Travis Walton

Rogan opens by naming the two abduction cases that have outlasted the rest of the literature: Betty and Barney Hill, and Travis Walton. Walton's correction arrives immediately and is about ownership rather than accuracy. He did not put himself forward.

It's nothing I've ever promoted.

The date is November 1975, in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Walton was twenty-two and working a logging contract. The film gives the crew five men; there were seven on the ground that night.

You have seven people, all identical testimony, all passing law enforcement lie detector tests.

His argument about the testimony is a courtroom argument, not a ufological one: seven matching accounts that survive polygraph would convict in a capital case. Then he makes the opposite case himself, without being pushed.

Of course people are going to be skeptical.

What separates the case from most of its kind is that none of the seven had any motive to protect him. Walton had fought with Alan that same morning, over a girlfriend, and the fight was in Mike's backyard.

The fight produced the scene in the film where Alan fells a tree that nearly lands on him. Walton says that happened to him in life, in front of a witness, which is why it went into the script.

they would have had incentive to say you're full of shit

The incentive ran the other way in a more serious sense. When the crew reported it, the sheriff's department did not believe a word of it and treated the men as suspects in a killing.

they were suspected of murder from the get-go

That suspicion is the reason the polygraphs were hostile. Alan's mother told him they were going to frame him and hang him, because as far as anyone knew Walton was never coming back.

The seven were interviewed by separate deputies. The accounts agree on sequence and disagree on vocabulary, which is what honest eyewitness testimony usually looks like.

One man described a beam a foot wide. Another described a long blue flame. A third compared it to a bolt of lightning. All three were describing the same discharge from different angles.

i didn't see the beam i just was unconscious

What Walton registered was a stunning force and then the ground; he puts the throw at ten or twenty feet. One of the men happened to be facing away, and said the flash lit the whole forest brighter than daylight.

The professional skeptics arrived as soon as the story was published. One of them, on Larry King, offered two incompatible objections within the same broadcast: that the ground was rocky and should have left bruises, and that it was deep in pine needles and should have caught fire.

They don't care if they self-contradict.

Before any of the film existed, the man who hypnotised Walton introduced him to Betty Hill. She had one piece of advice, and it was about what publicity does to a person.

make you into a parody of yourself

Walton says he has held to it. He wanted to be respected for work he had done rather than for something that happened to him at twenty-two, and he has been conscious of the difference ever since.

Hill's case was twelve years older, and by then she had already been through the machinery that follows a public abduction claim. She was, in Walton's phrase, through the ringer.

That was the first ever real public story about a UFO.

The day begins like any other shift. Physical work finished, equipment loaded, light going, seven men in a truck with everybody talking at once.

I saw this kind of glow coming through the trees.

His first reading was domestic: it was deer season, there were hunters on the hill, and light comes through a tent wall. What made him keep looking was not fear but something in the quality of it.

The others looked one at a time. Nobody said anything dramatic. For the first minute or two it was curiosity, not alarm, and that is the detail that makes the rest of the account credible.

it's a dirt road. Trees are real thick.

The clearing was an anomaly in that stretch of timber, which had not yet been cut under the contract. When they came out of the trees and could see the source, the curiosity ended. Walton got out of the truck and ran toward it, expecting it to be gone before he covered the distance.

The light in the clearing was not a set of beams. It was a haze, gold, soft at the edges, and not bright enough to hurt. Parts of the object's surface were dark and gave off nothing.

It was kind of a golden color

The shape itself is the least exotic thing in the account: a disc, with a metallic finish. Walton is careful to say that its familiarity is part of what he saw, not something he has added since.

It was a classic disc-shaped craft.

Years later a man who said he had worked at Area 51 had a model built of what he described, and Walton calls that model the closest thing he has seen to the object. He does not, however, accept that there is one design in circulation: he has seen several shapes.

It began to move, and as it moved it got louder. The men in the truck heard the same thing he did.

There was a low thunderous kind of a rumble that you actually sort of felt more than heard.