Here's what I wrote about Travis Walton (Fire in the Sky) in James Lynch's UFO America!:
And then there was Travis Walton. Jesus. You can go through sixty years’ worth of UFO accounts and analyze them one by one. Patterns quickly emerge, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. On the other hand it’s next to impossible to examine each case in a vacuum, any more than one can look at UFOs over the years without taking into account the nation’s zeitgeist, or what was making us tick at the time, which hopefully this tome has done. UFO or “flying saucer” reports of the late forties were of strange things in the sky. That continued throughout the fifties, augmented—unfortunately—by the contactees. The sixties saw the continuation of “conventional” UFO reports and the demise of the contactees. With the exception of Betty and Barney Hill’s interrupted journey in 1961, it was pretty much business as usual. The early seventies saw an upswing in UFO sightings and renewed public interest, despite the Condon Committee’s report and the Air Force dropping off the scene. The Pascagula incident received far more coverage than it would have in a previous decade thanks to television, and in 1975 another UFO close encounter would draw even more media attention. Coming just two years after Charles Hickson’s and Calvin Parker’s alleged abduction by aliens, it would reinforce the archetype of people being snatched by aliens while in a remote location at night and pave the way—in my humble opinion, at least—for the archetype of people being snatched from the comfort of their homes by—presumably—those same pesky aliens. It was slow to happen, but ufology was definitely getting weirder, on the one hand following a seemingly logical progression—an alien agenda?--while at the same time straining believability and the bullshit meter even further, which was one of the reasons I bailed from the field, not to return for some time.
On the night of November 5, 1975, a crew of seven forest workers had finished their jobs, piled into a truck and were heading back to the small town of Snowflake, Arizona. While bumping along a rough road, two of the men said they saw a UFO hovering over the woods. Travis Walton, 22, jumped out of the still moving truck to investigate. As the truck drew to a stop, the men saw a blue-green flash, which knocked Walton off his feet. They panicked and took off, leaving Walton behind. They didn’t get far, however, for they realized that they simply could not ditch their friend behind. As they turned to head back, they saw a streak of light in the sky which they assumed was the UFO leaving. When they returned to the scene, Walton was nowhere to be found.
After a fruitless search, the men, led by Michael Rogers, a Forest Service contractor, contacted the sheriff’s office. Three deputies joined Rogers and some of the other men in the search for Walton. They gave up around midnight. Rogers and another man went to Walton’s home to inform his mother that Travis had gone missing and how. She seemed to take the news of her son’s possible alien abduction calmly.
For the next five days the search expanded and intensified, but there was still no trace of Walton. The story went out on the AP wire and soon NICAP, APRO and MUFON had field investigators on the scene. Reporters from The National Enquirer were there as well. As far as law enforcement was concerned, however, the case was less about flying saucers than a missing person’s, and they could not rule out foul play. Michael Rogers and five of the forestry crew were given polygraph examinations by the Arizona Department of Public Safety The conclusion: “These polygraph examinations proved• that these five men did see some object that they believe to be a UFO and that Travis Walton was not injured or murdered by any of these men. If an actual UFO did not exist and the UFO was a manmade hoax, five of these men had no prior knowledge of a hoax. No such determination can be made of the sixth man whose test results were inconclusive.”
Shortly after midnight on November 11, Walton’s brother-in-law got a phone call. It was Travis. He was at a gas station in Heber, Arizona. Could someone come pick him up? Two family members went to get him. They found him crumpled inside of a phone booth, haggard, confused and “out of it”. Within twenty-four hours he was hidden away at a local Sheraton Inn. Coral and Jim Lorenzen came knocking, but the National Enquirer knocked harder, offering an initial cash down-payment for Walton’s story and more if he could pass a polygraph. One of the Enquirer reporters described young Walton as looking pale, “…twitching like a cornered animal.”
Pretty good story so far, huh? It gets better, for now here is Walton’s amazing story.
The bright, bluish-green flash his co-workers had seen was in fact some sort of a ray gun that had knocked him out. When he awoke he was aboard an alien ship and then transferred to a larger mother ship. He was surrounded by weird looking aliens who had big heads, and big black almond-shaped eyes. He described them as “fetus-like”. Taking a cue from good ol’ Sonny Desvergers, he engaged them in hand-to-hand combat and managed to get to the controls of the ship. While he was trying to figure out how to fly the damn thing, a tall man with long blond hair, wearing a spacesuit—replete with fifties sci-fi movie style fishbowl helmet—appeared and calmly took Walton out of the saucer. Walton saw that he was now inside of a huge hangar, filled with flying saucers. He was then taken into a room where a couple of other modern day Space Brothers and a Space Sister—all blond—were waiting. They were not wearing helmets. Per the standard drill, Walton was required to lie on a table and be examined. The last thing he remembered was a tube being stuck into him. When he awoke he was lying in the middle of a highway and the flying saucer was zooming off into the night. He stumbled to a payphone, were he called his brother-in-law. It was then that he learned that he had been gone for five days.
Personally, I like good ol’ Antny Villas-Boas’ story better, if only because he got well-laid by Barking Girl.
NICAP and MUFON had serious reservations about Walton’s story, but the Lorenzens and The National Enquirer plunged ahead. On November 15, Walton took a polygraph exam. It was administered by John J. McCarthy. He was the senior examiner in Arizona with twenty years’ of experience. He listened to audiotapes of Walton’s account, then interviewed Walton before beginning the examination. It was then that he learned that Walton had a history of petty crimes and drug use. The examination itself lasted almost four hours, during which Walton tried some tricks such as holding his breath and tapping his foot when asked about his abduction. The next day McCarthy issued his evaluation, citing Walton for “gross deception”. “Based on his reactions on all charts, it is the opinion of this examiner that Walton, in concert with others, is attempting to perpetrate a UFO hoax, and that he has not been on any spacecraft.”
Hoping to bolster Walton’s case, APRO brought in a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst to evaluate Walton. Their plan backfired. Dr. Jean Rosenbaum said that Walton’s story was “all in his own mind. I feel that he suffered from a combination of imagination and amnesia, a transitory psychosis—that he did not(italics) go on a UFO, but simply was wandering around during the period of his disappearance.”
Despite this, Allen Hynek weighed in on Walton’s side. “Walton’s story seems more consistent than that of his detractors,” he said. That surprised the hell out of a lot of us back then, because we sure weren’t buying Walton’s story. We weren’t interested in polygraph results one way or the other. What bothered us was that we had heard the story before, the guy had a criminal record and he was trying to get money from The National Enquirer. Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies would continue to do good work in the field, but Hynek’s reputation took a blow as a result of his endorsement of Walton, particularly when it came out that Walton and other family members had long been interested in UFOs, had seen UFOs previously, had watched The UFO Incident on NBC a few weeks before with aliens identical—save for the blonds—to those Walton described and that Walton and his older brother Duane had formed a “pact”, according to Duane Walton. The plan was that if either of them ever saw a UFO up close they would approach it immediately and try to get on board! Back in 1975, even we hard core saucer believers were inclined to dismiss Walton’s story, if only because we were all too well aware of good ol’ Sonny Desvergers self-inflating UFO account, but at least Sonny had some incredible evidence to back him up. Walton had nothing. We could have gone down the street to the locally headquartered Enquirer and told a similar story, they probably would have run it and we knew that, for again, LIFE and LOOK magazines were gone, no other major national magazine was running UFO stories anymore so that left the tabloids.
In July of 1976 the National Enquirer’s Best UFO Case of the Year—1975—determined by its Blue Ribbon panel of experts, went to Travis Walton, who split the $5,000 prize with his buddies. A few years later Walton would write his own book about the incident, and in 1993 the movie Fire in the Sky, based on Walton’s account was released. Fire in the Sky is worth watching for James Garner’s portrayal of a sheriff who doesn’t buy the story for one minute. By then not even The National Enquirer was doing much with UFO stories anymore, save for the work of Bob Pratt, who was genuinely interested in the subject and traveled the world in search of good saucer stories. His wife confirmed this when he passed in 2005, although she admitted that she was never interested in UFOs.
Sorry, Travis. I didn’t buy your story more than thirty years ago and I’m still not buying it today. Others may disagree, but I’ll stick up for Antny’ Villas-Boas and good ol’ Sonny Desvergers first, incredible as that may seem. I could have concocted a similar story with my friends and become nationally famous, given our knowledge of UFO stories, but we didn’t.
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