“T he foolishness of the impulse to get out and run towards it, just assuming it would take off before I got very far — that was a big mistake that created a huge detour in my life,” Travis Walton says. “Tell you the truth: I wish it had never happened.” It’s been 50 years since Walton’s “big mistake,” when he became the central figure in one of the most famous alien abduction stories in the world: the so-called “Fire in the Sky” event. The incident Five decades on, true believers and skeptics continue to debate what occurred in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in central Arizona on Nov. 5, 1975. A seven-man crew was finishing up a routine shift on a logging contract near Turkey Springs. After their shift ended, they got into the pickup and began their drive back to town. Mike Rogers, the crew boss, was behind the wheel when they saw the craft. “ We rounded that corner and there was an open view at a clearing and there was a thing, a UFO … It was an oval-shaped object, three-dimensional, and it had lighter parts and darker parts — looked to have sort of a framework,” Rogers says. According to Rogers, he stopped the truck, then Walton got out and quickly walked toward the object that was hovering about 15 to 20 feet above the ground. The crew was yelling at Walton not to approach it. Rogers recounts hearing loud rumbling and piercing sounds, before seeing Walton hit by a “bolt of energy.” “ It was just a straight beam, like a direct thing, and hit him in the head and chest area and knocked him on his back. He landed about 10, 15 feet from where he was standing. And at that point, it scared us so bad that I hit the gas,” he says. Per Rogers’ account, they fled the scene before acknowledging that leaving Walton was not the right thing to do. He gave the others an option to either go back with him or to get out and wait in the middle of the forest. They all decided to go back. Through the trees, he could see light rise up and then streak off. When they arrived back at the location, they searched for Walton. “ We went all around through the clearing looking for him, calling his name and couldn’t find him at all,” Rogers says. When they found no trace of him, they headed into town to contact the authori- ties, and that evening, law enforcement began a search. Over the next few days, what started as small-town speculation turned into a national media frenzy. Theories of a kidnapping or a murder coverup swirled. Walton was missing for five days before his reappearance, when he made a collect call to his sister’s house from a Heber phonebooth. When his brother picked him up, he had no recollection and did not realize he had been missing for five days. “That just kind of, you know, really hit me really hard, wondering what had happened,” Walton says. Soon after he reappeared, he underwent regressive hypnosis and psychiatric medical examinations, including drug and alcohol tests. “At first I was completely unable to speak about it at all … I was just so trauma- tized … I couldn’t even tell my brother what had happened,” he says, but he believes the hypnosis helped him commu- nicate the experience. “I was the observer in what happened rather than the experiencer … so it kind of separated me from it … and that made it easy enough to where I could talk about it after that,” Walton says. Even skeptics can’t deny the impact the alleged incident has had in the past five decades. Walton’s experience sparked national headlines, lectures, conferences, documentaries, books, podcast episodes, a motion picture (1993’s “Fire in the Sky”) and, most recently, a 50th anniversary event hosted by Walton’s family. The town Travis Walton’s UFO experience didn’t just change his life forever; it’s also shaped the mall communities of Heber and Overgaard.. For the better or the worse depends on who you ask. The neighboring small towns of Heber and Overgaard, commonly referred to together as the shared community Heber–Overgaard, are about two and a half hours northeast of the Valley, near the Mogollon Rim. And since the 1975 incident, there’s been a new kind of tourist showing up: the alien enthusiast. “Some locals might not like it, but it draws people in and puts them on the map,” Walton says. The town really became a pop-culture touchstone in the 1993 motion picture, “Fire in the Sky.” Although Walton made a cameo and was even brought in as a Travis Walton at the abduction site. (Angela RoseRed) Today, the “Travis Walton Rescue Site” sits next to the Heber Tire Shop (Angela RoseRed) HOLDING SPACE BY Angela RoseRed A world-famous UFO abduction still affects a small Arizona community, 50 years later.
