The Travis Walton Abduction
A logger vanished for five days after his crew watched him approach a glowing craft and fall under a beam of light. His return, his polygraph results and the crew's tests made the case a national controversy and, later, a film.
- Date
- 5–10 November 1975
- Place
- Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, near Snowflake, Arizona, USA
- Witnesses
- Travis Walton and six logging crew members
- Status
- Disputed
What happened
On the evening of 5 November 1975, a seven-man logging crew driving out of the forest saw a luminous disc hovering above a clearing. Travis Walton, 22, left the truck and walked beneath it. The others said a beam of blue-green light struck him and threw him backward, and they drove off in terror. When they returned minutes later, he was gone. A search involving the sheriff's department found nothing, and suspicion fell on the crew until they took polygraph tests, which five passed and one gave inconclusive results.
Five days later Walton telephoned his family from a petrol station in Heber, Arizona, confused and dehydrated. He said he had woken on a table inside the craft surrounded by three beings, fled into a corridor, met a tall human-like figure who led him to another room, and then lost consciousness. He remembered only about two hours of the five days.
The beings
Walton described three beings under five feet tall with large, hairless heads, huge brown eyes, tiny noses and mouths, and pale skin, in loose tan garments: a Grey variant. The second group was different: a tall, muscular, human-looking man with sandy hair and a transparent helmet, and later two men and a woman of similar appearance who did not speak. The mix of Grey and human-like types in one account is unusual.
Aftermath
The National Enquirer paid the crew a prize for the 'best UFO case' of 1975, and Walton's polygraph history became the battleground: he failed a test arranged by the newspaper, then passed later ones. His 1978 book The Walton Experience was adapted as the 1993 film Fire in the Sky, which invented most of its abduction scenes. Walton and several crew members still speak publicly about the case, and Snowflake hosts an annual festival.
Explanations
The sceptic Philip Klass argued that the crew invented the story to escape a logging contract they were behind on, which carried a penalty clause for non-completion; the crew denied it and the contract's terms have been argued over since. Others have suggested Walton wandered in the forest in a dissociative state. The strength of the case is the number of witnesses to the first minutes; its weakness is that only Walton saw anything afterward.
Beings described
Sources
- Travis Walton UFO incident
- Travis Walton, The Walton Experience (1978)