An alien abduction, mentions of the FBI and CIA, polygraph tests, and a feud with a skeptic. The story of Travis Walton is rolled up into a hybrid movie night episode by Jake Rockatansky. Walton's experiences were the basis for Fire In The Sky (1975).
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 181 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Fire in the Sky episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Jake Rokitansky, and Travis View.
Dearest listeners, This week, I have a very special treat for all of us.
At first I wanted to do an episode about the movie Fire in the Sky, a movie that absolutely terrified me when I watched it at some point in the mid-90s.
But then I realized I couldn't properly do an episode about Fire in the Sky without discussing the true story of Travis Walton and his six logging pals, who all claim to be part of one of the most compelling UFO abduction cases of all time.
And so, I present to you, for the first time in QAA history, a hybrid movie night episode, complete with clips from the feature film to help narrate pieces of the real story.
Think of this as my version of a History Channel documentary, except my reenactments have big-budget Hollywood names and special effects.
Maybe we don't show that off since, you know, it's someone else's copyrighted property.
Right.
But, uh, nope, it should be fine.
Podcasts are off the grid.
We don't exist.
Never speak of this again.
Nobody knows who I am, nobody knows who we are, and they don't exist.
We're ghosts in the machine.
Fire in the sky.
Before we get into Travis Walton's story, I'll give a little background on the film for those who aren't familiar.
Fire in the Sky came out in 1993 and starred D.B.
Sweeney, Robert Patrick of T-1000 fame, Craig Sheffer, Peter Berg, and James Garner.
It was directed by Robert Lieberman, whose other films include mostly made-for-television movies like the 1996 two-part miniseries Titanic, but he also directed D3, The Mighty Ducks, which was the third and, I believe, final installment of the original Mighty Ducks franchise.
In which the team was unfortunately fed into a thresher.
A lot of stars, a lot of stars came out of that Mighty Ducks franchise.
D3, Duck Pate.
The film was written by Tracy Torme, who started as a writer for Saturday Night Live, but who also wrote for the television series Star Trek The Next Generation, and co-created the TV series Sliders, starring Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davis.
Very interesting that this is the second time Sliders has come up on this show within a month, so it's clear that I was destined to write this episode.
Jake is baking his own mentions of movies.
He's like, interesting that I've mentioned it five episodes in a row.
Yes, it's very rare that Sliders makes an appearance, even though it did run for five years.
Coincidentally, I keep mentioning my favorite TV shows from childhood.
Very much a coincidence.
Alternate History, Jerry O'Connell, John Rhys-Davis, who would go on to play Gimli in The Lord of the Rings.
What about The Mighty Ducktales?
And it's Ducktales, but they play hockey.
Now, in DuckTales, you had a character named Scrooge McDuck, who would often swim in pools of gold.
Scottish hockey player.
I have a feeling that if we went back and looked at that series now, it potentially could be rife with anti-Semitism.
What?
No, he's Scottish.
There's no Jewish people in Scotland.
Nope, fact.
I just looked it up.
Wikipedia.fr slash UK.
Well, you've never heard of the famous Jew, Ruben McStein.
Moving right along.
Fire in the Sky was distributed by Paramount Pictures, and it only had a production budget of $15 million, which is fairly low budget, even at that point.
It grossed about $20 million domestically, so not a massive hit, but I do feel like it has since become somewhat of a cult classic.
The film is based on Travis Walton's biography, The Walton Experience, which was published in 1978, three years after the alleged abduction took place.
For this episode, I drew primarily from Walton's own biography, a documentary about his experience titled Travis, The True Story of Travis Walton, as well as archived media footage from CNN and FBI documents requested via the Freedom of Information Act, not by me.
I did not do any sort of requesting.
Ken Klippenstein was very nice to request some alien documents for me.
I don't think he did that.
Thank you, Ken, for the episode.
I appreciate it.
And so, without further ado, let's get into it.
It was many years ago that I got out of a crew truck in the National Forest and ran toward a large glowing object hovering in the darkening Arizona sky.
But when I made that fateful choice to leave the truck, I was leaving behind more than just my six fellow workmen.
I was leaving behind forever all semblance of a normal life, running headlong toward an experience so overwhelmingly mind-rending in its effects, so devastating in its aftermath, that my life would never, Could never be the same again.
Travis Walton.
It was early November in 1975.
Mike Rogers led a team of seven men into the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, which was located just outside the small town of Snowflake, Arizona.
According to one of the men on his team, Travis Walton, it was cold, but not so bad once the sun came out.
Alongside Travis, Rogers had five other men on his team.
There was Ken Peterson, The youngest member of the crew was Steve Pierce.
He was 17 years old and had lied about his age in order to get the work.
The crew was in the midst of a Turkey Springs thinning contract.
Alan's sidekick, and Dwayne Smith, a tall slender guy that John had brought with him.
The youngest member of the crew was Steve Pierce.
He was 17 years old and had lied about his age in order to get the work.
The crew was in the midst of a Turkey Springs thinning contract.
Now what this means is that the state would hire a group of loggers to go into a thick section of the forest
and thin out clumps of weaker or diseased trees, so that the dominant ones could have space to grow.
This process does occur naturally, but tree thinning can speed it up by decades,
maintaining the overall health of the forest.
Rogers and his team were a little behind on the contract, but then again, according to him,
they were always a little behind.
And then towards the end of the contract date, they'd double down and work extra hours to get it done on time.
That day, November 5th, 1972, The crew was working on a process known as fuel reduction.
This means taking all the dried debris and wood from the job, and stashing it in piles for the Rangers to come through and burn during the wet season, when fire risk was at its lowest.
This way, if a fire were to start in the forest, there would be no dead wood and kindling, and the blaze had a much better chance of being naturally contained.
It was evening, and the sun had disappeared below the horizon when Mike Rogers called it.
He told the guys to pack it in, They slung their chainsaws over their backs and headed towards Mike's pickup truck.
As they loaded into the vehicle, Mike gave them a talking-to about their brush piles.
They were getting sloppy, and if the burn piles didn't pass Forest Service's code...
They wouldn't be paid until they got it right. According to Travis, Mike was a good leader.
Tough, firm, but never talked down to the guys. They piled into the truck and took off down the
long dirt road leading them out of the forest. They always sat in the same seats on the way
home from a day's work. Non-smokers in the front, smokers in the back. It was just like any other
day for Mike Rogers' crew. But then, they saw something peculiar. A light shining through the
trees about a hundred yards in front of them. "It looked like, uh, like a fire."
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