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ART BELL | Legendary Travis Walton Interview | Night Drive 4K 🛸👽

Art Bell's August 7 2015 Midnight in the Desert interview with Travis Walton, the Arizona logger who vanished for five days and six hours after November 5 1975 and came back with the most investigated abduction account on record. Walton walks the whole thing in order: the glow through the trees near Turkey Springs, the blast that threw him like a sack of meat, waking in a cramped room with three small beings around him, the human looking man in the helmet, the hangar, and the cold pavement outside Heber. He goes deep on what Fire in the Sky got wrong, the polygraph history, the directional accelerated tree growth measured at the site, and the Barrow Neurological Institute EEG run under an assumed name. Two hours of Art Bell doing what he did best, plus a full hour of callers.

Published Jun 10, 2026 2:03:21 video 100 min read Added Jul 25, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

On the night of November 5, 1975, seven men in a 1964 International pickup came around a bend on a logging road south of Heber, Arizona, saw a glow through a break in the ponderosa pines, and drove into a clearing at Turkey Springs. One of them, a 22 year old chainsaw man named Travis Walton, got out of the truck and walked toward it. The other six watched him get hit by something, thrown through the air like a rag, and then they ran. When they came back he was gone. He stayed gone for five days and six hours.

Forty years later, on August 7, 2015, Art Bell put him on the air for two hours on Midnight in the Desert, the show Bell launched from his Pahrump, Nevada studio on July 20, 2015 after leaving Coast to Coast AM and then Dark Matter. Bell opens by reading Walton's Wikipedia entry out loud and pointedly refusing to say the word "allegedly." Then he hands Walton the whole thing and gets out of the way. Russell's House reposted the broadcast in June 2026 over two hours of 4K night drive footage, which is close to the ideal way to hear it.

This page rebuilds the broadcast in order. Walton walks the incident chronologically: the crew and the Forest Service contract, the glow, the clearing, the sound, why he got out of the truck, the 45 degree look up at a hull "smooth as glass" less than 90 feet away, the blast, the crew's flight and their return, the five day manhunt and the murder theory that formed around his friends. Then the part almost nobody gets right, because Fire in the Sky rewrote it: what he says actually happened on board. A cramped metallic room. A device with a green glow lying across his chest. Three small beings with irises and eyelids. A push, a stare that hurt, a passage, a room full of moving points of light, a man in a helmet, a hangar with two or three more craft in it, a gas, and then cold pavement outside Heber with his clothes still warm.

The second hour is Art Bell doing what Art Bell did: an hour of callers from Northern Ireland, Saskatchewan, Green Bay, Vancouver, New Zealand, Montreal and Gurley, Alabama, asking about smell, gloves, irises, God, probes, food and water, and whether he would do it differently. Walton answers all of it. He also draws a hard line, over and over, at the edge of what he can document, and says out loud which of his own earlier interpretations he now thinks were wrong. A section on the documented record and the skeptical case sits at the end of this page, where it belongs.

Chapters

Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read. The upload has no chapter markers, so these are honest section breaks read off the broadcast itself.

Cold open (0:00)

Before Art says a word, the tape runs a fragment of Walton describing something that happens two thirds of the way through his own story. It is a strange and effective choice, because it drops you into the middle of the craft rather than the middle of the forest.

"There was a chair in the middle of this room that had some controls on it, and I went up to that and tried to see if I could figure a way to open a door or get out of there or something. Another being came in at that point." (0:10)

"The first creatures that I saw were very, very different from us. They were short, you know, less than five feet in height. They had large bulging craniums. They had kind of a chalky white look to their appearance. Very large eyes." (0:32)

"He took me out of that room that this was parked in, down a hallway to a smaller room where there was some other people like him. And they put me down on a table and I struggled with them." (0:58)

Then music, and Art.

Art reads the entry and scratches out one word (1:21)

Bell's introduction is not a summary, it is a performance of the thing that made him Art Bell. He looks Walton up on Wikipedia live and reads it out, editing as he goes.

"Travis, Wiki says, is an American logger who was allegedly, and I scratch that word out, who was abducted by a UFO on November 5th, 1975, after working with a logging crew in the Apache National Forest in Arizona." (1:30)

He keeps reading. Walton could not be found but reappeared after a five day intensive search. The case received mainstream publicity and remains one of the best known instances of alien abduction. Then he stops to flag the edit a second time.

"Again, I went right past alleged." (2:04)

He quotes the UFO historian Jerome Clark, who wrote that few abduction reports have generated as much controversy as the Walton case. He notes the movie, Fire in the Sky, and then offers a piece of domestic evidence for its staying power: he rewatched it with his wife the night before the interview, and she was, in his words, utterly freaked out, completely freaked out. He guesses she is listening intently right now.

"So what's going to happen, coming up in a moment, the real McCoy. That's what he is, the real McCoy. Travis Walton." (2:37)

Forty years on (2:43)

The two of them have not spoken in something like six to ten years. Bell says it is an honor and repeats that he meant it about the word alleged.

Bell: "What happened to you happened. Period. That's it." Walton: "Absolutely." (2:55)

Then Bell makes an argument he clearly enjoys, and it is a neat inversion.

"Back in the day they used to say anybody who believes in such things is a kook. Now we're actually coming to the point where the debunkers and the skeptics are the kooks. Because the definition of a kook is someone who believes things that are at odds with known facts and accepted beliefs. And that's them, not us." (3:05)

Walton agrees and says there is so much to prove it now. Then Bell apologizes for what he is about to do, which is make Walton tell it all again.

"I really hate taking you back to this story again, but that's what I have to do, because they'd crucify me otherwise." (3:45)

A quick personal note first. Bell asks if Walton is still married to Mike Rogers' sister. Yes, but separated for a number of years, amicably, definitely living apart.

The date that never gets further away (3:52)

"November 5th, 1975. In some ways it's like yesterday. The emotional impact in particular, but the memories are so fresh. It's hard to believe it's been nearly 40 years." (4:04)

Bell asks whether the thing has defined his life. Walton says yes, regrettably, he lives with it every day. But he says the negative side of it has shifted, and he seems genuinely a little surprised by that.

He stayed in Snowflake, Arizona. For years, people would look and whisper and point. Now they come up and shake his hand and tell him they always supported him, which produces a very human internal reaction.

"And I'm thinking, well, I wish you'd have spoke up a long time ago." (5:00)

Almost every time he goes out now he gets some kind of positive response. "We've come a long ways in this town."

Snowflake was about 3,500 people in 1975 and is maybe 5,000 now. Walton delivers the town's list of civic achievements deadpan.

"We have added a stoplight. We've added a McDonald's." (5:38)

Bell, from Pahrump, Nevada, says they celebrated their first stoplight and their first McDonald's too, so he knows exactly how that feels. It is the first of several moments where two men in small desert towns recognize each other.

The crew (5:56)

Bell starts listing them and gets a couple wrong, and Walton corrects him, which is how the roster gets fixed on tape. The seven men on the truck that night:

What Hollywood had to compress (6:33)

Bell asks whether the movie is close enough for comfort or far away from what occurred. Walton starts generous, then gets specific about where the generosity ends.

"Anytime Hollywood tells a real life story, they've got to simplify and abbreviate and sort of symbolize things, because you're telling in 90 minutes something that spanned years." (6:52)

The compressions he considers fair:

And then the line that sets up the whole second half of the interview.

"The greatest amount of changes were what happened aboard the craft, and I see no reason for that except commercial conditions." (7:29)

The contract and the work (7:45)

The crew was working a government contract for the US Forest Service: clear out undergrowth, take out damaged and diseased trees, generally clean up the forest, and cut fuel reduction strips through the area so that forest fires would be easier to fight.

Bell asks if it is hard work. Walton is unambiguous.

"It's definitely some of the hardest work you can do. In a high altitude, on a steep terrain, carrying a heavy chainsaw all day. It's definitely not for the faint of heart." (8:18)

Ages, for the record. He was 22 then and is 62 at the time of the broadcast. Bell, who is 70, says "holy mackerel." Walton says he does not feel it, and that he could still outrun his boys.

A glow through the trees (9:00)

It was dark. They were driving out at the end of the day. The crew started running through candidate explanations for the light ahead of them, and Walton names all of them, in order, because the ordinary hypotheses matter to him.

"It was a glow, and we tried out a number of ideas of what it might be. Deer hunters camped out there, a plane crash, a fire in the truck. But nothing was fitting in with what we were seeing." (9:38)

Bell adds the one constraint that rules out the most obvious thing: the sun had gone down in the west. It was not the sun.

Bursting into the clearing (10:16)

"The closer we got, I could see that there was a break in the trees ahead, and then where the light was shining across the road. So, Mike, hurry up and get up there and we'll see what it is." (10:16)

They bounced along up the road. Walton says it was curious but not alarming, right up until it was.

"But we burst into the clearing, man, it was bam. It just hit us right between the eyes. It was unmistakable." (10:40)

Then a detail Bell has never heard before, which is the kind of moment this interview keeps producing.

Walton: "Allen yelled out, 'It's a flying saucer.'" Bell: "Oh, did he really?" Walton: "Yeah." Bell: "I didn't know that." (10:45)

Bell asks if the movie got the craft right. "No, not at all." And then Walton makes his first direct swing at the skeptical literature, naming the specific counter explanation he finds absurd.

"It's definitely not some little glowing point of light off in the distance, like the skeptics tried to say it could have been the planet Jupiter. And this was less than 90 feet away. Unmistakable metallic disc hovering there." (11:00)

He threw open the truck door thinking it would take off before he got ten steps. Instead, it stayed. And the closer he got, the more frightened everyone else became.

PONDEROSA PINE, MOGOLLON RIM, OVER 7,000 FT LOGGING ROAD OUT BREAK IN THE TREES light washing across the road METALLIC DISC, DOME ON TOP "two pie pans put lip to lip" TRUCK 6 men, engine off door left open he walks toward it, slower the closer he gets BRUSH PILE + LOG 45° LESS THAN 90 FT stands up: head and chest now the closest point
Figure 1. The clearing at Turkey Springs as Walton describes it on air. The geometry is the whole argument: the truck stops short with the engine off and the door left open, the disc hovers less than 90 feet away at a 45 degree sight line, and the log Walton dives behind puts him low and safe. He is hit only when he stands back up, at the instant his head and chest become the closest point on his body to the craft.

The sound, and why he kept walking (11:30)

The crew stayed in the truck, screaming at him. Walton is diplomatic about the vocabulary they used.

"They were describing me in some rather uncomplimentary language, that to get back in the truck so we could get the heck away from there." (11:36)

His own state, in his own words: "I was scared too, but I was trying not to show it. So the closer I got, the slower I went."

Then the sound, which is one of the most technically specific things in the entire broadcast.

"It was a bizarre combination of highs and lows. Cyclic sort of a sound, and then a throbbing, real low bass sort of sound. It was really complex." (11:55)

And a detail that shows how he has spent the intervening decades.

"I gave a talk to an engineering school and they were very interested in the types of sound that I was hearing, because it would give clues about what might be driving this thing." (12:20)

Bell interrupts to ask the obvious question: it is not the average person who gets out of the truck and walks under something like that. What made him do it?

Walton answers by first quoting his own crew's read on him.

"Allen and Steve thought, to them it looked like I was under outside control, that I was in some kind of trance. But I think we were all entranced, so to speak. It was just an incredible, awesome sight." (13:00)

The charge in the air (13:22)

Beyond the sight and the sound, Walton says there was something physical in the air. Mike Rogers said it seemed like something was about to happen.

"I think that we were sensing this electrical charge that was building. What was making the hair rise on the back of your neck wasn't just fear, it was something kind of like a huge static charge or something." (13:35)

Bell, who has a lifetime of radio engineering behind him, immediately produces a comparison from his own experience.

"You can get that same feeling. I've been under half million volt lines, and you can actually get little shocks from touching the wet grass beneath it, and you could feel that in your whole body." (14:00)

Walton adds that the vibration was both subsonic and ultrasonic, and that the crew said they could feel it coming through the metal of the truck. He also explains why the engine was off: when everybody started exclaiming, Mike had to lean over to see what they were all looking at, so he killed it.

Ninety feet, looking up (14:35)

This is the closest look any witness got.

"When I got up to where I was looking up at about a 45 degree angle, it was just so astonishing. It was smooth as glass over the entire surface, but parts of it were glowing and parts of it were metallic." (14:40)

And then the comparison he reaches for, which is very 1975 and very good.

"It was giving off this glow, and at the same time you could see the surroundings reflected in the surface. It's kind of like when you look at a television set and you can see the window and stuff." (15:00)

Reflective, he says. Not like a mirror, but somewhat reflective.

The blast (15:49)

He decided to turn around and run. Then the craft got louder and started to move, and he did the instinctive thing.

"I just instinctively jumped for cover. And there was a log in the middle of the clearing, part of this brush pile was there. And so I jumped down behind it." (15:20)

Then he stood up to run back to the truck, and that decision is the hinge of the entire case.

"When I stood up, my head and chest at that point became the closest point to that vehicle, craft, that it had been in that entire time. And that's what hit me. I just felt a shock. It felt like I'd been physically hit by a truck, but it also felt kind of like an electrical shock, sort of this numbing, paralyzing feeling. But that was something I just, as I blacked out." (15:55)

A small piece of radio housekeeping intrudes here. Bell hears an occasional break up and asks if Walton is on a portable phone.

"No, I'm not. I am on a cordless hardwired line." (16:34)

That line will get an explanation later in the show, and it is a good one.

What the movie got wrong about being hit (17:02)

Bell assumes the movie invented the throw. Walton corrects him: the throw is real. What the movie got wrong is the choreography, and Walton finds the direction of the error genuinely odd.

"I decided to run, but I didn't just stand up and zap. The way it's depicted in the movie, the actor jerked and then was thrown back, but kind of dragged it out. It's strange, because Hollywood normally wants to put on a light show, and they really missed an opportunity there, because it was far more violent than they depicted." (17:20)

How violent, according to the six men watching from the truck:

The crew runs, argues, and comes back (18:18)

They took off down the rest of that road as fast as the truck would go, nearly wrecking it. Walton defends them without being asked to, twice, and with real force.

"I do not blame them. I always want to say that those did the right thing at that point. What was the point in risking everyone's lives to save somebody they thought was already dead? So anybody that thinks that was cowardly is just wrong. Mike had the safety of the crew under his responsibility." (18:40)

Up the road, they stopped and argued about whether the thing had disintegrated him or incinerated him. They tried to find deer hunters with guns to come back with them and could not. So they decided to go back themselves.

And here is another movie correction, and it matters, because the movie's version makes one of them look bad.

"In the movie, when Mike said, 'This truck's going back, anybody who doesn't want to can get out and wait here,' nobody volunteered to stand alone in the dark like in the movie. They all said, 'No way, we're staying with the truck.' So they all went back." (19:20)

Bell: "Bless their hearts." Walton: "I give them credit for that. That took courage." And then Walton offers the line he says he was telling Steve Pierce earlier that same day.

"Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is to keep going in the presence of fear." (20:05)

The craft leaving, and the tracking dogs (20:13)

Ken Peterson told Walton the scariest thing for him was not the craft, it was the anticipation of what they were about to find.

"Kenny was saying the scariest thing to him, because they saw the craft leaving, the scariest thing to him he thought would be what my charred body was going to look like laying there." (20:20)

Bell catches the aside. They saw it leave? Yes. As they approached the area, they saw it streak off.

Bell asks whether anything was left on the ground. Walton mentions the long term research at the site, which he will detail later, and then gives the detail that shaped the search.

"When the sheriff brought in the tracking dogs from the state prison, they were unable to find the trail going anywhere beyond where my body fell in the middle of that clearing." (20:55)

The polygraphs (21:00)

Bell brings this up early and deliberately, before the story gets stranger, because he knows what listeners are about to think.

"Before we get further with this story, because people are going to be going, 'Oh, come on,' when you get into the details: your entire crew was given a lie detector test." (21:20)

Bell's summary: on the first round, Dalis may have been a little unreadable because he was so freaked out, but everybody else passed. Later they were given a second round, and everybody passed.

Walton fills in the specifics as he understands them.

"Although a polygraph on a single test is less than 100%, when you have that many people passing tests on the same issue, the odds are over a million to one of there being any error." (22:20)

And his running total as of August 2015:

"As of now, there are 16 passed tests. I've passed five different tests with three different examiners with extensive years in law enforcement, which is considered the better, more qualified polygraph examiner." (22:48)

Bell notes that even the movie has the examiner come out and say these guys were telling the truth. Walton: "And the examiners stand by it to this day."

That is the case as Walton presents it. The documented polygraph history is more tangled than this, in both directions, and it gets its own ledger at the end of this page.

Five days, a manhunt, a murder theory (23:26)

Bell sets the scene from the town's side. Walton is gone. Dogs are out. People are combing the forest. Helicopters are up. And the sheriff's office starts looking hard at the six men who came back without him.

Bell: "They began to suspect your crew of your possible, well, murder. Yes, murder. Right?" (23:50)

They became unpopular in a small town, fast.

Bell asks if Walton is still friends with Mike Rogers. The answer is quiet and a little sad.

"I haven't spoken to him in quite some time. He's kind of threw up his hands and didn't want to talk about this anymore." (24:05)

He is bringing a couple of the others to speak at his conference and would like Mike to come too, but Mike's health is not what it used to be.

Allen Dalis, the dropped tree, and the cut hand (24:43)

The movie leans hard on Dalis as the crew's problem case, and Bell wants to know how much of that is real. Walton gives a picture that is neither a defense nor a hit piece.

Dalis had had some trouble with the law. He had had run ins with various guys on the crew. He and Walton had done a little sparring. There was some antagonism over a girl Dalis had approached who Walton had been dating, before Walton's wife. And Dalis and Mike Rogers had had a fistfight in the street in front of Walton's house.

Then the specific thing that happened on the day itself, and why it poisoned the polygraph.

"The day of this incident, he had dropped a tree nearly on me, and that's what led to all this problem with the polygraph. Did he have any bad intentions towards me?" (25:45)

"He was pretty sure that they were going to try to pin the murder on him." (26:10)

Bell asks about the cut on Dalis's hand, which the movie shows and never explains. Walton takes the air out of it.

"We get scratched up stuff at work all the time." (26:37)

And then, in the same breath, he applies exactly that skepticism to a piece of evidence in his own favor, which is the first clear demonstration of the standard he says he holds himself to.

"After I was returned, the doctor examined me, found a puncture on my arm. And it was assumed that happened during my abduction, but it could have easily been being poked by a thorn in the course of a work day." (26:50)

Was there an actual physical altercation with Dalis? Walton's answer is the funniest thing in the broadcast.

"When he tried to spin kick on me, Steve, the youngest guy in the crew, laughs about how Allen fell on his behind trying to do that. It was just semi good natured sparring." (27:30)

Bell, dryly: "Alpha males, all of you."

Waking up on board (27:52)

Now the part the movie rewrote. Walton starts with his body, not the room, which is the right way around and also tells you what dominated the experience.

"I woke up on board the craft. I didn't know where I was at first. I was in a lot of pain and I was in and out for a while. And when I finally did come to, it was in a foggy, hazy kind of way. My vision was blurred, and even double vision, and the light, even though it wasn't bright, hurt my eyes. The pain in my head and chest was incredible. And I felt it was life threatening. Something was terribly wrong inside." (28:00)

Bell asks him to describe the environment.

"It was dimly lit and I could hear the sounds of movement around me. And I could just barely make out the forms of what I thought were doctors. But then my vision cleared and I could see these aliens standing close. And it just completely freaked me out. I was already scared about the way I felt, but I just completely lost my mind with fear." (28:40)

He was lying on his back, close enough to the ceiling that before he even looked sideways he assumed he was on a gurney or a raised operating table. His working hypothesis in that first instant was entirely mundane: he had been hurt somehow and taken into the hospital. Then he focused on what he thought were medical people.

The room, the table, and the device on his chest (29:10)

Walton anticipates the criticism before anybody makes it.

Walton: "A lot of people think, 'Oh, I would stay calm, ask good questions.'" Bell: "Who thinks that? Not me." (29:50)

Then he explains what he says actually drove the panic, and it is not the aliens.

"You have to understand, the pain I was feeling, the feeling of something mortally wrong inside, but moreover the most important feeling was that I felt like I couldn't get enough air. The feeling of suffocation." (30:00)

This is where he gives the movie credit for a scene that never happened. In Fire in the Sky, the actor is pinned under a membrane, struggling to scream and breathe through it.

"That didn't actually happen. But I think in that case it does a better job of explaining the source of my panic, or at least the chief source. That feeling of suffocation combined with the feeling of weakness, like you can't move when you need to move quickly." (30:30)

Fighting them off (31:01)

Realizing where he was gave him a shot of adrenaline.

"Enough burst of strength to actually sort of lash out at them. It was pretty weak. It was more of a push than a hit. And I rolled away in the opposite direction. This device they had lying across my chest fell off and hit the floor." (31:01)

He backed away, stumbling, keeping his eyes on them, until he hit a shelf behind him.

"I just looked real quick to see what I'd run into. And there was some things there, and I just grabbed the biggest thing there and started flailing in their direction. And that stopped their approach." (31:38)

Bell catches something in that. The device fell and hit the floor, so there was gravity, contrary to the movie's weightlessness.

"Yeah, there was gravity. There was no weightlessness. And actually, if anything, it might have been slightly heavy gravity." (32:00)

But Walton immediately declines to make that into evidence, and offers the competing explanation himself.

"To explain that feeling of weakness, although just the feeling of injury, I really think that whatever happened with that blast of energy from the craft, it did so much damage that when I came to at that point, whatever efforts had been made to revive me were not complete." (32:02)

What they looked like, and why Paramount changed them (32:15)

Bell asks the question everyone wants answered, and tells him to forget the movie.

"They were very similar. And you do have to forget the movie, because they changed them." (32:40)

The reason is the single best piece of production trivia in the broadcast.

"The panic that the people at Paramount had was that these aliens had been in another production immediately prior to the filming of Fire in the Sky. And they did not want anybody seeing something that had been seen before. So they changed their appearance." (32:52)

What he says he actually saw: small, hairless, grayish white beings with huge eyes. "Back then they didn't have the term grays. But that's what people call these."

Height: "Shorter than four feet for sure." (The cold open, drawn from a different part of the interview, has him saying less than five feet.)

Why he refuses the word "grays" (33:28)

This is the first appearance of an argument he returns to four separate times over two hours, and it is the closest thing the interview has to a thesis.

"I really don't use the term gray. I don't like that. I think that there's probably a number of similar species that are just being stuck under one name that really come from really different places." (33:36)

His evidence is convergent evolution.

"There are a number of species of animals on the Earth that look very similar but are completely genetically unrelated. They just look similar because they live in a similar environment." (34:20)

The stare, and the EEG that followed (34:42)

The push landed softer than he expected.

"It was softer and lighter than I expected, but it fell back pretty easily. And it was probably partly because it was totally unexpected." (34:50)

And then the interpretation that took him decades to arrive at, which reframes the whole encounter.

"I think they were trying to maintain control of me. And it took me many years to figure out that it was probably some kind of neurological impairment due to this blast of energy from that craft that actually worked against their normal method of being able to control humans and keep them in some kind of trance or in an unconscious state." (35:00)

In other words: the reason he was awake and fighting is that he was injured. The injury broke the thing that would normally have kept him under.

Then the stare, which is the image that haunted him longest.

"When they came around and I started flailing at them, they stopped and stared at me, and I felt that stare was so excruciating. That was my nightmares for months after the incident. That stare gave me this horrible feeling in my head." (35:25)

And the piece of physical evidence he ties to it.

"In support of that was the EEG that I was given immediately afterwards, that showed there was some kind of anomalous pattern that I think is consistent with some kind of burst of energy hitting me in the head." (35:45)

Did they ever get control of him? No.

"I was thinking of fighting my way past them when they abruptly turned and left the room. They may have anticipated my move, or just given up. If the three of them combining their forces couldn't control me, they were going to have to go to plan B of some kind." (36:10)

The passage, the star map, the buttons (36:37)

The room, as he describes it, is the anti Hollywood set.

"It was very small, dimly lit, cramped. Not at all like depicted in the movie. It was not organic looking. It was not cluttered. Very featureless, metallic surfaces. I saw no writing or symbols." (36:40)

He adds a caveat rather than claiming a finding, which is characteristic.

"But they may see in a broader spectrum of light than we do, and there may have been something that you didn't see." (37:05)

They went down a passageway to the right, so he went out and turned left. His plan, he freely admits, was not a good one.

"Looking for a way out, just in a blind panic to just open a door, and in the back of my mind thinking, just drop to the ground, be back in the woods." (37:16)

Bell points out that the heavy feeling could have been acceleration, and that at that point Walton had no way of knowing whether he was still in Earth's atmosphere or long past it. Walton agrees.

"In hindsight, it would have been foolish to get a door open, but that was my goal." (37:45)

The passage itself was frightening for a mundane reason: geometry.

"The passage was so narrow and so cramped, and turned so tightly, that I couldn't see very far behind me to see if they were chasing me. And I couldn't see very far ahead of me to what I was coming to." (37:55)

He reached a room with other doors leading out of it, which he later realized, piecing together the floor plan, would not have led outside anyway. He pushed buttons. Nothing opened. But something else moved.

"It did cause this star pattern projection to move at one point. This room was darkened and had points of light. Now whether it was a planetarium like projection, or some viewing method of where it was actually at in real time, I don't know. But it was very disorienting to have this pattern move." (38:29)

Bell, genuinely: "Isn't that interesting? I don't recall hearing this before."

Walton then does something that is easy to miss, and it is the best example of his own reasoning being applied against his own comfort. He works out what his button pushing might actually have been doing.

"In hindsight, what if it was actually moving where the craft was? Turning it upside down or something. Could have crashed it or something. I don't know." (39:20)

1. THE SMALL ROOM TABLE shelf he backed into 3 beings dimly lit, cramped, featureless metallic, no writing or symbols they exit RIGHT he goes LEFT 2. NARROW PASSAGE turns too tightly to see ahead or behind 3. THE DARK ROOM CHAIR star pattern MOVES when he pushes the controls 4. HANGAR 2 or 3 rounded, polished craft roof and walls like an airplane hangar helmeted man pulls him out

Then: a table, other unhelmeted people who will not answer him, a gas, and cold pavement outside Heber. Total conscious memory on board: "less than an hour." Total elapsed: 5 days and 6 hours.

Figure 2. Walton's route through the craft as he narrates it across the middle hour of the broadcast. Note the room he never mentions in the movie's version: a darkened space with points of light that moved when he pushed the controls, which he later worried might have been the craft's own attitude rather than a map. The hangar is the second surprise. He says it held two or three more craft, and that the one that returned him was rounder and more polished than the one that took him.

No sense of time, and why time dilation fails (39:44)

Bell asks whether Walton had any sense of how much time had passed.

"No idea. My initial impression was, since this was the first thing I was remembering since turning to run away, I thought it was immediately afterwards. But in hindsight, it could have been a day or two, or who knows how long afterwards. And also very far away." (40:00)

Total conscious memory on board: he figured less than an hour. Total elapsed time: five days and six hours.

Bell raises the obvious science fiction reconciliation, time dilation. Travel near the speed of light and time passes more slowly for you, so an hour subjective could be five days objective. Walton has a very simple, very physical rebuttal, and it comes from his brother Duane in the first minutes after the recovery.

"He could tell that I thought it was still the same night. And he said, 'Travis, you've been gone five days. Feel your face.' And I had a five day growth of beard. And that is what overturns the time dilation idea." (41:05)

That is a genuinely good argument on its own terms. Under relativistic dilation, his biology would have run slow with him. Five days of stubble means five days of Travis Walton, not one hour.

The green glow device (41:35)

Listeners are asking what the movie was called. Fire in the Sky. Walton mentions he saw it on television the night before last, and that it was on Netflix last he heard.

A listener named Joe asks about the device on his chest.

"It was glowing kind of a greenish glow coming from underneath it. So I don't know whether it was some kind of a treatment device designed to repair the damage that was done internally, or if it was something designed to diagnose or look inside." (41:55)

And then the reframe.

"I definitely think my regaining consciousness was unexpected and actually kind of put a kink in their efforts to revive me. For many years I thought I was taken aboard for experiments or to torture me, but it was actually probably more about reviving me." (42:20)

An ambulance call, not an abduction (42:51)

A listener named Richard asks whether Walton felt the beings cared if he lived or died. This produces the single most quotable line of the two hours.

"At the time, their complete lack of emotion I interpreted as hostility. But in total perspective, analyzing what happened, the way it fits in with the medical tests afterwards and how I was returned and everything, it took me years to realize that it was probably more an ambulance call than an abduction." (43:10)

"I got myself hurt, and that made it necessary to take me aboard just to avoid leaving me there as galactic roadkill." (43:29)

Forty years of thinking about it, and the man's conclusion is that he was not a specimen. He was a pedestrian who walked into traffic.

Hypnosis, and what it was actually for (44:07)

There are blocked memories, he says, and the hypnosis reinforced that view. Bell asks what came out under hypnosis, and the answer subverts the usual expectation entirely.

"Up to that point I was so traumatized that I could hardly finish a sentence about it. And I had not really told the entire story of what I had experienced to anyone, including my brother, until that hypnosis. It was just so traumatic, I'd break down. I could hardly finish a sentence. And so the technique was to separate the fear from the experience." (44:20)

He returns to this later, at 1:30:00, when a caller asks about it directly, and he is even blunter.

"Actually, it didn't add to the memories. It just allowed me to finally say them without breaking down." (1:29:59)

That is an unusual thing for an abductee to say about hypnosis, and it removes the recovered memory objection from a large part of his account. He also says he does not remember the sessions themselves. His brother was present and told him afterward about things he had no memory of saying.

The man in the helmet, and the hangar (45:23)

His button pushing, he thinks, attracted attention, either automatically or by coincidence. Someone came in.

"This person came in that I took to be a human being from some Earth based space agency or military arm from the Earth. But I really think now that that wasn't the case." (45:35)

The man took him out of the craft. And the craft, it turned out, was parked.

"It was inside of this big hangar like structure. It could have been a building somewhere on a military base or somewhere. Or it could have been a part of a larger craft. It had a sort of a look to the roof and wall that looked sort of like I'd seen in airplane hangars." (46:02)

The light coming from the panels could have been filtered sunlight through a translucent panel, or an artificial fixture designed to look like natural light. He does not know. He could not see out through the windows, if they were windows.

Telepathy that hurt, and the schoolchildren (46:40)

Bell asks whether any of them ever communicated with him, vocally or telepathically.

"I think that that excruciating encounter initially with the three of them was an attempt to say something telepathically. And I was curious about why it was so excruciating, until I connected to possibly that I was injured and the receiver, so to speak, wasn't operating correctly." (46:50)

Then he brings in a comparison case, and it is a good one. He had recently been interviewed for a documentary then working under the title 701, a reference to the 701 Project Blue Book cases that were never resolved. The project was being made by James Fox with Tracy Tormé, and it eventually became the 2020 film The Phenomenon.

He was interviewed on the same day as the witnesses from the Ariel School incident in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where around sixty children at recess in broad daylight in 1994 reported a craft and beings who communicated by staring at them. Walton had a specific question for them.

"I wanted to know if it was excruciating for them like it was for me. And they said no, it was very pleasant. The message wasn't unpleasant, it was friendly." (48:10)

That comparison is what convinced him the pain was on his end.

"That convinces me all the more that it was just an attempt with extreme aggressiveness, force, the combined force of the three of them trying to get control of me before I hurt them, or actually hurt myself, because I think my unscheduled regaining of consciousness interrupted some life saving repairs." (48:20)

Bilateral symmetry: why aliens look like us (48:36)

Bell asks whether the helmeted man was fully human. "Apparently in most ways. There was something odd about the eyes." Then Walton launches into the argument he has clearly been sharpening for years, and it is the most substantive stretch of thinking in the broadcast.

He states the skeptical position fairly first.

"Skeptics are really fond of saying, this is ridiculous, there are no aliens, because everybody reports bipedal, two hands, two legs, a head on top. Oh, they're not going to look anything like that. They're going to be a tentacled octopus." (48:52)

Then the counter.

"Well, that's ridiculous. If you understand the principles of biology, bilateral symmetry is almost throughout all life on Earth, no matter how diverse it is. And you have many cases where animals that resemble each other very, very much are completely unrelated, just because they are in a similar ecological niche, a certain similar environment." (49:13)

He returns to this at 58:42 with a full set of examples, and it is worth pulling them together here because they are the strongest thing he says all night.

Every one of those is a real, textbook case of convergent evolution. And then Walton turns it into a prediction.

"I predict that when we look at life on other worlds, they're not going to be astonished at how bizarre these life forms are. They're going to be amazed at the similarity of forms." (59:20)

Coveralls and a helmet (49:51)

Bell asks about helmets and breathing. The answer establishes an asymmetry that becomes important later.

"The so called grays were not wearing anything but coveralls. But the human looking one was wearing a helmet over his head. And so that was the reason I sort of accepted the fact that he was not responding to my babbling, my screaming, begging questions." (50:00)

The small beings breathed the air. The human looking one did not.

Radiation: the blood rumor, the trees, Ken Peterson's arm (50:27)

A listener named Heather asks whether it is true Walton was found to have radiation signatures in his blood of a kind only produced outside Earth's atmosphere. Walton kills the rumor immediately, and the promptness of the kill is the point.

"That is an untrue rumor. Unfortunately, that specific test was not performed. That kind of evidence might have been apparent had they done such a test." (50:45)

But, he says, there is radiation evidence, and it is in the trees. This section is the piece of the broadcast Bell has never heard before, and he says so.

The claim, in order:

  1. The trees nearest where the craft came down have definite markers of a huge radiation dose, in the form of accelerated growth.
  2. The same effect has been documented in Scots pine near Chernobyl, a species Walton says is very similar to the ponderosa pine at the site. Radiation at Chernobyl produced accelerated growth just as it did in the clearing.
  3. The trees nearest the landing point had the greatest accelerated growth, and the effect faded back into the woods with distance.
  4. The newest finding, and the one Walton is most excited about: the accelerated growth was directional. In a circle of trees around the landing point, the thickened growth appeared on whichever side of each trunk faced the craft.

"So in a circle of trees around where the craft came down, the thickened growth would be on the east, west, south, or north, or whatever side was facing the craft, which completely undercuts any skeptics' idea that there was some growth effect that had nothing to do with the craft." (52:00)

Bell: "This is all new information to me. When was this outed?"

Walton credits an expedition overseen by Ben Hansen, former FBI agent and host of the Syfy series Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files. The accelerated growth had been known for a long time. The directionality was not established until the previous year, when they were able to get a complete cross section of the trees.

He adds two more radiation notes:

DIRECTIONAL ACCELERATED GROWTH, AS WALTON DESCRIBES IT (50:27)

CRAFT

PLAN VIEW: thick arc always faces the centre effect strongest nearest, fades back into the woods

CROSS SECTION OF ONE TRUNK toward the craft amber rings: the accelerated years wider on the craft facing side

Comparison case Walton cites: Scots pine near Chernobyl showing the same radiation driven growth spike

Figure 3. The tree evidence as Walton lays it out on air, credited to an expedition overseen by former FBI agent Ben Hansen. The accelerated growth had been known for years. What was new in 2014 was the direction: with full cross sections in hand, they say the widened rings sit on whichever side of each trunk faced the landing point, and the effect fades with distance. Walton's argument is that a directional, distance dependent effect is hard to attribute to ordinary forest variation. This is his claim, presented as he presents it; it has not been through independent peer review.

Health effects and the woo woo factor (53:40)

Bell asks whether Walton has noticed changes in himself. Psychic abilities, better understanding of himself, of life. Walton's answer is a fascinating piece of self restraint.

"All of the above. All of the above. That I'd rather not get into that stuff. I have tried very hard to stick to things that I can document." (53:52)

Bell names the thing: "you're trying to avoid the woo woo factor." Walton: "Right. There's definitely some strange things that have become apparent."

This discipline is the spine of his entire public posture, and it comes up at least five more times before the show ends. He will not say a thing he cannot support, even when he clearly believes it.

Gassed, and waking on cold pavement (54:52)

The helmeted man took him to other people dressed similarly, but without helmets. Walton's hope was practical.

"So I thought, well, maybe they can hear me. Maybe they'll answer my questions. So I was a babbling idiot. I was screaming, crying, carrying on. I was basically out of my mind with fear. But they weren't responding to me." (55:00)

And then, again, he supplies the charitable explanation for their silence rather than the sinister one.

"In a way, it might not have been so much secrecy or anything covert or suspicious that they wouldn't respond to me. It was just that I was acting like a maniac, and they felt that to reason with somebody so out of control would be futile." (55:15)

"So they forced me down on this table and rendered me unconscious with some sort of a gas. And boom, next thing I woke was back on Earth." (55:32)

The return, which the movie sets at a gas station:

"I woke up and I was lying face down in the dark on a cold pavement. I looked to see where the light was coming from, but it went off. But when I looked up I could still see the shiny bottom of this craft hovering there just for an instant before it shot straight up into the air." (55:52)

And the detail that tells him time passed between the gas and the pavement, which is a beautifully physical observation.

"I could feel that my clothes were still warm, even though the pavement was very cold, the air was very cold." (56:25)

The naked scene they cut (56:47)

Bell notes the movie showed him naked. Not true, says Walton, and the story of the abandoned sequence is one of the show's better digressions.

"They actually filmed a sequence where the actor portraying me came upon a couple getting busy in a car. They're naked and he's naked, and they start screaming, he starts screaming. They said it was so bad that it was mercifully deleted from the film." (56:55)

But then Walton takes the metaphor seriously, and turns it into the best psychological observation he makes all night.

"The nakedness is a good metaphor for the feeling that I had, in a variety of ways, that these beings, the small ones, could look into me like they knew what I was thinking, could see into me. It was an intrusive, invasive kind of feeling." (57:10)

"And then in the aftermath, the way media microscopically analyzed my every move to an absurd extent. Every childish act of bravado or whatever, motorcycle stunts or whatever, was just blown out of proportion, and they were just looking for anything that they could interpret as strange. So the whole idea of being the bug in the jar began on board the craft and continued for months after I was returned." (57:26)

Are the human looking ones ours? (58:03)

Bell asks the natural follow up. If there were humans there, does that mean we know about the aliens? Are we cooperating with them? Were those government types?

Walton says that is what he initially thought, and then talks himself out of it using the bilateral symmetry argument, which is where the convergent evolution examples above land.

"It's entirely possible that they're not us from the future, us from the past, or related to us, or that we were seeded here by them. It's entirely possible that they just have a particular keener interest in us because of our similarity, which is just coincidental." (59:00)

Why it took five days (1:00:39)

Bell presses: you were clearly looking at two different species. Why both? Walton gives a two part answer that is entirely consistent with his ambulance call theory.

"I think that they were brought in, or summoned, or their assistance was gained because of, A, I would be less combative and they would be able to get some degree of cooperation and get me sedated to the point where they could finish the repairs. And B, they would know more and probably have more equipment and whatnot to deal with the nature of my injuries." (1:00:50)

"Which is why it took five days." (1:01:15)

Nightmares, and the dreams that replaced them (1:01:17)

A listener named Dale asks if he still has nightmares.

"I did for a long time, but that gradually faded away. Now, the dreams that came back later were not so much nightmares, but actually featured the human type people to a much greater extent, but with a much different emotional feel to it." (1:01:25)

The crew today (1:01:55)

Bell asks how the other men are doing. The answer is a roll call that has started to thin.

The detail about Dwayne Smith's teeth is the kind of thing you do not get from a case file. A man agrees to go on record about the strangest night of his life, and then wants to get his teeth fixed first, and then runs out of time.

  • Nov 5 1975 Late afternoon, Turkey Springs, Apache Sitgreaves National Forest, on the Mogollon Rim above 7,000 feet. Seven men finish a Forest Service thinning contract and start the drive out. A glow through a break in the trees. Walton, 22, leaves the truck. The blast. The crew flees, argues, and returns. He is gone.
  • Nov 5 to 10 Sheriff Marlin Gillespie runs search parties, a helicopter, and tracking dogs brought in from the state prison. Geiger counters are used. The dogs find no trail past the point where his body fell. The crew comes under suspicion of murder. Newspaper coverage goes international.
  • Nov 10 1975 Arizona Department of Public Safety examiner C. E. "Cy" Gilson polygraphs the six crewmen. Five pass. Allen Dalis walks out and is scored inconclusive.
  • Nov 11 1975 Around midnight, Walton phones his sister from a pay phone in Heber. He has been gone five days and six hours. He is dehydrated, down 10 or 11 pounds, has a five day beard, and thinks it is still the same night.
  • Nov 15 1975 Examiner John "Jack" McCarthy, arranged through the National Enquirer, tests Walton and reports gross deception. The result is not published at the time. Philip Klass surfaces it later.
  • Late 1975 Walton is examined at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix under an assumed name. He says the technician was told only to look for injury, making the EEG effectively double blind, and that an anomalous pattern was found. Dr James Harder of APRO runs the hypnosis sessions and puts Walton on the phone with Betty Hill.
  • 1978 Walton publishes The Walton Experience.
  • 1993 Fire in the Sky is released, directed by Robert Lieberman, written by Tracy Tormé, with D. B. Sweeney as Walton and Robert Patrick as Mike Rogers. Paramount rewrites the on board sequence for spectacle. Same year, Gilson retests Walton and Dalis; both pass.
  • 1996 Walton republishes the account as Fire in the Sky: The Walton Experience.
  • 2008 Walton appears on the Fox game show The Moment of Truth. The show's polygrapher scores him deceptive on the abduction question. Walton and critics both attack the format.
  • 2014 The expedition overseen by Ben Hansen gets complete cross sections of the site trees and reports that the accelerated growth is directional, biased toward the landing point.
  • 2015 The 90 minute documentary Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton, produced by Onwinges Productions with Jennifer Stein, wins two EBE Awards at the International UFO Congress.
  • Aug 7 2015 This broadcast. Walton, now 62, on Art Bell's Midnight in the Desert, three weeks after the show's July 20 launch.
  • Nov 5 to 7 2015 The Skyfire Summit, the 40th anniversary conference in Heber Overgaard, including a visit to the site on the anniversary itself and an instrumented skywatch.
Figure 4. The incident and its long tail, combining what Walton says on air with the documented public record. Note how much of the case's evidentiary weight sits in the first ten days, and how much of the argument about it has happened in the forty years since.

The documentary called Travis (1:03:49)

Walton plugs the new 90 minute documentary, and Bell makes him spell the production company because it is not spelled the way it sounds.

"It's produced by On Winges Production. That's o n w i n g e s productions dot com." (1:04:29)

Onwinges Productions made Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton, with Jennifer Stein as writer and executive producer. Walton says it interviews a lot of the prominent researchers in the field, some active since the case broke and some newer, and that it won a couple of EBE Awards. Available through onwingesproductions.com or traviswalton.com. Price, when Bell asks him later at 1:22:53, is "I think it's 25."

A shotgun and a fiber optic junction (1:05:08)

The line quality has been degrading through the whole hour. Bell finally asks whether Walton can hear the interference on his end. He can. And then he explains it in the flattest possible tone, which makes it better.

Walton: "We had some sabotage attempt on our local fiber optic node." Bell: "Oh." Walton: "Took a shotgun to various fiber optic junctions." Bell: "Wonderful. I bet that's fun to fix." (1:05:20)

Rural Arizona in one exchange.

Skyfire Summit (1:05:47)

The 40th anniversary conference, and the speaker list is a good snapshot of the 2015 field.

Walton explains why he wanted the Cowboys and Aliens material specifically, and it is a serious point about the historiography of the subject.

"I think it's fascinating to go back to the prehistory of UFOs and show that this is not some kind of a phenomenon exclusive to post Roswell. This goes way back. Reports in the American Southwest." (1:06:45)

Was he ever debriefed? (1:07:06)

A listener named Gilberto asks whether any government agency ever debriefed him. Bell agrees it is a good question. Walton's answer is a flat no, and he clearly finds it strange.

"You would think they would, and it's very, very curious that I have received no interest from any government agency." (1:07:20)

Then he goes after the man who spent decades attacking the case, Philip J. Klass.

"It was widely suspected for a long time that our chief debunker for many years, Philip Klass, was acting as some kind of a covert disinformationist on behalf of some government agency. And he harassed the heck out of Mike Rogers." (1:07:30)

Walton refers to a bribe offer he says is well documented, carried by a local deputy named Click. And then he brings up a piece of Art Bell's own history.

Walton: "Art, you challenged Philip Klass to take a polygraph test on the air." Bell: "I did. Yes." Walton: "And you got quite a bit of backlash over that. Well, you have been vindicated through the Freedom of Information Act. After Klass passed away, his FBI file revealed some very interesting stuff." (1:07:50)

"I wish you had been able to get Philip Klass to take a polygraph test, because I think he would have flunked it in regards to his covert disinformationist role." (1:08:15)

Bell, dryly: "Well, I don't think anybody in the audience is surprised that that kind of thing is going on."

The bribe allegation is genuinely disputed and is covered at the end of this page.

Richard, Northern Ireland: the hallucinogen theory (1:08:24)

Then the calls start, and the second hour of the broadcast is essentially an unstructured audience examination. Richard from Northern Ireland opens with the drug hypothesis: that Walton stumbled onto a government project and the alien material came from hallucinogens force fed to him.

Walton's answer includes the single sharpest debunk in the whole two hours, and it is a logical one rather than an evidentiary one.

"That was kind of a theory that was put forth because people were desperate to explain it away. Well, why does he pass a lie detector test? Well, he believes it happened, so he really hallucinated it. But that theory, and the transitory psychosis theory, and another one involving hypnosis, have no basis, because it doesn't explain how seven people can have an identical hallucination." (1:09:42)

Then a second, evidentiary point.

"Also, medical tests showed no trace of any drug in my body." (1:10:10)

Scott: celebrity, and a black triangle over Los Angeles (1:10:18)

Scott asks whether Walton's celebrity status might have made the ETs back away. Walton says he does not know, and then, unprompted, tells a story that puts a date and a place on the record.

"Here February 4th last, I was driving, leaving a MUFON meeting in LA. I was going north up the five towards the 10 to come back to Arizona. I was with my girlfriend and my son and we saw a giant triangular black craft come low overhead. Undeniable, incredibly close." (1:10:56)

Here is why he tells it. It is the only recent sighting he will discuss, and he discusses it because it has corroboration.

"I was astonished that you would have something over a city the size of LA and not have all kinds of reports. Well, we did a little research online. My son found this website called ufostalker.com, and at that exact time and place, there were over a dozen reports of the same thing." (1:11:20)

Bell says he saw one of those too. A big triangular craft.

Scott then adds his own report from Massachusetts: a ring of light that came within about ten feet above his vehicle, floated, and then ascended straight up. Bell says that is a big no for him. Walton says he has heard of such reports but has never seen one.

Bell then says something that reveals the shared occupational hazard.

"I'm sure everybody comes to you now with every story. I mean, they do with me. Once they know that you're open to that kind of thing, they really come to you a lot." (1:12:20)

Saskatchewan: the prime directive (1:12:44)

A caller from Yorkton, Saskatchewan asks whether the aliens are here for good or bad. Walton limits his answer to what he encountered.

"This is just my opinion, and it mostly speaks to the species that I encountered, and I really do not see them as malevolent." (1:13:00)

Then he offers a framework borrowed openly from science fiction.

"I think that there is something that's been suggested in science fiction as the prime directive, the non interference directive, that it's against the rules to overtly infuse any kind of technology. Because that's like giving matches to kids. We're just going to use it to hurt ourselves." (1:13:23)

And then, in the strongest bit of reasoning in the caller hour, he addresses the classic skeptical challenge and turns it into a two sided problem.

"The skeptics are fond of saying, if this was real they'd land on the White House lawn and say, here we are, Mr. President. But I also posit that with their level of technology so far beyond ours, that they are perfectly capable of doing everything that they're doing here and remain completely undetected. There would be no ufology, there would be no sightings. They could accomplish that, I believe." (1:13:55)

"So you have to explain why it's neither extreme. In my view, these glimpses, which are just barely provable enough to let this knowledge, this awareness, filter through the population in a way that doesn't have the kind of overwhelming, disruptive effect that just instant, open disclosure would have." (1:14:15)

That is the argument doing real work: the observed pattern is neither full contact nor perfect concealment, and any theory has to account for the middle.

The caller's second question: did he see any other people up there? Some human looking beings, yes. But not what the movie shows.

"Like in the movie where there were human cadavers, or artifacts of other people having been there. No, I did not see that." (1:15:05)

Green Bay: probes (1:15:18)

A caller asks the pop culture question: do they stick probes in you? Bell brings up the movie's needle to the eye scene and calls it the most horrible thing anybody could imagine.

Walton's answer is careful and, again, reframes toward medicine.

"There was an array of instruments there laid out. I had great apprehension about how they might have been used, initially thinking that some bizarre effects could come out later. But I really think that they were just simply there to try to help, and so I have no conscious memory of any probing or anything. I think what was done medically was just to correct a terrible accident that I brought on myself by getting too close unexpectedly." (1:15:56)

Vancouver: memories leaking back (1:16:36)

Scott in Vancouver, listening on TuneIn, asks whether time has awoken any buried memories, and whether there was a message, mentioning the African schoolchildren who were told to save the planet.

Walton's answer contains the best small human moment of the second hour, and it is about a screenwriter changing his mind over twenty years.

"Back about the time I was doing so many interviews for the movie, I started having these memories, little dreams or whatever, glimpses coming through, involving the human looking type of people. And I went to Tracy Tormé, the screenwriter on the film, and I asked him, 'Do you think that there could be some memories returning?' And he said, 'No. It's probably just because you're doing all these interviews. It's probably just dreams.'" (1:17:50)

"And so I asked him the same question here recently, and he says, 'Oh, yeah, that was probably memories leaking back through.' So he profoundly changed his opinion." (1:18:15)

But Walton refuses to make anything of it.

"None of those memories really constitute any useful information. They were just glimmers of things. It definitely had a much more positive feeling than the earlier nightmares that I had." (1:18:28)

What he thinks of the wider abduction phenomenon (1:18:28)

Bell frames Walton as unusually lucky in evidence: the lie detector tests, the many witnesses, the whole schmear. Other abductees have none of it. What does Walton make of the rest of the field?

His answer is notably unflattering to a lot of his own community.

"I think there's a whole mix of things going on. It's a variety of things. All of the above, actually. Some of it is extremely vivid memory. Some of it is delusion. Some of it is misidentified ordinary things. But I believe there's a core reality here." (1:19:06)

"Just because someone is unable to document it doesn't mean it's not true. But in terms of trying to get the public to become aware that there is a core reality here, that's the reason I stick to documentation. It's not that that's what you have to have for it to be true, but that's what you need to have in order to bring people along." (1:19:30)

Thirty nine years without calling in sick (1:19:45)

Bell says he is dying to know what the undisclosed changes are. Walton offers the one he can prove, and the way he proves it is very Travis Walton: he went and got a document.

"I didn't want to say anything about the health effects because I couldn't document it. But I went in to my employers and got the documentation that I never called in sick one time in the last 39 years." (1:20:00)

Bell: "Are you kidding? 39 years?"

"No, no. I never missed a day of work except for funerals and things." (1:20:40)

Bell: "So, if anything, you got a health benefit." Walton, immediately hedging his own best anecdote: "Possibly. I mean, it could be a coincidence that I'm healthy."

Hazleton: exactly where it happened (1:21:00)

A caller who missed the top of the show asks where this happened. Walton gives the location with more precision than at any other point in the broadcast.

"South of Heber Overgaard, Arizona. Up on the Mogollon Rim, over 7,000 feet elevation, up in the ponderosa pines of the Sitgreaves National Forest, very near the border to the Apache's reservation." (1:21:15)

The caller asks how he got out of the hangar. He was rendered unconscious and woke up returned. And then Walton uses that as evidence for his theory, in an argument from the negative that is worth noticing.

"They could have dumped me off on some asteroid, or even back in the woods where it happened, where I would have froze to death before I got help." (1:22:05)

The point being: where he was dropped is itself data. He was put down on pavement, near a town, in reach of a telephone.

Living with it, and Betty Hill's advice (1:24:10)

Bell asks how he deals with celebrity. Are people patient? Do they interrupt his dinner?

Bell: "You just washed your hands and they want to shake your hand." Walton: "Always, yes. No, actually, I have total patience for that. I totally understand." (1:24:10)

Then the piece of the interview that connects the Walton case to the one before it. Right after the incident, Dr James Harder put Walton on the phone with Betty Hill.

"I got some advice from her about that, about not letting it change you. And I really took that to heart. I've worked very hard at not letting it affect me one way or the other. I'm not going to accept the idea that I'm a crazy kook or a liar. And by the same token, I can't accept the idea that I'm some kind of a great person." (1:24:25)

"What happened was an extraordinary event. That doesn't necessarily make me an extraordinary person." (1:24:55)

Nineteen seventy five, and the woman from the 1961 Hill abduction is on the phone to the kid from Snowflake, telling him how not to let it eat him. That is the whole lineage in one call.

He adds that it helps that he lives in a very out of the way place. When he does go out, he tries to be gracious, "because that's my mission, to educate people."

Would he do it differently? (1:25:26)

Jacob on Skype asks whether he would react the same way if he encountered a UFO again, or take a more diplomatic approach. Walton restates the stay calm and ask good questions fantasy and then dismantles it, and then dismantles his own competence too.

"The fear that came on was an accidental conspiracy of circumstances that made it seem far more threatening, which it actually wasn't. And I think I would handle it better, but I don't know that I would voluntarily be so foolish as to get myself injured again." (1:26:03)

Then, the line that says the most about forty years of consequences.

"It would be great to have some questions answered. But the big question is, would I tell anybody? And I have to say, probably not." (1:26:25)

Bell asks whether there are things about the incident he has never made public. Yes, but:

"I just try to stick to what I can document and leave it at that. It's important to show people that there's a reality here, and I don't want to put anything out there that can be questioned, even though it's as real as any of it. If I can't prove it, I'm not going to talk about it." (1:26:45)

What did it smell like? (1:27:20)

Grizz, on the TuneIn chat, asks the question nobody asks, and both men immediately agree it is a good one.

"A lot of people do have a description of the smell, and that's actually a pretty common question that people wonder about. But I don't recall the sense of smell. And normally when you have an intense emotional experience, the smell is very intimately linked with memory." (1:27:40)

What he does recall is atmosphere rather than odor.

"Other than a feeling very stale and humid. It may be that the atmosphere in there was so strange. It wasn't appropriate for a human, obviously, because the human looking guy that came in was wearing a helmet." (1:27:57)

And then he connects the humidity to the suffocation, and lists three candidate causes without picking one.

"Very humid, and I was breathing hard the whole time, and I just felt like I could not get enough air. So I think that either the blast of energy damaged my lungs, or maybe even the neurological part of my brain responsible for breathing, or that atmosphere in there was just not right for humans. And maybe some of both." (1:28:36)

Bell's summary is the good one: "maybe they got as close as they could get."

The dome on top (1:29:14)

Chris on Skype, who had his own encounter, asks whether the craft had a glass dome on top. Walton says yes, four times over, which is the most emphatic he gets all night.

"There was a dome on top. There was a dome on top. There was a dome on top. But I did not look out from it from the inside. I never got to that part of the craft. But it did have a dome on top." (1:29:40)

The same caller asks what being hypnotized was like, which produces the clarification quoted earlier: it did not add memories, it just let him say them without breaking down. And he does not remember the sessions. His brother was present and told him afterward about things he had no memory of.

Not an attack (1:31:09)

Zach from Flagstaff notices something real: earlier in the show, Walton described it as an attack. Now he sounds like he thinks there was something almost altruistic going on. Which is it?

Walton concedes the shift openly and explains what changed his mind.

"I interpreted it as an attack, that possibly this blast of energy was even a beam that was fired, even mistakenly, as a defensive move. But now I'm thinking that it was just some kind of a side effect of the propulsion unit that just jumped to the earth through me." (1:31:30)

And then he does something unusual for a UFO witness: he cites the arch skeptic's own published work in support of his revised, less dramatic reading.

"Our famous UFO skeptic even wrote a paper saying that pilots who think they see they're being circled by UFOs are actually seeing the result of the huge charges, up to half a million volts, that actually have been documented to build up in the surface of our aircraft just passing at high speed through the air." (1:31:46)

He lists the candidates and refuses to choose: an electrostatic effect from the disc moving fast through air, a side effect of the propulsion unit, or residual energy from what he speculates might have been an agricultural experiment on the trees.

"I don't know. I just don't think it was a deliberate weapon. Because I unexpectedly closed the distance and got myself hurt, then it made it necessary for them to take me aboard to correct the mistake that I made. So I'm not saying that it was a hostile act at all, as I mistakenly may have thought at first." (1:32:35)

Was he a believer before? (1:33:01)

A listener called Big C asks whether Walton was a skeptic of ETs before it happened. His answer is prickly and then turns into a lecture on exoplanets.

"No, I was not that ignorant." (1:33:30)

"Studies have shown that over 60% of the people believe in the reality of this, and the percentage goes up with the educational level." (1:33:40)

Then the astronomy, which for a 1975 chainsaw operator in 2015 is a fair summary of where the field had gotten.

"We have the Hubble telescope and Kepler, and they've actually been able to fill in the blanks on the Drake equation, that the estimation of habitable or life supporting planets in our galaxy is far greater than they once thought. That virtually every star has about a dozen planets, and that there's always going to be those middle ones, the Goldilocks range, that aren't so close that they're overheated or so far out that they're frozen. And life, with the right chemicals, is going to be inevitable in those places." (1:33:50)

Bell: "You're beginning to sound like a scientist."

Walton: "I've been studying it for 39 years."

The Navajo Rangers and the woven blanket (1:34:56)

A caller from Phoenix who attended the previous year's Skyfire Summit describes two Navajo Rangers who spoke there, with federal law enforcement training, "no holds barred" men who would look right through you. How did Walton meet them?

Walton's answer opens the case's widest window.

"I had the opportunity to speak in Gallup at a film festival on the Navajo reservation and spoke to nearly a thousand Native Americans in the building, and they had some amazing stories about things that happened way back in the far reaches of the reservation. It's very remote out there, and these entities seem to have quite an attraction to more remote areas." (1:35:50)

And then the detail that sticks.

"This one story I got was of a guy whose grandmother had woven a blanket depicting an encounter with these beings, going way back." (1:36:25)

"The oral tradition amongst the tribes, the Zuni, the Navajo, the Hopi, is pretty extensive that this is not a new phenomenon." (1:36:35)

Which is exactly why he booked Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte on the Cowboys and Aliens topic: to show the reports predate Roswell entirely, back to the first Europeans in the region.

New Zealand (1:37:29)

A caller from Nelson, New Zealand offers two of his own, and the second one is unusually specific.

In 1978, a craft came in across the Pacific from about 100 miles out and covered that 100 miles in about 10 seconds, passing directly overhead flashing red, white, yellow and blue strobes, silently, within half a mile. He connects it to reports at Ludington, Michigan around July 28, 1978, which he says were also seen by Coast Guard and Sheriff's Department personnel, and directs listeners to the NICAP website.

His first, in 1975 in Los Angeles: being threatened by a biker, he sat down cross legged and closed his eyes instead of defending himself, and was hit by what he describes as a tractor beam, like a billion volts, knocked to the ground and shaken like a seizure. Bell's interjection is perfect radio.

Bell: "You sure the biker didn't hit you, right?" Caller: "No, the bikers just stood there with their jaws dropped. They couldn't believe what they saw and they walked away. The whole situation just diffused at that point." (1:39:00)

Occam's razor and the robot question (1:39:59)

Nathan from Oklahoma asks whether the ETs might be robots or biologically programmed proxies, a bridge built by fourth dimensional beings. Walton reaches for the right tool.

"Using Occam's razor, I see no necessity for that. If an advanced civilization could create a being that could stand in for an organic being, to resemble in every way a living, breathing thing, it would be undetectable. So there would have been no way that I could have seen such a creation. But I also don't see the necessity of it." (1:40:20)

"I think with their kind of technology, it's not that big of a leap to come here. It's just that they're being very circumspect out of respect for our level of development." (1:41:00)

Two pie pans lip to lip (1:41:15)

The same caller asks what the ship looked like, and Walton gives the fullest physical description of the night.

"A metallic disc with a dome on top, but glowing areas with non glowing areas that are more like some kind of a more rigid part of the structure." (1:41:30)

And a piece of negative evidence he raises himself, which is the sort of thing that separates a describer from a storyteller.

"I don't know the nature of why some of it was glowing. It didn't feel hot. I was close enough that I think that if it was glowing because of a high temperature, I would have been able to feel the heat. And I didn't feel heat." (1:41:50)

Bell asks him to just say it: would you roughly describe it as a flying saucer?

"Yes. Like two pie pans put lip to lip. Kind of angular. But the craft that I was returned from was more rounded, but again still a disc shape. I'm thinking that something to do with the propulsion requires a generally circular dimension." (1:42:20)

Why he will not talk about later contact (1:42:35)

Lots of listeners are asking whether he has had contact since. His answer is a policy, not an answer.

"That's a very common question, and I always tell them, if I did I wouldn't tell anybody, because I stick to what I can document. I did talk about that giant black triangle because I had two witnesses with me, and then went online and found that there was a dozen more." (1:42:45)

Bell agrees it is the right call.

"I think you're doing a wise thing, because if you had had another experience and laid that out for everybody, you're absolutely right, it would detract from your credibility, no matter how true it might be." (1:43:14)

Walton: "Exactly." Bell: "The nature of the beast."

God, the priest, and the Vatican (1:43:14)

Gabrielle of Eastern Carolina asks about Walton's thoughts on God before versus after.

"No, I found God prior to that. I believe that if you truly understand infinity in terms of time and distance, both future and past, then God is a certainty." (1:44:00)

Bell asks whether he was a church going person in Snowflake, which is a heavily Latter-day Saint town.

"Not a regular. I was an irregular, and that kind of put me on the edge of this devout community. But I see nothing about the presence of alien beings in this galaxy, in this universe, as in any way contradicting any religious principle." (1:44:30)

Bell points out that for some people it would be a contradiction, and Walton has a story about exactly what that cost.

"I've encountered that in ways that harmed relationships. My son's girlfriend was advised to get away from him by the local Catholic priest, who brought in a guy that said his dad is consorting with demons." (1:45:00)

"And it wasn't so long after that that the Vatican came out and said, no, there is absolutely nothing evil about believing that there are beings out there on other planets." (1:45:20)

Then the closing argument, which is genuinely a good one.

"People who say, well, if it's not in the Bible it doesn't exist, are really pretty small minded in my view. They're selling God short. There's nothing in the Bible about Native Americans, and yet they exist. There's nothing in the Bible about Antarctica, but it exists." (1:45:30)

The eyes, in detail (1:45:43)

Matthew, calling as his brother Jonathan, asks for maximum detail: appendages, feet, irises, colors, clothing. Walton starts with the eyes and immediately contradicts the single most famous image in the entire subject.

"Yeah, they did have irises. They did not have a black obsidian like eye." (1:46:24)

And then a hypothesis for where the black eye image might come from.

"I speculate that that might be some sort of a sunglass sort of eye protective covering, similar to sunglasses. Because every creature that has oversized eyes on Earth lives in a very dark environment. They're either nocturnal, live in a cave, or under the sea at great depths. So huge eyes imply low light." (1:46:35)

The fuller answer comes at 1:51:24 when Bell circles back for the complete physical description, and it is the most forensic passage of the broadcast.

Hands: the normal number of digits, looked like four fingers and a thumb. Extended toward him, they seemed to lack fingernails and creases at the bend points. And then, immediately, the alternative explanation, offered by Walton and not by Bell.

"Now, there is a possibility that that was actually a surgical glove. But that was the way the hands looked to me. If they were in the midst of medical type procedures, perhaps they were wearing gloves." (1:51:45)

Eyes: a pupil, an iris, and lids that blinked. No eyelashes. A very large iris and a very large pupil. And a piece of unexpected optical detail:

"Even in that dim lighting, the pupil was fairly constricted." (1:52:30)

Shape: Bell asks if they were almond shaped as depicted. "No, there wasn't a huge slant to the eye."

Suits (1:57:40): loose, billowy, soft material. A coverall. "I wouldn't call it a space suit at all. It was just clothing." All alike, and an orangish brown under that lighting. The human looking individual wore something much closer fitting, not a leotard but close, blue, "a sort of a velour or soft weaveless sort of a fabric." No insignia of rank or origin at all, on any of them.

Skin (1:56:26): he only touched one, and barely.

"It was really just the back of my arm. It was a kind of a sweeping, knocking them away sort of a thing. And it wasn't against their skin, it was against the chest. And he, or it, fell back very easily. It was much lighter and softer than I expected." (1:56:35)

And then he repeats his refusal to lump them together, giving a physical reason for the variety in the literature.

"That's the reason I say people that are lumping them together as grays. They just are different beings that just happen to look that way. I think it might be common that either the daytime radiation on the planet they're from is so intense that they're nocturnal, or the atmosphere is so thick that not a whole lot of light reaches during their daylight hours." (1:52:45)

Art's mystery email (1:47:00)

Midway through the caller hour, Bell breaks off entirely to tease something unrelated to Walton, and it is a pure slice of what his show was.

"So I am going to have, when I get done with the show, perhaps in an hour or two, I'm going to send this very long email to Keith and I'm going to have him post it. I'm going to eliminate the code word he gave me so I would recognize him when he calls." (1:47:15)

"I received it yesterday and I've been really, really, really struggling with how to approach this, and I think this is the right way to do it. It's going to take you a while to read, but I think we have a legitimate source here, just like we've got a legitimate guy on the line right now." (1:47:45)

Keith is Keith Rowland, Bell's longtime webmaster, whose studio in Mesa carried the Midnight in the Desert feed from Bell's Pahrump studio.

Why people get angry (1:48:17)

Bell asks whether Walton has noticed that some people respond to a story like his with anger rather than disbelief.

"Yeah. I've experienced that, and a sort of a desperate need to just latch on to anything to help them dismiss it, for some reason." (1:48:35)

Bell says many of his programs have been met with the same anger and guesses it is fear based. Walton agrees and then describes an intervention that actually works.

"It is fear based. Some of the blasts that I get every year and a half, two years, from somebody online, I say, 'Look, don't be afraid. It's not going to happen to you.' And you would not believe how often that turns them around and they're apologetic. The extreme reaction is just fear based." (1:48:55)

Toronto: light that does not behave like light (1:49:32)

Michael from Thornhill, Ontario asks a genuinely interesting physics adjacent question. He has met people who saw a bright light that "did not affect the area." Does anybody know of such a thing?

Walton's answer confirms the opposite in his case, which is a useful negative.

"It lit up the area with a very strange sort of an ethereal kind of a glow. It was a very soft light, and it was still visible from back down the road. The reason it was washing across the road at that point was because there was a break in the trees. But it was a very strange light that made the foliage and surroundings look very odd." (1:50:45)

So: the light did illuminate the clearing. It just made everything look wrong.

The accidental abductee (1:53:16)

Bell offers Walton a summary of his own case, and Walton immediately adopts it.

Bell: "Your story in totality, to me, sounds like you were the accidental abductee." Walton: "That's my favorite theory now." (1:53:20)

He notes that not everyone on his crew agrees.

"Allen and Steve and, I think, Kenny, they think it was all a plan, like they were laying for us. But I don't know. I did something very unexpected." (1:53:30)

Bell: "Some might say stupid. I mean, it's a big saucer out there."

And then Walton makes an argument against his own favorite theory, and concedes the point.

Walton: "I felt like this was my own irrational impulse. They say, well, if they can control you, they can make you think it's your idea." Walton: "And I guess they got a point there, too." (1:53:55)

Gurley, Alabama, and the saying (1:53:55)

A caller named Claude describes two UFOs no more than 50 or 60 feet from him in his backyard in Gurley, Alabama, and says he pretty much believes what Walton is telling him.

Walton: "Once you've seen it, changes your life. Simple as that." (1:54:33)

And then the epigram he has clearly used many times, which is the best compression of the entire evidentiary problem.

"I have a little saying. For those who have seen them, no more evidence is necessary. For those who have never seen it and don't want to believe, no amount of proof will ever be enough." (1:54:45)

Barrow Neurological Institute, under an assumed name (1:55:09)

A caller named AA asks whether they spoke to him telepathically, and Walton uses the question to lay out the strongest documentary claim he makes all night, which is about the design of the test rather than its result.

"I think they were attempting to do so and it wasn't working because of the brain injury. Now, the brainwave scan, the EEG I underwent, was at a very, very prestigious brain trauma center, the Barrow Neurological Institute. It's world famous." (1:55:30)

"And I was put in under an assumed name, which made the test double blind. The technician did not know the nature of my injury. He was just told to look for injury, and he found it." (1:55:47)

He adds that the scans and report are going to be reinterpreted by new neuroscientists, with a hoped for follow up to see whether any of the pattern remains.

Whatever you make of the finding, the procedure he describes is the right procedure. A blinded technician told only to look for injury, without knowing the story, cannot pattern match to expectation. Walton clearly understands why that matters, which is consistent with everything else he says about documentation.

Montreal, and the line he will not cross (1:57:02)

A caller from Montreal asks two things: about people who come back in pieces or not at all, and about how his psychic abilities have been enhanced and whether they have contacted him psychically since.

Bell heads it off before Walton has to.

Bell: "I don't think he's going to answer that." (1:57:25)

Walton, when it comes back to him: "First, my apologies to the previous caller. I'm just sticking to what I can document."

That is the fourth time in two hours he draws the same line, and it never once wavers.

Two different craft (1:59:32)

Several listeners want confirmation of something from earlier. Was he taken aboard one craft and returned by a different one?

"Right. Yeah, of a different configuration. The more rounded, more polished one is the one that brought me back, and I did see two, possibly three of those in that big hangar like structure." (1:59:40)

And then a detail about the helmeted man's urgency that Walton reads as medical rather than security.

"Whether it was a larger craft or a building, he was pulling me along pretty rapidly. I was having a lot of trouble just keeping my footing, and he was in quite a bit of hurry. And it might have been for my own benefit, that it was kind of a medical emergency, rather than trying to keep me from seeing too much." (1:59:55)

Ketones, dehydration, eleven pounds (2:00:47)

A caller called Sushi Dog asks the most practical question of the night, and gets the most physiologically specific answer. He was gone five days. When did he last eat or drink, and how was he sustained?

"Since I was only conscious for that brief, hysterical period of time, I obviously wasn't sitting down to a meal. However, medical tests did show that there had to have been some kind of nourishment, according to their indicators, which is the presence of something they call ketones, which is a sign that you've been breaking down your own body stores to stay alive. And that was absent." (2:00:55)

That is a real and reasonable inference. Five days without food should produce measurable ketosis. He says it was not there.

Hydration was a different story.

"There was considerable dehydration. So they were either underestimating my fluid requirements, or had another reason to minimize that as part of my treatment or something. But other than being somewhat dehydrated, and the evidence for that was a 10 or 11 pound weight loss, very quickly recovered just by slaking my thirst, which was pretty intense." (2:01:25)

And then the honest shrug about the rest.

"Whatever means of sustenance, or for that matter using the restroom, I don't have any memory of that other part. Whether I was in a coma the entire time or under anesthesia the whole time, I don't know, but probably had at least some conscious period. I don't know if I was fed during that time or not. But after this many years without recalling more of those memories, I really doubt a lot will ever come back to me." (2:02:01)

Wrap (2:02:37)

Bell runs the plugs one more time. The documentary is called Travis, available at traviswalton.com or through Onwinges Productions, spelled with a g and an e. The conference is the Skyfire Summit, November 5, 6 and 7 in Heber Overgaard, with a visit to the site on the anniversary itself and a skywatch with special equipment.

"Travis, it's been a long time since we talked. Thank you so much for coming on the program." (2:03:14)

"Great to be with you again."

Fire in the Sky, line by line

The movie thread runs the whole length of the broadcast and never gets consolidated on air, so here it is in one place. Every row is something Walton says explicitly during these two hours.

ElementFire in the Sky (1993)Walton on this broadcast
The crewSix menSeven men. compressed
His brothersOne brother, "Dan"Two brothers, Don and Dwayne. merged
The investigatorOne lawman, played by James GarnerSeveral investigators and lawmen rolled into one. merged
The craft's lookThe movie's design"No, not at all." A metallic disc, two pie pans lip to lip, dome on top, smooth as glass, partly glowing and partly metallic, somewhat reflective. wrong
Being thrownHe is hit and thrownhappened But far more violent. Compared by witnesses to a grenade or land mine. 10 to 20 feet. "Like a sack of meat." The movie underplayed it.
Crew abandons himOne man refuses to go back and waits alone in the darkNobody volunteered to stand alone. They all said "no way, we're staying with the truck," and they all went back. wrong, and unfair to them
The room on boardOrganic, cluttered, dripping, cavernousVery small, dimly lit, cramped, featureless, metallic. No writing or symbols. Not organic looking, not cluttered. wrong
WeightlessnessZero gravityThere was gravity. If anything, slightly heavy. The device fell off his chest and hit the floor. wrong
The beingsThe movie's creature designChanged by Paramount because the original look had appeared in another production just before filming. Small, hairless, grayish white, huge eyes, irises and blinking eyelids, four fingers and a thumb, orangish brown coveralls. changed for production reasons
The membraneHe suffocates under a membraneNever happened. But Walton credits it as a good dramatization of his actual chief sensation, which was suffocation. invented, but honest in effect
The needle in the eyeThe film's most infamous sceneNo conscious memory of any probing. There was an array of instruments laid out, which he now thinks were medical. invented
Human cadavers on boardShown"No, I did not see that." invented
Returned nakedShownNot true. A sequence was filmed of a naked Walton stumbling on a couple in a car and was cut as too bad to keep. wrong
The polygraph sceneThe examiner says they were telling the truthconsistent with what he says "The examiners stand by it to this day."
Time compressionYears of aftermath compressed into 90 minutesAccepted and understandable. "Anytime Hollywood tells a real life story, they've got to simplify and abbreviate."

Best quotes

"Travis, Wiki says, is an American logger who was allegedly, and I scratch that word out, who was abducted by a UFO on November 5th, 1975." (1:30)

"Back in the day they used to say anybody who believes in such things is a kook. Now we're actually coming to the point where the debunkers and the skeptics are the kooks." (3:05)

"We have added a stoplight. We've added a McDonald's." (5:38)

"The greatest amount of changes were what happened aboard the craft, and I see no reason for that except commercial conditions." (7:29)

"But we burst into the clearing, man, it was bam. It just hit us right between the eyes." (10:40)

"It's definitely not some little glowing point of light off in the distance, like the skeptics tried to say it could have been the planet Jupiter." (11:00)

"I was scared too, but I was trying not to show it. So the closer I got, the slower I went." (11:44)

"It was giving off this glow, and at the same time you could see the surroundings reflected in the surface. It's kind of like when you look at a television set." (15:00)

"John said that my body felt like a sack of meat, like there were no bones in it." (17:55)

"Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is to keep going in the presence of fear." (20:05)

"Kenny was saying the scariest thing to him, he thought, would be what my charred body was going to look like laying there." (20:20)

"It could have easily been being poked by a thorn in the course of a work day." (26:50)

"I felt like I couldn't get enough air. The feeling of suffocation." (30:05)

"It took me many years to figure out that it was probably some kind of neurological impairment due to this blast of energy from that craft that actually worked against their normal method of being able to control humans." (35:00)

"That stare gave me this horrible feeling in my head." (35:35)

"It was very disorienting to have this pattern move." (38:45)

"He said, 'Travis, you've been gone five days. Feel your face.' And I had a five day growth of beard." (41:05)

"It was probably more an ambulance call than an abduction. I got myself hurt, and that made it necessary to take me aboard just to avoid leaving me there as galactic roadkill." (43:20)

"It didn't add to the memories. It just allowed me to finally say them without breaking down." (1:29:59)

"I wanted to know if it was excruciating for them like it was for me. And they said no, it was very pleasant." (48:10)

"That is an untrue rumor. Unfortunately, that specific test was not performed." (50:45)

"The accelerated growth was primarily on the side of the tree in the direction of the craft." (51:42)

"All of the above. That I'd rather not get into that stuff. I have tried very hard to stick to things that I can document." (53:52)

"I could feel that my clothes were still warm, even though the pavement was very cold." (56:25)

"The whole idea of being the bug in the jar began on board the craft and continued for months after I was returned." (57:40)

"They're going to be amazed at the similarity of forms." (59:20)

"It doesn't explain how seven people can have an identical hallucination." (1:09:55)

"They are perfectly capable of doing everything that they're doing here and remain completely undetected. There would be no ufology, there would be no sightings." (1:14:00)

"Some of it is extremely vivid memory. Some of it is delusion. Some of it is misidentified ordinary things. But I believe there's a core reality here." (1:19:06)

"I never called in sick one time in the last 39 years." (1:20:10)

"They could have dumped me off on some asteroid, or even back in the woods where it happened, where I would have froze to death before I got help." (1:22:05)

"What happened was an extraordinary event. That doesn't necessarily make me an extraordinary person." (1:24:55)

"The big question is, would I tell anybody? And I have to say, probably not." (1:26:25)

"There was a dome on top. There was a dome on top. There was a dome on top." (1:29:40)

"I just don't think it was a deliberate weapon." (1:32:40)

"There's nothing in the Bible about Native Americans, and yet they exist. There's nothing in the Bible about Antarctica, but it exists." (1:45:35)

"They did have irises. They did not have a black obsidian like eye." (1:46:24)

"For those who have seen them, no more evidence is necessary. For those who have never seen it and don't want to believe, no amount of proof will ever be enough." (1:54:45)

"I was put in under an assumed name, which made the test double blind." (1:55:47)

"If I can't prove it, I'm not going to talk about it." (1:26:55)

Where it stands

Everything above is the broadcast. This section is not.

The Walton case is the most heavily documented abduction claim in the literature, and it is also one of the most heavily contested. Both of those things are true at once, and the reason is that the same body of evidence, the polygraph record, is claimed by both sides.

What is not in dispute. Seven men were working a US Forest Service thinning contract near Turkey Springs in the Apache Sitgreaves National Forests. On the evening of November 5, 1975, six of them drove into Heber and reported that Travis Walton had been struck by a light from a hovering object and that they had fled. Navajo County Sheriff Marlin Gillespie ran a search that included tracking dogs, a helicopter and volunteer parties. Walton was missing for five days and six hours and turned up near midnight on November 10 into November 11, phoning his sister from a pay phone in Heber. The crew came under suspicion of homicide. All of that is on the public record.

The polygraph ledger. This is where the case lives or dies, so here it is laid out plainly rather than argued.

DateSubject and examinerResultWho cites it
Nov 10 to 11, 1975The six crewmen, tested by Arizona DPS examiner C. E. "Cy" GilsonFive pass on having seen a craft and not having harmed Walton. Allen Dalis walks out; scored inconclusive.Both sides accept this happened
Nov 15, 1975Travis Walton, tested by John "Jack" McCarthy, arranged via the National EnquirerMcCarthy reports "gross deception" and says Walton used countermeasures such as breath holding. Not published at the time.Skeptics, surfaced by Philip Klass
Late 1975Walton, tested by an APRO arranged examinerPass. This is the test the National Enquirer publicized.Walton and APRO
1993Walton and Dalis, retested by Cy GilsonBoth pass.Walton
2008Walton on Fox's The Moment of TruthThe show's polygrapher scores him deceptive on the abduction question.Skeptics. Walton and many critics of the format both reject the show's methodology.

Walton's on air figure of "16 passed tests" counts every pass by every participant across all rounds. The critics' figure counts the failures Walton does not mention. Neither number is a lie; they are different accounting. What is fair to say is that Walton does not mention the McCarthy result during this broadcast, and it is the single strongest item the skeptical case has.

It is also worth knowing what a polygraph is and is not. It measures arousal, not truth. The National Research Council's 2003 review concluded that polygraph accuracy for specific incident testing is well above chance and well below perfection, and that it is not suitable as the sole basis for a conclusion. That cuts against the confident million to one framing Walton quotes, and it cuts equally against treating the McCarthy failure as settled proof of a hoax.

The skeptical case. Philip J. Klass, an aviation journalist and the field's most persistent debunker for decades, argued the whole thing was a hoax with a financial motive: Rogers was behind on the Forest Service contract and facing penalties, and the disappearance produced a force majeure exit plus tabloid money. The crew and Walton did receive a National Enquirer prize of five thousand dollars for best UFO case of the year. Klass also argued the tests were poorly administered. The skeptic Robert Sheaffer has proposed the nearby Gentry fire lookout tower, a roughly seventy foot structure with a spotlight, as a mechanism for the light. Walton's counter to the money motive, which he does not state on this broadcast but has made elsewhere, is that the sums were small and split seven ways, and that his side of it took forty years of hostility to collect.

The Rogers wobble. In March 2021, six years after this broadcast, Mike Rogers publicly renounced his witness status, and audio was released in July 2021 in which he described the event as staged with the involvement of Duane Walton. Rogers later retracted that and he and Walton reconciled. It is a genuinely messy episode, and honest people read it in opposite directions: as a conscience finally clearing, or as a sick and pressured man in his seventies being worked over. Either way, it postdates this interview by six years, and Walton is speaking here in 2015 with no knowledge of it.

The tree evidence. The directional accelerated growth Walton describes at 50:27 has not been through independent peer review and has not been published in a dendrochronology journal. Growth eccentricity in conifers is a real and well studied phenomenon with several ordinary causes, including reaction wood formed in response to lean or wind loading, and asymmetric light and crown competition after a stand is thinned, which is exactly what that crew was there to do. That does not make Walton's account of the finding dishonest. It means the finding needs the control comparisons and the blind ring measurement that a journal would require before it can carry the weight he puts on it.

What survives. Strip out everything contested and you are left with a genuinely hard core: six men reported the same thing on the same night, told the story to a sheriff within hours, passed a state administered polygraph five days before Walton returned and while they were the prime suspects in a homicide investigation, and never materially changed their account for four and a half decades. Walton returned dehydrated, down ten or eleven pounds, with five days of beard, and by every account was in real distress. Whatever produced that is either an extraordinary event or an extraordinarily well kept and well motivated conspiracy among seven working men in their twenties, several of whom disliked each other, sustained for the rest of their lives with almost nothing to show for it.

That is the shape of the thing. Bell's contribution, forty years on, was to let the man tell it straight through for two hours and then hand the microphone to the audience for one more. It holds up as radio regardless of what you conclude.

Resources

The broadcast

The case

The films

People named on air

Skyfire Summit 2015 speakers

Organizations, sites and cases mentioned

Science and concepts invoked

The skeptical literature

Full transcript
ART BELL | Legendary Travis Walton Interview | Night Drive 4K Russell's House. Original broadcast: Midnight in the Desert, August 7 2015. Host: Art Bell. Guest: Travis Walton. Full transcript, auto captions cleaned and time stamped. Speaker turns are marked by indentation. [0:00:10] There was a a chair in the middle of this room that had some controls on the um on it and uh I went up to that and uh tried to see if I could uh figure way to open a door or get out of there or something. Another being came in at that point. The The first creatures that I saw were very very different from us. They were uh short, you know, less than 5 ft in in height. Um They had large uh bulging craniums. Uh [0:00:54] They had kind of a chalky white look to their appearance. Very large eyes. He took me out of that room that this was parked in down a hallway to a smaller room where there was some other people like him. And they put me down on a table and I struggled with them. [music] All right. So, in a moment, Travis Walton. I looked him up on Wiki. I've interviewed Travis uh probably 6 or 10 years ago or something. Uh Travis uh Wiki says is an American logger who was allegedly and I scratch that [0:01:37] word out, who was abducted by UFO a UFO on November 5th, 1975 after working with a logging crew in the Apache uh National Forest in Arizona. Walton could not be found but in fact reappeared after a 5-day intensive search, the case received mainstream publicity, remains one of the best-known instances of alien abduction. Again, I went right past alleged. UFO historian Jerome Clark writes that few abduction reports have generated as much controversy as Walton case. It was made, you know, into a movie. [0:02:21] Um a very, very popular movie called Fire in the Sky. And prior to doing tonight's interview, I again watched Fire in the Sky with my wife, who was utterly freaked out, completely freaked out. And so, I imagine she is sitting intently listening to this interview. So, what's going to happen is coming up in a moment, uh the real McCoy. That's what he is, the real McCoy, Travis Walton. Good evening. Good evening. It has been, I don't know, 6 years, 10 years, like forever since we have had an opportunity to talk. So, it's really an honor to have you back, and I was serious about scratching [0:03:04] out that alleged stuff. What happened to you happened. Period. That's it. Absolutely. [laughter] I mean, we are we're at the tipping point. Uh back in the day, they used to say, "Anybody who believes in such things is a kook." Now, we're actually coming to the point where the debunkers and the skeptics are the kooks. Because the definition of a kook is someone who believes things that are at odds with known facts and accepted beliefs. Thank you. And that's them, not us. That's right. That that is them, and there is so much to prove it now. Um and I I really hate taking you back [0:03:48] to this story again, but that's what I have to do because they'd crucify me otherwise. Are you still married, right? To Mike Rogers' sister? Yeah, but we've been separated a number of years. Amicably, but definitely living apart. Okay. November 5th, 1975. You know, in some ways it's like yesterday. You know, it seems you know, the the emotional impact in particular, but the memories are so fresh. It's hard to believe it's been nearly 40 years. Travis, has this thing defined your life ever since? I mean, I can't imagine that it hasn't. It's kind of defined [0:04:31] your life. Yeah, it has. You know, actually, you know, I have to say regrettably that you know, uh it's it's something I live with every day. But the negative aspect of it has shifted. And you know, that might be surprising. I stuck it out here in Snowflake. It used to be, you know, people would look and whisper and point. But now, you know, the local people come up, shake my hand, and uh or greet me openly, and they'll say um you know, I always supported you. And I'm thinking, well, I wish you'd have spoke up a long time ago. Back back then. [0:05:12] But it is good, you know, that almost every time I go out now, I I get some kind of positive response. And I'll tell you what, we've come a long ways in this town. Oh, yes. How how big a town now is Snowflake? Well, it was about 3,500 then, but I don't know, not a whole lot bigger. Might be 5,000. Okay. All right. We we have added a stoplight. We've added a McDonald's. Oh, you have a stoplight and a McDonald's. Yeah. Wow. We celebrated here in Pahrump, Nevada. there's We got our first stoplight and our first McDonald's, so I know how you feel. [laughter] Um all right, so your crew consisted of [0:05:56] Mike Rogers. Um let's see. Peterson. Jim Peterson, right? Um Ken The Is it Ken Peterson or It's Ken Peterson, Kenneth Peterson. John Gullett. John Gullett, uh Dwayne Smith who always gets confused with my brother Dwayne. It's a different spelling of Dwayne, but and then there was uh Steve Pierce and Alan Dallas. Okay. Um I'm going to go to the movie for this, and I know the movie probably got an awful lot of stuff wrong, but there's something I want to ask about, and that is Oh, well, you know what? I I shouldn't ask about that yet. It tell the story [0:06:39] as uh I suppose Mike might have told it um that night. Uh the movie Is it close enough for comfort or is it far away from what actually occurred? Well, you know, anytime Hollywood tells a real-life story, they've got to simplify and abbreviate and sort of symbolize things because you're telling uh in 90 minutes something that spanned years. Right. So, it Some of that is to be expected and is acceptable. I had two brothers, Don and Dwayne, who became one named Dan. Uh James Garner was uh several uh investigators and and lawmen rolled into [0:07:23] one. And they actually reduced the number of the crew from seven to six. And um you know, some of that's acceptable and you know, understandable, but the greatest amount of changes were what happened aboard the craft, and I see no reason for that except commercial conditions. All right, well we'll we'll get to that, but all of this crew you were up there um uh cutting and clearing for I guess uh what? The US Forest Service? Yeah, it was a government contract to uh clear out undergrowth, damaged trees, and end disease trees, and you know, generally clean up the forest and and [0:08:06] also a lot of fuel reduction, which is, you know, fire reduction strips uh through the area that makes it easier to fight forest fires that might spring up. Uh it's hard work, huh? Oh, it's definitely some of the hardest work you can do in a high altitude on a steep terrain and uh carrying a heavy chainsaw all day, it's it's it's definitely not for the uh faint of heart. Mhm. It's it's for the young. Uh and and by the way, uh you are quite a bit older than you were then. How old were you at the time? You 22, I guess? 22 and now I'm 62. Oh my god. [0:08:50] You're older than I'm 70, Travis, so there you go. Wow, you're you're over 60 now. Holy mackerel. It's incredible. [laughter] I don't feel that. Oh. I could still outrun my boys. I don't feel that either um at all, but it happens and those years go by. So, you guys were uh you know, it it started out with you everybody in the truck going up there and working. Uh and I guess that you were on your way home. It was dark. And uh if the movie is accurate, somebody saw something in the distance that [0:09:32] uh and and I guess you were part of this uh that Uh, they claimed looked at first like like fire. Um Yeah, it was a glow and you know, we we tried out a number of ideas of what it might be, you know, deer hunters camped out there, a plane crash, you know, a fire in the truck. But, uh, nothing was fitting in with what we were seeing. Right. Uh, it was a full glow in the sky, kind of like in the movie, maybe not as reddish, but, um, a full glow, you know, and the sun had gone down, of course, uh, in the west. So, it could not have been the sun, it had to be a fire or as you mentioned a crash or something like that. Anyway, uh, it was apparently pretty much directly ahead of, uh, where you were [0:10:14] headed on that only road you were on to get out of there, right? Right. And, uh closer we got, I could see that there was a break in the trees ahead and then where the light was shining across the road. So, Mike, hurry up and get up there and we'll see what it is cuz by then, you know, all of us had noticed it and, uh and so, we bounced [snorts] along went on up there. I mean, it was curious, but it wasn't all that alarming at first. But, burst into the clearing, man, it was bam, it just hit us right between the eyes. It was unmistakable. Mhm. Allen yelled out, "It's a flying saucer." Just Oh, did he really? Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know that. Um, but it it obviously looked like one certainly [0:10:55] depicted in the movies. Did the movies have it about right the way it looked? No, not at all. Okay, good. But, uh you know, it was it's definitely not a some little glowing point of light off in the distance like, uh, the skeptics tried to say it could have been the planet Jupiter. [laughter] And, uh, this was less than 90 ft away, unmistakable metallic disc hovering there. You know, I threw open the door thinking that it would just take off before I got 10 steps outside the truck. But, the the closer I got, the the scarier everybody got. Uh Yeah, they all stayed in the truck, right? Yeah. And in fact, they were screaming bloody murder at you to get the hell back. [0:11:39] Yeah, they were describing me in some rather uncomplimentary language that to get back in the truck so we could get the heck away from there. Okay, they I was scared, too, but I was trying not to show it. So, you know, the closer I got, the slower I went. And I could hear the sound that it was making. It was a bizarre combination of highs and lows. And um [snorts] Highs and lows? You mean pitched high, pitched low? Cyclic sort of a sound and then a throbbing real below bass sort of sound. It was really complex I gave a talk to a engineering school [0:12:22] and they were very interested in the types of sound that I was hearing because it would give clues about what might be driving this thing. But the closer I got, the scareder I got. And so when I got right up to it, I mean, I was awestruck, too. You know, later on um Well, let me let me stop you and ask you first of all, [clears throat] it's not your average person, Travis, that would get out of the truck and try to run under something like this. The average person would do what the guys in the truck did after, you know, something happened to you. They would take off like a bat out of hell. You know, wait, I mean, that's scary. So, can you remember in your mind what [0:13:04] caused you to get out of the truck and try to get under this thing? Well, that's what I was starting to say is that Alan and Steve thought to them it looked like I was under outside control, that I was in some kind of trance. But you know, I think we were all entranced, so to speak. It was just an incredible awesome sight. And They're the crewmen agree with that. And it was just wow. And plus the sound and plus there was something in the air, just this feeling. You know, Mike said it seemed like something was about to happen. And I think that we were sensing this electrical charge that was building. [0:13:45] But Oh yes, humans can feel that. Yeah, and it you know, what was making the hair rise on the back of your neck wasn't just fear, it was it was something kind of like uh uh a huge static charge or something. That's probably exactly what it was. Uh you can get that same feeling. I've been under half million volts lines and you can actually get little shocks from touching the wet grass beneath it and you could feel that in your whole body. Kind of like that? Yeah. Yeah. And uh the plus the vibration was subsonic and ultrasonic [0:14:26] uh you know, they said they could feel it in the vibrating from the metal of the truck, you know. But um cuz you know, Mike had turned the engine off uh cuz when the everybody started exclaiming, he had to lean over to see what everybody was looking at. But um when I got up to where I was looking up at about a 45° angle, it was it was just uh so astonishing. The the it was smooth as glass. Uh over the entire surface, but parts of it were glowing and parts of it were um metallic. Mhm. And uh it was giving off this glow at the same time you could see [0:15:10] the surroundings reflected in the surface. You know, it's kind of like when you look at a television set and you can see you know, from the window and stuff. was it was reflective. Not like a mirror, but uh somewhat reflective. Yeah. And as I was looking up at it, those guys were, you know, pretty much in a panic screaming at me to get back in the truck. And I I decided to to turn around and and run. But it suddenly got louder and started to move. And so I just instinctively just jumped for cover. And there was a log uh in the middle of the clearing, part of this brush pile was there. And so I jumped down behind it. [0:15:53] And then, you know, immediately you know, decided to run back to the truck. But when I stood up, my head and chest at that point became the closest point to that vehicle craft that it had been in that entire time. And that's what hit me. I just felt a shock. It felt like I'd been physically hit by a truck, but it also felt kind of like a uh an electrical shock, sort of this numbing uh sort of a paralyzing feeling. But uh [0:16:35] that was something I just as I blacked out. Okay, all right. Let me ask you a question, Travis. Are you on a portable phone? No, I'm not. Okay. I am on a cordless hardwired line. Cordless hardwired. Okay, good. Uh I'm getting an occasional little break up, but nothing big nothing big. It's fine. Um so you decided at the last minute, the heck with this, I'm I'm going to run. Yeah. And uh Again, different than the movie, right? It didn't show that in the movie. What it showed in the movie was you got thrown by this thing. So that was wrong. [0:17:16] That is That is what happened. That is what happened. Oh, it is what happened. I decided to run, but I didn't just standing up and zap. And there was you know, the way it's depicted in the movie the guy the actors jerked and then was thrown back but kind of dragged it out. It was was just a you know, it's strange because Hollywood normally you know, wants to put on a light show and they they really missed an opportunity there cuz it was far more violent than they depicted. It was so violent it that it was compared you know, by the crew that was watching to a grenade or a land mine throwing me through the air. [0:17:59] Wow. Some guys said, you know, it threw me 10 ft. Some thought it was 20 ft, but John said that my body felt like a sack of meat like there were no bones in it. They they said that no attempt to break my fall or anything to the point where I mean, the violence was so powerful that they immediately started screaming that killed him. He's Uh so um Yeah, they were convinced you were dead and and frankly uh even from watching the movie I I can understand that. They thought this thing had killed you and of course at that point if the movie is accurate they said, "Heck with this. We're [0:18:43] getting out of here." and went tearing down some of the rest of that road as fast as they could go. That actually nearly wrecking the truck and you know, I do not blame them. I always want to say that those did the right thing at that point. Um They What was the point in risking everyone's lives to save somebody they thought was already dead? Mhm. So anybody that thinks that was cowardly is just wrong. Uh Mike you know, had the safety of the crew, you know, under his responsibility. When they got up the the the the road, they said that they argued about whether it had actually disintegrated or incinerated me. Um and uh [0:19:26] uh when they were unable to you know uh find some deer hunters, you know, with guns to come back, they they decided they would come back. Now, in the movie when Mike said, "This truck's going back. Anybody who doesn't want to can get out and wait here." Nobody volunteered to stand alone in the dark like in the movie. They all said, "No way, we're staying with the truck." Mhm. So, they all went back. Okay, so the Oh, man, that's really a deviation. So, they every one of them went back. They didn't stand in the dark as depicted in the movie. They all went back. Yeah. Bless their hearts. Um I give them credit for that. That took courage. Yeah, sure did. [0:20:07] I like I was telling Steve today, uh courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the is is to keep going in the presence of fear. Yes. Um all right, so that when they got back there Kenny Kenny was saying the the scariest thing to him cuz they see they saw the craft leaving. Scariest thing to him he thought would be what my charred body was going to look like laying there. You say they saw it leave? Yeah, as they approached the area, they saw it streak off. Wow. Um and obviously they were immediately looking for you and you were not there anymore. Now, was there any trace [0:20:51] left on the ground of either you or the presence of that craft above? Um well, in long term of ongoing research, there was uh evidence of the craft having been there. And when the sheriff brought in the tracking dogs from the state prison, Mhm. [snorts] they were unable to find the trail going anywhere beyond where my body fell in the middle of that clearing. Mhm. And you know, before we get further with this story because people are going to be going going, "Oh, come on." when you get into the details. Uh your entire crew was given a lie detector test. And if I have it right, um in the first [0:21:37] one, Dallas may have been a little unreadable because he was so freaked out, but everybody else passed the lie detector test. And then moreover, they were later given a second lie detector test, and everybody passed. Yeah, uh the second round, Allen Dallas uh uh uh uh first because obviously he had walked out on his initial test, but this was this with the same examiner. And Mike was retested. I uh took two more tests from the state police lie detector expert, which um you know, at the time that the six tests had been passed, [0:22:19] the president of the American Polygraph Association said that although a polygraph on a single test is less than 100%, when you have [music] that many people passing tests on the same issue, the odds are over a million to one of there being any error. Everybody involved uh took multiple lie detector tests. And uh so this, you know, it's a real thing. Yeah, listen on, I guess at your own peril if this kind of thing scares you. And uh it scares me. as as of now, uh there are 16 past tests. I've passed five different tests with three different examiners with extensive years in law enforcement, [0:23:02] which is considered the the the better more qualified polygraph examiner. Even in the movie, you know, the the guy came out and said, "Look, the the truth is these guys were telling the truth in my opinion. So, Yeah, and you know, the examiners stand by it to this day. All right. Um, so, we're going to get back to what happened to you and the craft, but the whole town um, it went to buzzing as you were gone and you were gone for a total of five days. My God, that's a long time. They had dogs out, they had people out combing, they had helicopters up. They looked for you everywhere and of course, [0:23:46] they began to suspect your crew of your possible well, murder. Yes, murder. Right? And [clears throat] um, and they became kind of unpopular in that in that small town. Uh, are you still friends with Mike, by the way? Um, I haven't spoken to him in quite some time. Uh, he's kind of you know, uh, threw up his hands and didn't want to talk about this anymore, but understand. How about the rest of them? Um, I'm going to have a couple of them come and speak at my conference, which we'll get to. And [0:24:28] I'd like to get Mike to come too, but you know, he's his health's not what it used to be. I I do understand. All right, back to the movie for a second. One thing they never explained in the interviewing they were doing, you know, as they thought you might have been murdered, they spoke to Alan Dalles. Now, it was referred in the movie or referenced in the movie that Dalles was kind of a uh, I don't know, what words would you use to describe of the crew. Yeah, he he had had some trouble with the law and he was just generally uh you know, had a few run-ins with [0:25:11] various guys on the crew and he and I had um done a little sparring and um Yeah, he didn't much like you, I guess, huh? Uh well, I there was a little bit of uh um antagonism over some things, you know. Uh it was a a girl that he had been uh uh approached that I had been dating. This was before um Uh-huh. my wife. But and then um he and Mike got in a fistfight in the street in the front of my house. And so, you know, it was just his nature. But the day of this incident, he had dropped a tree nearly on me and that's what led to all this uh [0:25:56] problem with the polygraph, you know, did he have any bad intentions towards me? That's why it came out a little screwy. Yeah, cuz he was pretty sure that they were going to try to pin the murder on him. Well, it looked like they might try pretty hard for a while there. Um what they never explained uh and Alan admitted that there had been um Alan Dallas admitted there had been an altercation with you. Now, was he referring to the tree because because he had a pretty nasty cut on his hand. And uh they never explained that. They We get scratched up stuff at work all [0:26:38] the time, you know. And after I was returned, the the doctor examined me, found a puncture on my arm. And you know, it was assumed that happened during my um abduction, but it could have easily been, you know, being poked by a a thorn in the course of a work day, you know? Well, the one on Dallas looked really in the movie looked really serious like, you know, he touched a chainsaw or something. Um, did you have a fight with him? Not with chainsaws. I mean, you know, he nearly dropped the tree on me and I gave him a, you know, a dirty look and uh, said some things under my breath if [0:27:20] he could read lips, I you know, it it wasn't a friendly, uh, exchange there, but But not physical? I mean, a rough bunch of guys. of course. Alpha males, all of you. Uh, was there an actual physical altercation with him? Um, when he tried to spin kick on me, Steve, uh, youngest guy in the crew laughs about how Alan fell on his behind trying to do that, you know. It was it was just, uh, semi good-natured, uh, sparring, you know. Okay. All right, so no altercation that would have produced a cut like they showed. No. All right, now back to you, uh, Travis, and um, you were, while the [0:28:05] whole town is going nuts and they're searching for you for the all these days, you're suddenly in well, where? Well, I woke up on board the craft. I didn't know where I was at first, I but I was a lot of pain and I was in and out for a while. Uh, and when I finally did come to, it was in a foggy, hazy kind of way. I I my vision was blurred and and even double vision and I I I I it even hurt the light, even though it wasn't bright, hurt my eyes and I had the pain in my head and chest was incredible. [0:28:47] And I felt um I felt it was life-threatening, you know, something was terribly wrong inside. Describe your environment if you can when you woke up. Can you? I mean, when you looked around, what did you see? It was dimly lit and I could hear the sounds of movement around me. And I could just barely make out the forms of what I thought were doctors, but then my vision cleared and I could see these aliens standing close. And it just completely freaked me out. I mean, I was already scared about the way I felt, but I just completely lost my mind with fear. Were you [0:29:29] describe what you were on if you can. Were you on a slab? lying on my back and I was close enough to the ceiling before I even looked over and saw them. I I figured I was on some kind of a gurney or a raised operating table. And I thought, you know, that I'd been hurt somehow and taken into the hospital. Uh-huh. But then when I finally focused on what I thought were medical people, it was these aliens and I just flipped out. Okay. lot of people think, "Oh, I would stay calm, ask good questions." Um Who thinks that? Not me. Uh you know, but you have to understand that, you know, the pain I was feeling, the feeling of something mortally wrong [0:30:11] inside, but more over the most important feeling was that I felt like I couldn't get enough air. The feeling of suffocation. There's a scene in the movie uh of a membrane Yes. when the actor's laying on the table and aliens are surrounding him and he's struggling to scream through this membrane, struggling to breathe through it. That didn't actually happen, but I think in that case it does a better job of explaining the source of my panic or at least the the chief source, that, you know, that feeling of suffocation combined with the feeling of weakness like you you can't move [clears throat] when you need to move quickly. Uh um to get away. And [0:30:53] so, you know, the suddenly realizing where I was gave me a shot of adrenaline, enough of burst of strength to actually sort of lash out at them. It was, you know, pretty weak. Uh and it was more of a push than a hit. And I rolled away in the opposite direction. This device they had lying across my chest fell off and hit the floor. But I uh just mainly kept my eyes on them as I backed away or stumbled backwards. And when I bumped up against this shelf behind me, [0:31:38] I just looked real quick to see what I'd run into. And there was some things there, and I just grabbed the biggest thing there and started flailing in their direction. And that stopped their approach. All right. Two things to ask. Uh one, that the movie depicted a lack of gravity. Uh you said something fell and hit the floor. So, obviously, there was some gravity. Yeah, there was gravity. There was no weightlessness. Okay. And uh it's actually if anything, it might have been slightly heavy gravity. Really? Uh but to explain that feeling of weakness, although just the feeling of injury. I really think that whatever happened with that blast of energy from the craft, it did so much [0:32:20] damage that when I came to at that point, whatever efforts had been made to revive me were not complete. Mhm. Um all right. You described aliens very close to you. And of course, everybody would like to know forget the movie what did these were these creatures all similar or um can you describe they were very similar. And you you do have to forget the movie because they changed them. Uh the panic that the people at Paramount had was that uh these aliens had been in another production immediately prior to uh uh [0:33:03] the production uh the you know, filming of Fire in the Sky. And they did not want anybody, you know, seeing something that had been seen before. So, they changed their appearance, but they were they were what's you know, at back in then they didn't have the term grays. But that's what people call these uh small hairless uh grayish-white uh beings with huge eyes, you know. And that is what you saw? Yeah. So, so that that part of it uh actually um I mean, there's a classic gray that you just described. Hairless. Pretty small generally. Uh any idea how tall they [0:33:46] were? Shorter than 4 ft for sure. So, small. But you know, I I really don't really use the term gray. I don't like that. I think uh that there's probably a number of similar species that are just being stuck under one name. Uh that uh really are come from really different places. Mhm. Um and I have a you know, a whole line of reasoning that tells me that that's the case. The variations in descriptions that you see uh and also there are a number of species of animals on the Earth that look very similar, but are completely [0:34:31] genetically unrelated. They just look similar because they live in a similar environment. And uh that's what I think is the case with these um um Whatever they are. Yeah. So, you actually you pushed one I guess pretty hard. Uh did did he go reeling backward or what? Yeah, it it was it was softer and lighter than I expected, but it fell back pretty easily. And it was probably partly because it was totally unexpected. I think they were trying to maintain control of me. And it took me many years to figure out that it was probably some kind of neurological [0:35:14] impairment due to this blast of energy from that craft that actually worked against their normal method of being able to control humans and keep them in some kind of trance or in a unconscious state. And that's why when they came around and I started flailing at them and they stopped and stared at me that I felt that stare was so excruciating. That was my nightmares for months after the incident that that stare made gave me this horrible feeling in my head. And uh in support of that was the EEG that I was given immediately afterwards that showed there was some kind of anomalous [0:35:57] pattern that uh you know, I think is consistent with you know, some kind of burst of energy hitting me in the head. Oh. Um did they ever get control of you? No, they were unable to get control of me and I was thinking of fighting my way past them when they abruptly turned and left the room. They may have anticipated my move or just given up on I mean, if the three of them combining their forces couldn't control me, they were going to have to go to plan B of some kind. Plan B. All right, can you describe the room you were in? Uh it was very small, dimly lit, [0:36:40] cramped, uh not at all like depicted in the movie. It was not organic looking. It was not cluttered. Very featureless, metallic uh surfaces. I saw no writing or symbols. But, you know, they may see in a broader spectrum of light than we do and I there may have been something that you didn't see. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, um they left and went down a passageway to the right. So, I went out and went to the left, you know, fearing that they would come back. Looking for a way out, just in a blind panic to just open a door and in my back [0:37:23] of my mind thinking just drop to the ground, be back in the woods. Drop to the ground. Um [laughter] Yeah, I was thinking that I was craft was still in the woods. You know, you that that could have been acceleration that you were feeling that would make you feel heavier. I at this point, you couldn't even really know if you were still in the atmosphere of the earth or way past. Yeah, in hindsight, you know, it would have been foolish to get a door open, but that was my goal. And so, [clears throat] I I was afraid because the passage was so narrow and so cramped and turned so tightly that I couldn't see very far behind me to see if they were chasing me. And I couldn't see very far ahead of [0:38:05] me to what was I, you know, coming to. Actually, I I can see why you would think that. You might even uh think that you were still hovering not all that far above the forest floor. So, yeah, of course. That makes sense. That you would look for a door. I went into this room where there were other doors that leading out of it, which later piecing together the floor plan wouldn't have led to the outside, but I thought at that point that was my best bet of escaping this place. Makes sense to me. And so I pushed buttons and and things trying to open the door and unsuccessfully. [0:38:46] And um it did cause this um uh star pattern projection to move at one point. What do you mean? And Star pattern? was a Yeah, this this room um was darkened and had points of light. Now whether it was a planetarium-like projection or some viewing method of where it was actually at in real time, I don't know, but you know, it was very disorienting to have this pattern move. Isn't that interesting? I don't recall hearing this before. Uh a star It might have been, you know, like a just a map that was moving, but when you when your sole points of reference are [0:39:30] these points of light, it's kind of I was already unsteady on my feet. Um so I decided to quit messing with that and you know, in hindsight, what if it was actually moving where the craft was, you know, Good point. turning it upside down or something. Could have crashed it or something. I don't know. All right, one quick question before we go on, and that is you know, from the moment you woke up Travis, did you have any sense at all of how much time had passed or whether a lot of time had passed while you were no idea. No idea. my initial impression was, since this was the first thing I was remembering since, you know, turning to run away I thought it was immediately afterwards, [0:40:15] but in hindsight, it could have been a day or two or, you know, who knows how long afterwards. Uh and also very far away. Okay. Um What is your sense of the totality of time that you spent on the craft? How long? Uh well, the conscious memory that I had upon return, I was a very brief period of time. I figured it was less than an hour. But obviously 5 days and 6 hours. Everybody leaps to the question, "Well, what about time dilation? You travel near the speed of light and time passes more slowly for you." [0:40:57] Right. Well, I The thing that refutes that was when I told my brother, you know, said something immediately upon being recovered. Something he said about my mom worrying these days. I He could tell that I thought it was still the same night. Wow. And he said, "Travis, you've been gone 5 days. Feel your face." And I had a 5-day growth of beard. And that is what overturns the time dilation uh idea. Travis, I get questioned and by the way, people are asking, "What was the movie?" My goodness, uh it is a long time ago. [0:41:39] It's called Fire in the Sky and you can still see it and we've got updated stuff for you coming up. We'll tell you all about it uh in a moment. Um I saw it on television night before last. It's still showing out there. It sure is. Um And it was on Netflix last I heard. There you go. Joe wants to know what the device, the medical device you thought it was, uh what did that look like? The one on you? Well, uh it was glowing kind of a greenish glow coming from underneath it. So, I don't know whether it was some kind of a treatment device designed to repair the damage that was done internally or if it was something designed to [0:42:21] diagnose or look inside. Um but um I definitely think my regaining consciousness was unexpected and actually kind of put a kink in their efforts to revive me. All right. for many years I thought you know, I was taken aboard for experiments or to to torture me, but it was actually probably more about reviving me. Richard asks, did Travis get the feeling that the aliens didn't care whether you lived or died? In other words, did you feel they were caring for you, about you, or [0:43:04] just sort of didn't that Richard's question is related to what I was just saying that at the time their complete lack of emotion I interpreted as hostility, but in total perspective analyzing what happened, the way it fits in with the medical tests afterwards and how I was returned and everything, it took me years to realize that it was probably more an ambulance call than an abduction. That I got myself hurt and that made it necessary to take me aboard just to avoid leaving me there as galactic roadkill. Um you said you don't you didn't feel as though you were [0:43:45] more than about an hour in total had had passed on board the craft, yes? Yeah, very brief period of time. Of course, in a in a state of complete hysteria, it seems like forever, but you know, when you piece together what happened and you know, even the waiting periods uh um it was less than thought, you know, it certainly doesn't account for the entire time. But, there were little glimmers of memory and, you know, the hypnosis reinforces this that there were blocked memories that happened that I'm unable to recollect even after all this time that other than what, you know, came out [0:44:29] under that first hypnosis session. Um what did come out under the hypnosis session? What did you find out? You know, up to that point, I was so traumatized that I could hardly finish a sentence about it. And I had not really told the entire story of what I had experienced to anyone, including my brother, until that hypnosis. And it was because it was just so traumatic I'd break down. I could hardly finish a sentence. And so the technique was to separate the fear from the experience. Okay. And although there was a great deal of fear in what I was relating is remaining, but it was still enough to [0:45:13] where I could tell them what happened. All right, so how did you get from the craft? I mean, you we last left you going down a hall or or passageway or something. Uh and then what? Well, my unskilled, I would say, button pushing trying to open a door must have attracted some attention automatically or maybe coincidentally this person came in that I took to be a human being from some Earth-based space agency or military uh um um arm of from the Earth and um but I really think now that that wasn't the case. Uh [0:45:55] um he took me out of this craft. And at this point, it was parked. It was inside of this big hangar-like uh um structure. It could have been a building somewhere on a military base or somewhere. Really? Or it could have been a a part of a larger craft. It It had a sort of a look to the roof and wall that looked sort of like I'd seen in airplane hangars. Huh. But it it the light coming [clears throat] from uh these panels could have been filtered sunlight through a translucent panel or it might have been um [0:46:40] an artificial uh natural light sort of light fixture. Okay. I have no idea where it was. I couldn't see out through these windows there or if they were windows. Um At any point, uh did any of these creatures uh communicate with you in any way, either vocally or telepathically? I think that that excruciating encounter initially with the three of them was an attempt to say something telepathically. And I was curious about why it was so excruciating until I connected to possibly that I was injured and the receiver, so to speak, wasn't operating correctly. [0:47:23] Mhm. I was interviewed uh the same day for this new movie coming up called 701, which refers to the 701 uh unresolved Blue Book cases. Uh this movie is in the works yet, but um I was interviewed the same day as these school kids from Zimbabwe. And uh I asked uh the young lady um what that felt like when these, you know, I don't know if you heard about this, but there were, you You if everyone heard that about this thing where there's like 60 kids at recess in broad daylight, this craft came down, these aliens are like I've described, came out and communicated to [0:48:06] them through this stare. And I wanted to know if it was excruciating like for them like it was for me. And they said no, it was very pleasant. The message wasn't un- unpleasant, it was friendly. And so that convinces me all the more that it was just an attempt with extreme aggressiveness, force of the combined force of the three of them trying to get get control of me before I hurt them or uh actually hurt myself because I think my um unscheduled regaining of consciousness interrupted uh some life-saving repairs. And so um [0:48:50] that's the reason for uh a human-looking person to come in and pick me out. Fully human? And I think uh apparently in most ways. There was something odd about the eyes, but again, I go back to the biology. Skeptics are really fond of saying, "Th- This is ridiculous. There are no aliens because everybody reports bi- bipedal, two hands, two legs, you know, a head on top." Right. Oh, they're not going to look anything like that. They're going to be a tentacled octopus. Well, that's ridiculous. If you understand the principles of biology, bilateral bilateral symmetry is almost you know, throughout all life on Earth, [0:49:34] no matter how diverse it is. And um you have many cases where animals that resemble each other very very much are completely unrelated just because they are in a similar ecological niche, a certain similar environment. Sure. Uh Uh These creatures, were they wearing helmets or were they breathing, if they were breathing? one the the Human one. Um what so-called grays uh were not wearing anything but coveralls, but the the human-looking one uh is wearing a helmet over his head. Huh. And so that was the reason I sort of [0:50:16] accepted the fact that he was not responding to my babbling, my screaming, begging questions, you know. Uh All right, I'm going back to my computer for a second here with that. with a question. on. Yes, I I I've got it. Um Heather would like to know uh she may have information. Is it true Travis was found to have radiation signatures in his blood that can only be found if a person is exposed to radiation like in space outside of Earth's atmosphere. Um that is a an untrue rumor. Um unfortunately, that specific test was not performed. Uh that kind of evidence might have been [0:50:59] uh apparent had they done such a test. Uh however, the trees nearest where the craft came down do uh have definite markers of having a huge radiation dose. Wow. And we can get into that in detail, but this this accelerated growth that was generated in these trees has been um duplicated in the trees. It's a Scots pine uh tree species near the Chernobyl nuclear accident that's very similar to ponderosa pine uh where this forest uh was, and uh the radiation uh at Chernobyl caused an accelerated growth there just like it [0:51:42] did at the clearing. Now, the trees nearest where the craft came down had the greatest accelerated growth. And then the effect uh faded back into the woods. And um most interestingly, the most recent discovery was that the accelerated growth was primarily um on the side of the tree in the direction of the craft. So, in a circle of trees around where the craft came down, the the thickened growth would be on the east, west, south, or north, or whatever side was facing the craft, which completely undercuts any skeptics' idea that there was some growth effect um [0:52:27] that had nothing to do with the craft. This uh is all new information to me. Um It's new research, yes. When was this outed? This was discovered in an expedition overseen by Ben Hansen. He was the um uh host of the uh TV series uh Fact or Faked. Former FBI agent, he oversaw uh uh an expedition back there, and we were able to check uh that this accelerated growth, which we were aware of from going way back, but we didn't know it was directional until this last year um when we were able to get a complete cross-section of the trees. Um [0:53:09] And uh this high radiation was detected with Geiger counters um on the men's hard hats uh during the search. And also um when I exited the the truck, I left the door open. Right. And the crewman that was in the open doorway was Ken Peterson, and his right arm, the arm towards the open door, has recently been diagnosed with skin cancer. Oh. Which again is um Sign of maybe radiation, yeah. from high radiation coming off them. Um So, [0:53:50] um No, the blood tests uh didn't reveal that uh but uh unfortunately, those kind of tests weren't run at the time. Yes, indeed. Um since the experience, have you noticed any changes in yourself? Psychic abilities, better understanding of yourself or anybody else or life itself? In other words, did it profoundly change you in some way? All of the above All of the above. That I'd rather not get into that stuff. I you know, I I I have tried very hard to stick to things that I can document. Right. And um And some things became documentable later, so I was able to talk about them [0:54:32] later. Like the radiation, but you were I you're you're trying to avoid the woo-woo factor. Right. I get that. There's some definitely some strange things that uh have come become apparent. All right, let me get again um so you were in this hangar-like place. Yeah. Uh I'm I'm I want to know how you got back to I don't know. Earth or took me uh to some other people who dressed similarly to him, except they didn't have helmets. And so I thought, well, maybe they can hear me. Maybe they'll answer my questions. So, you know, I was a I was a babbling idiot. I was screaming, crying, you know, carrying on. Uh I was basically out of my mind with fear. But they weren't responding to me. [0:55:16] And in a way, you know, it might not have been so much secrecy or, you know, anything covert or suspicious that that they wouldn't respond to me. It was just that I was acting like a maniac and they felt that ta-ta to reason with somebody so out of control was would be futile. Mhm. So, uh they forced me down on this table and rendered me unconscious with some sort of a gas. And boom, next thing I woke was back on Earth but Where where were you? When you woke up back on Earth, where were you? It it showed you at a in the movie at a gas station or something. [0:55:58] Well, I woke up and I was lying face down in the dark on a cold pavement. But there was a I looked to see where the light was coming from but it went off but when I looked up I could still see the shiny bottom of this craft hovering there just for an instant before it shot straight up into the air. But I think it probably quite a bit of time uh Ask. went on between the time I was put unconscious to the time I was uh lying there on the pavement. I could feel that my clothes were still warm even though the pavement was very cold, the air was very cold. the movie showed you naked as a jaybird. Not [clears throat] true. [0:56:40] Not true. Not true. You know, it was dreadful. I mean, they actually filmed a sequence where um the actor portraying me came upon a couple getting busy in a car. They're naked and he's naked and they start screaming, he starts screaming. They said it was so bad that it was mercifully uh deleted from the film. Uh but I guess the the nakedness is a good metaphor for the feeling of that I had uh uh in a variety ways that these beings the small ones could look into me like it they could [0:57:21] they knew what I was thinking, could see into me. It was an intrusive invasive kind of feeling. And then in the aftermath, the way in media microscopically analyzed my every move to an absurd extent. Every, you know, childish uh act of bravado or whatever, you know, motorcycle stunts or whatever was just blown out of proportion and uh you know, they were just looking for anything that they could interpret as strange. So, you know, the whole idea of being the bug in the jar began uh on board the craft and continued for months after I was returned. Uh here's one for you. Um you talked to [0:58:03] us about the aliens and then what seemed to be more human-like characters. So, an obvious question would seem to be um do you think that that means that we know all about the aliens, that we are in some way co- cooperating with them? You got taken because they perhaps thought you were hurt. They didn't want you they didn't want you to wake up and when you did they wanted you the hell out of there. And so um those humans that you say you saw may have been well, who knows, government uh types? Is that possible? Well, that's possible and that's what I [0:58:47] initially thought, but now, you know, going further into the skeptics idea that no way would they even be vaguely humanoid, let alone human-looking is is preposterous uh when you look at the biology behind it. It's entirely possible that they're not us from the future, us from the past, or related to us, or that we were seeded here by them. It's entirely possible that they uh just have a particular keener interest in us because of our similarity, which is just coincidental. Mhm. I predict that when we look at life on other worlds, they're not going to be astonished at how [0:59:32] bizarre these life forms are. They're going to be amazed at the similarity of forms. Uh there's there's they uncovered a fossil of a marsupial that is built just like a saber-tooth cat. It was a predator and yet biologically completely unrelated. But but very very similar because of the niche that it filled in the ecology. We have javelina in the Southwest that look like pigs, have tusks, and uh behaviors in so many ways like pigs, and they're not pigs at all. Mhm. Uh [1:00:12] the American pronghorn is not even a true antelope, and it resembles so much a particular African antelope species because our American pronghorn evolved here on the American continent in the presence of the American cheetah, which is now extinct, and because of the similarity in the environment, takes on a similar form and a similar ability. Every animal that winds up living in the water, whether it be a mammal, a bird, or a or a reptile or an amphibian, they all come to look very fish-like because the environment shapes the animal. Okay, but clearly you were looking at two different species. I mean, you were [1:00:54] looking at what? Aliens and at something close to human. Yeah, and I think that they were brought in or summoned or their assistance was gained because of the A, I would be less combative and they would be able to get some degree of cooperation and get me uh sedated to the point where they could finish the repairs. And B, uh they would know more and probably have more equipment and whatnot to deal with the nature of my injuries. Mhm. Uh which is why it took 5 days. Okay. Dale asks, uh again, this is from uh the wormhole, do you do you still have nightmares about this event? [1:01:39] I did for a long time, but that gradually faded away. Now, the dreams that came back later were not so much nightmares, but actually featured the uh human-type people uh to a much greater extent, but with a much different uh emotional feel to it. Fascinating. Um I haven't kept up on all the other guys uh who were on your crew or Mike's crew. Um obviously, we're going to get pretty good feel for how you're doing these days, which thankfully is pretty good. How are the other guys doing? Do you do you know? [1:02:20] Well, um come to find out Alan Dallas uh had a heart attack and died uh here a couple years ago. Oh, I'm sorry. And last year, I found out that Dwayne Smith had also passed away from a heart attack. And you know, I had had a quite a bit of difficulty tracking Dwayne Smith down. I had a friend who was a former police officer who enlisted the help of a friend who was a private detective, found him. I I talked to him on the phone, interviewed him. And fortunately, I taped the interview because, you know, he agreed that he would come out and speak with me. But, you know, he had some real problems with his teeth and he wanted to get them [1:03:03] fixed before he'd appear on camera. Right. Uh but he passed away uh Thanksgiving before last. Wow. Wow. Um so uh many are gone is the answer. And Yeah. Right. Two of them have gone. Mike's had some health problems, with some strokes and whatnot, but he's he's fought back pretty good. He's back to actually, you know, doing uh tree work. He does residential tree service now. Huh. Um uh John Gullet uh is back in the area locally, and and so is Ken. He moved back into this area. All right. Would you um I I want to plug uh what you you've got [1:03:47] a documentary, and we're going to talk about that in a moment, and also um whatever else you've got going on. So, there is new information uh out there that people can get, and we're going to tell them how. What I What I really would like to do is uh would you mind answering a few phone calls? Yeah, absolutely. Good. Good. Um there is going to be um an upcoming documentary. In other words, there has been a lot of information since all this happened, since uh the movie was made. Not everything in the movie was just so. So, there's a brand new, I guess brand new, 90-minute documentary called Travis. Um tell us about it. [1:04:29] Well, uh it's um produced by On Wings Production. That's o n w i n g e s Right. productions uh dot com. And um it interviews a lot of the prominent researchers in the field. Some who have been active since it happened originally, and some more recent to the scene, but uh All about your case. Yes, all about my case. It's a 90-minute uh film. It's won a couple of EBE Awards. And it's really a fantastic uh film, very thorough uh accounting. Boy, we're getting some interference on this line. I don't know if you can hear [1:05:12] it on your end or not. Uh we Yeah, I hear it. Uh You do? We had uh some uh sabotage attempt on our local fiber optic uh node and uh Oh. Oh, that would account for the the little breakup I hear uh as well as the as well as the static. All right. So, this documentary and took a shotgun to various uh Wonderful. fiber optic junctions. Wonderful. I bet that's fun to fix. Um anyway, this documentary, where can people get it? How how is it obtained? Well, uh like I said, through on wings productions.com or uh through my website traviswalton.com. Excellent. Um also, you've got a [1:05:55] conference coming up, right? Yeah. Uh this is the 40th uh anniversary of the event and we've got quite a lineup of speakers. Uh Tracy Torme, who was the original screenwriter on um Fire in the Sky will be there and uh his co-producer on 701 the movie uh James Fox will also be speaking. Uh we've got David Childress, uh Ben Hansen, uh Lee Speigel from the Huffington Post, um a UFO um editor Paola Harris, uh Lynn Catal will be speaking about the Phoenix Lights and um I've got Robert uh uh um Morning of Sky? [1:06:37] Uh Yuri Arty and Noe Torres. They wrote a book called Cowboys and Aliens and it I think it's fascinating to go back to the prehistory of UFOs and show that this is not some kind of a phenomenon exclusive to post uh Roswell. I mean, uh this goes way back. Reports uh in the in the American Southwest. All right, here's a big question. Gilberto wants to know uh by computer, were you ever debriefed and it's a good question by any government agency about the abduction experience? I would think they would be interested. You would think they would and it's very, very curious that I have received no interest from any government agency. [1:07:23] Now, uh it was widely uh suspected for a long time that our chief debunker uh for many years, Philip Klass, was acting as some kind of a covert disinformationist on behalf of some uh government agency. And um he harassed the heck out of Mike Rogers and he often, you know, discredited. And this bribe offer is is well documented. It was carried by local deputy James Click. And um you Art um challenged Philip Klass to take a polygraph test on the air. [1:08:07] I did. Yes. And you got quite a bit of backlash over that. Well, you have been vindicated through the Freedom of Information Act after Klass passed away, his FBI file revealed some very interesting stuff that I wish you had been able to get Philip Klass to take a polygraph test because I think he would have flunked it in regards to his covert disinformationist role. Well, I don't think anybody in the audience is surprised that that kind of thing is going on. All right, let's see who we've got. Um Richard, uh somewhere out in the world, you're on with uh Travis. Hi. [1:08:51] [snorts] Good morning, Art. It's Richard It's Richard from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, okay. Yep. And uh great show as always. And a big shout out to Belgob. And I have a question for Travis. Okay. Uh, you know what the internet's like, Travis? And there was a suggestion a few years ago that perhaps what you stumbled upon was some great government project. And in fact the whole alien thing was a result of hallucinogens force-fed to you. Is there any truth or any possibility that's the case? No, there's no possibility to that. You [1:09:34] know, that was kind of a theory that was put forth because people were desperate to explain it away and you know, well, why does he pass a lie detector test? Well, he believes it happened. So, he really hallucinated it and it didn't really somebody thinks it did. But, you know, that theory and the transitory psychosis theory and and another one involving hypnosis have no basis because it doesn't explain how seven people can have an identical hallucination. Really? All right, let's go to Also, also medical tests showed no trace of any drug in my body. Thank you. Scott, you're on the air with Travis. Hi. [1:10:17] Hello. Hello. Hi, all right. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Travis, I have a question for you. Do you think that the spotlight on you because now you have a celebrity status, do you think that now that the now that you have a celebrity status, maybe the ETs are kind of backing away from you a little bit? I don't know. If that were a security measure, then okay, but I don't know. You know, here February 4th last, I was driving leaving a MUFON meeting in LA. I was going uh uh [1:11:01] so see north up the five towards the 10 to come back to Arizona. I was with my girlfriend and my son and we saw a giant triangular black craft come low overhead. Um you know, undeniable, incredibly close. And I was astonished that you would have something over a city the size of LA and not have all kinds of reports. Well, we did a little research online. My son found this website called um ufostalker.com and at that exact time and place, there were over a dozen reports of the same thing. So, [1:11:43] others saw too. I saw one of them, Travis. A big triangular craft. Scott, anything else? Well, yes. Yeah, actually I live over here in Massachusetts. Actually, um I had I had a sighting myself actually, but it was more of a ring of light. Have either you, Art, or Travis heard of a like a a ring of light that would float above somebody because that's actually what I saw above myself. It came uh I don't know, about 10 ft above my vehicle actually. And it was it came really close and it floated really close and then it just ascended right up in the sky. I I was um [1:12:27] Okay, well, that that would be a big no for me. What about you, Travis? Any rings I've heard of such reports, but I haven't seen such a thing myself. I'm sure everybody comes to you now with every story. I mean, they do with me. It's it's, you know, once they know that you're open to that kind of thing, they really come to you a lot. So, let's go to I don't know, Yorkton? Is Is correct? Saskatchewan, perhaps? Yep. Yes, absolutely correct again, there, Hi. Um thanks for taking my call and hello uh Travis. I actually had a two question um have two questions. First one is um do you think that the aliens are here to help us cuz you always hear that there's uh the negative experiences, but do you think that they're here for the good or [1:13:10] the bad is the first question. Well, you know, this is just my opinion and it mostly speaks to the in uh species that I encountered and I really do not see them as malevolent. Um however, I think that there is something that's uh you know, been suggested in science fiction as the prime directive, the non-interference directive, that it's against the rules to overtly infuse any kind of technology because, you know, that's like giving matches to kids, you know, we're just [clears throat] going to use it to hurt ourselves. So, it makes sense that they're not going to do it. And I can I can expound on this a little further, you know, the [1:13:51] skeptics are fond of saying, "If this was real, they'd land on the White House lawn and say, 'Here we are, Mr. President.'" That's right. But I also posit that with their level of technology so far beyond ours, that they are perfectly capable of doing everything that they're doing here and remain completely undetected. There would be no ufology, there would be no sightings. They could accomplish that, I believe. Sure. So, you have to explain why it's neither extreme. In my view, this these glimpses, which are just uh barely provable enough to to let this knowledge, this awareness, filter [1:14:34] through the population in a way that doesn't have the kind of overwhelming, disruptive effect that just instant, open disclosure would have. Right. Caller? That sounds great. Um and one more quick question if I can. Did he Travis, did you see any more people up there with you or is it just you? Okay. Uh well, there were some other human-looking beings, but you know, like in the movie where there were human cadavers and that's uh or artifacts of other people having been there. No, I did not see that. All right, off to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hello. That's right. Hello Art, how's it going? [1:15:16] It's going okay. Turn your radio or whatever off, please. Yep, we'll do it right now. Okay. Got it. All right, proceed. All right. All right, I have a question for Travis. Um as part of pop culture that aliens when they abduct you, they stick probes in you. Is there any truth to that? Um You mean did it happen to Travis? Yeah, yes. Yes, it happened to Travis. Did they like actually penetrate him with any probes or did they not? okay. I've got it. They showed in the movie about the most horrible scene anybody could imagine with this needle coming to Travis's trapped eye. Oh god, that was awful. I'm so glad that [1:15:59] didn't happen to you, Travis. Any other Anything else? There was an array of instruments there laid out. I had great apprehension about how they might have been used, initially thinking that, you know, some bizarre effects could come out later, but I really think that they were just simply there to try to help and so I don't think anything I have no conscious memory of any probing or anything. I think what was done medically was just to correct a terrible accident that I brought on myself by getting too close unexpectedly. Got it. All right, let's go to uh Hello Scott on [1:16:41] Skype, you're on the air. Hi Art and Travis. Um I Get Get closer to your computer, sir. You sound like you're in a deep hall somewhere. Okay. Can you hear me now? That's better. Okay. Uh Art and Travis, it's great to talk to you both. Um it's Scott in Vancouver. I'm listening to uh you on uh TuneIn Radio. Yes, sir. Uh this is one of the most fantastic stories, obviously, that I've ever heard. Um you know, my I I've heard Travis speak over the years and I The only thing I I I a few people have touched on it. What have you Has time awoken any memories up that might have been buried? Has Has anything come forward that might have [1:17:24] been uh hidden before? Did What What was Was there a message? I mean, you hear about these kids in in South Africa that were were it was imparted to them that we have to save the planet. Was there any direct message to you? So, a few questions kind of combined there. And uh I'll listen off the air. All right. Travis? Well, um back about the time I was doing uh so many interviews for the movie, I uh started having these memories, little dreams or whatever, glimpses coming through that involving the human-looking type of people. And I went to Tracy Tormé, this screenwriter on the film, and I asked him, "Uh do you think that there could be some memories returning?" And he said, [1:18:08] "No." He said, "It's probably just, you know, you know, because you're doing all these interviews, that it's probably just dreams." Hm. And so, uh I asked him the same question here recently, and he says, "Oh, yeah, that was probably memories leaking back through." So, he he profoundly changed his opinion. But, none of those memories, uh you know, uh really constitute any useful information. They were just glimmers of things. It was definitely had a much more positive feeling than the earlier nightmares that I had. You're a very lucky guy because there was so much cooperation. A lie detector test, I mean, so many people, witnesses, [1:18:51] the whole schmear. You had it all. There are other abductees who tell stories, but without that kind of cooperation, do you have any feelings about the whole abduction phenomenon, people who tell all these stories? I think there's a whole mix of things going on. It's a It's a a variety of things. All of the above, actually. You know, some of it is extremely vivid memory, some of it is delusion, some of it is misidentified ordinary things. But, I believe there's a core reality here of other events and sightings and things that have happened. And just because someone is unable to document it, doesn't mean it's not true. [1:19:37] But, you know, in terms of trying to get the public to become aware that there is a core reality here, that's the reason I stick to documentation. It's not like that's what you have to have, but that's for it to be true, but that's what you need to have in order to bring people along and make them realize we're not alone and this is real. You're right. You dropped a sort of a hint earlier that there have been changes in you that you don't really want to describe, and I jumped and said because of the woo-woo factory factor. And you know, I I'm dying to know what they are, but I'll I'll I'll give you what I can document. Really? [1:20:18] want to say anything about the health effects because I couldn't document it, but I went in to my employers and got the documentation that I never called in sick one time in the last 39 years. Wow. And so that's unusual. That's unusual. It's extremely unusual. Are you kidding? 39 years? Yeah. You never called in sick once? No. No, no. So, if anything, you got a health benefit. Uh possibly. I mean, it could be a coincidence that I'm healthy, but uh you know, I never never uh missed a day of work except for a funerals and things, yeah. Uh Hazleton, Pennsylvania, your turn with uh [1:21:00] uh Travis Walton. Hi. Hi. Good to both of you. Very interesting. I missed the very beginning of the show. Where did this happen? Uh it happened uh south of uh Heber-Overgaard, Arizona. Okay. Uh up on the Mogollon Rim, over 7,000 ft elevation, up in the ponderosa pines of the Sitgreaves National Forest, very near the border to the Apache's uh reservation. And um you talked about when they left you out of the craft or whatever it was, you were in some kind of a hangar, is that it? [1:21:41] Yeah, apparently. Either a hangar or part maybe possibly a larger craft. Uh And how did you get out of that? Uh well, I was rendered unconscious, and but when I woke up, I was returned. So, uh obviously, they transported me to uh a vehicle after I was under conscious, and and brought me back. And in a way that really just uh reinforced my theory that uh it was with concern for my welfare. I mean, they could have dumped me off on some asteroid or even back in the woods where it happened where I would have froze to death before I got help. So, but you didn't know the time that was happening, right? You didn't know [1:22:26] when you were being transported. You didn't That would That That you you have no no consciousness of that at all, right? Right. Yeah. Wow. They kept me out. Wow. of memories. I I do think with the these little glimmers that have been coming through that there at least part of that time I wasn't in a coma or under anesthesia that part of the time I there was some kind of interaction, especially with these human-looking beings. Okay, the documentary name again? Uh is Travis. No, I didn't name it. That's not my ego playing there. They named it [laughter] Travis. Oh, you deserve a documentary name. No problem. We'll tell We'll tell everybody how to get [music] it. He's got a new documentary coming out called Travis. And again, uh I guess you can go to his [1:23:12] website and order it. Uh how much, Travis? Uh I don't know. You don't know? I think it's 25. I think it's 25. All right. And um you you also have a conference coming up called Skyfire Summit, right? Yes, November 5th, 6th, and 7th uh in the Heber Overgard, the town there is where it happened. And we are going to have a uh visit to the site on on the anniversary. Oh, no. Okay. And uh a really neat skywatch with some specially equipment. How is it uh dealing with celebrity? Somebody mentioned that earlier and um this of course is going to be with you [1:23:53] all your life. How How have you dealt with it since the incident? Uh are you Are you patient with people or is it really rough? Are you eating dinner a lot of times? Somebody comes up and wants an autograph or what have you? [clears throat] Yeah, you just washed your hands and they want to shake your hand. They are meeting. Always, yes. No, actually I I have total patience for that. I totally understand. You know, one thing that you know, Dr. Harder, right after it happened, put me on the phone with Betty Hill and I got some advice from her about that, about not letting it change you. Mhm. And I really took that to heart. I've worked very hard at not letting it affect me [1:24:35] one way or the other. I'm not going to accept the idea that I'm a a crazy cook or a liar. And by the same token, I can't accept the idea that I'm some kind of a great person. The the the what happened was an extraordinary event. That doesn't necessarily make me an extraordinarily person, see? I do and and I do understand what it's like to deal with celebrity and you you have to be patient with people because at times they do jump in at the oddest moments. Uh Yeah, it's fortunate I live in a very out-of-the-way place and uh you know, I'm [1:25:16] I'm a little bit harder to reach. But when I go out, I try to be gracious with people and I understand their interest and do my best because that's my mission is to educate people and Well, on their behalf, thank you for that. Um on Skype, Jacob, you're on air. Hi. Good evening. Good evening. a question for Travis. Yes. If you were to encounter a UFO again, how do you think you would react? Do you think you'd feel the same kind of fear or do you think you might perhaps try a more diplomatic approach this time around? Yeah, that's a good question. In other words, would I would I do what people say, "Oh, I would stay calm and [1:25:58] ask good questions?" Well, you know, the fear that came on was a an accidental conspiracy of circumstances that made it seem far more threatening, which it actually wasn't. Um and I think I would handle it better, but I don't know that I would voluntarily be so foolish as to get myself injured again. However, I it would be great to have some questions answered. But, the big question is would I tell anybody? And I have to say, probably not. When when thinking now of this entire incident, are there things not that I need to know [1:26:41] them that you have not made public? Yeah, but you know, like I say, I just try to stick to what I can document and uh leave it at that, you know, because it's important to, you know, show people that there's a reality here and I don't want to put anything out there that can be questioned, even though it's as real as any of it. If I can't prove it, I'm not going to talk about it. I so understand that. Um hello there, wherever you are, you're on the air. Uh turn your device off or down, please. How you doing, Art? It's uh Grizz on TuneIn chat. I want to say hi to everybody on TuneIn. [1:27:23] Yes, sir. And my question is My question is What did the alien smell like? What was the ship What did it smell like? No one ever describes that. Right, you're absolutely right. It's a good question. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. No, a lot of people do have a description of the smell and uh that's actually a pretty common question that people wonder about that. But, I don't recall the sense of smell and normally when you have an intense emotional experience that the smell is very intimately linked with memory, but in my case, I other than the a feeling very stale and humid, um [1:28:04] uh it may be that the atmosphere in there was so strange. It wasn't appropriate for a human, obviously, because the human-looking guy that came in was wearing a helmet. And unless that was for some other reason. You said stale and humid. Uh so, obviously, it's not like you felt air Obviously, you were breathing air, but you didn't feel air moving at all. It was just sort of a very dank you know. Yeah, very humid and uh I was consist- I was breathing hard the whole time and I just felt like I could not get enough air. So, I think that either the blast of energy damaged my lungs or maybe even the neurological part of my [1:28:50] brain responsible for breathing or that atmosphere in there was just not right for humans and maybe some of both. Yeah, maybe they got as close as they could get. Uh Chris, hello on Skype. You're on the air. Hi, how are you doing? Very well. I good. I was uh calling up. Thank you for having me on, Saunder Beyond. Um Don, you you described, you know, that that on the the the movie Fire in the Sky that the craft wasn't what it what it looked like, you said, but I had my own encounter. I won't get into that, but um the one we did, we had an encounter with the The craft had a huge uh glass dome on top of it. Um Did you did you happen to notice if [1:29:33] there was a huge glass dome um on on top of on top of the craft that you seen, you know, you see so many of them. on top. There was a dome on top. There was a dome on top. There was a dome on top, but I did not look out from it from the inside. I never got to that part of the craft, but there it did have a dome on top. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Well, I was uh I just was wondering uh I um like I said, I had my own experience and um it's fascinating. It's very fascinating. And you said that most of your your your your memories were were hit through re- when you got back through um hypnosis. Well, no, actually, you know, it didn't add to the memories. It just allowed me [1:30:15] to finally say them without breaking down. Mhm. What's it like being hypnotized? Is it pretty weird? I mean, are you conscious during it and aware of your surroundings and is it just that other other memories come flooding back or what was it like? I didn't really remember when I came out of the trance. My brother was present and he [clears throat] told me about certain things that I didn't remember. Huh. Interesting. I I understand some people do remember, but I didn't. Got you. Flagstaff, Arizona, your turn. Hello. Hi, thanks. [1:30:56] Sure. Go ahead. Hi, my name's Zach. I'm from Arizona. Hi, Travis. Up north and Flagstaff. And my question for you is that I feel like earlier in what happened to you, a lot of what you were saying was like there was an attack on you by extraterrestrial life. So, my question now is that just hearing you earlier in the show, you feel like there's more of an altruistic aspect to extraterrestrial life now? Like they weren't trying to hurt you. Well, yeah. You see, I didn't I interpreted it as an attack, you know, that possibly this blast of energy was even a beam that was fired even mistakenly as a defensive move, but now I'm thinking that it was just some kind [1:31:41] of a side effect of the propulsion unit that you know, just jumped to the earth through me. Our famous UFO skeptic even wrote a paper saying that pilots who think they see they're being circled by UFOs are actually seeing the result of the huge charges up to up half a million volts that actually have been documented to build up in the surface of our or aircraft just passing at high speed through the air. So, you know, maybe some kind of a an effect like that of this saucer traveling through the air at very [1:32:24] high speed or maybe some side effect of the propulsion unit or maybe they were process of some agricultural experiment there with the trees and some residual energy from that. I I don't know. I just don't think it was a deliberate weapon. I think that because I unexpectedly closed the distance and got myself hurt, then it made it necessary for them to take me aboard to correct the mistake that I uh made. So, I'm not saying that they were that it was a hostile act at all as I mistakenly may thought at first. All right. [1:33:07] Caller? All right. Thanks. All right. Thank you very much. Um Okay, so here's a question from somebody named Big C through the wormhole. Great show. Question to Travis. Was he a skeptic of the existence of ETs, UFOs, that sort of thing before this happened to you? I mean, did you have any attitude at all about this kind of thing? No, I was not that ignorant. I really, you know, you know, studies have shown that over 60% of the people believe in the reality of this and to the extent and the and the percentage goes up with the educational level. So, it's really dumb [1:33:51] people who say this can't be because uh we're reached the point now where it's it's a virtual certainty with accepted scientific methods. We have the the Hubble telescope and Kepler and and they've actually been able to uh, fill in the blanks on the Drake equation that the estimation of habitable or life-supporting planets in our galaxy is far greater than they once thought. That virtually every star has about a dozen planets and that there's always going to be those middle ones, the Goldilocks range, that aren't so close that they're overheated or so far [1:34:33] out that they're frozen and uh, life, uh, with the right chemicals is going to be inevitable in those places. You're beginning to sound like a scientist. Of course, you've been looking at this now for a while, haven't you? I've been studying it for 39 years, yeah. All right, let's, uh, I don't know. It says anonymous, so I don't know where we're going. Hello, you're on the air. Yeah, hi Art. Hello. Caller from Phoenix, Arizona. Yes, sir. And, uh, last year my wife and I were at the Skyfire Summit in the Heber right area with, uh, hosted by Travis and he had two Navajo Rangers [1:35:18] that were speaking at the event and these guys were super intense. I mean, we had a conversation, my wife and I with one of them outside after he spoke and you could he had federal, you know, law enforcement training and this guy would look right through you. You know, a no-holds-barred kind of guy and I was curious as to how Travis met them and if they ever teamed up together, you know, with Travis's conviction of his story and these two gentlemen um, they it would make a powerful combination to you know, go on a circuit. Okay, Travis. [1:36:00] Well, I had the opportunity to speak in Gallup at the at a film festival there on the Navajo reservation and spoke to nearly a thousand Native Americans in the in the building and they had some amazing stories about things that happened way back in the far reaches of the reservation. It's very remote out there and these entities seem to have quite a an attraction to more remote areas. This one story I got was of a guy his grandmother had woven a blanket depicting an encounter with these beings going way back. So, you know, the the oral tradition [1:36:43] amongst the tribes the Zuni, the Navajo, the Hopi is pretty extensive that this is not a new phenomenon and that was the reason that I invited them to my conference because that's a perspective that I think is very important and that's the reason I'm having Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte speak this year on the Cowboys and Aliens topic that this predates the early days, you know, that even you know, the the very you know, first European to come to this area were experiencing and seeing things even then. [1:37:25] All right, Harmony very quickly somewhere in the world you're on the air with Travis. Hello. Hi Travis. Hi Art, can you hear me? Okay, you're too loud. Just back away a little bit and tell us where you're calling. Where are you calling from? I'm ringing from New Zealand. New Zealand, okay. Yeah, from Nelson New Zealand and I had a couple of encounters uh in the very similar time period as what um Travis's where I looked on the net, I read some of his story. But, I'll tell you the second one first cuz I think it'll corroborate some of what he's saying. The second one was a visual that we had in 1978. It was a some sort of a craft that came across the Pacific Ocean [1:38:07] from from the distance, about 100 miles, and it covered 100 miles in about 10 seconds, went directly over our heads flashing uh strobe lights, red, white, yellow, and blue. Uh it it covered that distance in 10 seconds, not didn't make a sound, and it was within within a half a mile of us when it went over our heads. There was and to there's a reports in uh Ludington, Michigan on the 20, I think the 28th of July that year, 1978. A lot of other people saw it as well, including quite a few people from the Coast Guard and the Sheriff's Department. So, you can look at the the NICAP uh org website for that. Okay. Wait, that was a visual. The other one was around [snorts] the same time in [1:38:50] 1975. Um I was in Los Angeles and I was I was being threatened by a biker. Um and instead of defending myself, I sat down in cross-legged position and closed my eyes. And I got hit by a a tractor beam or something. And it and it was like a billion volts of electricity, knocked me down on the ground, and shook me for a minute. Um almost like I was having a seizure. You sure the biker didn't hit you, right? And so Then it was over. Okay, it was over. No, the biker they just stood there with their jaws dropped. They couldn't believe what they and they walked away. The whole The whole situation just diffused at that point. So, I've been a believer ever since that we are not [1:39:32] alone. We are not alone. And uh most of the news we hear is BS. Well, so Nion, is that correct? Uh Nion. Nion, sorry. Close. my name's actually Nathan. It was a a made-up video game name. Okay. Where are Where are you? Appreciate you taking my call call by the way, Art. Me and my brother are big fans. Right. Um, you've caused us a lot of sleepless nights in a good way, you know. Oh, thank you very Where are Where are you? was uh I can't get that out. Like, do you think the ETs um that you saw are kind of like you know, like a a uh like robots or biologically programmed uh you know, like you know, [1:40:16] like if we see an anthill, we see in cameras down there or you know what I mean? We Do you think they're like a way to communicate, uh a bridge? Like if they're like fourth-dimensional beings, you know, uh do you think that's a way they com- communicate with us? Well, you know, using Occam's razor, uh I see that no necessity for that. I I you know, if if an advanced civilization could create a being that could stand in for an organic being to resemble in every way a living, breathing thing, uh it would be undetectable. So, there would have been no way that I could have uh [1:40:58] seen such a uh a creation, but I also don't see the necessity of it. I I think with their kind of technology, it's not that big of a leap to come here. Uh it's just that they're being very circumspect uh out of um you know, uh respect for our level of development. Uh what did the ship look like? All right, uh we'll get to that. Where are you calling from? I want to get to that. Oh, uh Oklahoma. Oklahoma, all right. So, uh yes, as best you can describe I guess the the shape. You've sort of already done that, but for him uh if you would. [1:41:40] Well, a metallic disc uh with a dome on top um but glowing areas uh with uh non-glowing areas that are more like uh um some kind of a more rigid part of the structure. I I'm I'm uh don't know the nature of why some of it was glowing. It didn't feel hot. I didn't I was close enough that I think that if it was glowing because of a high temperature that I would have been able to feel the heat, and I didn't feel heat. Um Would you roughly describe it as a flying saucer? Yes, uh like two pie pans put lip to [1:42:24] lip. Kind of angular, but the craft that I was returned from was more rounded, but again still uh a disc shape. Um I'm thinking that something to do with the propulsion requires a generally circular dimension. A lot of people are sending in questions on the computer asking if you have had any experience or contact since. That's a very common question, and I always tell them if I did I wouldn't tell anybody because I stick to what I can document. I did talk about that [1:43:06] giant black triangle because I had two witnesses with me, and then went online and found that there was a dozen more. Mhm. I I think you're doing a wise thing because if you had had another experience and laid that out for everybody, you're absolutely right, it would detract from your credibility, no matter how true it might be. Exactly. So, very very interesting. it is. The nature of the beast. It is indeed. Glad you know that. [clears throat] Wilmington, North Carolina, hello. Hi Art, this is Gabrielle of Eastern Carolina. I ask my question and I'll jump off the air to listen. I just wanted to know Travis's thoughts on God [1:43:50] before his abduction versus after his abduction and that's it. Thank you. Uh thank you. All right, so did you find God with the aliens? No, I found God prior to that. I believe that if you truly understand infinity in terms of time and distance both future and past then God is a certainty. You were uh I'll leave it at that. Okay, and Snowflake, you were a church-going person, yes? Uh not not a regular. I was an irregular [1:44:32] and that kind of put me on the edge of uh this devout community, but uh I see nothing about the presence of alien beings in this gala- galaxy in this universe as in any way contradicting any religious principle. You do understand though that for some people that would be as a contradiction. They they Yes. Yeah, I've encountered that in in ways that uh harmed relationships. My son was a girlfriend was advised to uh get away from him Wow. uh by the the local Catholic priest brought in a guy that you know, said his dad is consorting with demons and it [1:45:15] wasn't so long after that that the Vatican came out and said, "No, there is absolutely nothing evil about believing that there are beings out there uh on other planets." And so um people who um you know say well if it's not in the Bible it doesn't exist are really pretty small-minded in my view. This they're selling God short. Uh there's nothing in the Bible about Native Americans and yet they exist. Mhm. There's nothing in the Bible about Antarctica but it exists. So you know the idea that if it's not in the Bible it's not true is is a little bit narrow-minded in my view. [1:45:57] Very quickly uh Jonathan on Skype. Oh, hi. Hi. Mr. Bell and Mr. Walton, very nice to meet you both. Thank you. Uh I'm I'm Matthew. This is Jonathan's brother. All right. Uh I have I have um a couple of questions. Real quick. Uh please explain in very in very detail what the alien looks like, the grays. Okay. In great detail like their appendages, [snorts] feet. All right, do they have irises? Their color of their irises, uh clothing, things like that. Okay. Yeah, they did have irises. They they did not have a black obsidian-like eye. I I speculate that that might be some sort of a sunglass uh sort of eye protective covering similar to [1:46:40] sunglasses because every uh creature that has oversized eyes on Earth uh live in a very dark environment. They're either nocturnal, live in a cave, or or you know under the sea at great depths. So huge eyes imply low light. So you know the idea that they would cover it with some sort of a a dark thing. All right. So I I want everybody to cooperate. You can make your own judgments if you wish. But I think this is the real thing. So I am going to have when when when I get it uh done with the show, perhaps in an hour or two, I'm going to send this very long It's [1:47:23] very long email to Keith and I'm going to have him post it. I'm going to eliminate the code word he gave me so I would recognize him when he calls. Beyond that, I'm going to post it so those of you over the weekend will have an opportunity at your leisure to read it and make your own decision. I received it yesterday and I've been really really really struggling with uh how to approach this and I think this is the right way to do it. So by tomorrow morning, no later than tomorrow morning and probably tonight if Keith can do it, he will post this email. It's going to take you a while to read [1:48:06] but I think we have a legitimate source here just like we've got a legitimate guy on the line right now. Travis Walton. Travis, um again, your documentary Travis it's got the newer stuff in it, right? Yes. So if they want to catch up on your real experience and it is real whether they like You know what the Have you noticed Travis that some people react to an experience like yours with anger? Yeah. I I've experienced that and you know, a sort of a a desperate need to just latch on to anything to help them dismiss it for some reason. That's right. That's exactly right. Uh [1:48:49] many of my programs have been met with the same kind of anger and I was I guess it's fear-based. I'm not really sure. It is fear-based and and some of the most the blasts that I get every you know, year and a half, 2 years from somebody online, you know, I I say, "Look, don't be afraid. It's not going to happen to you." And you would not believe how often that turns them around and they're apologetic. And you know, the the the the extreme reaction is just fear-based. All right, let's go to Thornhill, Ontario, I think it is. Hello. Hello, it's Michael from Toronto, [1:49:32] Canada. Okay. I'm sorry, it says Thornhill. That's right. I'm right on the border, 10-minute walk away. Okay. I have a question for your guest, Travis, and for you, Art, and and and for your whole audience. Sure. I'm with MoveOn Canada. I've I've had an experience with a UFO, and and very similar to what the crew seen as what was described as streaking away. And what I'm asking about is the light. I'm I'm actually very very interested in the type of light. I I don't believe it's normal light. Um Travis has al- already answered one of my questions when he said that the light was actually shining through the the the [1:50:15] trees and and onto the road. I've had an experience, I met other people that say, "Yes, they seen a bright light, but it did not affect the area." My question is, sir, to both of you and to your audience, has anybody or does anybody know about such a thing where a light is there but does not affect the atmosphere around it? Hm. Well, I think um okay, Travis. For you. Well, you know, it it it lit up the area with a very strange sort of a ethereal kind of a glow. It was a very soft light, and uh [1:50:58] but it was still visible from back down the road. Right. Uh the reason it was washing across the road at that point was because there was a break in the trees. But it was a very strange light that uh made the the foliage and surroundings uh look very odd. All right. The earlier before the break, the caller asked for the best description of the alien creatures that you could give. In other words, hands, legs, digits, fingers, color of eyes, anything you can come up with at all. Well, the hands had the normal number of digits and were, you know, looked like four fingers and a thumb. Extended [1:51:42] towards me, they seemed to lack fingernails and creases at the bend points. Now, there is a possibility that that was actually a surgical glove, you know, but that was way the hands looked to me that were extended towards me. Uh if they were in the midst of medical type procedures, perhaps they were wearing gloves. Now, as far as the eyes are concerned, now that's the reason I say, you know, people that are lumping them together as grays, the ones I saw had a pupil, an iris, and lids, eyelids that blinked. No eyelashes, but [1:52:26] um definitely um a very large iris, a very large pupil. Even in that dim lighting, uh the pupil was fairly constricted. Almond-shaped as we see depicted? No, there wasn't a huge slant to the eye, but, you know, I like I said, I really do think that a lot of these descriptions are accurate. They just are different beings that just happen to look that way. I think it might be common that uh either the daytime radiation on the planet they're from is so intense that they're nocturnal [1:53:09] or the atmosphere is so thick that not a whole lot of light reaches during their daylight hours. Right. You know, your story in totality to me sounds like you were the accidental abductee. In other words, That's my favorite theory now. Uh-huh. Really? Yeah, you [snorts] know, Alan and Steve and some of you I think Kenny, you know, they think it was all a plan like they were laying for us, but I don't know. I did something very unexpected. Yes. Indeed. Some might say stupid. I mean, you know, it's a big saucer out there. [1:53:49] I felt like this was my own irrational impulse. They say, "Well, if they can control you, they can make you think it's your idea." Your And I guess they got a point there, too. Claude, you're on the air with uh Travis Walton. Well, thank you, Art and Travis. It's uh great show tonight. I can just tell tell you one thing, Travis, is that uh if people who have never seen a UFO themselves are going to be deniers, but as for myself, the uh UFO I saw, or should I say UFOs, two of them, were no more than 50 and six or 60 ft away from me in my backyard of my house in Gurley, Alabama. [1:54:31] So, I pretty much believe what you're telling me. Yeah, once you've seen it, changes uh your life. Simple as that. Yeah. All right. I I I have a little saying for those who have seen them, no more evidence is necessary. [snorts] It's true. who have never seen it and don't want to believe, no amount of proof will ever be enough. That's right. That's exactly right. Um okay, we've got somebody calling named AA on Skype. AA, hello. Hi, Art. Yes. I got a question for uh Travis. For you and Travis, thank you. [clears throat] Okay. Um I was wondering if you would have uh Clyde Lewis on sometime and Travis, too. [1:55:16] Um I was wondering if they spoke to you telepathically? I think they were attempting to do so and it wasn't working because of the brain injury. Now, the uh the brainwave scan, the EEG I underwent was at a very, very prestigious uh brain trauma center, the Barrow Neurological Institute, it's world famous. And I was put in under an assumed name, which made the test double blind. The technician did not know the nature of my injury, he was just told to look for injury and he found it. So, that brainwave uh pattern, that report, those uh scans are going to be reinterpreted [1:55:59] uh uh with some new uh neuroscientists and uh hopefully a follow-up to see if there's um any remaining uh evidence of that pattern. Okay, wonderful. Thank you both. Right, thank you very much for the call. Um let's see. You actually touched one of them and uh somebody wants to know again, through the wormhole, if you can describe what the their skin felt like. Well, it was really just the back of my arm. It was a kind of a sweeping sort of knocking them away sort of a thing. Mhm. [1:56:40] And they were uh it wasn't against their skin, it was against the the chest. Right. And he he or it fell back very easily. It was much lighter and softer than I expected. Okay. Uh let's see. You're on the air on the phone line. Uh, don't know where you are, but you're on the air. Montreal, Canada. Okay. Excellent. a quick question? There's been many reports of people who've been abducted who come back in pieces or not at all. That's my first question. Second question, how have your psychic abilities been enhanced by this contact? Afterwards, have they contacted you again psychically? Mhm. I'll listen off the air. [1:57:21] Okay. Well, I I think that we would acknowledge your first statement about people, some of them coming back in pieces or not at all. And I think for the second part of your, uh, call, I don't think he's going to answer that, but, uh, You got it. I didn't think you were. Uh, on to another call. Hi, you're on the air. Hi, uh, Art. Yes, sir. Okay, yeah. Uh, question for uh, Travis? Right. Can I speak it now? Yes, you can speak it now. He's right here. Yeah, uh, when uh, if you could describe what the the jumpsuits looked like and if there was any type of identifying patches or anything like that on it. And then [1:58:02] secondly, with the human type person you saw, did that look like any type of a terrestrial type of a space suit or was it something that was just something beyond what we have here on Earth? All right. All right. First, uh, my apologies to the previous caller that, you know, I'm just sticking to what I can document. As far as the suits, uh, the, um, it was just a sort of a loose, billowy, uh, soft material, uh, a coverall. Uh, I I wouldn't call it a space suit at all. It was just clothing. Um, they were alike. It was a orangish-brown under that lighting. That's the way it looked to me. [1:58:43] And, uh, and the human-looking individual, uh, it was again much more close-fitting over the you know, it wasn't like a leotard, but it was closer fitting. Uh just a uh blue um sort of a velour or soft weaveless sort of a fabric. Mhm. Uh and no, there were no insignia of rank or you know uh origin at all. All right. Uh several people wanting to confirm you were taken aboard one craft and um returned to Earth [1:59:27] or returned to the ground, whatever the case may be, on a second craft, in your opinion. Right. Yeah, uh of a different configuration. The more rounded, more polished one is the one that brought me back, and I did see two, possibly three of those in that big hangar-like uh structure. Wow. Whether it was a larger craft or a a building, um he was pulling me along pretty rapidly. I was having a lot of trouble just keeping my footing, and he's was in quite a bit of hurry, and it might have been for my own benefit that there was it was kind of a medical emergency, [2:00:08] Mhm. uh rather than trying to keep me from seeing too much. Got it. All right, uh we're coming toward the end. Sushi Dog or somebody like that, you're on Skype and on the air. Yes, hello. Go ahead. Yeah, uh this is for Travis. Um I'm curious about uh food and drink. Uh from what I understand, he was gone for 5 days. A, when was the last time he had anything to eat or drink prior to the abduction? And B, has he ever thought about uh how he was sustained for 5 days? Awfully good questions, uh Travis. Yeah, a good question. I've heard it [2:00:50] before, uh obviously I've been a lot of years. Um Uh since I was only conscious for that brief, you know, hysterical period of time, I obviously wasn't sitting down to a meal. However, medical tests did show that there had to have been some kind of nourishment, according to, you know, their indicators, which is the presence of something they call ketones, which is a sign that you've been breaking down your own body stores to stay alive. Um and that was absent. But, um And they would have tested you for dehydration, of course. Yeah, and there was considerable dehydration. So, they were either [2:01:32] underestimating my fluid requirements or had another reason to minimize that as part of my treatment or something. Uh but, other than being somewhat dehydrated and the evidence for that was a 10 or 11-lb um weight loss Wow. very quickly recovered uh just by slaking my thirst, which was pretty uh uh intense. My goodness. Um You know, whatever whatever means of of sustenance uh or for that matter using the restroom, uh you know, I don't have any memory of those that other part. Uh whether I was in a coma the entire time [2:02:15] or under anesthesia the whole time, I don't know, but probably had at least some conscious period. I don't know if I was fed during that time or not, but uh you know, after this many years without recalling more of those memories, I really doubt a little ever uh come back to me. All right, let's do it quickly. Um the documentary simply called Travis is available on your website or where else was it? Traviswalton.com or on wings and the wings with a g e s on the end on wings productions. [2:02:57] And you've got a conference coming up a conference called skyfire summit. And it's got Yes, and that's the website skyfiresummit.com. Okay, so they can I I guess get tickets or join you there. Nothing like seeing somebody really in the flesh. Well, Travis, it's been a long time since we talked. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Great to be with you again.
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