Subject: Close Encounters

Summary: An interesting article...

Keywords: Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Date: 29 Sep 93 22:47:09 GMT

Organization: AT&T

This article was taken from the Arts&Leisure section of the North Shore Sunday

newspaper published in Salem, MA dated September 12, 1993:

CLOSE ENCOUNTER 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."

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