June 23, 1996 - Art Bell
01:36:46
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| Speaker | 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? | ||
| Yeah, I'm here, are you? | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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 Mogillon 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 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. | ||
| 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 this thing. | ||
| 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 crashed, 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, 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... | ||
| A UFO type object. | ||
| You know, a glowing disc. | ||
| Yeah, a glowing disc, a large glowing disc, covered about 20 feet off the ground. | ||
| About 20 feet off the ground. | ||
| How big would you say it was? | ||
| 20 feet in diameter, 25 maybe. | ||
| Could even have 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, 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. | ||
| In other words, here you were doing something that they weren't going to do, and they were afraid. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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, and the closer I got, the scareder I got. | ||
| And by the time I got up there, I'd 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. | ||
| You know, the closer I got to it, the more I became aware of it. | ||
| First, 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. | ||
| And there was this powerful swell in the sound, in 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 substance of a craft? | ||
| I could, you know, it was not like this blinding light that you couldn't look into. | ||
| I could see the surface of the object. | ||
| I could see that it was giving off light. | ||
| But you know how you can look at a light bulb and you can still see the surface of it? | ||
| It wasn't even that bright as far as looking directly into it. | ||
| It didn't hurt my eyes to look at it. | ||
| And I could see the surface of it was very shiny and very, very smooth. | ||
| And there was no mistaking this for some glowing ball of gas. | ||
| This was not what I was looking at. | ||
| And all of us saw the same thing. | ||
| And we described the same object. | ||
| But when it moved like that, I was really scared. | ||
| And I jumped for cover when that happened. | ||
| I got down behind a log that was sticking up there. | ||
| And those guys were still yelling at me to get away from there. | ||
| And tension was really building. | ||
| I was pretty scared. | ||
| And I made up my mind to make a run for it. | ||
| And when I raised up, I just felt this shock go through my body. | ||
| It was just kind of like a tingling sort of a feeling. | ||
| Well, everybody's had electrical shocks. | ||
| Yeah, it was kind of like that. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, it also felt like I'd been hit, too. | ||
| You know, you ever been blindsided in football or been tackled where your whole body is hit really hard from 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 turned away just at that moment, just a second before that. | ||
| I 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 kind of 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 to that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, at this point, you've probably got the engine going, and you're ready to get the hell out of there, I assume. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so I knew it wasn't following us 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? | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What kind of a boss were you? | ||
| I mean, were you the absolute word of the group, the leader of the group, or sort of the loose leader of the group? | ||
| Well, I had to win between that. | ||
| Yeah, I'd say Mike was, you know, a leader where he needed to be, and he let things go where it needed to be, you know. | ||
| He wasn't a bossy boss, but I was stern but easygoing. | ||
| Stern but fair, huh? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I'd like to say I was the first one to bring that up, but I think it probably was Kim Peterson that said it. | ||
| But I mean, you know, the minute he said it, I knew that's what we needed to do. | ||
| And then it was me and Kim 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 where I had to give the ultimatum. | ||
| We're going back, you know, and anybody that wants to can stand here and wait for us. | ||
| You know, 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 had 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 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. | ||
| All right, and everybody saw that because everybody was there. | ||
| 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 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? | ||
| Oh, 15 minutes, maybe. | ||
| 15 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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... | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| Hollywood. | ||
| Yeah, Hollywood. | ||
| You know, of course 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 ways? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I see. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So anyway, there you were all in the truck. | ||
| You got back to the scene. | ||
| You knew where Travis roughly was body, where you had last seen it, so obviously you rushed over there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you knew you were in the right place. | ||
| So from that I knew I was in the right place. | ||
| 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. | ||
| In other words, there were no footprints going either back toward the road or in any other. | ||
| Or in any other direction. | ||
| And, you know, it wasn't like there was a dense layer of pine needles there. | ||
| I mean, they had logged there and they'd piled that brush pile up there. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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fire | |
| Rob Barbara window in the field. | ||
| I fed you up, I bought the queen. | ||
| I made it to the top. | ||
| I gave you all, I have to give. | ||
| You're listening to an oldie but goodie from 1996 here on the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 Hebrew, 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? | ||
| No, it was a fellow there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, yeah, we pretty much walked all over him by then. | ||
| I mean, you know, we weren't even thinking about any, you know, that. | ||
| Sure, of course not. | ||
| The point is, 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| Well, I can imagine. | ||
| Now, there might have been some reason for it. | ||
| In other words, there had been some acrimony differences earlier in the day, during the workday, previous to all this. | ||
| Had there not? | ||
| Well, there have been a number of incidents over the previous months. | ||
| We weren't all close buddies. | ||
| We were just co-workers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 also they said what they did get was so full of spikes that you couldn't tell whether he was he would not register the truth or a lie. | ||
| It was just all over the place so 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 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. | ||
| All right, there were a total of seven of you. | ||
| Of the others who took the lie detector test, how did it come out? | ||
| All except Alan Dallas passed the flying colors. | ||
| That's the real truth of it. | ||
| There was no problem with them at all. | ||
| How many days into all this was that? | ||
| Three or four days? | ||
| It was the fifth day after Travis had disappeared. | ||
| The fifth day, all right. | ||
| 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 Alan Dallas. | ||
| None of these people have heard 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 defense later on in publicly. | ||
| But privately, he admitted that he pretty much believed that 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 the local. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or less. | ||
| So everybody knows everybody's business about anyway. | ||
| In that respect, it was your typical small town. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Travis was gone a total of how many days? | ||
| Five days, six hours, and some odd minutes. | ||
| And I guess now we should turn to Travis and find out that five days, six hours, so many minutes. | ||
| That's a long time, Travis. | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| Tell us what you can remember of that time, your first recollection when you opened your eyes, or did you ever? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 mat look to it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But for some reason I thought that at first. | ||
| No, 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. | ||
| Yeah, you know, maybe there was some odor that I didn't register consciously. | ||
| But anyway, you know, when I finally got clear enough to where I could see, I saw these creatures standing over me, and I just went nuts. | ||
| I just went hysterical immediately. | ||
| All right, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You said you heard sounds. | ||
| Can you remember what those sounds were? | ||
| I mean, as in human conversation... | ||
| It was the sounds of movement, you know, rustlings, footsteps, maybe like that. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What kind of object? | ||
| Well, it was just, 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, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They fell back easily. | ||
| It wasn't like they were gigantic and fearsome in that way. | ||
| It just terrified me because I'd never seen anything like this. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Some people go, 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. | ||
| Or 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, and so I went in the other direction. | ||
| There 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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 just was gasping all the time. | ||
| So you went down a hall? | ||
| Yeah, and this hall curved sharply to the right. | ||
| And so 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. | ||
| And I had this fear, you know, being, they're all around, but probably behind me, you know. | ||
| So running ahead may get me away from them, may be getting me into something worse. | ||
| And it was just kind of this panic. | ||
| I was torn in many ways, you know. | ||
| But I just kind of lost it there for a minute and took off running. | ||
| And I even went past an open doorway. | ||
| I don't know what was in there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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 guests, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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My mind, and from the moon, I'm only going to feel surrender. | |
| Oh, yes, and I've left my vision in quiet, in the way. | ||
| And I'm going to feel it from the moon, and you're going to feel it from the moon. | ||
| It's always repeating it, say. | ||
| I'm going to feel it from the moon, and you're going to feel it from the moon. | ||
| I'm going to feel it from the moon. | ||
| I'm going to feel it from the moon. | ||
| I was a highwayman, along the proach roads I did ride, sword and pistol by my side. | ||
| Many a young maid lost her models to my trade. | ||
| Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade. | ||
| The master from me in the spring of 25. | ||
| But I am still alive. | ||
| This hour on Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell from June 23rd of 1996. | ||
| It's more of the Arizona abduction case with Travis Wilson 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How do they get it, Mike? | ||
| Well, you can order it 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 a telephone number? | ||
| Yeah, Travis has a direct mailing for that. | ||
| Why don't you go ahead and 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, scooting down a corridor, going by one open room that you didn't even bother, and I wouldn't either, to stop and look. | ||
| And you keep going. | ||
| Then what? | ||
| Well, you know, it's kind of hard to explain the incredible fear. | ||
| You know, I was not the kind of a person to scare easily, you know. | ||
| And to me, I even puzzle over why I was that terrified. | ||
| I was practically out of my mind with fear. | ||
| And I can't really, you know, yeah, to a certain extent you can understand, but, you know, there was more there. | ||
| And 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, in 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, you know. | ||
| 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 motion. | ||
| 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 that this could be, was a projection or a map or some kind of a thing. | ||
| It might even be where I was at. | ||
| 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 as soon as I came to full consciousness. | ||
| Did you have well, 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. | ||
| You know, 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 some, you know, do something that I could get out, 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. | ||
| It 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. | ||
| You know, all of this was just sort of a desperate fumbling for something, you know. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it was quite quite disorienting to have all the everything, all the reference points around me suddenly move in unison. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so I resolved to not tamper with that anymore. | ||
| I went to see if I could open a door. | ||
| Well, I took it to be doorways. | ||
| And I didn't really find a 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. | ||
| I was considering pushing more buttons when something caught my attention, probably a change in light or maybe a sound from the doorway. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And I ran up to him and just started yelling all these questions. | ||
| And he didn't respond to me. | ||
| Where am I? | ||
| Who the hell are you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are these things in here? | ||
| Get me out of here, kind of basically. | ||
| It was just babbling, really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, my face across my arm. | ||
| And there was a light above me. | ||
| I looked to see where this light was coming from. | ||
| And just as I looked, it went off. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right, so we're talking about days and days and days and just a couple hours of conscious recollection during that time. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Unlike the movie. | ||
| I was going to say, in the movie, they showed you huddled in a little mass, 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 this stretch of road. | ||
| I saw some lights down below of the town, and I just, you know, with my last ounce of strength, just ran down into there and called my family. | ||
| Called your family. | ||
| All right, Mike, at this point, when did you hear that, guess what, Travis was back? | ||
| I didn't hear it right away. | ||
| Travis' brother whispered 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. | ||
| And I was included in that group, not deliberately, but I didn't hear 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 it 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. | ||
| They passed. | ||
| What have they had to say publicly in all these years? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, they do the same thing they've always said. | |
| It's not like they don't have anything to say. | ||
| Whenever they're given the opportunity, they speak freely. | ||
| But it's just that, you know, whenever they do these TV things or a radio thing, they only have so much room. | ||
| Travis and I still live in the same area, and the other guys are all scattered out. | ||
| I see. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One isn't. | ||
| Yeah, there's some of the guys, you know, would rather just forget about it, I guess. | ||
| well I can understand that reaction and they're probably tired of being bugged by the media and all the rest of it. | ||
| All right, look, 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 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. | ||
| And that was, you know, he was a skeptic. | ||
| He was a total skeptic. | ||
| Well, Phil Klass is probably one of the biggest debunkers around. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| And so he was in the class 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 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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 I 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 line. | ||
| No, you know what I think he wanted at that time? | ||
| He wanted answers. | ||
| 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 Golf Breeze and even Roswell and almost every major case there is, except this one. | ||
| Because this test. | ||
| Well, yep, 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 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. | ||
| I know I would have been. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You were not worried it was some kind of a setup. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's almost his entire clientele. | ||
| So he's good. | ||
| You did this in Phoenix? | ||
| Phoenix, Arizona. | ||
| Phoenix. | ||
| Alan and Mike each took a new test, and I took two separate question series. | ||
| All right, 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, 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 to 90-something. | ||
| Mine was 0.964 and 0.961. | ||
| Mike's was 0.99. | ||
| And Alan's was 0.993. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Let me find this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you... | ||
| 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 they seen the bright flash of light that hit Travis, did I see Travis Walton propelled 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 did you conspire with the Walton brothers or anyone else to perpetrate a hoax about that UFO sighting in 1975? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Those are the straight-on questions. | ||
| And you all passed with flying colors, to say the least. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Then, since that time, Travis has been examined by, in fact, regressed by, a psychiatrist. | ||
| Is that correct, Travis? | ||
| Not hit in the test yet. | ||
| It was 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 story to anyone, not the sheriff, not my brother, not anyone. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It was just too traumatic. | ||
| Every time I tried to talk about it, I broke down and I could 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, you know. | ||
| But this has taken many years. | ||
| I mean, it still is not easy to talk about. | ||
| Sound quite a bit more relaxed, a little more able to talk about it as time goes by. | ||
| I can see that growing. | ||
| So can I. 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I guess I was pretty normal. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They didn't comment on that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So you did. | ||
| How much were you able to relate under hypnosis? | ||
| I take it they taped it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I was able to recall for them basically everything, you know, 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 here. | ||
| See, this is just a short period of time. | ||
| What happened in all this other time? | ||
| 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, you know, they backed off on that. | ||
| Commonly known as a block. | ||
| In other words, the fellow who was doing it, I believe, according to the book, said, this is too dangerous. | ||
| Here is where we stop. | ||
| Yeah, basically, you know, that was what I was told later. | ||
| And I've been reluctant to, you know, go at it. | ||
| And I, you know, probably never will. | ||
| 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 would be the thing of nightmare for me. | ||
| Yeah, you know, basically, you know, I would die if they continued any further. | ||
| And my brother told me, you know, he advised me not to mess with it. | ||
| And I haven't. | ||
| There have been people that tried to get him to, myself included, but he just doesn't. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I would probably keep it to yourself? | ||
| Keep it to myself. | ||
| So even if you remembered right now, you probably wouldn't tell us. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Better tell me. | ||
| I'm waiting 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? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I don't know specifically what you mean. | ||
| What were 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've taken out the big, 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, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| Not in 1970. | ||
| But they were never thinned. | ||
| These trees in this opening were never thinned. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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 just kind of swept it under the rug. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah well they just they just went you know they were like 8, 10 and up to 12 Gauss 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 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. | ||
| So they did at least get up there and do that kind of testing. | ||
| That was done the second day after Travis' disappearance. | ||
| Now that never made the movie. | ||
| No, none of that stuff. | ||
| Well you know what's peculiar is that in the movie credits you'll see Geiger-Counter-Man 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was not the case. | ||
| We didn't read them. | ||
| I don't even think they sold them in our town. | ||
| I'd never seen one before. | ||
| They played things down rather than exaggerate. | ||
| These were outright falsehoods. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So maybe that was their reason. | ||
| Well, maybe it was, but leaving out the hard and physical evidence 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. | ||
| once again we will tell people how to get it in a moment All right, 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, you know, 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, you know, how could you do that? | ||
| How could you drive off and leave your friend to his fate? | ||
| And, you know, my family was kind of down on Mike about that. | ||
| They took a dim view of it. | ||
| And, you know, I think that 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. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, they were powerless to help me. | ||
| What brought you two back together? | ||
| Well, I guess it was just time. | ||
| We finally got together and ironed things out. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, you know, serious position of trying to get to what's behind his activities. | ||
| Well, I mean, after the second lie detector test, even his own guy took off and left the class camp. | ||
| Now, what does class say about all of this? | ||
| Well, I don't really care. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right, Travis. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh, he won't tell me, but I feel there is. | ||
| Well, you know, come on. | ||
| Nah, there's nothing to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At least not in this book, right? | ||
| No, 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 during the abduction. | ||
| If not, was he hungry, thirsty, when he was brought back? | ||
| Yeah, all of the above. | ||
| 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 was returned and was able to regain what looked to be about a 10-pound weight loss. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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 come with 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, did you have? | ||
| Did you have any sense 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes, indeed. | ||
| 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 lighter than I expected, but they were physical. | ||
| You know, it wasn't like, there was no dreamlike quality to this. | ||
| So if you had given them a good roundhouse right, you probably would have knocked him up against the wall. | ||
| Yeah, or done some serious damage, yeah. | ||
| Were there any physical marks on your body? | ||
| Well, 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, 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Back to the subject of Phil Klass. | ||
| 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 Class. | ||
| Well, he might have got somebody that said that or something, someone might have said something of that nature. | ||
| But, you know, there was so much distortion. | ||
| Things were blown so out of proportion. | ||
| There was, you know a lot of psychological factors at work there. | ||
| I'll get into that a little bit in the book. | ||
| Yeah, that's fine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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 factor 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, you know, declined these kind of offers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I finally agreed with the idea of getting my side out, and then these misconceptions came in, and 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 that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it was a pretty intense experience. | ||
| Well, as you sat there watching the movie, how many times did you look up and go, oh, come on? | ||
| Well, you know, I finally did had an opportunity to learn about these departures prior to that, and I'd had a little time to get used to these things. | ||
| I see. | ||
| And, you know, it was always something that I've had strong reservations about. | ||
| It put me in a difficult position, you know. | ||
| 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 facts. | ||
| Plus, of course, you were there with the actors, and you wouldn't 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, even now, I wish that they would redo certain parts of it and tell it how it was. | ||
| 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 having a movie made about my own story, I've paid a little more attention to these things. | ||
| And 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, you know, make any attempt at that kind of accuracy. | ||
| And, you know, one thing I'd like to stress is that I had no legal power to enforce my will. | ||
| Once I agreed to do this, you know, it was entirely their game. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A willingness to question the old version of things, the misinformation that was out, and to take a fresh look at the facts. | ||
| And that's the number one thing I ask for with this book. | ||
| How close are you to, you mentioned it earlier, 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. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of promotion for this book left to go. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Oh, yeah, we got things scheduled all the way up through the end of the year. | ||
| But, you know, once that's done, you know, that's it. | ||
| There's nothing more to say. | ||
| It'll be good to get back to my normal life. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Well, we've uncovered some leads, and people are uncovering bits and pieces of evidence all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right, 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, Arizona, 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. | ||
| And, of course, Mike Rogers. | ||
| And there it is, folks, fire in the sky. |
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