15

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The Travis Walton Case

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in chapter 15 are from Walton’s book Fire in the Sky.

It was fall when Travis Walton went to work with his logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in northern Arizona. In Walton’s own words:

It was the morning of Wednesday, November 5, 1975. To us, the seven men working in Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, it was an ordinary workday. There was nothing in that sunny fall morning to foreshadow the tremendous fear, shock, and confusion we would be feeling as darkness fell.

The crew had the job of thinning a thick stand of small trees that were spaced together too tightly to allow them to grow at a fast rate. That particular day they were cutting, as Walton describes “a fuel-reduction strip up the crest of a ridge running south through the contract. Fuel reduction is the process of cutting the thinning slash into lengths and piling it up to be burned in the wet season.”

This was a no-nonsense group of working men, not prone to sit around and speculate about whether life existed in outer space. Logging is hard, demanding work, and it leaves no time for fooling around. This was a young team; the boss, Mike Rogers, was twenty-eight, and Walton was just twenty-two.

The workday proceeded as usual, without any mishaps or serious personal conflicts. Injuries, arguments, and even fisticuffs are not unknown among logging crews.

Fig. 15.1. Travis Walton in 1975

Most people have the impression that Arizona is nothing but wide-open desert and unending sunshine and warmth. That is largely true of the southern portion of the state but not of the north, which is a combination of canyons (e.g., Grand Canyon) and forested mountains.

By midautumn, the nights are cold, and the mornings and afternoons are chilly. As Walton describes it:

The afternoon sun was starting to cool as it began angling steeper down in the west. In the mountains, sundown comes early. . . . The gathering chill was beginning to numb my nose. With summer ending, it was starting to get down to five or ten degrees at night. I worked a little faster to ward off the chill, eagerly anticipating the reprieve of the day’s conclusion. Not long to go before we could head for home.

Sundown came, but the crew continued working. Walton looked at his watch and noticed that it was six o’clock. He signaled the crew to stop. The harsh, deafening sound of buzzing chain saws died down. Darkness began to sink in as they loaded their gear into the bed of the pickup truck. They piled in, eager to get home. Walton describes the seating arrangement:

Dwayne by the left rear door, John and Steve in the middle, and Allen by the right rear door. In the front, I sat by the door, riding shotgun. Ken sat in the middle, and of course Mike was driving. The seven of us usually sat in the same place every day. Nonsmokers in front, smokers in back.

The truck bounced along the logging road for a short distance, and then Walton noticed something out of the corner of his eye, a light that was coming through the trees on his right side, about three hundred feet ahead. For a moment, he dismissed it as the glow of the setting sun, but he quickly realized that it was already well into twilight and darkening fast.

His next thought turned to the possibility of a hunter’s campsite, headlights, or a fire blazing. He noticed that some of the guys seemed to be sharing his thoughts because they had fallen silent as if mulling over the situation as he was.

At this point, the truck was heading toward the light. Then it quickly passed by it.

During that instant Allen yelled, “Son of a . . .”

Next, Walton blurted out, “What the hell was that?”

He struggled to focus and make sense out of what he was seeing. But all that was visible was a bright, glowing light because a thicket of dense trees was obstructing his view.

Mike, fully engaged in driving the truck, asked them what they were looking at.

Dwayne replied, “I don’t know—but it looked like a crashed plane hanging in a tree!”

By this time, the truck was struggling to climb an uphill stretch. The adrenalin was pumping through the crew, and Mike put the pedal to the metal trying to squeeze out whatever speed the pickup had left.

They finally bounced past the tree thicket to a point where they had an unobstructed view of the light source. All were immediately dumbstruck.

“Stop!” John yelled. “Stop the truck!”

Mike hit the brakes, and they skidded to a halt. Walton pushed the door open to get a clear view.

“My God!” Allen yelled. “It’s a flying saucer!”

Travis Walton did not know it then, but his next, impulsive decisions would forever change the course of his life.

Mike turned the engine off.

The crew silently stared at the object that hovered about twenty feet above the ground. Walton describes it as “a strange, golden disc”; it sat motionless, not making a sound. Walton gives a striking portrayal of the scene:

The craft was stationary, hovering well below the treetops near the crest of the ridge. The hard, mechanical precision of the luminous vehicle was in sharp contrast to the primitive ruggedness of the dark surroundings. Its edges were clearly defined. The golden machine was starkly outlined against the deepening blue of the clear evening sky.

Walton’s mind automatically began to analyze the craft. He calculated the object to have an overall diameter of fifteen to twenty feet and to be about ten feet thick. He describes the disc as having a “shape like that of two gigantic pie-pans placed lip to lip, with a small round bowl turned upside down on the top.”

He searched for any signs of antennas, portholes, protrusions, or anything that resembled a window or hatch. However, he saw nothing of the sort. He turned toward his crew members, and “I glanced from one to another stricken face.”

Then he turned back to further study the craft, which was still hovering silently in the air. It was at this critical point that he made his fateful decision. “I was suddenly seized with the urgency to see the craft at close range.”

He jumped out of the truck and headed for the hovering craft. His abrupt, inexplicable action startled the rest of the crew.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mike asked in an urgent, harsh whisper.

Walton ignored him; determined to stay the course and satisfy his curiosity, he moved closer to the craft.

At this point, the other men tried to warn him off, but to no avail. Though he struggled with doubts for a moment, he shook them off. He describes the conclusion of this sequence the following way: “Finally I reassured myself with: I can always run away.”

As determined as he was, he nonetheless approached the craft slowly and cautiously, adopting a half-crouch as he neared it. About six feet from being directly below the machine, he stared up at it and was amazed by its smooth, curving hull. His momentary fears had given way to an overwhelming sense of awe and a mounting curiosity about what might be inside of it.

In a few fleeting moments, he heard a strange mixture of sounds, and then the machine began wobbling erratically on its axis. The craft was still in the same position, and it was still hovering “at approximately the same height while it wobbled.” He instinctively tucked tighter into his crouch.

At that instant, a bright, blue-green ray shot from the bottom of the craft, but Walton neither saw nor heard anything. “All I felt was the numbing force of a blow that felt like a high-voltage electrocution. . . . [The] beam struck me full in the head and chest. My mind sank quickly into unfeeling blackness.”

His crew members watched in horror as Walton’s body arched backward, arms and legs outstretched, the force of the blow lifting him off the ground. They saw him then being hurled backward through the air about ten feet. Finally, he landed and lay motionless, for all appearances dead on the ground.

Panic immediately gripped the crew. Paralysis and awe quickly turned to fear and self-preservation. Mike frantically cranked the ignition and gunned the engine. Hell bent for leather, they had one purpose, to leave the scene and to do so as quickly as possible.

There was only thing on Mike’s mind as they sped off; he shouted, “Is it following us?” The rest of the crew stared ahead blankly in silence.

Terrified, Mike drove recklessly, bumping over the dirt logging road at speeds far in excess of what he would normally drive. The truck careened down the road, crashing into a boulder, and then a tree limb bent the rearview mirror backward. The situation was going from bad to worse with each passing minute.

THE ABDUCTION

Oblivious to what had just happened, Walton came to and was quickly overcome by excruciating pain. In his words, “I felt badly burned, all over, even inside me.”

He was lying on his back motionless, eyes closed; his mouth was filled with a bitter, metallic taste that was accompanied by an intense thirst. Walton wrote that he felt completely spent to the point of being ill. “The trembling felt odd, like a strange mixture of exertion and illness. Something was terribly wrong.”

Walton continued to struggle through a period of turmoil during which he shifted between mental disorientation, physical pain, and blurred vision. Slowly, his mind and vision began to clear enough so that he could make out the features of a light and ceiling.

Realizing that he was hurt, he wondered what had happened. Then it all came rushing back. His next thought was that he must be in the hospital.

Then I felt something pressing down lightly on my chest. It felt cool and smooth. A strange device curved across my body. . . . I could feel that it extended from my armpits to a few inches above my belt. It curved down to the middle of each side of my rib cage. It appeared to be made of shiny, dark gray metal or plastic.

Still suffering from shock, Walton was as yet unable to appreciate the reality of the situation.

I looked past the upper edge of the device. I could see the blurry figures of the doctors, leaning over me with their white masks and caps. They were wearing unusual, orange-colored surgical gowns. I could not make out their faces clearly.

At this point, it appears that he actually perceived the situation with some clarity, but his mind hesitated to accept what his eyes were reporting (like Zamora). That state quickly changed.

Abruptly my vision cleared. The sudden horror of what I saw rocked me as I realized that I was definitely not in a hospital. . . . I was looking squarely into the face of a horrible creature! It looked steadily back at me with huge, luminous brown eyes the size of quarters.

No sooner did Walton realize that he was being examined by three alien doctors than he flew into an aggressive rage. He hit one of them, who fell into another. The situation steadily deteriorated as Walton grew increasingly desperate. Finally, the aliens left the room, and he found himself alone.

Though he had succeeded in getting rid of his tormenters, his mind was not entirely rational: “I’ve got to get out of here, I thought frantically with a surge of determination.”

How he imagined that he could escape a spaceship in flight is hard to comprehend, unless he still did not fully understand where he was and just how little control he had over the situation. Nonetheless, he reports that he ventured out of the room and into a passageway. Suddenly overcome by anxiety, he started running.

Charging past one door, he suddenly realized that it could have led to an exit, but another one soon appeared. “I slowed down to a walk as I neared it. . . . Maybe this would be my way out.”

There are elements of the Travis Walton case that need further critical analysis. In this investigator’s opinion, there are good reasons to suspect that the abduction segment, as Walton has characterized it taking place in the interior of the craft, did not occur as Walton has described it.

Before presenting the evidence to back up the above assertion, a very important issue needs to be addressed. I am not a skeptic nor am I in any way a debunker. I am convinced that Walton and the rest of the logging crew did experience the events involving the observation of a UFO hovering in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, which they have individually and collectively given an accurate account of.

PROBLEM

The account of the events that led up to the direct observation of the UFO have the gritty, earthy feel of the reality experienced by loggers during actual logging operations. I have lived in logging communities in Northern California, and I am well aware of the attitudes and behaviors that loggers exhibit as well as what challenges they encounter in the woods.

Every aspect of the account given of the crew’s experiences leading up to and including the UFO observation are consistent with what one would expect of a logging crew. As presented in Walton’s book, Fire in the Sky, the literary style and tone reflect a reportage approach, and it sounds like Walton is simply reporting his experiences (mostly in his own words) to a journalist who is acting as an unbiased literary conduit.

By the time the crew packs up the logging gear and climbs in the truck and they leave, the reader is bouncing along with them down the bumpy logging road, twilight is approaching, and the forest shadows are deepening into dark blotches that will soon unify into pitch blackness.

To this point, there is nothing to suggest the account contains, in any way, fictional devices used to increase the drama or embellish and color the story. When they encounter the UFO, the men act as one would expect them to in such a situation. They are so shocked and terrified by the sight of an otherworldly object hovering soundlessly before them that each is riveted to his seat.

However, Walton alone is compelled by a profound curiosity to overcome his fears and approach the object. The emotional tension and drama of the scene seem quite real and authentic as the rest of the crew urge him to get back in the truck. Consider the following account:

I ducked into a crouch when a tremendously bright, blue-green ray shot from the bottom of the craft. I saw and heard nothing. All I felt was the numbing force of a blow that felt like a high-voltage electrocution. The intense bolt made a sharp cracking or popping sound. The stunning concussion of the foot-wide beam struck me full in the head and chest. My mind sank quickly into unfeeling blackness. I didn’t even see what hit me; but from the instant I felt that paralyzing blow, I did not see, hear, or feel anything more.

This too seems as real as it is terrifying.

The men in the truck saw my body arch backward, arms and legs outstretched, as the force of the blow lifted me off the ground. I was hurled backward through the air ten feet.

It is at this point that we need to stop and intently focus on the gravity of the event described. Walton has been hit by a bolt of unknown energy so powerful that it lifts his body off the ground, tossing it ten feet through the air like a rag doll. The very impact is so intense that he instantly blacks out (and seemingly dies).

Following this event, the crew panics and flees the scene as fast as possible. As they are driving, the following heated conversation takes place:

Mike anxiously asked: “I saw him falling back, but what happened to him?”

“Man, a blue ray just shot out of the bottom of that thing and hit him all over! It just seemed to engulf him.” Ken’s voice was solemn with awe.

“Good hell! It looked like he disintegrated!” Dwayne exclaimed.

“No, he was in one piece,” Steve contradicted. “I saw him hit the ground.”

“I do know one thing. It sure looked like he got hit by lightning or something!” Dwayne returned. “I heard a zap—like as if he touched a live wire!”

That raises an issue: a charge with the intensity described—enough to render a person immediately unconscious, lift the body off the ground, and hurl it about ten feet through the air—should have killed Walton. People are critically injured and killed in accidents when contact is made with live wires that do not carry the high-voltage current described by Walton and the crew observing the event.

For example, the amount of electricity used to execute someone sentenced to die via the electric chair only causes spasms and convulsions prior to death. Even if the restraints were removed, the body of the condemned individual would not fly up ten or even five feet off the chair.

The scenario suggests that Walton was killed or at least critically injured to the point of near death, as evidenced by the fact that he lay limp and motionless on the ground as his cohorts sped off.

This assertion is supported by the radical shift in the tone, style, and content that characterizes the abduction chapters when Walton finds he is in the interior of the craft.

The narrative resumes with Walton regaining consciousness in slow, painful stages. He seems to be in a supine, motionless position with his eyes closed; then he notes that his body is wracked with excruciating aches and pains. Next, he claims to be so fatigued and weak that he feels ill.

The narrative is outside of time, in that the reader is not given any sense of when these perceptions and events occurred in relation to his being zapped and then lying on the forest floor. We read:

My mouth was dry and I was very thirsty. Oddly, the weakness in my muscles did not seem to come from hunger. The trembling felt odd, like a strange mixture of exertion and illness. Something was terribly wrong.

Then the situation changes, so dramatically and so radically, in such a quick succession of events that they seem to have no connection with all that he has just described. No sooner has he realized that he has been badly injured, is exhausted, and is barely able to open his eyes and clearly focus than he is in combat with three diminutive, horrid-looking aliens.

In one moment, he cannot move and his vision is entirely blurred; in the next, he describes the aliens and the objects around him in great detail. The net effect on the reader is jarring.

Their thin bones were covered with white, marshmallow-looking flesh. They had on single-piece coverall-type suits made of soft, suede-like material, orange brown in color. I could not see any grain in the material, such as cloth has. In fact, their clothes did not appear even to have any seams. I saw no buttons, zippers, or snaps. They wore no belts. The loose billowy garments were gathered at the wrists and perhaps the ankles. They didn’t have any kind of raised collar at the neck. They wore simple pinkish tan footwear. I could not make out the details of their shoes, but they had very small feet, about a size four by our measure.

Too much detail is included in a chaotic scene that has Walton aggressively attacking these entities after barely being able to open his eyes and move. (It reads like a Hollywood script insert used to describe what the aliens look like so that the prop crew gets the general idea.)

I submit that the sequence does not at all seem either real or logical. Whereas the forest narrative seemed like a naturally flowing account of the facts, the abduction narrative has the pronounced hallmarks of literary construction. The language is obviously the ghostwriter’s (not Walton’s), and the descriptions of the sequence of events do not fit into the context of the prior events already established.

In fact, the abduction chapters read like literary surrealism; they have an ongoing dreamlike quality. Walton continues to act in ways, and to describe his surroundings in ways, that do not conform to the logic of the situation.

For example, if he had attacked the alien doctors, would we be incorrect to assume that the ship would include a security detail that would have been alerted? The narrative does not mention that. Yet among established patterns, UFOlogists have noted that alien crews act in a very strict, military manner. We read:

Afraid of the aliens’ return, I looked toward the door. No sign of anyone. I needed something better to defend myself with.

Walton has just regained consciousness, is recovering from fatigue, is in pain, and has described his vision as being out of focus, yet he is able to give a vivid description of the alien’s oversized “bald heads” and such other details.

Those glistening orbs had brown irises twice the size of those of a normal human’s eye, nearly an inch in diameter! The iris was so large that even parts of the pupils were hidden by the lids, giving the eyes a certain catlike appearance. There was very little of the white part of the eye showing. They had no lashes and no eyebrows.

(Travis Walton was an unpretentious logger, and I doubt that he has ever used the word orbs [instead of eyes] in his life and especially not in his early twenties.)

It is odd that he is able to note all of the foregoing minutiae during the throes of a fight prompted by an increasingly desperate feeling that is urging him (irrationally) to try to escape from the situation. (How can one escape a spaceship in flight?)

(Being a veteran journalist who has written reports based on investigations that I conducted that were later used to persuade a grand jury that they needed to indict someone, I strongly note that the literary mind of the ghostwriter grows increasingly dominant as the abduction scenario unfolds.)

Not only is there is no security detail when Walton ventures out of the room and into the passageway, he also reports it as being completely empty. This, too, seems highly improbable and out of synch with logic.

However, it is when he stumbles into a room and describes himself as being alone in a control room that the situation turns totally unreal.

Glancing apprehensively toward the open door, I slowly went toward the chair. As I gradually approached it, a very curious thing began to happen. The closer I got to it, the darker the room became! Small points of light became visible on, or through, the walls, even the floor. I stepped back and the effect diminished.

Now he is describing himself alone in a room that appears to contain some high-tech equipment.

I looked at the controls on the chair. On the left arm, there was a single short thick lever with an oddly shaped molded handle atop some dark brown material. On the right arm, there was an illuminated, lime-green screen about five inches square with a lot of black lines on it that intersected each other at all angles.

At this point, I submit that the narrative has assumed a completely fictional tone, style, technique, and content. A captive onboard an alien craft, who recently assaulted the crew, is now wandering the premises alone and has discovered a room with equipment that he is tampering with. Seriously?

Let us come down to Earth for a moment. No sci-fi writer would stretch credulity that far.

Our corner convenience stores contain video surveillance cameras that record the entry, movement, and exit of every patron. But in the abduction account, the UFO does not include a security detail or, apparently, any advanced surveillance devices. Once again, that seems extraordinarily improbable.

Did the UFO not zap him when he approached too close to it? This suggests a high-level security orientation. The abduction narrative simply does not hold up to a forensic type of close scrutiny of every available piece of evidence down to seemingly unimportant details.

I am not suggesting that Walton was not aboard the craft that he and the others observed in the forest. Neither am I implying that he deliberately faked the account of what occurred while he was aboard the craft. What is being suggested is the probability that his account is more dream than reality, more fragmented impressions than facts.

How so? Since he was unconscious, and perhaps even deceased, when he was taken aboard, Walton would have gone through a period of convalescence under the care of a medical staff, during which time he may have been in a comalike state (or even in a true coma).

As he emerged slowly from that state in stages, he alternated between becoming slightly aware of himself and his surroundings and slipping back into unconsciousness.

In this light, the abduction scenario (as portrayed by Walton) makes sense. The events he claims occurred are so improbable that, in my opinion, they could not represent a true account. For instance, Walton asserts the following:

Trembling, I sat down on the hard surface of the chair. I put my hand onto the molded T-grip of the lever. The handle was slightly small for my hand. The whole chair seemed a little too small. I rotated the handle of the lever forward, feeling the slow, fluid resistance of it. I felt suddenly disoriented as the stars began moving downward in front of me, in unison. Quickly I pulled my hand off the lever. . . .

I whirled around and looked at the door. There, standing in the open doorway, was a human being!

Now we are presented with an entity, apparently human in appearance, that is quite the opposite of the demonic-looking little aliens. He is described as large, muscular, and well proportioned. In all, Walton seems to allude back to an earlier era of UFOlogy, when space brothers and sisters who inhabited some distant, utopian paradise visited Earth, bringing messages of cosmic brotherhood to contactees such as George Adamski. Walton continues:

Two men and a woman were standing around the table. They were all wearing velvety blue uniforms like the first man’s, except that they had no helmets. The two men had the same muscularity and the same masculine good looks as the first man. The woman also had a face and figure that was the epitome of her gender. They were smooth-skinned and blemishless. No moles, freckles, wrinkles, or scars marked their skin. The striking good looks of the man I had first met became more obvious on seeing them all together. They shared a family-like resemblance, although they were not identical.

Immaculate specimens of ideal (if extraterrestrial) Homo sapiens!

The aura of timelessness still permeates the narrative. What happened to the excruciating pain, dizziness, blurred vision, lack of mental clarity, fatigue, dysfunctionality, and so forth? He has apparently completely recovered over the course of no chronologically established time frame. Walton seems to float from one sequence to another without pausing to sleep or eat.

Returning to the event that immediately preceded the abduction sequence, it is clear that Walton would have suffered extensive burns, shock, paralysis, and other symptoms of major trauma from the beam’s blast. Under normal Earth hospital conditions, his recovery would have taken some time, not the few days that Walton had aboard the ship.

Typical victims of lightning strikes either die or survive; however, the survivors suffer extensive burns that often result in permanent scars.

Certain elements of the Walton case described above depart from the body of evidence accumulated from contactee and abduction cases. Specifically, in all the well-documented cases where the credibility of the contactee has been ascertained, the alien entities closely monitor the contactee and tightly control the events. This definitely is not the case where the Walton abduction is concerned.

In fact, in recent years, after having a protracted period to reflect on the event, Walton’s view of it has changed. He is now of the opinion that it was not so much an abduction as it was a medical intervention.

I would concur emphatically with Walton on this point. What remains to be seen is whether he will entertain the possible interpretation of his abduction narrative offered herein.

CONCLUSION

Walton and his crew gave an accurate account of true events that ended in the observation of a hovering UFO over the forest in northern Arizona in 1975. However, the abduction events that followed Walton’s exposure to an intense energy beam neither conform to the norms of alien behavior established by UFOlogists, nor do they agree with the logic of the situation. Therefore, it appears likely that Walton’s recollections of what happened aboard the craft are the product of dreams and hallucinations triggered by trauma he experienced during his convalescence onboard the craft.