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Travis Walton Case
I am having trouble locating all the old therads. The ones I saw did not bring up the details I read in Curtis Peebles' book, a book several said they have not seen. I didn't know any other way to introduce the startling details that I had not heard or seen before. They may be old news to everyone here, but not to me.
I will put the text below, and if someone thinks it is a violation of copyright, I will remove it or do something else.
The bottom line is that Peebles states it was a hoax to bail out desperate people in a bad spot. Once into it, Travis didn't know how to get out. I am sure today he is probably a good man, and have heard him speak on C2CAM. But if what Peebles is saying is true, then back then, he got into things way too deep.
_____
Watch the Skies
Curtis Peebles
Abductions and Abductionlsts
pages 227 ff
The Travis Walton Abduction
Two weeks after The UFO Incident {TV show of Betty and Barney Hill] was telecast, the next major abduction case began. On November 5, 1975, Michael H. Rogers, a Forest Service contractor, reported that one of his brush clearing crew, Travis Walton, age 22, had been abducted. The crew had been thinning timber in the Sitgreaves National Forest. They had finished work at 6:00 P.M. (about dusk) and begun the drive back to Snowflake, Arizona, via the village of Heber. As the truck headed down a rough logging road, Allen Dalis. age 21, who was sitting in the rear of the truck, reportedly saw a yellow glow in the heavy timber. When the truck reached a clearing, both Dalis and Travis Walton said they saw a UFO hovering about 100 feet from the road. Walton, who was sitting by the door on the passenger side, yelled for Rogers to stop the truck. Walton jumped out of the still-mov*ing truck and ran toward the UFO. As he neared it, Rogers said, there was a blue-green flash, like a bolt of lightning which "blew him back ten feet." Rogers said later that he panicked and drove off, leaving Walton behind. After driving about a quarter of a mile down the road, Rogers stopped and the crew began debating going back to rescue Walton. After seeing a streak of light which suggested the UFO had left, they agreed to go back. When they returned to the site, however, there was no trace of Walton.
Finally, they abandoned the search and drove back to Heber. One of the crew called Undersheriff L. C. Ellison around 7:45 P.M. After hearing the story, Ellison called Navajo County Sheriff Marlin Gillespie. He and his deputy, Kenneth Coplan, drove to Heber. The three policemen, Rogers, and two crew members returned to search for Walton. (Three crewmembers refused.)
The search was abandoned soon after midnight. Rogers and Coplan went to notify Mary Kellett, Walton's mother. She was living in a ranch house about fifteen miles from the UFO site. Her reaction seemed strange to Coplan. He told Klass, "When Rogers told the mother what had happened, she did not act very surprised. She said, 'Well, that's the way these things happen'." Kellett notified her daughter, Mrs. Grant Neff, who also took the news calmly.
Starting on the morning of November 6 and continuing through November 9, several searches were conducted of the Turkey Springs area. No trace of Travis Walton was found-there was no blood, no ripped clothing, nor any trace of burning on the dry wood pile or pine needles.
While the search for Travis Walton was underway, Rogers and Duane Walton (Travis's older brother who acted as a surrogate father, owing to Mrs. Kellett's two failed marriages) were interviewed by Phoenix UFOlogist Fred Sylvanus. Throughout the sixty-five-minute interview, neither expressed any concern about Travis's fate. Duane said he was "having the experience of a lifetime!" Travis had not acted impulsively, Duane said, but as part of a long-standing plan between the two brothers:
Travis and I discussed this many, many times at great length and we both said that [if either ever saw a UFO up close] we would immediately get as di*rectly under the object as physically possible.
We discussed this time and time again! The opportunity would be too great to pass up ... and whoever happened to be left on the ground-if one of us didn't make the grade-to try to convince whoever was in the craft to come back and get the other one. But he [Travis] performed just as we said he would, and he got directly under the object. And he's received the benefits for it.
For the police, this was a missing persons report. In any such case, the possibility of foul play must be considered. Accordingly, on Novem*ber 10, Rogers and the five other members of the crew took a lie detec*tor test. The test was conducted by C. E. Gilson of the Arizona Depart*ment of Public Safety. Because this was a possible criminal investigation, three of the four questions were whether Travis was killed or injured by one or more of the crew. The fourth question, added at the last minute, was "Did you tell the truth about actually seeing a UFO last Wednesday when Travis Walton disappeared." All six answered "no" to the first three questions and "yes" to the UFO question. Gilson concluded five were truthful. The result for the sixth, Allen Dalis. who was the first to see the UFO, was judged "inconclusive." Gilson concluded: "These poly*graph examinations proved that these five men did see some object that they believe to be a UFO and that Travis Walton was not injured or mur*dered by any of these men, on that Wednesday (5 November 1975). If an actual UFO did not exist and the UFO is a manmade hoax, five of these men had no prior knowledge of a hoax. No such determination can be made of the sixth man whose test results were inconclusive."
A few hours later, just after midnight on November 11, Travis returned.
"Gross Deception"
Travis called his sister's house from a gas station in Heber, Arizona. Du*ane Walton and Grant Neff drove to pick him up. They found him col*lapsed in the phone booth. As word spread of Travis's return, Duane be*gan to get phone calls. Among them was one from Coral Lorenzen who offered APRO's assistance. Soon after, she was called by the National En*quirer and asked for an appraisal. Lorenzen suggested that Travis and Duane be "sequestered" in the Scottsdale Sheraton Inn. The National Enquirer agreed to underwrite the cost in exchange for the exclusive story.
On November 12, Duane and Travis were in a suite at the Scottsdale Sheraton Inn. The following day APRO's James Lorenzen and Dr. James Harder met with the Waltons. They were joined by several National En*quirer reporters. One of the reporters, Jeff Wells, later described the "four days of chaos" he experienced. Duane was described as "one of the meanest and toughest-looking men I've ever seen." He warned them, "Nobody is going to laugh at my brother." The National Enquirer reporters reassured him and offered a $1,000 initial payment. If the story was good and Travis passed a lie-detector test, the amount could reach the five-figure range. Travis was a very different picture. Wells wrote, "Our first sight of the kid' was at dinner in the motel dining room that night. It was a shock. He sat there mute, pale, twitching like a cor*nered animal."
On November 15, Travis underwent a lie-detector examination. It was administered by John J. MCCarthy, who had twenty years of expe*rience and was the senior examiner in Arizona. McCarthy's examina*tion lasted some four hours. He first listened to tapes of Travis describing his abduction. Then he conducted a lengthy preliminary interview with Travis. He learned Travis had experimented with marijuana, speed, and LSD, and had been convicted of stealing and forging payroll checks in 1971. McCarthy also went through the questions to make sure Travis could answer them with a simple "yes" or "no."
With Travis wired up to the lie detector, McCarthy began by asking Travis "baseline" questions (where he was born, etc.) to establish that he would respond in a Significant manner when he told a lie.
With this completed, McCarthy asked nine questions on the UFO sto*ry. He found Travis was lying. Moreover, Travis was holding his breath before the questions, trying to fool McCarthy. The test was completed shortly after 4:00 P.M. McCarthy called Travis's responses "gross deception" and said it was the plainest case of lying he had seen in twenty years. Wells heard Duane yell, "I'll kill the sonofabitch!" Wells later re*called "the office was yelling for another expert and a different result."
The following day, McCarthy completed his formal report, stating, "Based on his [Travis's] reactions on all charts, it is the opinion of this examiner that Walton, in concert with others, is attempting to perpe*trate a UFO hoax, and that he has not been on any spacecraft."
Walton's abduction story suffered another blow a few hours after he failed the McCarthy lie-detector test. APRO had invited Dr. Jean Rosen*baum, a psychiatrist, and his wife Beryl, a psychoanalyst, to examine Travis. They arrived on the evening of November 15 and spent several days with Travis. Dr. Rosenbaum, his wife, and another psychiatrist all concluded the "abduction" was a psychological aberration. Dr. Rosen*baum said that the story "was all in his own mind. I feel that he suffered from a combination of imagination and amnesia, a transitory psy*chosis-that he did not go on a UFO, but simply was wandering around during the period of his disappearance." This should have been the end of the case. It was not.
On November 22, Travis Walton and James Lorenzen appeared on Phoenix television station KOOL. In this and subsequent appearances, Travis described two different kinds of aliens. The first looked like "well* developed fetuses." They were about five feet tall and wore tan-brown robes. Their skins were described as "white like a mushroom." Their heads were domed and lacked hair. Their eyes, Travis said, were large and they had long fingers with no fingernails. The others looked like a normal human (hair, facial features, etc.) and were dressed in blue. Lorenzen said Travis had been examined by doctors and psychiatrists who had rejected the idea of a hoax. What he did not say was that the psychiatrists were convinced Travis was simply fantasizing. Lorenzen also did not say a word about the failed lie-detector test.P
The December 16, 1975, National Enquirer carried an article titled "5 Witnesses Pass Lie Test While Claiming ... Arizona Man Captured by UFO." Dr. Harder said "after considering all the known facts" he was convinced Travis Walton had been taken aboard a UFO.B Again, there was no mention of the failed lie-detector test.
On February 7, 1976, APRO announced that Travis and Duane Wal*ton had passed a lie-detector test administered by George J. Pfeifer. (Mrs. Kellett also later passed another test given by Pfeifer.) These tests, along with those given earlier to the six crewmen, became the center*piece for the July 6, 1976, National Enquirer. The Walton case was selected by the tabloid's "Blue Ribbon Panel" as 1975's "Most Extraordinary Encounter With a UFO". The $5,000 prize was split between Travis and the six crew members.
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26th August 2012
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