extraordinary%20encounters

not all) local police officers and then by
William H. Spaulding, head of a Phoenixbased
group called Ground Saucer Watch. Jim
and Coral Lorenzen, directors of Tucson’s Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO), entered the investigation and, with
the National Enquirer, arranged for Walton to
take a secret polygraph test. It was administered
by John J. McCarthy, who did not hide
his skepticism of Walton’s claim and grilled
him about a youthful scrape with the law. Afterward,
when Walton had taken the examination,
McCarthy declared that he had
flunked it. Walton’s critics cited the test as reason
to reject Walton’s story, while his defenders
disputed the results as the consequence of
a hostile examiner’s harassment of an already
shaken witness. In any case, the results were
suppressed and did not come to light until
UFO debunker Philip J. Klass learned about
it sometime later from McCarthy.
The following February, Duane Walton
and then Travis took a polygraph, this one run
by George J. Pfeifer. Pfeifer concluded that
their responses were truthful. Mary Kellett,
their mother, whom some had accused of
being a conspirator in a hoax, also passed the
test, in Pfeifer’s judgment.
Walton would tell the same story without
elaboration over the next two decades and
more. He reported that after the beam hit
him, he lost consciousness and had no memory
of anything until he awoke in what he
thought was a hospital. The atmosphere was
wet and heavy, and he had a hard time breathing
in it. Three humanoid figures with big
staring eyes, large hairless heads, and tiny
mouths, ears, and noses, stood by the bedside.
Terrified, he leaped out of bed and pushed
one into another. Grabbing a cylindrical tube
he noticed on a shelf jutting from the wall, he
waved it like a weapon toward the beings,
who put out their hands as if to stop him.
After a short time, they fled through a door
behind them. Soon afterward Walton ran out
the door himself and ran to his left, through a
curving, three-feet-wide corridor. Seeing an
open room to his right, he ducked into it. The
Walton’s abduction 263
A drawing by Travis Walton’s boss, Michael Rogers, based
on Walton’s description of the being he saw when he was
abducted (Fortean Picture Library)
room seemed empty, though Walton was
nervous about a high-backed metal chair in
the middle. Because he was observing it from
the back, he did not know if anyone was sitting
in it or not. No one was. As Walton approached
it, the lights in the room began to
dim. When he stepped back, the light returned.
As he went forward again, the light
dimmed again, and now stars surrounded
him. He did not know if he was witnessing a
planetarium effect or if the room had become
transparent. He would recall that the experience
was “like sitting in a chair in the middle
of space” (Walton, 1978).
On the right arm of the chair, he saw a
panel of buttons and a screen with black
lines going up and down. On the left there
was a leve r. Curious, Walton pushed the
l e ver forw a rd. Suddenly the lines on the
s c reen moved, and the stars began to spin
e ven while maintaining their re l a t i ve positions.
When he let go of the leve r, eve ry t h i n g
returned to the way it had been before. After