Charlie Foltz is one of the four men at the center of the Allagash abduction case. In August 1976 he and three fellow students from the Massachusetts College of Art, twin brothers Jack and Jim Weiner and Chuck Rak, were canoeing the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine when, by their account, a large glowing object appeared over Eagle Lake. Foltz and the Weiners later said they had been taken aboard the craft, and the story became one of the most widely publicized multiple-witness abduction claims in the United States.

According to the men, they were night fishing on Eagle Lake when the light rose over the treetops. Foltz has said he first took it for the moon, then flashed an SOS at it with a flashlight, after which the object stopped and sent down a cone of blue light he likened to "a giant glass straw." The next thing the men said they remembered was standing on the shore, where their campfire had burned out as though far more time had passed than they could account for. Rak said the group reported the lights to a ranger the next day and was told they probably came from a hardware store's grand opening in Millinocket, an explanation he rejected.

The abduction account emerged years later. After a fall left Jim Weiner with seizures, he reported visions of beings in his bedroom and contacted UFO investigator Raymond Fowler. In hypnotic regression sessions in the late 1980s, the Weiners and Foltz described small grey beings taking them aboard a craft for what they experienced as medical examinations. Foltz has recalled lying on a table under a focused blue light while the beings carried out what he called "a clinical examination of me for lack of another term." Fowler's 1993 book The Allagash Abductions brought national attention, and the men appeared on The Joan Rivers Show and Unsolved Mysteries.

The case has been contested from within. In 2016 Rak told The County, a northern Maine newspaper, that the abductions never happened, that he had backed the story at first "because I wanted to make money," and that he regarded it as storytelling rather than a hoax. Dread Central reported in 2021 that the other men maintained an abduction had taken place, and Foltz has continued to tell the story publicly.

Interest revived in 2026. In May, Foltz and Jim Weiner gave a long interview to Jesse Michels on American Alchemy, which promoted it with claims of lasting physical aftereffects, including bald patches and benign tumors on the men's shins and tissue it said military pathology could not identify. The conversation also covered stories involving astronaut Gordon Cooper and engineer John Norseen, and a separate 1970 sighting Foltz associated with the USS Holland. In June, Ryan Sprague's Somewhere in the Skies devoted an episode to the case, drawing on testimony from Foltz, the Weiners and Fowler as well as skeptical critiques. Fifty years after the canoe trip, Foltz remains one of its principal witnesses and, with Jim Weiner, its most active public voice.