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April 9, 1999 - Art Bell
01:28:49
Dreamland with Art Bell - Fire in the Sky - Travis Walton - Mike Rogers
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From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours, from Guam, out across the Dateline, all the way east to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, where I'm going to go visit one day, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole.
This is Coast to Coast AM, worldwide of course on the Internet.
Alright, now to that portion of the show promised.
He does not do frequent interviews.
Barely ever does them.
As a matter of fact, that really goes for both of these gentlemen.
I now would like to bring on Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
So let's do it one at a time and be sure we can get them planted properly.
Uh, first, let's go to, uh, Mike Rogers.
Mike, are you there?
Yes, I'm here.
Okay, you hear me okay?
Yeah.
Alright, good.
Uh, let's see if we can bring, uh, Travis on.
Uh, Travis Walton, good evening.
Are you there?
Yeah, I'm here.
Oh, excellent.
We've got you both just fine.
Um, alright.
I don't know where to start.
I sat down and watched Fire in the Sky again and took notes this time and so I guess I'll kind of move through it the way they did except I would like to not do it the way they did with the flashback in the beginning and then the story taking up.
Mike, you had a government contract of some kind with the Forest Service?
Right.
What was that to do?
Well, we had to thin out the trees that were damaged and diseased and whatnot after a logging operation and pile the debris.
Basically, it's just kind of an ecological program that cleans up the forest after logging and makes the trees grow better.
All right, and you were the crew chief for that?
Right.
How big a project was it?
How long were you going to be up there?
We'd been on it about a year and a half at that time.
Oh, I see.
Pretty good size contract.
Exactly.
You were married at the time, Mike.
Are you still in a divorce status?
Right.
I haven't been married now for many years.
Okay.
I guess at the time, also, the movie went into the thing that you had some financial troubles.
The movie took a few liberties.
I wasn't really having financial troubles.
I was having troubles trying to live the American dream and have quite as much as I wanted, I guess.
And then it covered a little piece where Travis drove up on a motorcycle and wanted to start a motorcycle shop there.
Is that right, Travis?
Yeah.
So you did do that?
Well, we had various businesses.
We thought we might get in together.
You know, the motorcycle thing was more kind of my idea.
I don't know that Mike and I had plans together.
So the movie at least was pretty true in that area?
Yeah, I was kind of into motorcycles at the time.
Alright, scene shifts and you guys are on the way up to the mountains to do the contract
and on the way up, Travis, you got into kind of a thing, a bit of a friction with Alan
Dallas.
Yeah, well, you know, he was kind of a wild guy and he'd had a little friction with probably
several of the guys on the crew at various times.
You guys arrived okay at the worksite then, worked all day, left the worksite around dark.
Was it already dark when you left?
Well, not quite dark.
It was getting dark.
The sun had gone down and it was darkening.
Okay.
Then you, on the way down I guess, you both saw something, some sort of Glow or fire in the sky, the way the movie made it look.
I've seen fires at night and it looked just like a fire in the distance, kind of lighting the horizon.
Is that about right?
Well, we could see it through the trees and, you know, first we didn't know really what it was.
We thought it might be a forest fire, but it was more of a golden color rather than a red color.
And then it apparently moved?
Well, um, I mean, did it look like a fire was spreading, or did it look like just the whole thing was moving?
We were just puzzling over a lot of different things.
Nobody really talked about it while we were looking at it, because, you know, there wasn't that much time.
We saw it, and, you know, I heard the guys kind of one by one fall silent from, you know, the various conversations that were going on.
So I assumed that they were all looking at what I was looking at, but nobody said, like, you know, started analyzing out loud what it was.
There was more, you know, what was going on inside of our heads.
If you had to guess then, would you have said fire or plane crash?
Well, it was puzzling, you know, because at first I was thinking fire, but then the light seemed to be coming from higher above.
You know, I knew the ridge top was just a little bit above us, but this was from higher above that.
That's the reason the plane crashed.
Maybe it was hanging up in a tree or something.
I guess we ought to identify exactly where this was.
Where was your work site?
It was the highest area up on the Mogollon Rim forested region up in the mountains of Arizona.
And so you were at about what altitude do you think?
Oh, I don't know.
What do you think, Mike?
7,500 to me.
7,500.
Oh, you were way up there then.
All right.
Then, in the movie, as they always do in movies of this kind, you know, the radio started to go crazy.
Is that also accurate?
Well, we didn't have a radio on at the time.
So that's a little dramatic license they took then?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
At any rate, did you guys head toward this, or did you just keep going down the road, and that took you closer to the line?
Yeah, that's the way it was.
See, there was just no other way out of there, and we had no choice but to keep going the direction we were going.
Alright, and somebody yelled to stop the car.
Was that you, Travis?
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess it was me.
As soon as we got around this group of trees, this thicket, to where we could see the source of this,
somebody in the back yelled out, it's a spaceship or something like that. And,
I mean, it was unmistakable. It was so close that, you know, I mean, everybody knew what it was right off the bat.
Nobody needed to say what it was.
Okay in the movie and again it's you know I'll tell you what the movie did or I'm sure you know what the movie did they showed it to be a craft but Then at other times, they showed it to be sort of a living light, almost.
Did they get that right, or how would you describe what you saw?
What we saw was very distinct as a mechanical object with, you know, hard angular edges.
It didn't have the shape that they gave it in the movie.
Now, the guys described it as looking to be the color of molten metal coming out of a blast furnace.
But, you know, they're talking about white hot, golden hot, you know?
Sure.
So, you know, they gave the craft in the movie a kind of a molten red flowy sort of look that wasn't really the way it was.
If you had to judge, either one of you who saw it, how far above ground was it?
If you were going to guess.
Oh, I don't know.
20 feet.
20 feet?
Oh, that's not far.
In other words, it was way down below the tree line.
Yeah.
Oof.
So that's close.
That's a close encounter, alright.
Then the movie, Travis, shows you getting out of the truck.
Is that right?
Uh, yeah.
I was thinking that this thing was just gonna zip off and be gone.
You know, the way it is when you catch sight of a wild animal in the woods, you know, you're just gonna glimpse it and it's gonna be gone.
And so I was in a hurry to get up to it before it left.
I don't know.
Here's where I gotta stop you for a second, Travis.
You know in the horror movies, when inevitably the lady, you hear this noise, this horrible noise,
and inevitably she goes to one place she shouldn't go, down to the basement, where something eats her.
So in other words, here you are with a pretty frightening thing going on,
a ship hovering, what, 20 feet above the ground or something,
and you get out of the truck and go under it?
It's kind of a crazy impulse.
When you think back on it now, can you remember what you were thinking when you did that?
Well, I was kind of given to impulsive behavior back in those days.
It certainly changed me and I'm not that way anymore, but at the time I was just thinking that it would be gone and I'd miss a chance to see up close.
You know, the guys were really alarmed by what I was doing.
They were yelling at you to come back to the truck.
Yeah, they were, you know, and getting pretty excited about that.
So, you know, that kind of egged me on.
But I was having serious misgivings because as I got closer to it, it didn't take off.
I understand.
Was there any noise?
Yeah, it was a very strange sort of a sound, a kind of a high-pitched, cyclic sound.
With some real deep tones, it just seemed to be so deep you almost couldn't hear it.
Would you describe it as real loud or just there?
Well, it was just there.
It wasn't tremendously loud at first, but then when I got closer, it suddenly got louder and started to move.
It rose up a little bit and that really scared me.
They're still yelling at you.
Mike, I'm sure you're still yelling at them from the truck, right?
Oh, yeah.
Is your recollection of it, Mike, like his regarding the crafted self and the noise?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
In fact, there's little difference, if any, between all the guys that were there and the descriptions of everything concerning it.
Okay, at this point, there's what?
Six of you in the truck?
Six in the truck and Travis out there under the craft.
So, there's Travis under the craft.
How much time went by, Travis, before your memory either ends or that bolt of light hit you?
I was just second because as soon as it started to move, you know, I jumped for cover and resolved.
I made up my mind to get out of there and get back to the truck like they were saying.
And as soon as I raised up to go, wham, that's when I went out.
Just at the very moment common sense overtook you.
Now, in the movie, it showed this bolt of light that came down and literally threw you up in the air.
Is that Is that accurate, or is that dramatic license?
What they did there in the movie didn't quite look the way it actually happened.
In fact, the movie didn't make it quite dramatic enough.
The movie did some things that were a little exaggerated.
In other places, they under-exaggerated, and that's one of the places where the movie didn't make it as dramatic as it was in real life.
The thing that hit Travis, whatever it was, It was so powerful that it blew him back like an explosion.
It didn't gently lift him up and throw him back like that.
Going backwards was the result of a very hard blast of some kind.
I've described it many times as like a hand grenade going off in front of him.
He was blown backwards, literally.
Wow.
Travis, is that where your immediate memory ends?
In other words, were you out cold?
Yeah, I just kind of felt a numbing sort of a shock, but I was out instantly.
Out instantly.
All right, then at this point we shift back to you, Mike.
There he is laying on the ground, looks like he's been blown up by something, and that's when The panic hit the fan, I guess, with you guys.
At least that's the way they showed it in the movie, and I can imagine that's the way it was.
What did you guys think?
Well, the movie depicted that real well right there.
It was almost identical to what happened afterwards.
I mean, total panic.
I don't even know if it was shown in the movie two or three seconds before I hit the gas.
I think I hit the gas more immediately seeing him hit the ground.
You thought he was dead?
Well, he looked dead flying through the air, and he sure looked dead when he hit the ground on his back.
He didn't even flinch, didn't make a motion when he hit the ground.
So I rolled up around him, and we were headed down the road.
I can imagine you were, and you say it was almost immediate.
You didn't want to end up like you thought he was.
Right, it was a panic situation.
Alright, so then they showed the truck just careening down this road.
How fast were you guys going, do you remember?
If they could have actually taken footage of that truck going down the road, it would have looked almost exactly like it did in the movie.
Wow.
And then careening is the right word.
Hitting things.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, really?
Smacked the mirror.
Busted the mirror off, you know.
There were actually humps in the road which they didn't show there.
Humps that were bulldozed up mounds of dirt to prevent erosion.
And every time I'd hit one of those things, the truck would go flying.
And you know, crashed down on its shocks real hard.
It was a real crazy, panicked flight.
How far down the road, I guess still going down the mountain, right?
How far down the mountain did you get?
How much further away from the scene did you get before you started talking about stopping and going back?
Probably not even a quarter of a mile.
You know, me and Ken Peterson, who was sitting right next to me, the one sitting between Travis and I in the front seat of the truck, he was the next oldest to myself.
He was only two years younger than me.
He was 26.
I was 28.
And he was like the next oldest.
Travis was actually four years younger than that.
But Ken and I both seemed to realize about the same time that, you know, here we are flying down the road like this.
But it was like, as soon as I could see that it wasn't following us, as soon as you could tell from looking in the rearview mirror and the other guys looking back, it's not following us.
Whatever it is, it's still way back there.
We've got a quarter of a mile distance between us.
In fact, in the trees, we've lost sight of it.
And then it's not quite so panicky.
It's like, you know, what do we do?
We left Travis back there.
Yeah, in a way, you're like Travis.
Common sense returned about a quarter of a mile down the road.
Uh, so it hit both of you really the same way.
Utter absolute panic.
I, I do understand.
And so then, uh, you began, you finally stopped the truck.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Uh, did stop the truck a quarter mile down the road.
Just hit the brakes and stopped.
All right.
Both of you, hold on one second.
We'll be right back to you.
my guests are Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
Back now to Travis Walton and Mike Rogers.
I'll try to give them equal top billing here as we go along.
Back with you again.
So Mike, the truck stops.
And you say, watch.
Well, Ken and I looked at each other, and nobody said anything for a moment.
And I said, you know, finally, we're going to have to go back.
And somebody in the back, Alan, I think, yells out, what?
You know, we left Travis back there and, you know, he certainly looked hurt.
We need to go back.
Of course, you know, a quarter of a mile down the road, it didn't take very long to get there.
The speed I was traveling, and this is not something that took well.
We started arguing about this.
After a couple of minutes we got out of the truck, all of us but one I think.
We stood out there on the other side of the truck away from this thing because I'd made a left hand turn and now this thing was looking back to the north.
across through the forest there and I really couldn't see any light or anything at all.
We put enough distance between us and the forest was thick enough through the quarter
of a mile of foliage there that we could see a thing.
Yeah, dark again.
Right.
And yeah, we're standing there in the dark.
It was even a moonless light.
There was a sliver of a moon just about to go down on the horizon.
Just a sliver.
And it was really getting quite dark there.
And so after a little bit of a hectic day, I got up and I went to the office and I said
I'm going to go to the office and I said, I'm going to go to the office and I said,
There was no sense going on there at all, really.
The only sensical thing was that Travis is still back there.
We don't know what happened to him.
We don't know what's happening to him.
We need to go back.
It wasn't very brave of us to leave and we need to go back.
Finally, we just made the decision, at least Ken Peters and I made the decision, that we had to go back.
Unlike the movie, where in the movie they had the guys stand there by the road, that's one difference there.
In reality, everybody elected to get back in the truck and go back rather than stand there in the dark.
Oh, that's a pretty big difference.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, I would think the other guys would resent the way the movie portrayed them.
Well, yeah, there has been a little of that.
Well, for all of us, I guess.
There's been the good and the bad as far as the way we looked at the movie.
This was one particular difference that made a lot of difference to me because it made
it look like I was the only one that went back at all and had any looksy when in reality
everybody went back.
One thing that made it easier for us, I think was kind of the reason why we just went ahead
and went back, is because as I was rounding the truck to get back in my door on the other
side of the truck and the other guys were getting in, we looked back over in the direction
that this thing had been and a light, this thing never really got above the treetops,
you could see the light, it lifted up and streaked away to the northeast.
Just a streak.
Well now see they missed that one in the movie too really.
So you're saying the craft, and you were how far from it still?
A quarter of a mile away.
A quarter of a mile away and you saw it lift up and streak away at this point?
Right.
It was so fast and you couldn't see it clearly because you're looking through the trees.
Remember these trees right next to us are reaching to the sky and there wasn't any way
that you could see anything clearly but you could see through the foliage.
You can see this light a quarter of a mile away raise up and streak away.
Wow.
All right, so at this point then, everybody piles back into the truck and you go back up The quarter mile to the site where you last saw Travis.
Well, there was a little more discussion that went on there, but it takes a long time to explain these sort of things.
But yes, we did.
We did go back.
And it's been maybe 15 minutes at the most before we actually went back to the site.
All right, gentlemen, here's where you get to take a rest.
We'll be right back with you.
All right.
All right.
Both of you stay right there.
Stay planted, everybody.
I've got guests.
Mike Rogers.
Who was the crew chief, along with Travis Walton.
Travis is also here.
And we're talking about an incident that occurred, an abduction, the abduction of Travis Walton.
As depicted in Fire in the Sky, and sometimes not as depicted in Fire in the Sky.
In other words, we're getting the real story.
Travis had already encountered the vehicle, the craft, whatever it is you want to call it.
And it had thrown a light on him, zapped him backwards, literally almost blowing him up.
Mike and the rest of the guys had taken off down the hill.
They were down the hill, as a matter of fact, about a quarter of a mile away, finally decided to turn around and go back and get Travis as soon as they calmed down after that truck careened down the hill.
And they're just about to start back up, and we'll get to them in just a moment.
Let me take care of the commercial continuity right now.
Back now with Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
Welcome back, both of you.
Yeah.
Okay, um, Mike, uh, so here you are, I guess, headed back up the hill with everybody in the truck.
You're going to find Travis, and I take it you go up a little slower than you came down.
A lot slower.
Yeah, we, uh, we headed back up there and Very, very slowly, very cautiously.
We were still in a mild state of panic.
I mean, it wouldn't have taken much to cause us to turn around and run, but we were headed that way and we did get back to the site where this had happened.
Upon doing so, since the thing was gone and there was no trace of it, it took a little bit of time to actually make certain that we had the right clearing.
But once we had done that, and we certainly had the right place, and we were sure that we were in the right spot, we took a flashlight out of the glove box and shone it around there while we were still in the truck, not seeing anything, shone the flashlight into the clearing where Travis had fallen, and he wasn't there either.
No depression in the ground like in the cartoons, you know, a Travis Walton depression in the ground.
Well, nothing like that.
This was 90 to 100 feet away where he fell, 90 to 100 feet from the road.
Right.
And, uh, so, you know, you couldn't have seen a depression from that distance.
Uh, but we, you know, we, there was a, a slash pile, a pile of logging debris there in the middle of a clearing, which Travis had been standing next to when, when he'd gotten hit.
And, uh, So we used that as kind of a locating device, and he wasn't anywhere in that clearing that we could see.
So we just shone the light around for a while, still being very cautious, very timid, frightened, completely mentally overwrought.
Just, you know, emotions were at a high point.
You were probably in a state of shock.
Oh yeah, I'm sure that we were.
I mean, I know what shock has been explained to me like and I was definitely in a state of shock and the other guys later on explained their feelings of it similarly.
But we eventually pulled the truck up into the clearing where the headlights of the truck shone right into the clearing and right where Travis had fallen.
And then there was another discussion that had to take place about getting out of the truck and looking around.
And again it was a unanimous decision that everybody do it together rather than me or Ken getting out.
Everybody decided to go with us rather than stay in the truck alone.
So we were all walking around out there but we were all very close to each other, shoulder to shoulder.
Six men as close together as they could get.
And we had the one flashlight, but we walked up and down the ridge.
We looked for everything.
The only tracks we could find, which were barely visible, and the pine needles intermittently, a heel mark in the edge of the road that I saw before we got out of the truck.
And then, you know, you could see the pine needles were disturbed there where Travis had fallen, where he had stood.
But that was the only sign of him.
There was nothing else there.
There were no footprints in the road leading out.
From what we saw of the way this thing hit him and how he flew backwards and how he hit the ground, it was a pretty unanimous feeling among us that he wouldn't have gotten up from where he lay.
So he had to be taken?
Yeah.
Well, everything put together, all this put together, made that very strong.
By the time we left there to head back down the hill to notify the authorities, we felt that he was taken.
It was a real strong feeling.
We had no other explanation.
We know that he didn't walk out of there.
We didn't feel he was hurt in the first place.
He looked dead when he hit the ground.
And we were certain that he had been abducted.
All right, so you guys drove back to town, probably half in a state of shock the whole way, and reached this cafe gas station that they showed in the movie.
Is that accurate?
Fairly.
There wasn't a lot of people around.
Like in the movie, they added more people and whatnot into that.
But what actually happened is that we stopped there.
In fact, on the way into town, See, I wasn't the one that actually made the call.
I guess they just chose to use my character throughout the movie there in certain places.
They do things like that to simplify movies.
I understand that.
And because you had been the crew chief, so they would imagine that you would act.
Who did call?
Well, a guy who they even changed his name in the movie.
His real name is Ken Peterson.
In the movie, they called him something else.
I don't remember right now what it was.
Had you guys made a decision, all of you, that you would call?
No, that was the problem.
I would have called normally, but I was against it.
I didn't believe that we would be believed.
I thought that we should report it as a person in our crew missing, that somebody got lost, and try to get somebody to help us search for him.
In fact, I didn't even want to notify the authorities.
Just get some people.
I didn't have a deliberate plan in mind.
Go up and find Travis.
I just knew that we needed to look for him before the authorities were notified because I just knew that they would not believe this.
That was my feeling.
This was a discussion on the way back into town.
By the time we got there, it was Ken Peterson that called and the reason he called was because he was very firm.
He was the guy in the movie that was, even though they changed his name, he was depicted as the choir boy, the steadfast... The church going fellow.
The church going choir boy, right.
Never told a lie in his life, and that's a very accurate description of Ken Peterson.
And he was very adamant about reporting this to the authorities.
He wouldn't take any other thing for a way of doing it.
I mean, he was firm on that entirely, and so he's the one that called.
He didn't know who the authorities were, but the call that he made there in Heber connected him with the Chuck Ellison, who was the local deputy there, Navajo County deputy.
Right.
And he's the first one we talked to, and then after talking to him for a while, and I don't think that Chuck Ellison believed it at all, just like I suspected, but after a while, an hour later, after Chuck Ellison had notified the county seat, the actual sheriff, the Sheriff Marlon Gillespie, I came down with another man, an undersheriff, Ken Copeland with him.
So there was nobody named Blake Davis?
No, that was a composite character.
And Lieutenant Frank Waters, also composite?
Exactly.
There were a lot more law stories all together involved, and to get all those people and their real names in there, you know, there was composite characters.
That was done several times in the movie because the movie involved a lot more characters everywhere
along and they had to simplify that I guess is the only explanation I know of that makes
sense that they would do that.
Well, there was one point there where I guess just before the law arrived you said, look
we're going to stick with our story or somebody said we're going to stick with our story.
Was there a general agreement to do that?
Well, it's funny.
I think the movie was trying to play kind of a murder mystery type of thing to the audience.
In reality, the stick to it is, you know, Uh, let's not have contention among us here, even though we have differences of opinion of what we should do and what we should say to the authorities.
It was like, you know, Ken says, I'm gonna, I'm gonna call them, and I'm gonna tell them the whole truth here.
And, and I hope you guys don't, don't, you know, try to act differently, because this is what we need to do.
We need to tell the complete whole truth about this thing, and just let the chips fall where, where they may.
Well, you had to know one of the place, places those chips were gonna fall was in the murder column.
In other words, They were going to suspect this because of the nature of the story.
I really didn't have that in mind, because we did not know what happened to Travis exactly.
We had our own feelings about it, but we certainly didn't know that he was going to be gone, especially for as long as he was.
There was no way I could foresee the future at that point, and I wasn't concerned at that point with the way it eventually turned out, with the accusations of murder and everything.
To me it was just, we shouldn't tell them the whole thing right now because they're not going to believe it.
I thought that they wouldn't even come and search for him if we told them about the UFO.
I know.
I'm curious, Travis, I don't mean to leave you out, but this is the part where you're left out.
Travis, when you hear all this now, You know about all that went on and what they thought and what they did.
I know that after the whole thing you felt, according to the movie, some resentment that Mike and company didn't stay there and try to get you, that they took off.
When you hear all of this now, from Mike and others, what goes through your mind?
I mean, do you suddenly understand or do you still feel any resentment?
Well, you know, I felt less resentment than I mean, back when this happened, every time he was interviewed, somebody would ask him, how could you go off and leave your friend like this?
So they were really dumping this load of guilt on him, which really added to the sort of feelings that he was getting from my family during the search and things.
So it was kind of a blame situation.
that came about and he kind of misread me as feeling that way. I don't really, you know,
I've always said, excuse me, that they, you know, they did what they had to do. But, you know,
in a similar situation, I can't see that it would have made any sense for anyone to have
done any different than they did. Yeah.
Jumping out to the end of the movie for a second, or the story, was it a year, a year and a half that you guys really didn't see or talk to each other?
Was that accurate?
Yeah, but there were some other things involved there too, but that was a part of it.
Did you really get together, the two of you, at the end as they showed?
Go back out to the area?
We've been out there A few times.
A few times.
That's what I try to avoid.
All right, back now, Mike, to you.
So this went on, there was five days of pure hell.
I mean, Travis was gone for five days.
What did that, what happened?
You talked to the police the first time, I guess.
They arrived and you started telling them this story.
Yeah, it was a very harrowing five days.
Believe me, it was the worst five days of my life.
And it didn't get much better the next several days after that.
The Sheriff, although he's always held a line publicly that he's skeptical, I think he was the only one of the three police officers that we met with that night that gave us a glimmer of hope.
He partly believed at least.
At least his mind was open to the possibility that what we were saying all together was true.
Well, here's a guy who probably knew you.
It's a pretty small town there and he knew your character.
Well, in reality he had actually had a fighting himself not too long before that, a few months or years before that.
And I guess from what I've heard, this was what made him at least open-minded to the possibility.
He never just totally believed it, but it left him open enough before he could take what we were saying serious to an extent, and it made it possible for them to go out and conduct a real search.
Which they did.
I guess the movie showed helicopters out, dog teams, the whole thing.
Four days worth of searching altogether.
How many men were involved in that?
Oh, gosh.
Fifty to a hundred.
I don't know how many.
I'd just be taking guesses.
I don't think anybody knows the actual figure, but it eventually involved aircraft and helicopters and dogs.
You know, what's funny about the search, the one thing that I always bring up about it that the movie never showed, is that this search was so thorough.
That these guys would come back from a jog out and around with their hands full of debris that they had found in the woods.
Everything from pop tops to beer cans to old oil bottles, you name it.
Old pieces of logging equipment, you know, pieces of cable and whatnot.
They literally slicked those woods up and they'd come back and throw them in the back of the pickups and they had piles of debris there that was gathered up.
This is how thorough the search was.
They were looking for every little speck or clue that they could find and managed to clean up the forest in the process.
And I thought that was kind of funny.
I always have since then.
I thought that was kind of an interesting little part of the whole thing.
Well, it's interesting because they didn't find even a trace, did they?
Right.
Not so much as a footprint.
Wow.
So Travis was gone.
In other words, he wasn't There's no way we could imagine he was conked out, unconscious, somewhere in the area.
They'd have found him.
That's right.
He would have been found.
That's really the truth of it.
Well, alright.
So, they didn't find him.
Were you up there during the entire time of the search?
Not every single hour of it, but almost.
Alright.
Meanwhile, back in town, at this point, how many people started thinking that you had You or the Wild One, they called him I think Allen Dallas, had dispatched Travis.
Well, there were people who thought that almost immediately.
In fact, you know in the movie they have Travis' brother called Dan.
This is another composite character.
In reality there were two brothers.
One's name is Dwayne and the other's name is Don.
And Dan was a name in between, combined the two brothers together.
In reality, one brother was very supportive because he believed this because he had an experience himself a few years before that where he had seen something fairly close range in the woods while he was hunting.
The other brother was totally the opposite.
He was hot mad.
He was certain that foul play was involved, that his brother had been murdered.
And there were some confrontations between him and us, the crew.
Well, I'm sorry to say it, but I have sympathy with that.
I mean, if somebody... By the way, you two, I've seen a craft myself, so I have a lot of sympathy with the story you're telling, but if you came back with a story that, sorry, your brother's gone, maybe dead, we saw him hit, he looked like he was dead, and it was aliens, You know, that story's not going to go down real easily.
Well, that's what I say.
It's funny.
The one brother took it that way.
He believed that foul play was involved, while the other one, the one that knew me best, was completely supportive and believed everything that we said about it.
So two brothers, full brothers, took it exactly opposite from each other.
Interesting.
Yeah, and that was kind of the whole mode of the town there.
That summed up the entire reaction of the town.
You had those that were almost completely supportive and those that were just, those who believed that we had murdered him or the whole thing was a hoax or something.
But it was very divided that way, almost down the middle.
And that's what made for a real wild situation in the town there for several days.
In fact, ever since really.
Well, the fellow they called Allen Dallas, the bad apple or the bad seed or the drifter, Um, was he as hot-headed as they depicted him to be in the movie?
Yeah.
He was?
Yeah.
So, then there was some reason that, you know, particularly since Travis, did you really have that altercation with him?
Well, we'd nearly come to blows.
You know, it'd be even kind of a situation that cropped up with not just me, but some other guys on the crew.
Mike actually got in a fist fight with him.
So then if you're a cop, if you're a lieutenant or the sheriff or whoever, and you're getting told this story, you're going to figure this Allen Dallas character might have done in Travis.
Right, you know, of course he had an attitude about police too, of course.
Yeah, I'm sure he did.
Well then, that's exactly the way they showed it.
Alright, there was a town meeting, Mike, wasn't there?
I imagine there were several.
So you didn't really walk in on a town meeting the way this did?
No, that was, again, that's the condensation of a much bigger story.
But I had confrontations with a number of groups of individuals in the town there during that time, and they just chose to do it that way in the movie, which summed it all up really.
I'm sure you were thinking, Travis is never going to be found, I'm either going to be suspected of being, or Yeah, by the fourth day of the search.
Yeah, by the fourth day of the search, by the second day of the search, those accusations
were beginning to arise and by the end of the fourth day of the search, it was full
blown...
Alright, you two, hold on just a moment, we'll be right back.
Back now to Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
Hi there, you two.
We're back on.
All right.
Now, here we are in town.
They're beginning to suspect you strongly and the other guys of murder.
Maybe Dallas, maybe all of you.
They don't know and they keep asking questions.
At some point, according to the movie, they wanted you to take a lie detector test.
Is that right?
That's right.
I imagine you thought pretty hard before you decided you'd take it.
Well, not really.
We all knew that we were telling the truth.
There was no doubt of that.
And we certainly knew we didn't murder anybody.
And they wanted us to go down to the county seat, which we did the following day.
And they had it all set up for us.
They had a lie detector man up from Phoenix DPS, State Police Polygraph Operator.
His name was Cy Gilson and he looked like a mean guy.
You know in the movie they made him look like Mr. Friendly and everybody said he's the best, you'll be happy with this and all the rest of it.
Today he sort of looks like Mr. Friendly, you know 20 years later.
But back at the time he looked pretty stern.
And he acted real stern and he was very intimidating and there was a little conference that went on before these started early in the morning.
It was a Monday morning and he really had us intimidated pretty bad there to the point
to where after he went to set up the machines for the lie detector test some of the guys
including myself were feeling just a little bit uncertain.
We were a little bit afraid that just by the way this guy acted and the intimidating manner
in which he talked to us there we were afraid maybe there was some government involvement.
It turned out that just wasn't true.
It was just simply a feeling that we had that maybe this guy had been bought off and we
were all going to fail these tests even though we were telling the truth.
That's what I would have been worried about.
You know, I would feel intimidated, probably like Kato Kaelin in front of Marsha Clark or something, and my pulse would start racing and the machine would say I'm lying.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Is that about right?
Well, no, we weren't worried.
You know, we knew we were telling the truth.
I had no idea how polygraph machines worked, you know.
We just were basing our feelings entirely on his attitude.
He was a very stern guy and very experienced obviously.
The way we felt because of the way he was acting, it made us feel very intimidated and we felt like he was being too skeptical.
He was acting extremely skeptical.
And he'd pop me on the back of the arm with the back of his fingers, you know, on my arm with the back of his fingers.
And he'd say, you're not lying, are you?
And pop me on the shoulder, you know?
Boy, oh boy.
You know, I'd be thinking he's trying to get the graft to spike.
Well, he had us intimidated.
He definitely did.
All right, well, so you all took it.
And, you know, the impression I got from the movie was that one of them was inconclusive, but that the others had all passed.
Yeah, and the inconclusive one, of course, was Alan Dallas.
But not because he wasn't telling the truth.
Him being the person he was at the time and involved in a few more things than anybody actually knew at the time.
He might have been afraid they were going to ask him something he didn't want to answer.
Right.
He was really on the spot, and he was concerned about being in that position.
And I guess that something happened.
I never have heard the complete explanation.
You know, these lie detector tests, it's not just like they ask you a series of questions once.
They actually go through it at least three and maybe four and even five times.
Each test actually involves several series of questioning.
Each series of questioning is pretty much identical, but the whole thing altogether per person took two hours or more.
So you really get grilled.
You don't just go through the thing one time.
What happened is Alan had gone through like two run-throughs of this thing, and somewhere along the line, more or less in the middle of the testing series, something happened between him and the examiner where Alan got mad.
I thought that indeed this guy was bought off by the government for some reason.
And that in combination, that feeling because of something that the examiner had said to him.
And so he gets up and he pulls himself loose from the machine and he stomps out of the room and came back.
And I think he was like the second one tested.
There was one before him and he had drawn the straw for second.
I don't know.
At that point I volunteered to go in ahead of my schedule, fifth place in line and went
next after Alan because I figured that somebody needed to cool the situation down.
I knew that we couldn't just all get up and walk out because of Alan's anger.
Knowing Alan's personality I figured that his reaction was more his personality than
anything.
We didn't want to have this thing end that way, so I went in next and the examiner kind of explained a little bit of what happened with Alan, but he wouldn't tell me a whole lot.
He just said, He thought I was the next one in.
Only those guys knew who was in order because we had drawn straws among us to go in order.
But once in there, he went ahead and convinced me by talking to me that he was on the up and up, that there was nothing going on here.
He hadn't been bought off.
He was just doing his job.
He was going to give you an honest test.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the way he presented this to me.
So I went ahead and was tested then.
And the whole thing, you know, went normally and then the next couple of guys came in and everybody got done.
It didn't finish until late that night because it took so long for each one.
Ooh, that's a big process.
Yeah.
The examiner really went through a day there.
And then they kind of, at the end of that day, they said, well, everybody seemed to be telling the truth and there was one inconclusive, which you say is Dallas.
I want to clear something up about Dallas before we go on.
Travis, Dallas had a cut on his hand?
No.
No.
Well, he may have cut himself at work, but it had nothing to do with any fight that we had.
So that was movie stuff?
Yeah.
They were trying to imply that there had been some fight between you and Dallas where he might have gotten that cut?
Yeah, there were theories, you know, about chainsaw murder and that sort of thing.
And, you know, the movie went out of their way to sort of add suspicion or questionable circumstances that weren't really there.
Well, they need a story.
There was no National Enquirer in the truck that day, you know.
Oh, really?
Now, see, had I been you, Travis, or you, Mike, I'd have been really angry about that because the clear implication was you guys were sitting around the truck yucking it up, drinking some beer or something, And uh, read this story and decided to perpetrate a hoax.
That was the clear implication, wasn't it?
Yeah, well, you know, that was, that was the reason they threw that in there, was to add suspicion.
And the movie, you know, ignored a lot of, uh, you know, corroborating evidence and threw in a lot of suspicious things that never really happened.
Yeah, but that one would have made me angry.
Would have made me angry.
Because it cast doubt on all of your characters.
Well, there is one thing Travis passed over there between him and Alan.
Alan did nearly hit him with a tree that day.
Yeah.
Oh, that was true then?
Yeah.
I'll be darned.
Did you think Travis, he was out to get you one way or the other?
Or pick a fight with you or something?
Well, yeah, and I think that may have contributed to his anxiety in the testing, you know, because the thrust of the question was, do you harbor ill will towards this guy?
But, you know, even though he knew he didn't kill me, he was in a situation where, you know, if he denied ill will, he'd be lying on the test, and I would show up, and if he admitted it, then Then they would just fuel the suspicions that were directed towards him.
So I think that kind of added to his anxiety.
All right.
I'd kind of like to, Travis, try and ask you about what you can remember.
The movie, the movie, Travis, showed, of course, very specific things.
The movie showed that you were in a cocoon-like area, almost like a beehive or something.
Did they take this from your description, Travis?
No.
As a matter of fact, the script that I was given didn't have that sequence aboard the craft in it at all.
It was totally mythic from the copy I was given.
I understand.
Travis, what do you remember?
Well, there were certain things that occurred in the movie that sort of symbolized things that I underwent.
Left you with the same kinds of emotions, but as far as the actual events were concerned, none of it was really there, except in symbolic form.
There were no cocoons.
The ship itself looked very clean.
Hospital-like.
It was not all trashy and organic.
That's very different.
You lost consciousness, obviously, when the light hit you.
Right.
What is the first thing that you can remember after that?
Just pain.
I was just coming to and I was in a lot of pain.
I didn't come to very quickly.
It was kind of like in and out for a long time.
And I was kind of half conscious and half wondering what had happened to me.
I could hear movement around me and I even remembered approaching the craft, but I figured that I'd been injured somehow and that I'd been taken to a hospital.
Were you lying on a table or in a bed?
Yeah, I was lying on my back and there was a light above me.
I know what you mean.
You're kind of half conscious in and out, in and out.
I've been there myself.
So you slowly, slowly came toward consciousness.
Yeah.
And there was this thing lying across my chest that was kind of like holding me down.
I wasn't moving too much because it hurt and I felt really, really weak.
But when I finally got where I could focus my eyes and made out these faces that were
standing over me, they were not doctors.
This was something that just totally blew me away, the appearance of these creatures.
Can you describe them?
Can you remember generally how they looked?
Well, they were humanoid.
You know, they had just large eyes, kind of a large cranium, no hair.
No hair.
It was just such a shock.
It just, you know, combined with the pain and, you know, not being able to breathe, it just flipped out.
Were they just standing around you or were they communicating among themselves?
Can you recall?
Well, they were, you know, kind of standing over me.
At least one of them was closer than the other.
And when I saw them, I just involuntarily sort of lashed out at them.
And I was just so weak that it was just more of a push than anything.
And my arm hit him in the chest and knocked him back into the other one.
Did he feel... I've never talked to anybody who's hit an alien before.
Did he go over easily?
Yeah, it was much lighter than I expected.
Huh.
You know, even though I was so weak, he just fell back quite easily.
But he was solid substance.
Yeah, sort of soft and smooth.
Bungie, but you know it was it was unreal of anything and he got pushed backwards. Yeah, I
Yeah, I was in a lot of pain and having a lot of trouble moving, but I managed to get to my feet and
back away from him Their thing fell off of me what fell off
Well, this instrument.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know what they were doing to me, but whatever was going on, I was putting a stop to it.
Did you have a feeling that they didn't expect you to wake up?
Well, looking back now, but at the time, I was just total confusion.
You know, I was in such pain, I wasn't really fully conscious, but at the same time, I was, you know, just hysterical.
So it was just kind of this animalistic sort of instinctive No, I hear you.
I would be too. Just screaming and lashing out at them. And they stopped when I did that and
turned and left the room simultaneously. They all just turned and went out the door.
Oh, there was only one way out of there. Can you describe the room? You said it was like a
hospital. Was it really hygienic? White color or?
No, it was metallic, but it was very bare and it was featureless.
Incidentally, did you have any sense of movement?
Travis, presumably you were in a moving craft.
No, I felt no movement.
No movement?
I didn't hear any mechanical sounds in the distance either.
I wasn't in the most tuned-in state, but I just don't have a memory of anything like that.
All right.
Let me try this.
From the time that you were hit with the light until you began to raise from unconsciousness, how much time do you guess passed?
That's something that really bothered me, because the time that I recall, Board to Craft, even though I was hysterical, And it kind of affects your perception of time.
Sure.
It couldn't have been more than an hour or so at the most, probably less than an hour.
And in this span of time, even though I was missing for five days and six hours, I don't know where in there this conscious period occurred.
Whether this coming to was soon after I was taken on board or Or later on.
Well, if you had to guess, how much total conscious time can you remember spending in that cramp?
There were five days in real time that went by.
To you, how much time went by?
Well, it just seemed like a matter of minutes.
In retrospect, at the time, it was just like forever.
I've got to get out of here.
I've got to get out of here.
It was just total panic.
Just less than an hour probably.
So it felt like less than an hour in the craft total?
Yeah.
Wow.
I don't know whether there was some sort of time dilation or contraction effect going
on here or if I was just unconscious the rest of the time.
Maybe it was the last hour before you were actually returned.
Maybe you were unconscious for a very long time.
I know that in the movie they examined you when you got back and they said you had not
eaten or had anything to drink in five days.
Is that accurate?
Well, the medical tests are kind of, I don't know, I need to look into this perhaps, but they say that if you haven't eaten for five days that you'll have certain chemicals in your urine that will I don't know.
Is that true of an unconscious person?
I don't know.
I would imagine so.
In other words, the body's processes, conscious or unconscious, continue.
If you have not had nourishment in that time, then I would imagine that would be so.
You spent an hour of conscious time in that craft.
Did they ever come back into that room?
No.
I was afraid they would, though.
I'm terrified of that.
And they've gone out this hallway down to the right, so I just took off to the left, just running.
Oh, wait a minute.
There was an open door?
Yeah.
Oh, excellent.
I figured they'd have locked you in, but they didn't.
No.
So you just walked out?
Yeah.
And they went to the right, so you went to the left.
Yeah, that'd be my choice, too.
Yeah.
Well, I tried to find a way out and push some buttons and controls and things, you know,
trying to open a door, crazy, desperate sort of things.
But this was interrupted by a person, a being coming in who I took to be human.
I figured I was saved.
And when he motioned for me to go with him, I went, thinking that he was saving me, rescuing
me.
And he let me out of this craft.
Thank you.
Out of a craft?
Yeah.
And at this point, it was parked inside of what appeared to be, well, it was either a building or part of a larger craft.
Wow.
And again, I felt no movement, you know.
Getting outside of there, the air was much more breathable.
The air, the light was brighter, it seemed.
So you were either walking out, you walked out of the Swancraft either into like a hangar or a building or another craft, who could tell I guess, huh?
No.
But it was completely enclosed?
Yeah, there was like panels where light was coming through, you know, whether these were artificial lights or actual sort of translucent windows, I don't know.
I didn't get too much chance to look around.
He hurried me out of this large room, down a hallway to another room, where there were some more people like him.
All right.
That's where we're going to have to break it off.
You two take it easy for a few moments.
It's a great cliffhanger point anyway, and we'll be right back.
It absolutely is.
I make no guarantees about getting to the telephone.
We're going to let this story unwind as it needs to unwind.
And in just a moment, we will return to our guests.
Travis Walton, the abductee, Mike Rogers, the crew chief in the group in which Mr. Walton was present when he was abducted.
We'll get back to them in just a moment.
♪♪ ♪♪
All right, back now to my guests, Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
Hi there, you two.
We're back again.
Travis, I just got a fax from somebody in Washington, and they asked the following.
Though there are many questions I'd like to ask both Mike and Travis, my main question is, why the human-type being, the one who showed Travis the star map, was never shown in the movie?
Yeah, that's very curious.
I've always been really amazed at how many times I've been interviewed over the years in which this being is just kind of like excluded from the report.
It came off that way from the very start.
To me, the amazing similarity to human, this could be the key to the whole thing.
For people to just ignore this, Maybe, Travis, the movie makers thought, gee, how pedestrian or how common to show somebody who looks like a human and they wanted to just show aliens or alien-looking beings.
Could that be?
Yeah, you know, I understand the reason for it in a commercial sense, but for me, trying to figure out what's going on here This seems to be a key element.
Was he as human as anybody else, or were there any differences?
Well, there was something odd about his eyes that I never was able to really pin down.
Alright, did he say anything to you?
No, I was really trying, but I thought that maybe it was because of this helmet that he was wearing.
A helmet?
that he couldn't speak to me or hear what I was saying or something.
But when he took me to these other people and they didn't have helmets, I started over
with the same torrent of questions and they didn't answer me either.
They just started putting me on the table.
Where were these, okay, he took you out of the one craft into what was another crafter
of building and to some other beings?
Yeah, human looking beings.
Human looking beings.
They just put me down, forced me down on this table.
I started to try to fight back at that point, and I was still too weak, and there were too many of them.
And they put a mask over my face, and I went out real quick.
Oh!
In the movie, of course, it showed this really weird membrane-like stuff being put over you, but it was a mask.
And you went out.
It was anesthesia of some kind.
Yeah.
Apparently.
I just went out real quick and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the roadway outside the town nearest where this happened.
Okay, that's something they never showed.
They showed you at a sort of a gas station store type affair, all curled up and naked.
And wet, I might add.
It wasn't raining and I was dressed.
I looked around after the craft left and figured out where I was.
What kind of condition were you in?
I was still kind of weak and still a little bit of pain.
Cuts?
Bruises?
No, not like that.
I was just kind of psychologically blown out.
I was just really glad to be back on earth.
I just ran as hard as I could down across the bridge.
Let me ask you, Travis, did you know where you were when you regained consciousness and looked around?
Did you recognize where you were?
Well, at first I didn't, but I figured out the stretch of road and the lights down there where I must be, and then ran down into the town.
The closer I got, of course, the more I knew it was the town.
You know, to make a long story short, I finally was able to telephone my family and they came and got me.
In the movie, of course, you telephoned Mike.
Right.
But you did not?
No, it was another brother-in-law.
It was another brother-in-law.
And he came and got you.
In the movie, it showed your condition was terrible.
I mean, you were all curled up and screaming.
And not very with it.
Is that right or half right or all wrong?
Yeah, that was basically how it was.
I was dressed, though.
I thought it was the same night.
I didn't realize how much time had gone by.
Wow.
And then on the way back, they said something that kind of let me know, you know, could feel your face.
You know, I had this five-day growth of beard.
Look at your watch.
And, you know, so much time had gone by.
It was quite a shock to me.
I just kind of broke down at that point.
As you look back on this now, Travis, do you think you were taken just because you were crazy enough to walk out there under that craft?
Do you think they decided you were a target of opportunity?
Do you have any idea what they wanted with you?
Well, it's all just speculation, you know, but a lot of people, you know, Try to suggest that they were waiting for us there, but I think it was just kind of an accident.
At least I prefer to believe that this was just a bolt from the blue, so to speak, no one intended.
It was just a one-of-a-kind sort of incident that I can just put behind me and get on with my life.
Well, I know that you both really love reporters, don't you?
Well, there have been a few good ones, but, you know, we've had a lot of trouble with people getting it right, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Well, I know I'm interviewed frequently myself by the press, and I worry most about that when you talk to a I mean, it's like they have to get it wrong or something.
Yeah, sometimes it's not like anything malicious.
It's just basic facts.
People's names, dates, places.
It's just never right.
Well, that's why radio is better.
It really gave me a lot of insight into looking at the news.
When I see things going on, I always wonder what really happened there.
I understand.
But a few of them have had it right.
Yeah.
If you were to guess, and I know it is just speculation, but again you think it was just all sort of happenstance, do you have any guesses about what they did with you for that time?
Well, for a long time it was just something that, you know, it was like there was just a fragment of things and you didn't really have enough information to go on.
And it was just something that would have just driven me nuts, you know, to try to piece something together from what I remembered at the time.
So I just sort of put it out of my mind and tried to get on with my life and live a normal life as possible and not just constantly delve into it.
You didn't end up being consumed by it, wanting to go to a hypnotherapist and get regressed and all the rest of that sort of stuff?
No.
You know, I was invited to go to a lot of gatherings and approached by people who had similar sightings.
To the greatest extent, I've avoided that and just tried to get on with my life.
There's a lot to adjust to and a lot to cope with.
When you go through something like this tonight with Mike and you sort of go back through the whole story again, is it like reliving it?
Yeah, you know, it never felt to just get me all wrenched up inside.
And for a long time I didn't talk about it hardly at all.
But when the movie happened, I was kind of in a situation where I was being pressed for large numbers of interviews all of a sudden.
I was afraid that it was going to just make me so sick of the subject that I never could speak of it again.
It would just build up to a point where it would get worse and worse.
But actually it's kind of had a desensitizing effect on me.
Even though I'm still there to a certain extent.
And I'll feel a little easier to talk about it than I used to.
All right.
Right at the end of the movie, Mike, this is for you, they rolled something that said, and I think this audience ought to know, that another lie detector test was administered and every single one of you passed.
Well, there were only three of us that took this new series of tests.
What happened was there was a fellow by the name of Jerry Black who caught wind of the movie being made just as the movie was beginning to be filmed back in the summer of 1992, and Jerry Black approached the screenwriter Tracy Torme on the phone at first, and he was trying to get Tracy to cease the movie, to top it off, because he said, you know, this whole thing is a hoax.
Jerry Black was a personal friend of some major skeptics, although he himself is a believer in the UFO phenomena.
That was his first initial approach to this thing.
Then after launching, eventually, a whole new investigation into the thing, because Jerry Black is a UFO investigator, he came to the point where he thought, well, what we need now It's a new test because the first test, everybody took them and everybody passed.
Even Alan Dallas, of course, according to the police report that finally came through after all these years, showed that Alan passed part of the test that he took.
But what Jerry Black wanted for his own personal conclusion to his investigation was a new
lie detector test for me and Travis and Alan Dallas, who he considered to be the lead characters
of the thing. Alan was not only the lead character but was the one who had an inconclusive test
in 1975. So in February, the first week of February 1993, just a month and a half before
the movie came out, we all submitted to a new lie detector test and Jerry Black chose
the same, mistakefully polygraphed examiner Cyrus Gilson, who then had 20 years experience
and something like that.
He had been in it all these years since then, and he was a very experienced examiner at the time in 1975.
By this time, Cy Gilson had worked to develop equipment and machinery that is unbeatable and is computer-assisted in analysis.
I was about to ask that.
that the last niche in this investigation was these new polygraph tests.
It would, you know, just polish it off.
So we finally, reluctantly, but finally agreed to these tests and took them.
And Travis, as a matter of fact, took two.
He was in there all day long taking lie detector tests, two separate tests with two separate
lines of tests.
I was about to ask that.
Travis took one himself?
Yeah.
Well, Travis took mine years ago, back in, you know, right after this happened and passed it.
But, you know, this was the first time that Travis had taken a test with the state police polygraph examiner.
And the new whiz-bang technology.
Exactly.
And we all three passed the test to the highest degree possible.
And then what did your skeptic friends say?
They haven't said anything about it to this day.
The major skeptics have never come forward in the last two years to say anything about these new tests.
Well, it is widely regarded as one of the best documented cases ever.
There's no question about it.
Let me go back just for a second to that moment when Travis phoned home, so to speak.
And how did you get the news, Mike?
I mean, it must have been pretty important to you.
Here you are, missing a friend, probably accused in the minds of many of having committed murder.
And all of a sudden, bang, Travis is back.
It didn't happen like that with me.
I wasn't the brother-in-law he called.
Again, like I said earlier, they kind of used my character throughout the movie for a lot of things.
Even though I was present throughout this entire time and kind of a lead character in the thing, they gave me the role of doing certain things like calling the police initially and then again Uh, being the one that Travis called from the telephone booth, you know.
Right.
No, I understand that you were not the one called, but surely somebody at some point picked up the phone, called you and said, guess what?
Right.
Well, see, this is where I kind of got left out.
Uh, everything that happened, uh, when Travis's brother and brother-in-law, uh, went out and picked him up, uh, he was actually, had already been transported down to Phoenix.
I didn't even know that he was returned for almost a whole day after he had actually been returned.
Nobody had even told me for a long time.
Of course when I did learn of it, I was elated.
I was thrilled.
that they could throw at him. I didn't even know that he was returned for almost a whole
day after he had actually been returned. Nobody had even told me for a long time. Of course
when I did learn of it I was elated, I was thrilled, I was relieved. You see what happened
at the time was my brother had been watching what had been happening to my mother and the
the way the police and the media were just unmerciful.
She'd had to be sedated and the kinds of things that were being done to the family and the community and everything.
You know, he said, oh, that mob is not going to get hold of this guy.
How were they treating it in the media, Travis?
You must have read all the clippings now.
Were they making a big joke out of it?
Was it a murder mystery in the media?
What were they doing?
Well, you know, it was one theory after another, you know.
Of course, at first it was just a murder, and then it was a drug hallucination, and then it was a transitory psychosis.
It was just one thing after another, you know.
I'm sure they tested you for drugs.
Yeah, the medical tests revealed no trace of any drug in my system.
All my psychiatric tests were perfectly normal scores.
But, you know, there was no end to the sorts of accusations, however baseless.
And you know, it turned into a long series of attempts to try to set the record straight.
So they got you in Phoenix.
They put you in the hospital in Phoenix, huh?
Yeah.
And came at you with, what, a battery of tests and doctors to come in and have little conversations with you?
Yeah, that sort of thing.
EKG, EEG, you know, the whole shooting batch.
Did they find anything wrong?
Anything, for example, that Physically could have caused you to go into a coma-like state, say, for five days?
No.
Nothing.
Nothing like it.
Wow.
So, what did you do, Mike?
You heard he was back, you heard he was in Phoenix, and after you sighed a big sigh of relief, I'm sure, because you were accused, and your friend's back, what did you do?
Well, obviously I wanted to get down there and see him, you know?
But I wasn't able to do that for another couple of days more.
It was like maybe three days before I was actually able to see him for the first time.
And this is one area where the movie, Fire in the Sky, actually got real simple.
They showed him in the movie being put in a local hospital and treated very normally.
The hospital was quiet.
And I snuck in there during the night and got in touch with the nurse to talk to my buddy for the first time, you know?
That's right.
And in reality, this thing was a media circus.
There were a whole team of doctors and people there, and they had him bound up for several days before I was able to ever get a first glance at it.
I couldn't hardly go anywhere, walking across the parking lot of the hospital, and there he is!
There he is!
Oh no!
It was just crazy, you know, just crazy stuff.
They put me in the hospital under an assumed name.
And I kind of delayed the media.
of delayed the media.
Yeah.
But at some point they saw you walking.
Yeah.
How were you going to handle it in the media, Travis?
I'm sure you thought about that.
You know, what am I going to say to them?
Well, you know, I was just a country boy.
I wasn't really very well versed in these kinds of things.
I didn't know how to handle it, you know.
I guess I was a sitting duck at times.
So did you talk to them or did you tell them to get lost most of the time?
Yeah, I just wasn't up to talking for quite a while, you know.
You still don't like talking about it, do you?
No, it's still kind of upsetting, but, you know, I feel that it's important to set the record straight.
Maybe it's important for you, too, because every time you go through this, maybe a little, you know, like another piece of it or the pressure of it falls away from you a little bit.
Yeah, just a little.
All right, you two, stay put.
We'll be right back to you.
My guests, Mike Rogers and Travis Walton.
The story of Fire in the Sky.
Only, uh, this is the real thing.
And we'll be right back.
For some craft to come back and for you to then understand exactly what happened and what it means in a larger scheme of things.
Yeah, in other words, we would like for the mystery to be solved.
You know, by somehow, maybe not being the person that...
that gets out there and solves it, but you know, it would be nice for it to be known.
If it's going to remain a mystery, I'd just as soon get on with my life.
Yeah, I can understand that, wanting to get on with your life.
Travis, of your whole experience, of what you remember of it,
what was the worst and most terrifying moment for you?
I mean, when you flash back on it and you think of the worst, what was that worst moment?
Uh, well, you know, suddenly seeing them and their eye, the way their eyes just seemed to look into me.
Does that haunt you still?
Yeah, it does.
And that's been, you know, something that's been in the center of every feeling, you know, not exactly flashback, but When I think back, you know, that's the part of it that just is the most intense.
Other than when some crazy person from the media like me comes along and talks to you, is it getting now to the point where you think about it less and less, or does it still come to you regularly?
Well, I work at not letting it.
You know, when somebody brings it up, I never bring it up.
I just never bring up the topic of conversation.
I can't blame you.
Are the two of you now close?
Would you both say you're close since it, or what?
Well, we were close prior to the incident.
We had a falling out in the interim but we have kind of passed things up and we are getting
to where we were more like it was before.
Were you really close friends?
Yeah.
Best friends?
Yes.
What about the others?
Do you stay in touch with them?
Have they fallen away?
They have just fallen away.
Most of them are in other states and we have rarely talked to them since this happened.
Mike, for you, in the movie it showed your wife at the time kind of in a crisis and not
believing you and ending up crying and not believing you.
Is that about the way it happened?
Well, she did believe me.
I think they just did that for some sort of personal drama there going on and kind of an explanation for why there was eventually a split up between us.
But as far as her wondering what to believe, that wasn't Just her.
That was all of our relatives.
Travis' family, my family.
I think everybody struggled in that way.
My wife at first didn't know what to think.
In the movie they didn't actually show her saying that she didn't believe me.
Well, I'm sorry.
Are you still in touch with your children?
Yeah, they showed her crying as though she couldn't say, yes, I believe you.
Right, but she did have an awful hard time with the community and she was in a personal
crisis as a result of that and that was instrumental in our divorce.
Well, I'm sorry, are you still in touch with your children?
Oh yeah, as a matter of fact, eventually I got real close to my family.
I've been close to my children especially all along.
It's not like my family was taken away from me.
We've always lived in the same town.
What do you both think now?
Mike, do you think your family completely buys the story?
I don't know one that doesn't.
Travis, same deal?
You think your family buys the story?
You know, and a lot of people here in the town, you know, over the years, it's grown more and more in favor of it, because as one theory after another just sort of fades away, I mean, the evidence against it comes forward.
You know, people are forced to face the facts, and, you know, belief has grown.
Well, I imagine it would, particularly with the latest lie detector tests.
Yeah.
The movie did a lot for it, too.
It's partly a personal thing.
A lot of people that I meet very often remark that they're skeptical, but after meeting me it changes them.
All of the actors in the movie said the same sorts of things.
Well, it seems to me as though the real story, as you two have told it tonight, is to me A lot more convincing and a lot less trying to throw doubt in the mind of the audience than the movie.
I mean, they threw doubt at several places with the tabloid newspaper that never happened, all the rest of it.
When you guys sat down and you watched that movie for the first time, how would you describe your feelings after seeing it?
Were you amused, upset, angry?
Well, it kind of became apparent to me in a gradual way how these departures were being made.
I fought against that as best I could.
and successfully to a certain extent. You should have seen what they wanted to do.
In other words, as the movie was being produced you had some input?
Yeah, but no power to veto things. I was just able to get them to not do certain things.
Every now and then say, you guys are nuts, this didn't happen.
Yeah, and I kind of wore out my welcome I guess. I kind of faced the fact that they
had commercial considerations and they were just going to do what they were going to do.
And so...
When it came time to see the movie, I had kind of come to terms, at least in part, with some of it.
It was kind of like an emotional reliving in a way that was pretty intense.
I had my own sighting, you two, and I thought really long and really hard before I admitted it publicly because of the job I do.
And I might not do it again.
And I guess that's my question for you.
If it had not been for Travis being abducted, and you all had just seen this craft, and instead of losing Travis, you'd taken off back to town in the truck.
Would you have told this story, or would you have kept your mouth shut?
I would have kept my mouth shut.
If there was any way that I could have, you know, had it totally under myself to decide whether or not to tell what happened, and could see into the future how things would happen, and how I would be treated, there's no way I'd say a word about it.
I wouldn't recommend that.
You know, it's just, it's not worth the grief that the world is going to give you.
And it has been a lot of grief, hasn't it?
Look, I want to thank you both for telling the story as it really was.
And as I promised, I will get both of you copies of this program.
Oh, thank you.
All right?
Thank you both for being on the air with us.
Thank you.
Take care.
Good night.
Travis Walton and Mike Rogers.
And I hope that you all enjoyed this.
I ended up not taking any calls because I wanted to get the story out.
I thought it was an important story.
These two strike me as very, very honest individuals.
And I was very impressed by the story.
So I'd like to take a second out to tell you that if you would like a copy of this program, and I can imagine that you would, it's probably one of the best renditions of the Travis Walton abduction.
You can get it by calling 24 hours a day, beginning right now.
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