The Travis Walton case is one of the few alien abduction stories with several witnesses to its beginning. It started in the pine and juniper country of the Mogollon Rim in eastern Arizona, where small crews worked government contracts to thin overgrown forest, and it ended up as a Hollywood film. Nearly fifty years on, the people involved still disagree about what happened.
What happened
In the autumn of 1975 Mike Rogers, a young contractor from Snowflake, held a US Forest Service contract to clear brush and small trees from a large tract of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. He was behind schedule. On the evening of Wednesday, November 5, Rogers and six crewmen were driving out of the woods at the end of the day when, they said, they saw a glowing, metallic disc hovering above a clearing. Travis Walton, 22, got out of the truck and walked toward it. According to the crew, a beam of light struck him and threw him to the ground. Rogers drove off in panic, then returned some minutes later to find Walton and the light gone.
The crew reported Walton missing that night, and over the next days deputies and volunteers searched the area. Some officers suspected the men had harmed Walton and were covering it up. Five days after the disappearance, Walton phoned his family from a pay telephone at a gas station near Heber. He was thin and agitated and said he had woken on a table surrounded by short, bald beings with large eyes, then been taken through other parts of a craft before being released on a highway.
The investigation
Polygraphs became the center of the case. An examiner from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Cy Gilson, tested the six crewmen. Five passed on questions about whether they had harmed him and whether they had seen a UFO; one result was inconclusive. After Walton’s return, the National Enquirer arranged a test by a veteran examiner named McCarthy, who concluded that Walton was attempting deception and that he may have been trying to manipulate the machine. The tabloid did not publish that result. A later test by another examiner, which Walton passed, was publicized instead. The Enquirer went on to award Walton and the crew a prize for the year’s best UFO case.
The aviation journalist Philip Klass, the most persistent critic, investigated the case for years and set out his findings in UFOs: The Public Deceived in 1983. He reported the suppressed polygraph, noted that the Walton family had a long interest in UFOs, and argued that Rogers had a motive: if the contract could not be completed because of an act of God, he might escape the penalties of falling short. Rogers rejected this as nonsense.
The explanations
Supporters point out that seven men told essentially the same story under heavy pressure, including suspicion of murder, and that most of the crew passed polygraphs. Critics answer that polygraphs measure stress rather than truth, that the results conflicted, and that a shared story is what a shared hoax would also produce. No physical trace was found at the clearing, and the medical checks after Walton’s return showed no sign of injury or of five days without food. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid concludes that a hoax, possibly inspired by an earlier piece of science fiction, is the simplest explanation, while acknowledging that it cannot be proved.
Where it stands
Walton published his account as The Walton Experience in 1978, and in 1993 it became the film Fire in the Sky, which added an abduction sequence far more lurid than his own description. In 2008 he took a polygraph on a television game show and was judged to be lying about the abduction; he said the test had been badly run and later reported passing others. He has never wavered from his story. With no physical evidence and conflicting tests, the case remains unproven either way.