1: on the water, and both of those numbers are guesses.
Speaker 1: Anybody with real campfire miles knows big fires or moody
Speaker 1: dry wood, a rising wind off the lake, a pile
Speaker 1: that collapses and opens its own core, And your three
Speaker 1: hour fire is coals inside of one, And time on
Speaker 1: dark water is famously elastic in the other direction. Because
Speaker 1: absorbed men fish for two hours and swear it was
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. I'm not saying that's what happened out there.
Speaker 1: I'm saying a burned down fire is an anomaly, not
Speaker 1: a clock, and the two hour gap everybody quotes was
Speaker 1: never measured by anything. Add Jim's temporo olympic epilepsy, a
Speaker 1: condition documented to produce presence, hallucinations and dreamlike intrusions. Add
Speaker 1: ordinary sleep paralysis for Jack, which afflicts millions of people
Speaker 1: and manufactures bedroom intruders as its signature symptom. Add one
Speaker 1: motivated sincere believing investigator whose previous landmark case was also
Speaker 1: built through regression. Add a hungry early nineties media, and
Speaker 1: then subtract Chuck Rack. That's the skeptical construction. And I've
Speaker 1: laid it out at full strength on purpose because it's
Speaker 1: a serious account of this case, and anybody who tells
Speaker 1: this story without it is selling you something. But that
Speaker 1: construction has a hole in the middle of it, and
Speaker 1: it's the same hole it started with the sighting. Everything
Speaker 1: the skeptics dismantle, they dismantle downstream of the beam, the hypnosis,
Speaker 1: the exams, the bench fine argue all of it, but
Speaker 1: the conscious pre hypnosis for witness account, the eighty foot
Speaker 1: silent sphere with the swirling surface, the response to Charlie's flashlight,
Speaker 1: the cone of light crossing the water toward the canoe,
Speaker 1: the instant cut from flight to shore. None of that
Speaker 1: came out of a regression session. It was reported from
Speaker 1: the start, remembered without anyone's assistance, and repeated consistently for
Speaker 1: fifty years. And in twenty sixteen, when Chuck rack burned
Speaker 1: every bridge he had to this story, when he had
Speaker 1: every reason to raise it to the waterline, he left
Speaker 1: that part standing, both sightings his words. So the debunker
Speaker 1: still owes an answer to the original question, the one
Speaker 1: four young men were asking each other on a beach
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy six, and swamp gas over Eagle Lake
Speaker 1: isn't going to cover an object that reoriented and approached
Speaker 1: a canoe in response to a signal light. A star
Speaker 1: doesn't do that, a satellite doesn't do that. Whatever was
Speaker 1: over that tree line behaved like it noticed them twice,
Speaker 1: And noticing is the one thing none of the mundane
Speaker 1: candidates can do. And when you start running through the
Speaker 1: less mundane candidates, nineteen seventy six doesn't give you much
Speaker 1: to work with. There were no civilian drones, obviously, and
Speaker 1: nothing remotely like one military craft. Is the explanation. People
Speaker 1: reach for and I understand the instinct, but you'd have
Speaker 1: to explain what an eighty foot silent platform with no
Speaker 1: navigation lights was doing loitering over a state waterway, chasing
Speaker 1: a canoe full of fishermen in an era when the
Speaker 1: closest thing we had to silent.
Speaker 2: Flight was a glider.
Speaker 1: A helicopter with a searchlight covers the beam and covers
Speaker 1: exactly nothing else, not the silence, not the hovering sphere,
Speaker 1: not the swirl of color, not an acceleration that took
Speaker 1: it from a dead stop to gone in a second.
Speaker 1: You can stack hypotheticals until you've built something that fits.
Speaker 1: But at some point the stack of hypotheticals gets less
Speaker 1: likely than the thing you were trying to explain away,
Speaker 1: and that's usually the moment honest people admit the word
Speaker 1: unidentified is doing legitimate work. The timing of the nightmares
Speaker 1: gives the contamination theory trouble too, more than it usually admits.
Speaker 1: Jack's bright room dreams, the bench, the naked friends, the
Speaker 1: leg all of it predates the hypnosis by years, and
Speaker 1: by the accounts we have, some of that imagery was
Speaker 1: already circulating in the Twins' nights before communion put the
Speaker 1: template on every night stand in America. You can still
Speaker 1: get there through twin suggestion and shared culture if you
Speaker 1: want to, but you have.
Speaker 2: To work for it.
Speaker 1: And the people who wave it off in a sentence
Speaker 1: haven't read the file. I keep coming back to the
Speaker 1: ledger of the three who stayed too. Hoaxes are investments,
Speaker 1: and they either pay or they get abandoned. This one
Speaker 1: never paid, Rack told a soe himself, and yet Jim
Speaker 1: and Jack and Charlie have carried it into their seventies
Speaker 1: through the mockery, through the recantation of their own friend,
Speaker 1: decade after decade, with nothing left to gain except the
Speaker 1: ability to look at themselves in the mirror. People lie constantly,
Speaker 1: fluently and for terrible reasons. But a story a man
Speaker 1: keeps holding at his own expense for fifty years has
Speaker 1: usually stopped being a story to him.
Speaker 2: It's a wound. And in all that.
Speaker 1: Time, nobody has ever caught the Alligash four and the
Speaker 1: kind of lie that actually unravels these things. Nobody surfaced
Speaker 1: a bar receipt from Bangor for the night in question.
Speaker 1: Nobody found a draft of the tale written before the trip,
Speaker 1: or a witness who heard them planning it, or a
Speaker 1: fifth man who was really there. The one crack in
Speaker 1: this case came from inside, from Rack, and even his
Speaker 1: version leaves the object in the sky. When a story
Speaker 1: is built, it fails at the seams, at the logistics,
Speaker 1: at the small checkable facts, and this one has been
Speaker 1: checked for half a century by believers hoping to prove
Speaker 1: it and Debunker's hungry to bury it, and the seams
Speaker 1: have held. That doesn't make the abduction real, because a
Speaker 1: sincere false memory would survive the same scrutiny since there's
Speaker 1: nothing external for anyone to catch. But it does mean
Speaker 1: the simplest hostile theory four buddies cooking up a payday
Speaker 1: has never actually fit the record, not even after one
Speaker 1: of the four tried to hand it to us personally.
Speaker 1: So here's where land and the case divides itself for you.
Speaker 1: If you let it on one side sits the encounter.
Speaker 1: Four sober, capable witnesses with trained eyes giving immediate, consistent,
Speaker 1: conscious testimony about a structured object that was silent, responsive,
Speaker 1: and performing beyond anything flying in nineteen seventy six, with
Speaker 1: a physical anomaly waiting at the camp site. Fifty years
Speaker 1: of confirmation from all four witnesses, including the hostile one.
Speaker 1: Something was over Eagle Lake on August twenty sixth, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, and nobody has ever identified it. And that's
Speaker 1: not folklore. That's an evidence backed unknown. On the other
Speaker 1: side sits the abduction, and the honest answer there is
Speaker 1: that the evidence is human testimony refracted through a tool
Speaker 1: are own courts, examined and rejected, recovered in the most
Speaker 1: contaminated decade imaginable from witnesses who could no longer be
Speaker 1: independent and now carrying a one in four defection. I
Speaker 1: can't take that side of the case to the and
Speaker 1: I won't pretend otherwise. What I also won't do is
Speaker 1: call three men liars just to make my own filing
Speaker 1: system tidy. Because something tore up the wine or twins
Speaker 1: Nights for a decade before anybody ever said the word hypnosis.
Speaker 2: Whether it was.
Speaker 1: Eagle Lake or a wounded temporal lobe or the black
Speaker 1: water of the mind doing what it does down there,
Speaker 1: I don't know, and neither does anyone else who's being
Speaker 1: straight with you. What I do know is that four
Speaker 1: friends went into the deepest wilderness in the Eastern United States,
Speaker 1: looking for trout, and something up there looked back. They
Speaker 1: built a fire to find their way home, and by
Speaker 1: every account we have, home is the one place none
Speaker 1: of them ever fully got back to. The Alligash is
Speaker 1: still there. The waterway still runs its cold miles through
Speaker 1: the North Main Woods. The floatplanes still drop fishermen onto
Speaker 1: Tilus Lake, and those two rusting locomotives still sit in
Speaker 1: the trees near Eagle Lake getting swallowed a little more
Speaker 1: every year. Camp at smith Brook without knowing the name
Speaker 1: means anything, and rangers still tell people to build a
Speaker 1: good fire if they're heading out on the water after dark,
Speaker 1: because the shoreline all looks the same at night and
Speaker 1: you need something to steer home by. The lake keeps
Speaker 1: its surface blank. Jim, Jack and Charlie are old men now.
Speaker 1: Chuck Rack painted until the end and went to his
Speaker 1: grave holding his half of the split that the lights
Speaker 1: were real and the rest was not.
Speaker 2: Somewhere in a.
Speaker 1: File, the tapes of those fifteen sessions still exist. Four
Speaker 1: voices in a quiet office, shaking, describing the cold room,
Speaker 1: one chair at a time. Fifty years this August. Nobody
Speaker 1: has ever explained the object, and nobody has ever proven
Speaker 1: the abduction, and every summer somebody out on Eagle Lake
Speaker 1: after dark looks up from their line at the black
Speaker 1: wall of the tree line and feels, just for a second,
Speaker 1: the oldest alarm system we own brush the back of
Speaker 1: their neck. Most of the time, it's nothing, most of
Speaker 1: the time.