This article was taken from the Arts&Leisure section of the North Shore Sunday newspaper published in Salem, MA dated September 12, 1993:
by Alexander Stevens
Anthony Constantino’s hypnosis sessions helped four men relive their alleged UFO abductions
When you chat with Anthony Constantino, there’s always one inevitable question: “Do you believe them?” “Them” is a group of four friends who went camping on the Allagash Waterway in northern Maine in the summer of 1976. Maybe you saw them recently on the Joan Rivers Show, where they detailed an ordeal in which they claimed they had a close encounter with a UFO. They are receiving national attention with the release this summer of “The Allagash Abductions” written by Raymond Fowler of Wenham who is a director of investigations for the Mutual UFO Network.
Those who are familiar with this case know that the full story, with all its mysterious and harrowing details, wasn’t revealed until Anthony Constantino of Beverly placed the four men under hypnosis, and revealed events that had been pushed into their unconscious.
It was the most intense experience I’ve had as a hypnotist,” says Constantino. The conscious part of the story begins on Thursday, August 26, 1976, when the four men – Chuck Rak, Charlie Foltz, and identical twins Jim and Jack Weiner, set up camp on Eagle Lake in Maine, and decided to go fishing in the evening. They built a huge bonfire to act as a beacon for their return to camp.
Soon after they were out in their canoe, they saw “a large bright sphere of colored light hovering motionless and soundless about 200 to 300 feet above the southeastern rim of the cove,” according to Rak.
Foltz blinked a flashlight at the object. Maybe that was a bad idea. The UFO began to approach the canoe, while a cone-shaped beam of light from the object struck the water and began following the canoe. More inspired than any Olympic athletes, the four campers began paddling for shore.
But the beam engulfed them, and the next thing they remembered, they were in the canoe, near the shore of the lake, watching the UFO ascend and disappear. The bonfire was now nothing more than embers. Built with heavy logs, the fire should have lasted hours. It was the first indication that more time had elapsed than they could remember, but they had no conscious memory of what had happened.
It was years later before the four men explored that missing period of time. When Jim Weiner suffered tempero-limbic epilepsy, his doctors asked him to report any unusual experiences that might be symptomatic. Weiner described his UFO experience, and various phenomena that had happened to him and his camping buddies since then. His doctors suggested he contact a UFO researcher.
Enter Anthony Constantino. A professional hypnotist from Beverly, who also works as an English teacher at Masconomet High School, Constantino had hypnotized Ray Fowler in 1988, helping him to remember the details of Fowler’s own alleged abduction in Danvers.
Fowler was leading the investigation of the Allagash abductions for the Mutual UFO Network, and he wanted Constantino to hypnotize each of the four men separately.
All four men were willing to participate.
“It’s natural,” says Constantino. “They wanted to know if something had happened to them — especially if it were something traumatic. They wanted to know for sure.”
GOING UNDER
In 1989, in the dark den of Constantino’s Beverly home, each of the four men separately recounted a tale of being beamed aboard the UFO that night on Eagle Lake. Under hypnosis, they described the diffusely lit, sterile interior of the spacecraft, the spindly fingered big-eyed bald-headed aliens that Whitley Strieber popularized with his non-fiction book “Communion”, and strange medical experiments conducted on each man.
Constantino says Fowler was cool and professional as he observed the 12 hours of hypnosis sessions, but Constantino admits that at times he had difficulty repressing his own astonishment.
“I’m the one who kept making faces at Ray, like,’I can’t believe this. I can’t believe what was done to these guys.”
Which brings us back to The Question. Constantino conducted three-hour hypnosis sessions with each of the four men. He heard their voices fill with fear as they explained how medical instruments were inserted into their bodies, and how communication from the aliens was telepathic.
Constantino says he went into the session “with no pre-concieved notions,” nothing more than a healthy curiosity about an unexplained phenomenom.
But was he convinced?
“Do you believe them?” Constantino is asked.
He pauses and rubs his chin, as if weighing the gravity of the question.
He looks up and nods solemnly.
“I do,” he says. “After working with those guys, I was scared. I still am. I think it’s true. I think they were being tagged — the way we tag and study sharks and bears and then release them. The men were highly indignant that they were taken (aboard) and these things were done to them without their permission.
THE DANVERS ABDUCTION
It wasn’t the first time Constantino had seen a man tortured by a memory he couldn’t quite grasp. When Fowler went in search of a hypnotist to help him with the Allegash abductions, he asked Constantino, who was interviewing for the role of hypnotist, to put him under. Fowler wanted to see if he could remember any other details of his own abduction in Danvers.
Constantino says he will always remember how emotionally distraught Fowler became under hypnosis, as new details of his abduction emerged.
“He was sobbing and crying,” Constantino remembers. “I kept asking him if he wanted to stop, but he said, ‘No, lets go on.’ But finally he was shaking and I just couldn’t continue, so I pulled him out and we continued later.”
The new information was a vital part of Fowler’s 1990 Bantam book, “The Watchers,” which included his abduction from the Danvers home of his youth. And Constantino’s hypnosis sessions with the Allegash men were a key part of the 10-volume, 700 page report that Fowler filed. One of the intriguing aspects of Constantino’s character is that, although he believes the four Allegash men, he’s willing to play the role of the skeptic.
He admits that hypnosis is no truth serum. People can lie under hypnosis just as they can lie when they are fully conscious. In fact, people can even feign being hypnotized. Although there are checks a hypnotist can use to detect a fraud, they are never fool-proof.
Constantino also points out that people under hypnosis are prone to “confabulation.”
“Confabulation is not deliberate lying,” he says. “It’s an attempt by the subject to fill in gaps in the story. Maybe he wants answers for himself, or maybe he’s trying to please the hypnotist. Whatever the reason, it makes him create details that he can’t actually remember.”
The chances for confabulation are reduced by a hypnotist who knows how not to lead a subject in questioning. For example, the hypnotist doesn’t ask,” Did he have a moustache?” Instead, he says, “Look at his face, tell me what you see.”
Constantino admits that cynics have plenty of fodder against cases like the Allegash abductions. The four abducted men say they were warned not to tell anyone about the abduction, but Constantino points out, ” If (the aliens) were so advanced, why would they care if the men spoke about their experiences?”
And imagine how advanced a civilization would have to be to perfect a form of space travel that we could only imagine. They would be operating with a mastery of physics far beyond human comprehension. So, if an alien species were that advanced, doesn’t it seem likely that they would be able to pluck human guinea pigs, perform their experiments, and then wash the memories of their subjects so thoroughly that there wouldn’t even be an unconscious trace of the experience ?
And if the aliens aren’t afraid of being known ( after all, what could we possibly do to battle them?), why do these spaceships always appear in remote sections of Maine, rather than hovering over Manhattan?
And what are the chances that an alien from such a far-away galaxy would have such a B-movie, humanoid appearance?
Constantino admits that all these questions are valid. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says.
But that doesn’t stop him from believing. Not only is he convinced that these four respectable men believe what they are saying, he also believes they were actually abducted. “These are not four kooks,” he says. ” These are four decent, sincere human beings.”
“It bothers me when people who haven’t seen this (phenomenon) call the people who have ‘liars’. When you see these people sitting through hypnosis, suffering, when you see Ray Fowler crying at the memory, it’s not so easy to say they’re lying.”