Last night we watched Fire in the Sky, the 1993 film based on the story of Travis Walton’s disappearance for 5 days in 1975 in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona:
On November 5, 1975, near Snowflake, Arizona, logger Travis Walton disappears mysteriously during an encounter with a flying saucer. Authorities treat with skepticism the outrageous story related by the only witnesses to the alleged event, including Walton’s co-workers and his best friend and future brother-in-law, Mike Rogers. They are suspected of foul play despite no apparent motive or knowledge as to Walton’s whereabouts.A state lawman finds a tabloid newspaper in the crew’s pickup truck and quickly concludes that tensions had arisen between Walton and surly co-worker Allan Dallis, leading the lawman to conclude that a murder cover-up is under way. However, all of the suspects pass lie-detector tests and the case becomes stalled. Five days later, and just as mysteriously as he disappeared, Walton reappears, claiming to have been abducted by extraterrestrials and taken aboard a UFO. [link]
While the film is based on Walton’s book detailing his experience, the abduction scenes in the movie are the most memorable and the least consistent with Watson’s account of what happened to him. The image of Walton restrained on the alien operating table with a needle-like instrument piercing his eye, isn’t in Walton’s less terrifying and less dramatic account. Instead, he describes how there were two types of aliens, shorter ones with “huge luminous brown eyes” that seemed afraid of him and human-like ones that didn’t speak:
I stood frozen to the spot. He was a man about six feet two inches tall. His helmeted head barely cleared the doorway. He was extremely muscular and evenly proportioned. He appeared to weigh about two hundred pounds. He wore a tight-fitting bright blue suit of soft material like velour. His feet were covered with black boots, a black band or belt wrapped around his middle. He carried no tools or weapons on his belt or in his hands; no insignia marked his clothing.I ran up to him, exclaiming, babbling all sorts of questions. The man remained silent throughout my verbal barrage. I was worried by his silence. He took me firmly but gently by the arm and gestured for me to go with him. [link]
The screenplay writer acknowldedged that the abduction scene was dramaticized at the request of the movie’s producers. It’s not surprising that the violent abduction and alien sequences in the movie received critical acclaim or that for the next ten years, the X-files played off of these kind of terror-inducing images of aliens. But if you believe Walton’s account, the supporting testimony of the men that were with him, and the consistency of their story over the past 30+ years, something very different and much more interesting happened that night to Travis Walton.
