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June 23, 1996 - Art Bell
01:36:38
Dreamland with Art Bell - Travis Walton, Mike Rogers - Fire in the Sky
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Time Text
It is, without a doubt, the best documented case of a UFO abduction in all of history.
And as a matter of fact, we're going to add to that documentation this evening.
I would like you to welcome Travis Walton.
And Mike Rogers.
Travis, are you there?
I'm here.
Good.
And Mike?
I'm here, Art.
Excellent.
We've got good connections with you both.
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.
In other words, what happened?
But when did it happen?
How did it come about?
Well, it came about in November of 1975.
I had a crew of men working up there on the high rim, the Mogollon Rim, running directly through Arizona.
And what we were doing was PSI contracting from the Forest Service, timber stand improvement work that followed up the logging contracts.
And I had six guys working for me that day.
Travis Bolton was one of them.
We worked almost until dark.
We actually worked until after sunset.
And I had a crew cab truck, which we all rode to work in, and four of the guys who smoked, of course, jumped in the back and lit up because they couldn't smoke during the day.
And Travis was in the front seat on the passenger side.
A kid named Ken Peterson was in the middle, and I was driving the truck, and we headed out of there.
And we hadn't gone too very far.
What kind of altitude were you at?
7,500 feet, almost exactly.
Okay.
That's pretty high.
I was up in the fir country.
Ponderosa Pine grows all the way down to around 5,000 foot elevation, but at this elevation we were in mixed conifer, a lot of fir.
Pretty dense area and very steep country right there on top of the rim.
So you were winding your way down?
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 hundred yards from the very top of the rim when these guys saw this thing and started noticing this light coming through the trees.
Do you remember offhand who saw it first?
Well, you know, it's hard to determine because we were all looking in the same direction and everybody was kind of like talking and really, you know, a lot of animated conversation right after work.
And one by one, everybody kind of fell silent before anybody really said anything.
I think Alan Dallas was the first one that mentioned something and brought our attention to it.
I know several of the guys were seeing it.
He was the first one that spoke, I believe.
Typically, what the blank is that?
Yeah.
Something like that.
They started trying to guess what it was.
It ranged everything from a forest fire to an airplane crash hung up in the trees.
Sure.
Just a weird light coming through the dense brush.
In a place where there shouldn't have been any light at all.
Well, not weird light anyway.
Yeah, sure.
So you thought you might have either a fire or a plane down or both?
Something like that.
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.
It was a 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.
Nobody else was.
When you say this thing, what thing?
I think it's a UFO-type object, a glowing disk, a large glowing disk, about 20 feet
off the ground.
How big would you say it was?
Twenty feet in diameter, 25 maybe, it could have even been 30 feet, I don't know.
It's hard to guess a round-type object.
Sure, sure.
Exactly.
All right, so Travis, here's where you come in.
Might I ask you, Travis, what made you get out of that truck?
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 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.
I was kind of scared about what I was doing, but this was really alarming.
The guys 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.
In other words, here you were doing something that They weren't going to do it, they were afraid.
Alright, so you walked toward it.
Do you remember what you were thinking during that time?
In other words, do you have conscious memory of going toward it?
Oh yeah, and those guys were yelling at me to get away from there, and the more they talked, the closer I got, the scarier I got.
By the time I got up there, I had slowed down, and I was thinking about, you know, maybe this wasn't such a smart thing to do.
So it was 20 feet above you, right?
Yeah, it was hovering there and I didn't quite get under it because there was this big pile
of logging slash that was kind of like in my way.
But before I even got all the way up to that point, there was a sound.
The sound that it was making suddenly got louder and that startled me.
What kind of sound was it?
Well, it was a really strange kind of a sound.
The closer I got to it, the more I became aware of it.
It was such a low sound that I didn't notice it, but then when I got up close to it, it
rose up and started to move.
There was this powerful swell in the sound and the volume.
You were close enough to it that you should have been able to see, I really shouldn't
say that, was it just a light glow or could you perceive...
I'm sure you have a lot of questions.
When it moved like that, I was really scared.
I jumped for cover right when that happened.
I got down behind a log that was sticking up there.
Those guys were still yelling at me to get away from there.
Tension was really building.
I was pretty scared.
I made up my mind to make a run for it.
When I raised up, I just felt this shock go through my body.
I don't think so.
like a tingling sort of a feeling.
Well, everybody's had electrical shocks or something like that.
Yeah, it was kind of like that.
Was it?
Yeah, but it also felt like I'd been hit, too.
You ever been blindsided in football or been tackled where your whole body is hit really
hard from...
Yeah, kaboom.
Yeah, that was the feeling.
But anyway...
What the guys in the truck described, which I didn't actually see because I lost consciousness.
Okay, that's the end of your conscious memory there.
So something hit you.
Mike, you were in the truck along with the other four, right?
Five.
Five, I'm sorry.
So what did you see?
What came down from this craft?
Well, we don't know what it was that came from it.
We know what it looked like.
Okay.
For myself, personally, all I saw was a blinding light, because I'd turned away just at that moment, just a second before that.
I'd turned away to start the truck back up, because I was feeling great apprehension.
This thing was moving.
Its momentum was gaining speed, so to speak.
Even though it didn't leave the spot it was in, it made slight motions within the same space it was in.
And the sound that it made got more powerful to the extent that it was shaking the truck, and you know, you just created a tremendous apprehension.
And I turned the truck back on, 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 that were there have all described, everybody saw it except for me.
of 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.
But the picture that I painted for the cover of this book is more exactly the picture that
everybody describes.
Oh, no kidding, you painted this?
Yes.
Oh, very well done, I must say.
Oh, thank you.
And it shows Travis being struck, his arms outstretched with this beam of whatever it was.
And you actually, and others actually, saw Travis fly through the air.
Yeah, as I turned my glance back towards him, I caught him just barely after this thing hit him because he was still lit up, and he was blown backwards.
It was like an explosion had gone off in front of him, a bloom backwards, and he was flying through the air with his arms outstretched.
I could tell that he was unconscious flying through the air there.
He wasn't wiggling his arms to catch his balance or anything like that.
He was just limp.
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.
Alright, well at this point you probably got the engine going and you're ready to get the hell out of there.
Right, 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.
Did you think Travis was dead?
I knew that he was unconscious.
I didn't know that he was dead, but it certainly looked like a heck of a blast.
I mean, it really jolted him.
I mean, it was a very hard shock that he took, and just the way he shot backwards in the air there, the concussion, you know, I felt maybe he was dead, yes.
All right, so you apply pedal to metal.
You take off out of there.
Meanwhile, people are probably looking back.
Do you have any idea what that object was doing?
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 I kept trying to look back, but the guys and everything was
in my way.
The thing is still up high enough where you kind of have to look down through the windows
behind and like that to see it.
The other guys didn't seem to be looking back right at first.
I looked 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.
Alright, 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 they could.
Well, that is a very accurate scene 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 literally flew down that road and it was a rougher road than they showed in the film.
There were these humps in the road and I kept hitting them and flying over them and crashing
down on the other side.
The UFO was scared to hell.
I'm sure this drive was scaring them, too.
How far do you think you got before you stopped?
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'd
look over there, I could see that it wasn't following us, and 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.
And so, you know, I knew it wasn't following, so it seemed safe to be there for the moment.
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?
It wasn't either one.
It was extremely hectic.
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.
This is the most incredible thing that could ever happen to somebody, especially twenty years ago.
You're out there in the woods and the first time you've ever seen anything like this, especially at a hundred feet away, and then you see your friend get blasted by this thing.
We didn't know what to make of it.
All we knew was that it was horrifying.
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.
Our conversation was very agitated.
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.
When we did, we were able to finally What kind of a boss were you?
one of us, me or Kim, that we left Travis back there and 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.
What kind of a boss were you?
Were you the absolute word of the group, the leader of the group, or sort of the loose
leader of the group?
I would say Mike was a leader where he needed to be and he let things go where it needed
It wasn't a bossy boss, but I was stern but easy going.
I was just trying to determine, so somebody else really was the first one to speak up
and say, ìHey, we better go back and pick up Travisís body or whateverís left of him.î
Yeah, Iíd like to say I was the first one to bring that up, but I think it probably
was Ken Peterson who said it.
The minute he said it, I knew that's what we needed to do, and then it was me and Ken with this concept, we've got to go back and get Travis, and the other guys weren't buying it at first.
In fact, it got to the point before I had to give the ultimatum, we're going back, and anybody that wants to can stand here and wait for us, but we're going to go back.
And unlike the movie, where they have me alone going back, they all elected to get back in the truck and go with me, but it was a little easier to go back.
We'd already made the decision to go back.
We were getting in the truck to go back, and as we were rounding the truck, I looked back over there, and this thing rose up.
I mean, it was just a light through the trees, but then once it got above tree level, you know, I could see it clear, and it just, once it just got above tree level, it just, bang, it was just gone like a bullet.
And it just streaked away towards the Northeast at an incredible rate of speed.
I mean, one second and it was gone.
Alright, and everybody saw that because everybody was there, right?
Well, not everybody saw it.
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 the 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.
All right.
How much time do you think elapsed from when you left till when you got back?
Fifteen minutes, maybe.
Fifteen minutes, all right.
No point in going to Travis here.
Travis is still unconscious at this point.
No memories of this particular time, right, Travis?
That's right.
Um, so you got back to the site, drove back to the site, and everybody was in the truck.
By the way, that's an important, uh, why do you think the movie got it so wrong?
You tell me.
Hollywood.
Yeah, Hollywood.
You know, some of the things they did in the film I can excuse, you know?
Yeah, but weren't you guys, weren't you guys advisors to the film in some way?
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 changed hands and were sold to another person, another studio,
and another producer, more and more people started pulling it this way and that way.
I see.
All right, so anyway, there you were on the truck.
You got back to the scene.
You knew where Travis, roughly, where his body, where you had last seen it, so obviously
you rushed over there.
Yeah, there was a little concern right at first as we were driving back into it exactly
which little clearing it was, because there were 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.
What ascertained the exact location was the fact that with the flashlight I was able to
find Travis's tracks and 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.
So you knew you were in the right place?
So from that I knew I was in the right place.
From there on we started looking for footprints and then the other thing we could and eventually
I pulled the truck up into the opening and the 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 Ken 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
got out of the truck.
There wasn't any sign of him.
There wasn't any footprints leading out.
And, 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 concluded personally from that, as well as the other guys there, that Travis did not leave there on foot.
In other words, there were no footprints going either back toward the road or in any other direction?
Or in any other direction.
Uh-huh.
And, uh, you know, it wasn't like there was a dense layer of pine needles there.
I mean, they had logs there, and they piled up, piled up, a brush pile up there.
So you would have... Ten years before, and there was a lot of bare ground there.
All right, you would have seen the footprints.
You two, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Travis Walden and Mike Rogers are my guests.
Fire in the sky!
Thanks for watching!
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Go round by the wind, throw down in a spin I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top
I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top The original podcast of the San Diego Times is available in
bookstores, on the web, or from the website of your choice.
The original podcast of the San Diego Times is available in bookstores, on the web, or
from the website of your choice.
We're telling you the real story and we'll get back to it in a moment.
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, we might as well go?
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 Heber, Arizona, Ken proceeded to tell him the whole thing, and of course, we went ahead and jumped in.
Who was that?
Was that the sheriff?
I can't remember his name, just one of the local authorities.
He in turn called the sheriff right after we talked to him.
The sheriff and another deputy came on down there to Heber and they brought a four-wheel
drive and another car.
They had a big truck there with a lot of lights on it and whatnot.
The three of them and three of us, me, Allen 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.
We with the three, the sheriff and the other two deputy sheriffs, under-sheriffs, 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 and the four-wheel drive and they searched all the roads.
The search lasted two hours or maybe three hours in the middle of the night and they
couldn't find Heiber or Herrovin 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.
Right.
Yeah, we pretty much walked all over him by then.
I mean, you know, we weren't even thinking about it.
Sure, of course not.
The point is that they couldn't find his tracks anywhere in any of the roads or anywhere up and down there.
They couldn't find any part of him.
No lead of any kind.
But they were skeptical, you know.
They hadn't seen what we'd seen.
The sheriff seemed to be somewhat fair about it.
In fact, him coming out there the way he did right from Holbrook there on such short notice in the early evening like that was kind of unusual, but... Well, now, what was his attitude?
You said it was sheriff.
Now, look, you know, our buddy Travis ran out, he got under this flying saucer, and it zapped him.
That automatically sounds a little suspicious.
Well, the other two fellows there, the other two policemen, didn't I don't believe it at all, and they don't to this day, I don't think.
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.
Well, they said they could see the shock and the emotion in these guys' faces.
One of the guys was still crying, so they figured something really bad had happened, but maybe not quite what was being said.
And it didn't take long for accusations of murder to come up.
In fact, the very first day of the day search, uh... after uh... would concluded that my person we got in
the town of the progress of the family trial of the moment
and i think that they have people up to the very next day a lot of people and
for service and private research rescue teams of their in the area
a lot of the you know the police everybody and right there before the end of the first day of
searching uh...
accusations of murder began to emerge well i can imagine and now
there there might have been some reason for it In other words, there had been some acrimony, you know, differences earlier in the day, during the work day, previous to all this.
Had there not?
Well, there have been a number of incidents over the previous months.
You know, we weren't all close buddies.
We were just co-workers.
Right.
And Allen Dallas was very much like they showed him in the movie.
In fact, they got all the characters in the movie pretty accurate.
Allen Dallas was definitely a bad boy.
He had a chip on his shoulder.
He was against the authorities.
He was against everybody.
In fact, I even had a fist fight with him earlier that year over a problem.
The concept of us killing Travis I can understand.
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.
So I understood that from these people, but it was still hard.
We didn't know what to make of it.
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.
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 pentothal, whatever you want.
We'll do it.
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, he showed us we were late, we weren't late, we were early, 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.
label his house 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 also they said
what they did get was so full of spikes that you couldn't tell whether he was uh...
he would not register the truth or a lie it was just all over the place so
they they couldn't figure out. Well publicly they announced it as
inconclusive but we got a hold of the original police report
and internally they uh... described him as basically telling the truth
Uh-huh.
But, you know, the official thing was inconclusive just because he got upset and walked out in the middle of his test.
All right, there were a total of seven of you.
Of the others who took the lie detector test, uh, how did it come out?
All except Alan Dallas passed with flying colors.
That's, that's the real truth of it.
There was no, uh, problem with him at all.
How many days into all this was that?
Three or four days?
It was the fifth day after Travis had disappeared.
Fifth day, alright.
And so, at that point, really, you had passed the lie detector test, with the exception of one that was inconclusive.
So, did they, at that point, begin to leave you alone?
Well, the polygraph examiner told them that these guys have not committed murder.
None of these people have done anything, not even Allen Dallas.
None of these people have hurt Travis Walton or killed him.
And the sheriff didn't know what to think then.
They were beginning to believe that maybe the UFO story was true.
And the sheriff very much, in fact, did lean that direction, even though he straddled the fence later on publicly.
But privately, he admitted that he pretty much believed it.
He leaned that direction.
What about the rest of the town?
Was it sort of torn one way or the other?
Travis has an interesting story to tell about that concerning local... Oh yeah, you know, it was portrayed in the movie as everybody's down on this whole thing, but it was worse than that.
It was 50-50, and parts of the town were against each other.
The town deputy, he sort of believed it, but his wife didn't.
But his brother, who was the How big was the town?
I didn't believe it, but his wife did.
There were all these people, even along close lines, that were divided in their opinions.
Right down the middle.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's a small...
How big was the town?
How many people?
At that time, about 3,000, I think.
More or less.
So everybody knows everybody's business.
Pretty much.
It was about...
In that respect, it was your typical small town.
Travis was gone a total of how many days?
Five days, six hours, and some odd minutes.
I was in and out.
hours so many minutes was a long time travis yeah well
uh...
tell us what you can remember of that time your first recollection when you open your
eyes or did you ever when i first
came to it was kind of gradual i was in and out uh... it was there was no real distinct point at which i
suddenly knew i was conscious sure but i was in a lot of pain and kind of in
and out and and i 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 there, I was thinking I was in a hospital, because I was in 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 just hurt so bad.
Did it feel like you were in a bed?
Well, no.
I was on a raised surface.
I knew that, but it was hard.
I could feel that it was hard.
And the light was not very far above me and the ceiling was just beyond that.
The ceiling was made out of metal or a metal looking surface, sort of a matte look to it.
Right.
And, you know, I don't know really what it was that made me I was in a hospital at first because at first I couldn't
even focus my eyes all that well.
This light, even though it wasn't all that bright, my eyes couldn't take it.
But for some reason I thought that at first.
That would be a natural conclusion the brain would jump to.
If you were in a place where there was a light right above you, you knew you had been injured
somehow.
You'd figure in a hospital, sure.
Maybe there was some odor that I didn't register consciously.
Anyway, when I finally got clear enough to where I could see, I saw these creatures standing
over me.
I just went nuts.
I just went hysterical immediately.
Alright, creatures.
Can you describe them?
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.
The hardest thing to bear about the whole thing was these eyes that just seemed to look right into me, right into the very core of me.
It was something that was so unnerving that for a long time after the event, the image of these eyes, I just couldn't shake it.
You said you heard sounds.
Can you remember What those sounds were, as in human conversation?
Well, it wasn't voices.
It was the sounds of movement, rustling footsteps, maybe like that.
It seemed hot.
I was having trouble breathing.
I was struggling to catch my breath.
I still had my jacket on.
It was bunched up around my upper body, and when I looked Down there was an object across my chest.
An object?
What kind of object?
I couldn't see all of 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.
I got to a sitting position and this thing fell off of me.
I sort of staggered back away from them.
I was trying to stay facing to them and they started towards me.
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 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, get a sharp point, and it wouldn't break.
I just swung it through the air as fast as I could in a threatening way and was screaming
at them.
They started towards me.
Thank you.
They were coming around the table and coming towards me, and their hands were outstretched.
Abruptly, they stopped, and they had their hands outstretched like that.
Then, all at once, they turned and went out the door.
At that moment, I was thinking, ìWhat am I going to do?î I was looking around wildly, trying to findÖ of escaping.
Were these short, Travis, or were they tall, or a combination there?
Well, they were small.
They were very small.
All of them were about the same size, around four foot.
Alright.
They fell back easily.
It wasn't like they were gigantic and fearsome in that way.
It just terrified me because, you know, I'd never seen anything like this.
Of course.
You know, some people are like, what's so scary about that?
Back then, you know... No, Travis, I don't think that's true.
I mean, somebody might subjectively say, what's so scary about that?
I sure wouldn't be one of those people.
That's really scary.
So they went out the door and they left you alone?
They closed the door?
Well, no.
The door remained open.
If there was a way to close it, I couldn't detect that.
I was afraid they would come back.
And so...
I went to the door and looked.
I didn't see them in the direction they went, so I went in the other direction.
It was a hallway outside the door.
It was a very small, cramped, dimly lit hallway.
Passage.
By the way, Travis, let me ask you.
You're on a craft.
In all probability, you're on a spacecraft of some kind.
Yeah, I surmised that to that point.
You know, that was likely the case.
Did you detect any difference in gravity?
Any difference in atmosphere?
Any difference... Did you get a sense of movement?
Any reason to know you were on a moving vehicle?
No, I never got any sense of movement, but I was continually weak the whole time.
I had trouble moving.
I felt like I wasn't strong enough.
That may have had something to do with gravity.
I don't know about that.
It may have been some physiological condition because I felt like I was in pretty bad shape.
I was struggling to catch my breath.
Maybe that's where the weakness came from.
I was gasping all the time.
So you went down a hole?
Yeah, and this hall curved sharply to the right.
It actually curved so much that I couldn't see if they were behind me, and I really couldn't see if they were ahead of me.
I had this fear of being, they're all around, but probably behind me.
So running ahead may get me away from them, may be getting me into something worse.
It was just kind of this panic.
I was torn in many ways.
I just kind of lost it there for a minute and took off running, and I went past an open doorway.
I don't know what was in there.
Alright, you two hold on right there.
We'll pick it up right at that point.
We're headed to the bottom of the hour.
My guest, Mike Rogers, Travis Walton, their movie was Fire in the Sky, but more to the point, they've got a book and we'll tell you how to get it.
Their book is called Fire in the Sky, The Walton Experience.
It's almost 400 pages and it's very, very well documented, as this entire case is.
It's a very, very well documented case. It's a very, very well documented case.
It's a very, very well documented case.
Sword and pistol by my side.
Many a young maid lost her marbles to my trade.
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade.
The master taught me in the spring of twenty-five.
But I am still alive.
This hour on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from June 23rd of 1996.
It's more of the Arizona abduction case with Travis Walton and Mike Rogers.
Tune in Monday night when Art Bell returns from vacation here on Coast to Coast AM.
And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
And when the arts go gone...
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 web page master, Keith Rowland, and he has put in a link.
So guess what folks?
You can go to my web page and just jump over to the Fire in the Sky web page.
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 web page.
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.
How do they get it, Mike?
Well, you can order direct.
Some bookstores have it in stock if they've already sold out or if they haven't got it yet.
Just ask the bookstores, Fire in the Sky, The Walton Experience.
That's how to get it.
All right. You say they could order direct. Is there a telephone number?
Yeah. Travis has direct mailing for that.
Why don't you go ahead and... Okay, how much is the book, by the way?
The book is $24.95.
$24.95.
And then $5 shipping and handling.
To Travis Walton, Post Office Box 1072, Snowflake, Arizona.
That's a neat name.
Zip code 85937.
Boy, absolutely excellent.
All right.
Now, let us pick up... There you are.
It's kind of hard to explain the incredible fear.
I was not the kind of person to scare easily.
To me, I even puzzle over why I was that terrified.
It's kind of hard to explain the incredible fear.
I was not the kind of a person to scare easily.
To me, I even puzzle over why I was that terrified.
I was practically out of my mind with fear.
To a certain extent, you can understand, but there was more there.
I can't really put my finger on it.
But I was just desperate to find a way out any way I could.
No, look, I do understand.
I think it would be what your parents kind of fear, myself.
I mean, just so totally alien, no pun intended, that you'd be out of your mind.
Yeah.
Well, I came to a room eventually, a short distance, and looking in, it was empty except
for this large chair, small chair.
But on the opposite side of the room, there were outlines, rectangles that I took to possibly
be doorways.
So I was thinking, well, maybe I could go over and open one of these and get out.
So when I first entered the room, I kind of sidled around to the side, you know, because
I couldn't see if there was someone sitting in this chair.
When I got around to where I could see that it was empty, I started towards it, and then
a very strange thing started to happen.
The room darkened, and at first, you know, I didn't connect this to my emotion.
I thought, I looked around to see if there was someone doing this.
But I stepped back, and the darkening effect diminished and moved forward and increased,
and I quickly figured out that it had to do with my position.
The closer to the center of the room that I got, the darker it became, and I saw these
points of light all around me on the floor, walls, ceiling, resembling stars.
And I figured out pretty quick, you know, that this could be a projection or a map or
some kind of a thing.
It might even be where I was at.
You know, I didn't know.
Had you concluded, by the way, at this point that you were on a ship?
Yeah, I pretty well figured that out as soon as I came to full consciousness.
Did you?
Okay, you were fully conscious.
So did you remember what had happened on the ground?
Did you remember?
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I finally, you know, everything clicked once I saw these creatures, you know, I put
it all together right then.
All right.
So you pretty well knew by then you were on a ship, and you were in some kind of a room
that was displaying space and stars for some reason.
Yeah.
So approaching the chair, I started messing with these controls, and this was a stupid
sort of a thing to do.
I know that now, but at the time I was just out of my mind with fear, and I was trying to figure out some way that I could open a door or do something that I could escape.
So I pushed some of these buttons, and some of them didn't really appear to do anything.
None of them opened a door.
Were they buttons like we understand buttons?
Yeah, they were lighted buttons.
I didn't see any symbols or anything that I would recognize.
Gotcha.
There was a screen there.
Some of these buttons made these lines move.
There was a lighted screen, but nothing that made sense to me.
I sat in the chair.
I moved the lever.
and this made this star pattern move.
All of this was just sort of a desperate fumbling for something.
It was quite disorienting to have all the reference points around me suddenly move in
unison.
So I resolved to not tamper with that anymore.
I went to see if I could open a door when I took the guitar away.
I didn't really find a button or a knob or any way to open it.
I tried to look through the crack.
I couldn't detect any light coming through or even any air coming through.
I was considering pushing more buttons.
caught my attention, probably a change in light or maybe a sound from the doorway.
I saw what I took right away to be a human being standing in the door, a man standing
there with a helmet on his head.
I ran up to him and started yelling all these questions.
He didn't respond to me.
Where am I?
Who the hell are you?
Where am I?
What are these things in here to get me out of here?
It was just babbling.
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.
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 to a small room or passage,
which I take to be some kind of an airlock thing to the left.
When we got outside of that, at this point we were inside of a large room, a huge domed
or curved ceiling room.
It was very much easier to breathe outside there.
The air was much fresher and cooler.
The light was brighter.
It was a lot like sunlight in a way.
Thank you.
Anyway, he took me down the ramp onto the floor below, and I tried to look around because there were other craft, disc-shaped objects, large ones, inside of here that were sort of different than the one we came out of.
But he just hurried me on out of this room and, you know, while we were moving quickly,
I didn't like to keep trying to ask questions, but he took me down this hallway, out of this
room, down a 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 when I went 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.
I had second thoughts about was that had I been rescued, they weren't answering my questions.
Their silence was very upsetting, so I started to resist.
There were just too many of them and I was still very weak.
They didn't have too much trouble putting me down onto this table, although 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.
So there was some kind of anesthetic?
Apparently, yeah.
So at that point, good night?
And I went out real fast just to grade right out.
And the next conscious memory?
I woke up pretty quickly.
It was cold air outside.
It was dark.
I was lying face down.
Let me stop you, Travis, so I can understand what might be the timeline.
I looked to see where this light was coming from and just as I looked it went off.
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.
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?
Being hysterical, it's very difficult to estimate accurately, but 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.
So we're talking about days and days and days and just a couple hours of conscious recollection
during that time.
Yeah.
So, you know, later that night, when I was finally reunited with my family, I thought
it was the same night, but I learned how much time had gone by and it was quite a shock.
I bet.
All right, you found yourself on the ground.
What did you do?
Well, I saw this craft hovering there and it shot up into the sky and was gone in an
instant.
And there you are.
And there I am, standing there in the dark, in the middle of a highway, in the middle
of the woods.
Did you have clothes on?
Yeah, I was fully dressed.
Alright.
Unlike the movie.
I was going to say, in the movie, they showed you huddled in a little mask, totally naked.
Not true, huh?
Not true.
Not true.
Dramatic license, I guess.
So anyway, you had clothes on, and you got up, I take it eventually, wobbled up, and made your way where?
Down into the town.
I recognized the stretch of road.
I saw some lights down below the town, and I just, you know, with my last ounce of strength, When did you hear that Travis was back?
I didn't hear it right away.
Travis' brother whisked him away and took him on down to Phoenix and got him away from the police and the media circus that was going on up there.
I was included in that group, not deliberately, but I didn't hear it for a while.
And I wasn't actually able to see him for three days or so after he was returned.
Well, you must have received word that Travis is back, we're off the hook, even though we passed the lie detector test, thank God, no dead body, my buddy's alive.
Right.
Well, even though I didn't hear for almost a day after he'd actually been returned, when I did hear about it, yes, there was great relief for many reasons.
You too have been the vocal ones about this whole incident, but there were several other guys involved.
They took a lie detector test, except for Dallas, that passed.
What have they had to say publicly in all these years?
It's not like they don't have anything to say whenever they're given the opportunity.
They speak freely.
Whenever they do these TV things or radio things, they only have so much room.
Travis and I still live in the same area and the other guys are all scattered out.
They can only accommodate so many people on a show, so it's usually the two most vocal, as you put it, 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.
One isn't.
Some of the guys would rather just forget about it, I guess.
Um, well, I can understand that reaction, and they're probably tired of being bugged by the media and all the rest of it.
Alright, look, uh, there is new information to be told, and I guess it is, was it a Mr. Black?
Who was Mr. Black?
Jerry Black is one of Philip Glass's associates, so to speak, at least he used to be.
He approached Tracy Torme, 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, to forget it.
His initial approach to Tracy was that this thing was a hoax.
Philip Glass proved it to be a hoax, and he wanted to know why Tracy would even bother
with it.
He was a skeptic, he was a total skeptic.
Well, Philip Glass is probably one of the biggest debunkers around, there's no question
about it.
So he was in the Glass camp.
Yes, he certainly was, and that's the way he approached the makers of the film, but it didn't take him very long after talking to Tracy and then finally me and Travis, and eventually Jerry Black set off about conducting his own investigation. Yeah, he found out that,
you know, he'd been handed a bill of goods that Clafford 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.
So, well, this is very interesting.
So, he decided apparently that he wanted to talk you guys into doing another
lie detector test Is that right?
That's right.
Yeah, he did talk us into it.
He talked me into getting Alan Dallas to do it first.
Alan Dallas had never actually passed a test, even though he hadn't failed one.
And so I got a hold of Alan, and Alan said, sure, I'll do that.
And so they got that going, and then he wanted me to take one.
And I gave in fairly easily.
I put up a little bit of fight.
My main concern was that wouldn't the new tests sort of say that the old tests weren't valid somehow, you know?
And actually, as you put it in the book, you had everything to lose and, in effect, nothing to gain.
The movie was about to come out.
That's one of the main reasons why Jerry Black wanted us to do this, besides the fact that
we were taken in the polygraphic examination sponsored by a skeptic himself.
He had picked out Cy Gilson, who had tested us 17 years earlier.
By this time, Cy Gilson had new methodology, newly developed technology, computer-assisted
equipment.
By this time, he was one of the best in the world.
He was the best in the state at the time, and in 1975, he was one of the best in the
world three years ago when these tests were conducted.
So he picked him.
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.
Do you think at that point he wanted to blow away the movie?
In other words, he wanted to put you guys through a second life?
No, you know what I think he wanted at that time?
He wanted answers, you know?
He had learned enough about digging into this with a new investigation to know that all the things that he'd been thinking before weren't accurate.
And so, to just put the final degree on his investigation, he just wanted to close out with that.
So at this point, he was beginning to break with Phil Klass and saying, come on, folks, there's more to this than you're saying.
Yes, and it did create a rift between him and Phil, but, you know, Jerry Black is still skeptical about Gulf Breeze and even Roswell and almost every major case there is, except this one.
Except this one.
Because we all passed our new test.
Well, yeah, that's it.
We'll get to that in a moment.
The new modern lie detector tests.
Guess what, folks?
Every one of them, every one of them, passed.
We'll get to some of the questions and the results next.
Well, all right.
Here I am once again coming up.
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 this 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.
I know I would have been.
Well, I was hesitant, you know, because, you know, the imperfections in the science of polygraph, you know, I'd heard enough about that.
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 there wouldn't be anything.
It would have to be some sort of a fluke for anything to go wrong.
You were not worried it was some kind of a setup?
No.
This guy is impeccable 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.
That's almost his entire clientele.
So he's good.
You did this in Phoenix?
Phoenix, Arizona.
Alan and Mike each took a new test, and I took two separate question series.
Alright, so the audience knows, I believe, There's a plus-minus scale in the results of a lie detector test, and I think I read in your book that a plus six is considered to be truthful.
Isn't that correct?
Yeah, and in the scoring system he was using, he had both a percentile sort of a scale, and a point scale.
You know, one was the computer and one was the examiner.
To put it more in perspective, there's actually a 200-point spread, especially on the computer analysis readout.
It goes 100 points in the positive and 100 points in the negative, and all three of us passed these tests at 90-something, plus 96... Mine was .964 and .961.
Mine was .964 and .961, Mike's was .99 and Alex's was .993.
You know, these are up near the absolute theoretical maximums that you can have.
So he then wrote a letter saying, look, these guys are telling the truth.
Yes, he appeared on television saying that.
All right, what were the key questions asked of each of you?
That would be important to know.
Well, Alan was asked, did you see this object?
You know, did you see the UFO?
Did you see the UFO?
Did you conspire with anyone to perpetrate a hoax about this?
During the time Travis was missing, did you have any contact in any form with him?
And his last question was, in the past 17 years, has anything occurred to you to cause
you to now believe that the incident was a hoax?
And he answered no.
And my questions were a little different.
They asked me the first couple.
They asked me, for instance, after seeing the bright flash of light that hit Travis, did I see Travis Walton propel backwards through the air?
Between November 5th and 10th of 1975, when Travis Walton was reported missing, did you have any verbal or personal contact with him?
and uh... did you conspire with the wall brothers or anyone else perpetrator hope
about that you're talking about twenty five all right those of the straight on questions and you you
all passed with flying colors to say the least
all right uh... then since that time travis has been examined by in fact
regressed by uh... psychiatrist uh... you Is that correct, Travis?
A hypnotist, yeah, and a psychiatrist's presence.
All right.
And so they began, they put you under, and they took you back, hoping to retrieve the details of what now obviously did occur.
Yeah, and up to that point, I was just so incredibly traumatized.
I hadn't told the entire Uh, story to anyone, not the sheriff, not my brother, not anyone.
Sure.
It was just, just too traumatic.
Every time I tried to talk about it, I broke down and I could just, just barely get it out.
I remember the last time, in fact, we did an interview with you.
You could barely get it out, Travis.
Yeah.
You know, the longer it goes, the easier it is that, you know, but this has taken many years.
I mean, it's, it's still is, is not easy to talk about.
I'm quite a bit more relaxed and a little, a little more able to talk about it as time goes by.
I can see, I can see that growing.
So can I.
So anyway, they took you in and they put you under.
Are you an easy or a hard subject?
Well, as far as going under, I guess I was pretty normal.
I don't know.
They didn't comment on that.
The main thing that was accomplished there was that I was able to finally tell this whole thing without breaking down.
What he did was to remove this fear to the point where I could get into my perceptions more.
How much were you able to relate under hypnosis?
I was able to recall for them basically everything, relate to them in detail everything that I had been able to recall, but they came to a point In trying to dig deeper, trying to find out if there was more memory, saying, ìThis is just a short period of time.
What happened in all this other time?î You bet.
And I had assumed that I'd been unconscious the rest of the time.
All that missing time, yes.
Well, apparently, there's more that there was just too dangerous to get to.
Too dangerous?
Well, there was a post-hypnotic suggestion or a block.
Some of the people present thought it might be my own fears, but for whatever reason, I felt that I would die if regression continued any deeper, so they backed off on that.
commonly known as a block in other words uh... the fellow who was doing it uh...
i'd leave according to the book said this is too dangerous here's where we stop
yeah basically you know that was uh... what i was told later
uh...
and uh... i've been reluctant to you know go out at and i'd be no probably
So there's some kind of block that was either put there or you have put there.
Yeah.
Some point where you don't want to remember or it's too dangerous for you to remember.
Yeah.
That'd be the thing of nightmare for me.
Yeah.
You know, basically, you know, I would die if they continued any further.
My brother told me he advised me not to mess with it, and I haven't.
There have been people I've tried to get into, myself included, but he's very, very reluctant.
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.
If I were to spontaneously Remember or in some other way remember other things.
I don't think I would want to make that public.
I would probably keep it to myself.
So even if you remembered right now, you probably wouldn't tell us.
That's right.
Better tell me.
I waited too long.
Yeah.
Then, Mike, there's been some additional facts that have come forth.
You went back to the location, didn't you?
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, are you talking about the newly discovered physical evidence?
Yes, sir.
Yeah.
In 93, right before the movie came out, the Paramount sent a bunch of film crews, various people, hard copy, Entertainment Tonight and the like.
One of which went out on snowcats 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 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 recognize the road.
I mean, the road's even labeled, and it's 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.
Well, 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?
I don't know specifically what you mean.
What was the size of the surrounding trees, Mike?
Oh, the surrounding trees, you remember, it was logged three or four years prior to this, and they'd taken out the bigger, the big trees, but there were still very large trees there, I would say 50, 60 feet tall.
How many years does it take to produce a tree that size?
Oh, anywhere from 200 to 400 years.
200 to 400.
Pine trees grow extremely slow.
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, you know this
by counting the growth rings. You have a dark ring for winter and a white ring for the growing
season, summer growing season. They are 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 are basically very, very small. After 1975, and the way I find 1975 is to
count back 17 years from the time this tree was cut down, and there is 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 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.
Good Lord!
Yeah, and the change is just abrupt.
You can just see it, you know, here's the growth rings, they're real narrow and close together, and then right at 1975, boom!
They just, you know, real thick and wide, and they continue that way for the rest, until the time the tree was cut.
Alright, well, both of you have been working in timber, Sort of the timber industry cutting trees down.
I take it that you've talked to some people, experts, about how this could be?
Well, I actually have tried, for instance, Stanton 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 or 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.
I don't know what that would be, Mike, because it only happened to the trees right where
the...
Exactly.
The trees were sampled back in the thickets where the trees had actually been thinned.
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 range would be wider for three to four years prior to 1977.
That's when the logging actually occurred.
But they were never thin.
These trees in this opening were never thin.
There were 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 thin, because these trees were almost exactly on top of a ridge.
And there's just no explanation for it.
And you go out into the surrounding areas and take other trees and they don't show this.
Alright, well that's obviously anomalous then, and maybe somebody will help you out with it.
What about other obvious tests?
For example, did anybody go up there and look for radiation above ambient level?
Did anybody look for... In 1975 they did.
They did?
Yeah, and they found some.
And it was kind of funny the way they...
Yeah, there's quite a bit of physical evidence connected with this thing, which a lot of people just don't realize.
There were also abnormal magnetic readings there.
Travis, I'm sure, remembers off the top of his head what those were.
Yeah, well, they were like eight, ten, and up to twelve goths, I believe it was.
Above background, above the surrounding area, this whole thing was gridded off and measurements were taken.
Okay, not all of us understand what is average and so how far above average that represents.
Well, all I 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.
So they did at least get up there and do that kind of testing?
That was done the second day after Travis's disappearance.
Now that never made the movie.
No, none of that stuff did.
Well, you know what's peculiar is that in the movie credits you'll see Geiger counterman And there is no Geiger counterman in the movie, so somewhere along the line, that part was cut, for what reason, I can't tell you.
And in most films, you see a film based on a true story and you know that they're going to do some changes, but one of the 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 wasn't included.
They made the polygraph test look inconclusive, all of us, when in reality they were not.
They drew a National Enquirer in the back seat about some guy being kidnapped by a UFO.
That was not the case.
We didn't read them.
I don't even think they sold them in our town.
I've never seen one before.
They played things down rather than exaggerate.
Yeah, these were outright falsehoods.
Yeah.
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 a 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 right through the audience at the uh... it's supposed to think that the
and that this was a murder up until you know a certain point
so maybe that was the reason maybe it was but uh... leaving out the hard and physical
evidence uh... at least later
or at some point seems to me to be very suspicious Very, very suspicious.
Well, this movie was far from a documentary, and you won't find that there.
All right.
But what we will find is a real truth in your book by the same name, Fire in the Sky.
and once again we will tell people how to get it in a moment
alright back Mike Rogers, Travis Walton, Fire in the Sky, gentlemen, welcome back.
I've got several questions I want to ask now, and they go like this.
Over the years since this has occurred, have you two remained fast friends, or what has happened to your friendship in all this time?
Well, I have to admit that there was a time where Mike and I, for several years, didn't speak to each other.
We had a little rough spot there.
It seemed that every time Mike got interviewed, people would ask him, ìHow could you do that?
How could you drive off and leave your friend to his fate?î My family was kind of down on Mike about that.
They took a dim view of it.
Mike read into some things that I said, things that I didn't mean, that he probably felt for a time that I felt that way.
But I'll say right now that I feel that he did what he had to do, all of them, in taking off and getting away like that.
They did the only intelligent thing.
They were powerless to help me.
What brought you two back together?
Well, I guess it was just, uh, time.
Time.
You know, we finally, you know, got together and ironed things out.
Um, all right.
You both will enjoy this, I think, from Steve in Santa Barbara.
Art, you know, with all the misquotes, false representations, and outright fabrications, I think it's time Philip Klass took a lie detector test.
What do you two think about that?
Well, no one's ever going to get him to agree to something like that.
No way.
He's got too much to hide.
He'll never take a lie detector test, no matter how hard he's pushed for it.
I just don't believe he ever would.
Not from anyone that was in a skeptical, serious position of trying to get to what's behind his activity.
Well, I mean, after the second lie detector test, even his own guy, took off uh... and and left uh... the class camp now what
is class say about all of this
well i don't really care you know he he spoke uh... about me and drug my name
to the mud for years and years and years and years and all i've come out and and to do is is to speak at uh... the
correct version of things and
and uh... just let the chips fall with him and i i don't have any intention of even
you know karen what he has to say alright travis uh...
This is probably a tough one, but I'm going to try it anyway.
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?
Oh, he won't tell me, but I feel there is.
Well, you know, come on!
No, there's nothing to say.
At least not in this book, right?
No, this is all I've got to say on this subject.
You know what?
There's going to come a time in the not-too-distant future where I'm not going to speak about this subject at all.
I don't blame you.
Here's one for you from Fairbanks, Alaska.
Please ask Travis if he has any recollection of receiving food or drink I have no memory of being fed or given fluid, but I was very hungry and quite dehydrated.
I drank a lot of water.
I was so thirsty in the hours right after I returned and was able to regain what looked to be about a 10-pound weight loss.
All right, 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.
Any changes on that front?
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 some surprising discoveries there.
So you were talked to?
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.
All right, Travis, somebody else wants to know what sense of these creatures, the two types, I guess I would have to describe two separate impressions.
that they were not wanting to harm you, in other words, trying to relax you, or did you
think they were demonic or evil?
What sense did you have?
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 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.
Being unable to breathe gives one a panic kind of feeling that just doesn't go away.
My wife is an asthmatic, and that's exactly what sets in and worsens it, is panic.
When you can't breathe, there's absolute panic.
You pushed one of these creatures, so they had physical form, didn't they?
Yeah.
And they weren't strong.
In other words, you were able to give them a good push, and back he went.
Yeah, as weak as I was, you know, I was surprised at how easily they fell back.
They were a little wider than I expected, but they were Physical, you know, it wasn't like, uh, there was no dream-like quality to this.
So if you'd given him a good roundhouse right, you probably wouldn't have knocked him up against the wall.
Yeah, or done some serious damage, yeah.
Were there any physical marks on your body?
Well, uh, yeah, the examining physician found a puncture wound on the inside of my right arm.
He did?
Yeah, it was partially healed.
He couldn't really determine the exact age of it, so 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 prior to the incident.
We work on a lot of thorny brush, and sometimes the chain will catch on those things and flip them back at you, and it might have just been something that poked me, 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.
Is that true?
No, that's not true.
Oh, Phil Klass.
Well, he might have got somebody that said that, or someone might have said something of that nature, but there was so much distortion.
Things were blown so out of proportion.
There was a lot of psychological factors at work there.
I get into that a little bit in the book.
Yeah, that's fine.
and then uh... the second thing on this class learned that a mister jack mccarthy a good
polygraph examiner even in phoenix
had conducted a two-hour lie detector session with miss wall which he had
failed would miss one clarify the circumstances about that
well this you know with uh... a test that was given immediately uh... on the
heels of the my experience i was in for 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.
So it wasn't failed.
It was not conclusive.
That's true.
And that test has been reviewed by two of the top examiners in the world and declared as being invalid.
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.
Well, Phil might agree to take a test.
That's the way he is.
He'll say, oh, sure, no problem.
But a year later after actually getting him to do it by someone who was actually trying to get to what he's covered up, he's never going to do that.
All right.
Please ask Travis and Mike if their book is going to be available in audio.
Do you have any idea?
Well, I've been interested in doing that.
There's nothing solid yet, but I'd like to see that happen.
Alright, as both of you reflect on all the years now that have passed and the wonderful book you've written, boy, it really is a good book.
I mean, I've been talking to people who have read the book, and the reviews are just absolutely spectacular.
Was it a lot of work?
How did you decide to write the book?
I mean, after the movie, what Got you guys to the point where you wanted to put all this down on paper?
Well, I think one of the major motivating factors was the movie itself.
A lot of misconceptions were created.
Here, you know, the whole reason I finally agreed to do a movie, and for years I declined these kind of offers, I finally agreed with the idea of getting my side out, and then these misconceptions came in.
I feel the need to correct those, but on top of that, I got to digging and discovered a lot of interesting new material that I think was very important that people know.
Why do I think there's another book somewhere in you, Travis?
No, I got no intention of going beyond this.
When the two of you, I'd like to get your reaction, because it's not everybody that has a movie made about their experience, but as you sat, did you get to see it before everybody else?
Well, I attended a screening with the actors in Hollywood, and it was a pretty intense experience.
Well, as you sat there watching the movie, how many times did you look up and go, ah, come on!
Well, I finally did have an opportunity to learn about these departures prior to that, and I had a little time to get used to these things.
It was always something that I've had strong reservations about.
It put me in a difficult position.
It's not my job to get out there and trash my own movie.
I can tell you, I wish that they had stuck to the to the fact and uh... i thought
of course you were there with the actors and you would want to insult any of
them i'm sure but mentally you must have done a kind of a double take a
couple times yeah you know i even now i wish that they would reduce certain parts
of it and uh...
tell how 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 well you know because of i i i i'm
having a movie made about my own story i paid a little more attention to
these things and i'm i've discovered that most movies about real life
stories are more fictionalized than mine was
You very rarely get something that's going to make any attempt at that kind of accuracy.
One thing I'd like to stress is that I had no legal power to enforce my will.
Once I agreed to do this, it was entirely their game.
You do have to give the movie credit for one thing above all.
It did allow 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, in fact certain specific individuals who were very harsh on us, this just doesn't occur anymore.
It created a large believability in and around us.
A willingness to question the old version of things, the misinformation that was out, and to take a fresh look at the facts.
That's the number one thing I ask for with this book.
Well, there's a lot of promotion for this book left to go.
to just saying that's it we've told as much of the story as we know or are
going to tell we're not talking about this anymore there's a lot of promotion for this book left to go who
knows oh yeah we got things scheduled all the way up to the end
of the year but you know once that's done you know that's it there's nothing
more to say you know it'll be good to get back to my normal life I'm sure
Have you, too, begun to figure that there is more to this whole UFO thing, this whole cover-up charge?
Yeah, and I think that some of these things may come out.
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.
We've uncovered some leads and people are uncovering bits and pieces of evidence all the time.
As time goes by, it seems like every couple of months, 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.
We're being, over the years here, we've been prepared.
We're being prepared, and I don't know how long it'll take until whoever's doing whatever they're doing considers us prepared enough, but I got the strong feeling we're being prepared for something.
Alright guys, one more time, if you want a signed, an autographed copy of the book, which is quite an offer, and it won't last, give the address one more time.
Travis Walton, Post Office Box 1072, Snowflake, AZ 85937.
Well, I want to tell you both, I really appreciate your appearing on Dreamland tonight.
I wish you all the luck in the world with the book and the appearances you have yet to come because of it.
And again, particularly with all the new info, thank you for being here tonight.
Thank you.
Take care.
That's Travis Walton.
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