Travis Walton and Mike Rogers recount the 1975 Mogollon Rim UFO abduction, where a 20-30 ft glowing disc struck Walton with a blue beam, leaving him missing for five days. Advanced lie detector tests in 1996 confirmed their truthfulness (scores: 0.964–0.993), debunking skeptic Jerry Black’s earlier hoax claims. A 40-ft tree’s unnatural growth post-1975 and radiation spikes of 8–12 Gauss—omitted from the film—support their account, though discrepancies persist. Walton insists no further hypnosis will reveal more, leaving lingering questions about UFO cover-ups and the timing of official disclosures. [Automatically generated summary]
I think the best way to do this, since you've got to realize a lot of people will never have heard the other program, is to let you, Mike, begin the story.
If you could both give us sort of the short version of Fire in the Sky.
Well, actually, this particular place where we were, we were going uphill to connect in with the main road, and then from there we'd go down that road a ways and then downhill from there.
But yeah, we were sort of making an incline up to the very top.
And we were only a couple of hundred yards from the very top of the rim when these guys saw this thing and started noticing this light coming through the trees.
Nobody knew until we got up around a thicket of trees there and broke into an opening where they could see it clearly.
And when that happened, somebody yelled out for me to stop the truck and I hit the brakes.
I didn't have to hit them hard.
I wasn't going that fast, very rough road.
I leaned over to where I could see this thing after turning the truck off and noticed that Travis was already walking up to it, and he was the only one.
Well, you know, Alan Dallas said later that he thought that it looked like I was just drawn to this thing, like I was just being compelled, you know, that, you know, that I was transfixed in some way.
But, you know, my own feeling was that I was just going to miss a chance to see this thing up close and that it'd be gone before I even got up there.
And I was kind of scared about what I was doing.
But, you know, this was really alarming the guys, and they were yelling at me to get away from there.
And at the time, I was kind of getting a kick out of that at first.
And just as I turned the key on, I see this blinding flash of light in front of the truck.
And I turned my head back around, and Travis was flying through the air.
The other guys who were there have all described, everybody saw it except for me, the thing that hit him actually, and they've described it in various ways.
For lack of better words, it's been called like a long blue flame or a bolt of lightning or a long flame described as a bolt of lightning.
Yeah, and but you know, the picture that I painted for the cover of this book is more exactly the picture that everybody describes.
Yeah, as I turned my glance back towards him, I caught him just right barely after this thing hit him because he was still lit up and he was blown backwards.
It was like an explosion.
It got off in front of him and blew him backwards and he was flying through the air with his arms outstretched.
I could tell that he was unconscious, flying through the air there.
I mean, he wasn't wiggling his arms to catch his balance or like that.
He was just limp.
I mean, he flew through the air like he wasn't conscious at all.
And he landed on the ground without breaking his fall at all.
He just landed sort of to one side and mostly on his back, and he just bounced off the ground.
The engine was going, and just as soon as I saw him hit the ground, I mean, there wasn't more than a couple of seconds pass after that, and one or more of the guys from the back yelled for me to get the hell out of there, and my foot was on the gas at the same time.
I kept trying to look at it in my rearview mirrors.
I had these great big rearview mirrors, but I was driving the truck so fast and the road was so rocky and stuff, all I was just getting this blur, blurry image.
And I kept trying to look back, but the guys and everything's in my way.
And this thing's up still up high enough where you'd kind of have to look down through the windows behind and like that to see it.
And the other guys, they didn't seem to be looking back right at first.
I'd look back at them, and I was looking at these blank faces on these guys.
I don't know if they were scared because of the way I was driving or keeping their eyes glued to the road in front of them or what.
All right, in the movie, Fire in the Sky, they showed a totally frantic drive, bumping up and down, crashing nearly into things, just really applying the pedal to the metal and trying to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
Of all the things that they did in the film to detract a little from the actual reality of what happened, that was something that was almost identical to what really did happen.
That's the way it really was.
I mean, I literally flew down that road, and it was a rougher road than they showed in the film, and there was these humps in the road, and I kept hitting them and flying over them and crashing down on the other side.
And I mean, the UFO had scared the hell out of us.
Not very far, really, especially at the speed I was going.
We'd only covered a quarter of a mile at best, maybe not even that far from where the object was to where I stopped the truck.
And where I stopped the truck was partly due to because there was a great big pile of dirt, and I couldn't go over it the way I headed at it.
I had to go around it usually at a slow rate of speed and I knew I was just going to nose the truck right into it and so I braked and that's where I stopped.
But we'd already put enough distance between us and it.
In fact also we'd made a left-hand turn in the road which put the object to my left and out my window where I could look back that way.
And once I was in that position and once the truck was stopped where it was and I looked over there I could see that it wasn't following us and that you could still see a little of the glow through the trees even though there was a lot of dense foliage between us and it at that time.
All right so that's when a conversation ensued and I guess a bit of a, was it an argument or just a conversation about, hey, we've got to go back, you know?
I mean much of what some of the guys were saying, I couldn't even tell what they were saying and maybe I wasn't so articulate myself.
I mean, you know, this is the most incredible thing that could ever happen to somebody, especially 20 years ago.
You know, you're out there in the woods and the first time you've ever seen anything like this, especially at 100 feet away, you know, and then you see your friend get blasted by this thing, you know.
And we didn't know what to make of it.
All we knew is it was horrifying.
And we just, we didn't know what the thing was.
We didn't know what happened to Travis.
We didn't know what was going to happen next.
It was terrifying and perplexing, and our conversation was very agitated.
And it took us quite a while, several minutes, for us to calm down and start becoming coherent enough to actually make sense with each other.
And when we did, we were able to finally, you know, Kim, I think, brought it up first, one of us, me or Kim, that, you know, we left Travis back there.
We need to go back and get him.
It looked like it hurt him.
It could have killed him.
And that idea wasn't floating too well right there.
All right, I was just trying to determine, so somebody else really was the first one to speak up and say, hey, hey, you know, we better go back and pick up Travis' body or whatever's left of him or something.
Not all of the guys, but it did make it easier to go back because we knew, at least I knew for certain, and a couple of other guys knew that this thing must be gone.
So, you know, even though we'd already made the decision to go back, seeing it leave made it a little easier.
Well, you know, in the early going that was the case, and the script was already a script in its earliest form.
It was much more accurate.
And then as time went on, as more and more people bought the script and it changed hands and was sold to another person, another studio, and then another producer, more and more people started pulling it this way and that way.
Yeah, there was a little concern right at first as we're driving back into it exactly which little clearing it was because there was like three in a row and it turned out to be the very last one or the first one we'd come into from the other direction.
And what ascertained the exact location was the fact that with the flashlight I was able to find Travis's tracks, his heel print there on the side of the road where he jumped out and I could see them intermittently through the stifty pine needles laying on the ground there.
And from there on we started looking for footprints and any other thing we could and eventually I pulled the truck up into the opening and a discussion ensued where we didn't know whether we wanted to get out of the truck yet or not.
Finally we did.
Once me and Kim got out of the truck everybody else got out of the truck and we met like in the headlights in front of the truck and formed a little huddle there and then shoulder to shoulder conducted about a half hour long search up and down and along the ridge there.
And the only footprints that were ever found were just those initial footprints where Travis had got out of the truck.
There wasn't any sign of him.
There wasn't any footprints leading out.
And once, you know, putting the whole thing together, by the time we had concluded the search, the best search we could right there in the immediate area, I had concluded personally from that, as well as the other guys there, that Travis did not leave there on foot.
Once again, here I am, Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
The main pair from Fire in the Sky are my guests, and we're sort of retelling the Fire in the Sky story their way, not necessarily the way you saw it in the HBO movie.
We're telling you the real story, and we'll get back to it in a moment.
The End Travis Walton and Mike Rogers once again, and the point of the story that we have come to is the crew, the entire crew in the truck, returning to the point where they saw the disc, the saucer, whatever you want to call it.
They saw the beam hit Travis.
They saw Travis jump like a ragdoll.
And they took off, running, and got about a quarter mile away, turned around, went back, searched for Travis.
Travis was nowhere to be found.
No fingerprints leading in any direction.
And so I take it after about, what, 30 minutes, Mike, you decided he's not here.
Yeah, it was about a half an hour search there, and we got ahead and jumped back in the truck and decided we needed to go into town.
And on the way back into town, it was my idea that we should go get some people to help us search for Travis, but I didn't have it in mind that we should notify the authorities because 20 years ago in that area, that wasn't the thing to do.
Ken Peterson, on the other hand, being the good little Mormon boy that he was, he argued against that, felt that we should tell everything right up front.
And unlike the movie where I'm shown calling the authorities, it wasn't I, it was Ken Peterson.
And when the guy came over and met with us there in a parking lot in Hebrew, Arizona, Ken proceeded to tell him the whole thing.
I can't remember his name, just one of the local authorities.
And he in turn called the sheriff right after we'd talked to him.
And the sheriff and another deputy came on down there to Heber, and they brought a four-wheel drive and another car.
And they had a big truck there with a lot of lights on it and whatnot.
And the three of them and three of us, me, Alan, Dallas, and Kent, went back up the hill that very night to search for Travis again right away.
The other three that didn't want to go back, they were too afraid to go back.
And I let them take my truck and take it on into town and notify girlfriends and wives and whatnot.
And we with the three, the sheriff and the other two deputy sheriffs, undersheriffs, whatever they were, we went back up the hill and conducted another search.
That search was more intense.
And one of the guys there, I think his name was Ken Copeland.
He claimed to be an expert tracker, and they had the lights and all the gear and everything for it, the four-wheel drive, and they searched all the roads.
Search lasted two hours or maybe three hours in the middle of the night.
And they couldn't find hiding or hair of him either.
By now, since you had been back up there previously, I assume that you had more or less obscured the singular path of Travis, the footprints, by searching for him.
Well, the other two fellows there, the other two policemen, didn't believe it at all.
And they don't to this day, I don't think.
But the sheriff, it turned out, had had some sort of an encounter himself sometime before this, and although he'd never been abducted or anything like that, never even really told us exactly what had happened to him.
Something had happened to him sometime previous to this that made him somewhat open-minded.
But he was pretty sharp anyway.
He at least took it serious to the extent that he conducted a search and didn't just say, ah, you guys leave me alone.
And it didn't take long for accusations of murder to come up.
In fact, the very first day of the day search, after we'd concluded that night search and we'd gone into town and notified the rest of the family, Travis's mom, and them, they had people out there the very next day, a lot of people, and Forest Service and private search and rescue teams there in the area, a lot of the police and everybody.
And right there, before the end of that first day of searching, accusations of murder began to emerge.
And Alan Dallas was very much like they showed him in the movie.
In fact, they got all the characters in the movie pretty accurate.
But Alan Dallas was definitely a bad boy.
He had a chip on his shoulder.
He was against the authorities.
He was against everybody.
And at one time or another, in fact, I'd even had a fist fight with him earlier that year over a problem.
But, you know, the concept of us killing Travis was understandable.
I mean, I can understand.
I mean, my head was in that frame of mind before this happened.
If I would have been one of the sheriffs or anybody else looking on at this thing from the outside and not knowing what I knew at the time, I would have treated it pretty much the same way.
And so I understood that from these people.
But it was still hard, and we didn't know what to make of it.
I mean, Travis is gone.
We can't prove where he went.
We only know what we think happened.
But we had no way of proving it.
And so by the time this search, which lasted four days, was concluded, the concept of lie detector tests had already come up.
And every time it did, we were more than willing.
Yeah, we'll take lie detector tests, sodium pinothol, whatever you want, we'll do it.
And the following Monday, after the fourth day of searching was concluded, that was on a Sunday, and then the following Monday they had already set it up and they had a guy come up from Phoenix, Cy Gilson, who was the Department of Public Safety State Police Polygraph Expert.
And he was right there and we all came and we weren't late, like in the movie it showed us, we were late.
And unlike the film also where they make it look as though the lie detector tests weren't conclusive, there was a problem with them.
There was no problem with them.
Alan Dallas was labeled, his test was labeled inconclusive only because he didn't complete his full testing series because of the type of guy he was and he walked out.
Well publicly they announced it as inconclusive but we got a hold of the original police report and internally they described him as basically telling the truth.
But the official thing was inconclusive just because he got upset and walked out in the middle of his test.
Oh, yeah, you know, it would have as it was portrayed in the movie as, you know, everybody's down on this whole thing, but, you know, it was worse than that.
You know, it was 50-50, you know, and parts of the town were against each other.
The town deputy, he sort of, you know, believed it, but his wife didn't.
But his brother, who was the town marshal, didn't believe it, but his wife did.
So there was all these people, you know, even along close lines that were divided in their opinions.
Well, when I first came to, it was kind of gradual.
I was in and out.
There was no real distinct point at which I suddenly knew I was conscious.
Sure.
But I was in a lot of pain, and it kind of in and out.
And at first I didn't remember anything.
I didn't know where I was.
And then I remembered approaching that object in the woods.
And then I was thinking that maybe I'd been hurt somehow and had been taken to a hospital.
So for a while I was thinking I was in a hospital because I was all this pain and there was a light above me and I could hear the sounds of movement around me and I was you know it was just it just hurt so bad.
And you know, I don't know really what it was that made me conclude that I was in a hospital at first because I, you know, at first I couldn't even focus my eyes all that well.
And this light was, even though it wasn't all that bright, my eyes couldn't take it.
Well, they looked, you know, basically humanoid in the sense of having two arms, two legs, you know, and like that.
But, you know, they had these large heads with no hair, these huge eyes.
You know, the hardest thing to bear about the whole thing was these eyes that just seemed to just look right into me, right into the very core of me.
And it was a way, something that just was so unnerving that for a long time after the event, you know, the image of these eyes just, I just couldn't shake it.
It was just sort of like four or five inches thick, and it sort of curved in the general curvature of my chest.
But as soon as I saw the faces of these things, I just flipped out and I jumped up, or jumped is kind of an exaggeration.
I was so weak, I knocked them back, which was more of a push, and I got to a sitting position.
This thing fell off of me, and I sort of staggered back away from them.
I was trying to stay facing to them, and they started towards me.
And when I bumped up against this bench behind me, there were a bunch of utensils and things there, and I just grabbed for something to fight, to defend myself with.
There was a long, thin, clear thing, a tube or a cylinder, and I grabbed that, and I tried to break it, you know, get a sharp point, and it wouldn't break.
So I just swung it through the air as fast as I could in a threatening way and was screaming at them.
And they started towards me.
I mean, they were coming around the table and coming towards me, and their hands were outstretched.
And abruptly they stopped, and they had their hands outstretched like that.
And then all at once, they turned and went out the door.
And, you know, at that moment I was thinking, you know, what am I going to do?
You know, I was looking around wildly, you know, trying to find thinking of escaping.
with Back to my guest, Travis Walton, Mike Rogers.
Before we resume the story in the corridor of the ship or whatever it was, I would like you all to know a couple of things.
One, there is a webpage up for Travis and Mike and the whole fire in the sky experience.
Now, I contacted my quick draw webpage master, Keith Rowland, and he has put in a link.
So guess what, folks?
You can go to my webpage and just jump over to the fire in the sky webpage.
I suggest you go take a look.
It is incredible.
So it's www.artbell.com.
That's www.artbell.com.
And you will see a link there to be able to jump right over to the Fire in the Sky webpage.
In addition, the book, a comprehensive book with a lot of new information, which we are yet to get to, by the way, new information on the whole Fire in the Sky business is now available nationwide in your favorite bookstore.
He didn't respond to me, but I thought maybe because of the helmet he was wearing, he couldn't really hear me or maybe he couldn't speak because of that.
So when he wanted to take me with him and took me by the arm and led me out of there, I went with him.
I was only too eager.
He took me on down the hallway in the direction I had been going and to a small room or passage, which I take to be some kind of an airlock thing, to the left.
And when we got outside of that, at this point, we were inside of a large room, a huge domed or curved ceiling room.
Uh it was very much easier to breathe outside there.
The the l the air was much fresher and uh cooler and the light was brighter and uh it was a lot like uh sunlight in a way.
Anyway, uh he took me uh down uh the ramp onto the uh floor below and uh I tried to look around because there was other uh other craft, disc-shaped object, uh large ones uh inside of here that were sort of sort of different than the one we came out of.
But he just hurried me on out of this room and while we were moving quickly, I keep trying to ask questions, but he took me down this hallway, out of this room down the hallway to another room and there were some people in there who looked, they were dressed like him, basically human looking people.
They sat me in the chair and went on out the door on the other side.
They came over to me and I started asking them all these questions again, thinking that since they didn't have helmets on that maybe they could hear me and would be able to speak to me.
But they didn't answer me and they started taking me over towards this table and they started to put me up on this table and I was starting to have second thoughts about had been rescued.
They weren't answering my questions and their silence was very upsetting.
you know so I started to resist and and and there was just too many of them and I was still very weak and they didn't have too much trouble putting me down onto this table although I did able I was able to get my hand free they put this mask over my face and I almost was able to pull it away before I blacked out and just lost consciousness.
All right, let me stop you, Travis, so I can understand what might be the timeline.
Not that I suppose we're going to really ever understand, but the conscious time you had in the craft, from the time that you regained consciousness until you found yourself back on the ground, in Earth time, how much time did that take?
You know, being hysterical, it's very difficult to estimate accurately, but kind of like going back through and reconstructing the motions and everything.
At first I thought maybe two hours, but it could be a lot less than that.
Well, even though I didn't hear for almost a day after it actually been returned, when I did hear about it, yes, there was great relief for many reasons.
And they can only accommodate so many people on a show, so it's always usually the two most vocal, as you fit it, you know, that get picked for such things.
But these guys all have something to say, and they're all more than willing to talk about it, or at least most of them are.
Jerry Black is one of Philip Cross's associates, so to speak.
At least he used to be.
He approached Tracy Tarmay, the screenwriter for this movie, right at the time they got into making the movie, right before they actually started shooting the film.
And his whole purpose was to get Tracy to drop the project.
Forget it.
His initial approach to Tracy was that this thing's a hoax.
Philip Klass has proved it to be a hoax.
And he wanted to know why Tracy would even bother with it.
Yeah, he found out that he'd been handed a bill of goods, that Glass had told him a bunch of things that just simply weren't true.
Nevertheless, he went back to the same people and spoke to the sheriff, he spoke to the Forest Service, the polygraph operators, and all this and found out, hey, this stuff was baloney.
Right, and that's one of the main reasons why Jerry Black wanted us to do this, besides the fact that we were taking in the polygraph examination sponsored by a skeptic himself, and he had picked out Cy Gilson, who had tested us 17 years earlier.
And by this time, Cy Gilson had new methodology, newly developed technology, computer-assisted equipment.
And he was, by this time, one of the best in the world.
He was the best in the state at the time, in 1975.
He was one of the best in the world three years ago when these tests were conducted.
So he picked him.
And one of his main concerns, one of his main aspects of this was that if we took this test now, the three of us, the three that he considered most key to the case, if we took this at a time when the movie was already in progress, it hadn't come out yet.
It still had two months or so to go before it came out, we literally had nothing to gain and everything to lose unless we were telling the truth.
Travis Walton, Mike Rogers, Fire in the Sky, the rest of the story.
And there is more to be told, and we're just getting into that area right now.
I think you'll be amazed at the documentation behind this case.
Back now to Travis Walton and Mike Rogers.
Welcome back, you two.
And by the way, for everybody out there, if you want to fax a question, that's fine.
We're not going to be very caller intensive in this program because we're trying to get all this out.
Now, I want to ask a little bit about the second lie detector series of tests, the more current ones.
I'll be damned if I would have done it.
I would have thought really hard about it because had you failed for any reason, I'm sure that ammunition would have been used to discredit the movie or even your book.
Yeah, absolutely.
So both of you must have been really, really hesitant.
Well, I was hesitant, you know, because the imperfections in the science of polygraph.
I'd heard enough about that.
But once I realized that this guy was the top in the field and using the best equipment with the most modern methods, I felt fairly secure that it wouldn't be anything, you know, it would have to be some sort of a fluke for anything to go wrong.
No, you know, this guy is impeccable credib credentials-wise.
He was the state police polygraph expert for many years, and now that he's in private practice, police departments and judges and lawyers still come to him.
But there was, they did manage to, the main thing that was accomplished there was that I was able to finally tell this whole thing without breaking down.
And what he did was to remove this fear to the point where I could get into my perceptions more.
You know, everything that's happened to me, the onslaught of attacks from skeptics and people and just being treated differently, this whole thing has not been a picnic.
And so, you know, if I were to spontaneously remember or in some other way remember other things, you know, I don't think I would want to make that public.
Yeah, in 93, right before the movie came out, the Paramount sent a bunch of film crews, various people a hard copy, Entertainment Tonight and the like, one of which went out on snow cats in the middle of the winter there, two and a half foot of snow or so.
And I think it was Entertainment Tonight.
And when we got to the site, it didn't look like the site.
I mean, this was a clearing.
By clearing, it was specifically, it was a clearing in the large timber.
It had a few small trees, you know, very short, like jack pines, scattered throughout the opening.
But basically, it was a clearing, except for that.
When we went back there, you know, we recognized the road.
I mean, the road's even labeled, and it was very recognizable.
We've been there many times, especially way back, many, many years ago.
I hadn't been there in several years until then.
And this clearing no longer existed due to the fact that these small trees that were in the middle of the opening had grown tremendously, almost to the size of the larger trees around it.
I didn't know what to make of it at the time.
And of course, we had this thing to do.
We had to do an interview on the spot and whatnot.
And we were in the snow, and we had to leave as soon as we got done.
Let me ask you, the timber that was in the area that was unaffected by the area where Travis was hit, how tall was that and how many years of growth would that represent?
To give you an example of that, see, I went back to the site just as soon as the snow had melted down to where I could get in there with my four-wheel drive right after that.
And I went in and I took a sample.
In fact, I cut one of those trees down, one of the ones closest to the center of the opening.
And this tree was almost 40 feet tall.
And when I cut it down, I could immediately see something very unusual there.
And so I took some slabs like that, and I took them home, and I polished them and whatnot and made some samples out of it.
But what we have there is a tree that in 1975, at the time of the incident, was, you know, and you know this by counting the growth rings.
You've got a dark ring for winter and a white ring for the growing season, you know, summer growing season.
And they're not all exactly the same size.
But relatively speaking, the first 57 years of this tree's life, these rings are all pretty much the same size.
They're basically very, very small.
After 1975, and the way I find 1975 is count back, you know, 17 years from the time this tree was cut down, and there's 1975, and all of a sudden these rings are three to five times bigger in width.
And when you put the formula of actual volume into it, the formula for a cone, which is, you know, a tree is actually a very tall cone, so that you can obtain a volume cubic feet, what we came up with is that after 1975, in terms of volume, average per year growth, this tree was growing at a rate of 36 times what it was previously.
Well, I actually have tried, for instance, Staten Friedman.
I asked him specifically if he'd come and help conduct an investigation on this.
And he declined.
He said that he was too busy.
And there's other people that I've talked to that gave me various excuses.
I haven't been able to find anybody yet of the right type of people.
I already know what we would hear from Forest Service personnel because they know that thinning and logging produces increased growth.
Of course, their figures and what they know isn't anything like this, not anywhere near this drastic, but I'm certain that anybody who didn't particularly believe in UFOs would definitely come up with a natural answer for this.
And I have to say...
That's another thing.
See, if this was natural in any way, it would either occur because of the logging, which means that the growth rings would be wider for three to four years prior to 1975 when logging actually occurred.
There was no stumps there to show that anything had been cut from away from it.
There's no way that they could have gotten any extra water drain off from the areas that were thinned because these trees were almost exactly on top of a ridge.
Yeah there's quite a bit of physical evidence connected with this thing which a lot of people just don't realize and there are also abnormal magnetic readings there.
Travis I'm sure remembers off the top of his head what those were.
Well all I know you know and I'm not familiar with this stuff either is that they consider this to be whopping variations that dissipated to normal within a week or ten days.
You know and in most films you naturally, you know, you see a film based on a true story and you know that they're going to do some change but one of the most things that you expect that they're going to do is they're going to exaggerate beyond what really happened.
In this particular case they under-exaggerated.
They cut out so much that was included.
They made the polygraph test look inconclusive all of us when in reality they were not.
They threw a national inquirer in the back seat about some guy being kidnapped by a UFO.
Now, do either one of you or both of you suspect that there was an intentional agenda because you would think that they would want to sensationalize, document at least, as heavily as possible what they were trying to show us in the movie.
So why in the hell wouldn't they use the physical evidence?
Well, and there was plenty of that that didn't get in there, you know, and a lot of people have theorized that they were cooperating with some sort of underhanded sort of thing to sort of discredit it.
But actually, you know, I think what they were trying to do there was they were structuring the story to build, from the audience's point of view, the speculation that maybe they did murder me.
So they had to throw in these false clues, these little conspiratorial glances and things that actually detracted from the credibility of it in order to, you know, they have one of the guys going to the church and praying for forgiveness, you know, forgiveness for having run off and left me, not for having murdered me, but see, the audience is supposed to think that this was a murder up until, you know, a certain point.
You both will enjoy this, I think, from Steve and Santa Barbara.
All right, you know, with all the misquotes, false representations, and outright fabrications, I think it's time Philip Klass took a lie detector test.
You know, he spoke about me and drugged my name through the mud for years and years and years and years, and All I've come out to do is to speak the correct version of things and just let the chips fall where they may.
I don't have any intention of even carrying what he has to say.
This is probably a tough one, but I'm going to try it anyway.
You know, as you told us the whole story, and then we talked about the hypnotic regression, I noticed that as we got to that part of the missing time, even now, even here, even in this conversation, your voice began to lilt.
You began to not be particularly responsive.
In other words, there's still something there.
And Mike, I'll just ask you, Mike, do you think Travis knows some stuff about that time, consciously or even subconsciously, that he's just not going to tell us about?
Art, the last time Travis was on your show, you questioned him about any visits or encounters he might have had with government officials or some other authorities after the abduction.
He seemed reluctant to answer, saying something like it was, quote, nothing that he'd want to discuss at that time.
Well, as a matter of fact, I have decided to come out with some of that, and I give as many details as I'm free to in the book and come with some surprising discoveries there.
Yeah, more than once by people that I feel represented probably a government agency, certainly some organization that's intent on discrediting this case and the subject in general.
Well, you know, I guess I would have to describe two separate impressions.
One would be the one that I had right when I was encountering them, and the other one would be one that I have now after time to reflect and adjust better to the experience, the emotion of it.
At the time, the human beings appeared to be rescuers to me, and I was very reassured by their form, the similarity to myself.
And the alien-looking creatures, it was just so traumatic to me that I viewed them at the time as the most monstrous, hideously formidable thing that I'd ever encountered in my life.
But now, in looking back, I have to ask this question, what actual hard evidence do I have to regard these things as hostile?
And I can't come up with anything better than the fact that there was the trauma of seeing them at the time combined all simultaneously with this pain I was feeling, with this feeling of suffocation, of claustrophobia, of being trapped, and just the suddenness of it all.
And being unable to breathe gives one a panic feeling that just doesn't go away.
So, you know, there was some speculation, and I kind of leaned towards this direction, that it might have been something that I'd gotten in the course of the workday, you know, prior to the incident.
We work in a lot of thorny brush, and, you know, sometimes the chain will catch on those things and flip them back at you.
And it might have just been something that poked me, you know, even insect bites.
Phil Klass wrote a book called UFO Abductions, A Dangerous Game.
And he contended two things in there.
One, that shortly before the UFO incident, Travis had told his mother, Mary, that if he were ever abducted by a UFO, she need not worry because he'd come back safe and sound.
And then the second thing, Mr. Klass learned that a Mr. Jack McCarthy, a good polygraph examiner then in Phoenix, had conducted a two-hour lie detector session with Ms. Walton, which he had failed.
Would Ms. Walton clarify the circumstances about that?
Well, this, you know, was a test that was given immediately on the heels of my experience.
I was in such terrible psychological condition that any knowledgeable examiner would know that there was no way that you could get an accurate reading on someone in that shape.
Well, with all the tests you guys have taken and passed with flying colors, not just barely passed, but with flying colors right up at the top of the chart, I kind of agree with Steve and Santa Barbara.
I think it's time that Phil Klass went and took a test.
Do you find there are many people, for example, in America now, after having seen JFK, the movie, who are absolutely convinced, because it was in the movie, that's the way it happened.
You do have to give the movie credit for one thing, above all.
It did allow the audience, the viewing audience, to live what we lived.
Even though there were some departures, it allowed the people to live what we lived through.
And it created an effect that was very much for the positive.
In our own communities here where before there were so many people, certain specific individuals who were very harsh on us, this just doesn't occur anymore.
It created a large believability in and around us.
Have you two begun to figure that there is more to this whole UFO thing, this whole cover-up charge?
Oh?
You have reason to believe there may be sort of a magic day when Somebody, say, from the government comes forward and says, Okay, we do know more than we've told.
Yeah, as time goes by, it seems like every couple of months go by, somebody uncovers some new piece of information, something new that shines a whole new light on things and gets closer to some of the answers we've all been looking for for so many years.
I personally think it goes far beyond that.
I think that we're being, over the years here, we've been prepared.