United States.Travis Walton (Snowflake)

On November 5, 1975, Travis Walton (22) and six teammates from his forestry crew, Mike Rogers (the foreman, who held the job contract), Allen Dalis, John Goulette, Steve Pierce, Kenneth Peterson and Duane Smith, were working a thinning-and-clearing operation in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, in northern Arizona, under a contract Rogers's crew held with the US Forest Service. At dusk, returning to camp, they observed an incandescent disc-shaped object hovering near a clearing. According to the account of the six witnesses, gathered by APRO investigator Raymond Jordan, Walton got off the truck and approached the object; it emitted a light beam that struck and dropped him. The six teammates, panicking, drove off; when they returned, within fifteen minutes, Walton had vanished. Per the same report, the whole encounter lasted less than a minute and only one of them saw Walton hit the ground.

The six reported the incident that same night: at 7:35 p.m. they alerted the Navajo County sheriff's office in Heber, whose deputy described them as badly shaken. Over the following days the sheriff organized a search with 40 to 50 men, Forest Service staff, volunteers and a helicopter, with no trace of Walton. Shortly after midnight on November 11, Walton placed a collect call to his sister's home from a phone booth in Heber; his brother-in-law, Grant Neff, answered and went to fetch him with Duane Walton, his older brother. APRO's November 1975 bulletin already printed a detailed account of what Walton said he had experienced: waking on a table, three beings about five feet tall with large eyes, a room with a push-button chair, a man in a transparent helmet who led him down a ramp, and a large enclosure holding other craft. Between November 13 and 16, in a Phoenix hotel paid for by the Enquirer, APRO's research director James Harder put him under hypnosis "to alleviate the tension", according to the same bulletin.

The polygraph question is more tangled than the popular version suggests, and it is worth spelling out. The first test was the crew's: on November 10, at the sheriff's request, Cy Gilson, an examiner with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, tested all six. Three of his four relevant questions asked whether any of them had injured or killed Walton; the fourth, added at the last minute, whether they were telling the truth about seeing a UFO. Five passed and Allen Dalis's result was inconclusive; Gilson wrote that those five "did see some object that they believe to be a UFO" and had no prior knowledge of a hoax. Walton did not show up for the test the sheriff scheduled for him on November 14. On November 15, the National Enquirer (which was paying for the exclusive) arranged one with John J. McCarthy, Arizona's most senior examiner, who concluded "gross deception"; the Enquirer and APRO kept that session quiet and skeptic Philip J. Klass revealed it in June 1976. On February 7, 1976, APRO announced that Travis and Duane Walton had passed another test, given by George Pfeifer; Pfeifer's employer, Tom Ezell, later reviewed the charts, declared it invalid because the subject had dictated the questions, and said he could not give an opinion either way. Klass also proposed a motive: Rogers's crew was badly behind on its Turkey Springs thinning contract with the Forest Service, on a penalized extension with five days left and more than a hundred acres unfinished, and an 'act of God' would have let him close the contract without penalty. The participants have always denied that fraud hypothesis. The case later became the basis for Walton's book and the film 'Fire in the Sky' (1993).

It is an 'abduction'-type case that brings together: (a) six witnesses who reported the event that same night to the sheriff's office, before knowing the outcome; (b) a police polygraph, run on November 10 and focused on whether they had harmed Walton, in which five of the six affirmed seeing the object without showing deception; (c) the absence of an obvious financial benefit in the initial report: the National Enquirer money, the book and the film came later.

But the same case demands a serious skeptical reading. The polygraph is a disputed fact-validation tool, and here its history weighs more against than for the central part, Walton's own: the only test of Walton by a senior examiner in 1975-76 (McCarthy, Nov 15, 1975) concluded "gross deception" and was concealed by interested parties, and the favorable one of February 1976 (Pfeifer) was invalidated by the examiner's own employer. The memory of what happened 'inside' the object is the weakest component: it is not an uncontaminated recollection, since Harder hypnotized him between November 13 and 16 while the Enquirer kept him sequestered in a hotel; the defensible core is the six crewmen's sighting, not the interior narrative. Klass also raises an economic motive (the contract penalty with the Forest Service).