Arizona was the site of one of the most famous reported UFO abductions.
In 1975, Travis Walton was working on a logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, on the Mogollon Rim, near the tiny town of Heber-Overgaard, in the central part of the state. According to Walton, who was 22 at the time, on the night of Nov. 5, encountered the blinding light of a UFO in a clearing in the forest.
The other members of the logging crew said they fled the scene in terror to go get help, and when they came back, Walton was gone. Walton was missing for days. And then, around midnight on Nov. 12, the phone rang at Walton’s sister’s house. It was him — and he said he’d been abducted by aliens.
Walton’s story became national news — and he was interviewed extensively by, among others, Jim Lorenzen. Lorenzen later gave an interview about his conversation with Walton.
“Well, I was struck by the fact that he said these beings didn’t look quite human. He described them precisely the way another person who described them, who had a similar experience. Now, this case has not been published anywhere and nothing like this case has been published anywhere. So, it’s something Travis could not have read anywhere,” Lorenzen said.
Walton ended up writing a book, which was later adapted into a film called “Fire in the Sky.” And while numerous questions have been raised about the veracity of the story Walton and his fellow loggers, he’s never wavered.
In 2015, filmmaker Jennifer Stein made a documentary about Walton that she hoped would counter the attempts to debunk Walton’s account. For the last few years, they’ve been traveling the country giving talks.
Walton and Stein joined The Show to talk about what it’s like to stick to a story that so many people simultaneously want to believe and disprove. Walton said he’s a little sick of it.
Conversation highlights
TRAVIS WALTON: Well, you know, it's continually having to prove myself and, you know, it wasn't anything that I could have foreseen and desired as a part of my life.
SAM DINGMAN: Jennifer, how did you first become interested in Travis' story?
JENNIFER STEIN: Well, I knew Travis' story, but when I finally got to meet him and I realized how genuine he was. I realized nobody had ever bothered to do a decent documentary about his case. There was “Fire in the Sky,” Paramount Pictures film that really kind of told the story, but changed it and made it, you know, a horror scary, scary, story, especially the onboard craft experiences that Travis had.
And it really didn't legitimize any of what these boys had been through. And I had my own UFO encounter as well. So, I had a lot of respect for what they've been through, and for the ridicule they'd been through. And I just felt somebody really needed to tell their story.
DINGMAN: Travis, if I'm not mistaken, one of the things that must be difficult in terms of giving people the story they might want about this is, as I understand it from Jennifer's film, your memories of what actually happened, there's not that much to them, right? I mean, you have a memory of being up in this craft, you have a memory of seeing this figure in a helmet. But, it seems like that's kind of all there is to it, right? It’s not like there’s enough content for a feature-length —
WALTON: I was unconscious or dead, most of those days. As far as the overall picture, you have seven people testifying and staying by their story for all these years. And, if you had seven people testifying that they had witnessed a murder, I mean, even without polygraph tests, you would have an extremely airtight case. But, only because it involves this particular subject, that people continue to try to find cracks in it, which they don't.
DINGMAN: Well, can I ask you, Travis, I mean, you've now been talking about this experience for 50 years. I'm sure people have said all kinds of things to you over the years, but I'd love to know what are some of the things that have stayed with you over all the decades of talking about this, the most unique things people have brought up?
WALTON: Probably, you know, my perception of these beings' intentions was extremely negative at the time, but over the years I've realized that the intention was to, to save my life.
DINGMAN: And just to say for people who haven't seen Jennifer's film, that's a very remarkable moment in the film where you say, basically, and, and please correct me if I have this wrong, that you have come to this interpretation that you got swept up in in the beam from this craft that you say you had seen, and that the reason they took you into the craft was to to treat your wounds, basically.
WALTON: Yeah, and, you know, I was probably mortally wounded and that saved my life.
DINGMAN: One of the other things that the film talks about is the idea that after this happened, you were likely experiencing some symptoms of trauma, and that was one of the reasons that it was hard for you to speak out about it initially, to speak coherently about it, and those are obviously things that are much better understood now than they were back when this happened.
Jennifer, from your perspective, and if you'd care to speak about your own experience, did you relate to that? Is that one of the reasons you wanted to feature that in the film?
STEIN: Mine was in September of 1975, so it was before Travis's event. And it was a rectangle of white light that was 90 feet long and about 6 feet high and made absolutely no sense at all, and it was less than 500 feet away from me, sort of in the middle of a forest land in Pennsylvania, Mennonite forest land where my parents' house was. And for 25 years, I didn't really talk about it, because I thought I was the only one that saw it and I wasn't quite sure it wasn't the tail end of a dream or if it really happened or what.
And then, 25 years later, the person who was at my house at the time, who I knew very well, was visiting me, and he saw the same thing I saw, and he was asleep on the other leg of the house, another floor of the house. He saw the same thing I saw at 5:30 in the morning. And we never talked about it at the time. But 25 years later, this friend said, “What happened? Like, do you remember that?” And, and I was like, “Wow.”
DINGMAN: Travis, how much do you feel, you know, at this point, there is less skepticism, I think it's fair to say, about the idea of unidentified objects in the skies, thanks to some declassifications that have happened over the past few years. But, obviously a significant difference in your story versus the stories that other people have about just sightings is that your story is one of actual abduction and of seeing other beings. How much do you feel like that has differentiated your experience from other folks who have had UFO encounters?
WALTON: I think that is a critical factor that I don't think it was an intentional abduction now, in hindsight. I'm thinking that my injury is what necessitated me being taken aboard. They were the only ones in a position to rescue me. And, you know, they could have covered it up. They could have just dumped me on some asteroid somewhere and never, you know, left it up to the crew to be under suspicion of murder forever.
DINGMAN: And I should just say for, for listeners who aren't as familiar with the story, the other folks who were working on the logging crew that, you were a part of, Travis, during the five days or so during which you were missing, there was some suspicion that those other folks on the crew had been involved in your your death. But, obviously once it turned out you were alive, those suspicions went away.
WALTON: It was thought to be a cover-up for murder, but that was not the case.
DINGMAN: One of the other things that comes out in the film is this stat that one in 10 people who say they've had UFO encounters report those encounters. Is part of what you're hoping for, to encourage more people who've had these experiences to talk about them?
STEIN: Sure. The more people can deal with their issues, their trauma, no matter what it is, the better. This is one of those things that's usually the most profound experience someone has and they often feel like they can't talk about it with anybody. And yet, they're really turned on or lit up by it. They're, you know, their lives are catapulted by it because their mind is opened up, their consciousness is shifted and changed, and they want to try to understand it and put it into perspective with a bigger understanding.
You know, I just encourage people not to let it freak them out or destroy their lives, but to find a place to have compassion for themselves and put it in the framework of their fuller understanding of the nature of reality.
DINGMAN: And it sounds like if I'm hearing you right, Jennifer, one of the things that you are advocating for is that in speaking about one's experience, something that you can get out of that is to find community, even if you might not necessarily get an answer to what happens in your own experience.
STEIN: Yes, correct. Correct. And many people look at going to UFO conferences as one of the most enlightening things to do, because you can kind of talk about almost anything at a UFO conference. Because once you've already, you're at that level of discussion, you're not really gonna freak people out very much, you know.
DINGMAN: So, it can be a gateway to other things.
STEIN: Correct, exactly.
DINGMAN: Well, I do have to ask you both. I was reading about in 2021, Travis, one of the guys who was on that logging crew that you were with, told a film producer in this recorded phone call that the abduction was a hoax. He later retracted that story. I imagine that must have been a complicated experience for you. What do you make of that whole, that whole situation?
WALTON: Well, you know, there's powerful jealousies involved, and, you know, these guys would come out and speak with me. And then, people would rush right by them and ignore them and talk to me and, you know, after what they've been through and the emotional impact it had on them, I can understand the jealousy. What happened was a dishonest investigator came to him and said, “Travis is getting ready to tell me the whole story was all made up, but I just can't meet his price. Can you match him?”
And that was how he leveraged Mike to get Mike to say that it never happened because he thought I was betraying us all by just being willing to say it didn't happen for the right price, which was not true. I did not say any such thing to him. I told him to buzz off and, you know, that was the end of it. He had tricked Mike into believing that I was gonna claim it didn't happen just for money.
DINGMAN: I see. Well, I mean, I guess what's interesting to me about all this is less the question of, you know, “Who has their facts straight and who doesn't?” But, the fact that after all these years and everything that has come out, It seems like these questions still give people such strong emotional reactions, like this is still something that people feel so strongly about.
WALTON: Either the facts can guide us to our conclusions, or we have some strong emotional thing that we wish was true and we'll grab at anything to support it. And that's just a human frailty that we see everywhere we look everywhere you look, you know, they come up with a conclusion and then look for a way to justify it.
