Encounter Atlas
On the evening of November 5, 1975, a seven-man forestry crew working at Turkey Springs in the Apache–Sitgreaves National Forests was driving home when, they said, they saw a glowing object hovering near the road. Crew member Travis Walton got out and walked toward it. The others said a beam of light struck him and threw him to the ground, and they drove off in fear. When they came back about 15 minutes later, they said, Walton and the light were gone.
Crew chief Mike Rogers reported Walton missing to the Navajo County sheriff. Searches over the following days, including a helicopter, found no trace of him. On November 11 the six crew members took polygraph tests from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, mainly to rule out foul play; the examiner judged five truthful and one inconclusive. Five days after vanishing, Walton phoned his family from a payphone in Heber. He later said he had woken aboard a craft, fought off three short, bald beings with large eyes, been led away by a human-looking man in a helmet and then blacked out, remembering nothing more until he found himself by a highway.
The case soon became a media story. Walton and his family worked with the National Enquirer, which paid for his stay and awarded the crew a prize after other polygraph tests. Skeptics Philip J. Klass and Michael Shermer argued it was a hoax, noting that an early polygraph found Walton showed "gross deception", that Walton and his family were longtime UFO enthusiasts, and that the crew was behind on a Forest Service contract that a dramatic event might excuse. Investigators later suggested a nearby fire lookout tower could have been used to stage the light.
In 2021 Rogers said in a recorded call that the event had been staged, then retracted the statement; after his death in 2026 his daughter said he had made a deathbed confession. Walton has always maintained the abduction was real. His 1978 book The Walton Experience became the 1993 film Fire in the Sky.