extraordinary%20encounters

264 Walton’s abduction
he stood up, the light returned to the ro o m ,
and the stars disappeare d .
At that point, a human-looking figure
wearing a spacesuit and helmet entered the
room. He stood over six feet tall, looked to be
about two-hundred pounds, and had blond
hair long enough to cover his ears. His skin
was deeply tanned. Thinking that the stranger
was a fellow human being (even though he
would recall that the eyes were peculiar, a
“strange bright golden hazel”), Walton felt relieved
and peppered him with questions. In
response the figure only grinned, then beckoned
him to follow. He took Walton’s arm,
and the two proceeded down the curving hallway.
They came to a door and opened it to
enter a tiny “metal cubicle” of a room. They
passed through it into a huge space that Walton
thought looked like a hangar of some
kind. Inside it was bright as sunshine, and
breezes blew as if they were outdoors. He realized
that they had just left the craft. When he
turned to examine it, he observed that it resembled
the UFO he had seen in the clearing
but this one was bigger. He also saw two other
identical but smaller craft parked near the
wall.
They then went through another door into
another hallway, strolling past a number of
closed double doors until finally they entered
yet another room. Inside this room two men
and a woman sat, not only dressed like his
companion but looking enough like him that
Walton wondered if they were related to him.
They were all good-looking, and the woman’s
hair was longer than the men’s. The three were
not wearing helmets. Walton had assumed
that he had not been able to communicate
with the first man because the stranger could
not hear him through the helmet. But like the
first man, they did not respond to Walton’s
questions, just smiled pleasantly. When the
helmeted man left, the others led him to a
table. Suddenly frightened, Walton demanded
to know what they were doing. The woman
forced something that looked like an oxygen
mask with no connecting tubes onto his face.
He passed out. The next thing he knew, he
was lying on his back near Heber, ten miles
from where he had been before all of this
started. In the darkness “one of those round
craft [hovered] there for just a second. I
looked up just as a light went out. A white
light just went off on the bottom of it. The
craft was dark, and it wasn’t giving off any
light” (Barry, 1978).
Walton’s return was an international news
event. Soon afterward, UFO debunker Philip
J. Klass embarked on what would amount to a
lifelong crusade to prove that Walton, his
family, and the logging crew had conspired to
hoax the incident. No very good evidence of a
hoax would emerge, however, even after one
of the crew was reportedly offered ten thousand
dollars to expose the story. Walton went
on to marry, become a family man and respected
member of his community, and write
two books on his experience, the second containing
a long and pointed rejoinder to the
skeptics’ case. On February 1, 1993, Travis
Walton, Duane Walton, and witness Allen
Dalis (who had not seen Travis in two
decades) underwent new polygraph examinations,
again administered by Cy Gilson.
Gilson judged them to be telling the truth
when they responded affirmatively to the
UFO questions and negatively to the hoax
charges. In March 1993 Paramount Pictures
released a movie drama, Fire in the Sky, based
loosely on the incident, with D. B. Sweeney
in the role of Travis.
Few students of this complex episode bel
i e ve it to be a hoax. Alternative, non-UFO
explanations tend to focus on psyc h o l o g i c a l
or natural causes. One theory holds that
Walton and his companions saw an eart hquake
light—a luminous phenomenon generated
by electrical fields in rocks in fault
zones—that triggered hallucinations. A
p roblem with this hypothesis is the thinly
clad Wa l t o n’s surv i val in the woods over five
bitterly cold mountain nights. The Wa l t o n
abduction story remains one of the most intriguing
cases of the UFO age.
Interestingly, Walton’s is one of the first
two cases in the UFO literature to describe