Bypassing Travis Walton's abduction saga to assess the reality of that 'Fire In The Sky'

originally posted by: saltlick
i met travis when he gave his little speach out here in oregon about 5 years ago. Seems like a nice genuine person. I bought his book, i read it. He signed it for me and it was shipped from his PO BOX which is from Snowflake Arizona. I totally belive him, 100 percent.

Sooo funny!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!1!!!one111!!!!!!!

originally posted by: ConfusedBrit
a reply to: InTheLight

Here's a link: www.abovetopsecret.com...


Most of Walton's actual ATS posts focused on that 'Moment Of Truth' nonsense - which he admits was a stupid thing to ever get involved in, but the $100,000 prize was too big a carrot.

So break it down for us. Travis got 100,000 for making up his story?

I thought you were talking about $2,500?

How did you jump from 2,500 to 100,000?

Plus didn’t he go missing and then tell his story BEFORE any money was involved???????

originally posted by: ConfusedBrit
a reply to: InTheLight

How odd. The ATS link on the right is missing from your screen?

In any case, I just checked and the linked interview audio within that post seems dead now (mind you, it was 9 years ago), and I was looking forward to listening myself!

Shame. I wonder if other ATSers have separate sources for it.

Whoops! You posted a fake link.

But we all assume that you’re genuine and honest lol

originally posted by: Soloprotocol
Has there ever been another case like this one where 6 adults go to the police with this fantastic story of a UFO, a friend being zapped and then disappeared?... This is stuff a bunch of kids with vivid imaginations make up. Under questioning holes in their stories start to emerge.

If Travis and co were in cahoots and making this all up, they would no doubt go further and say they saw Travis being lifted into the ship. They didn't do that because they were genuinely in fear for their lives and never saw what happened to him after they vamoosed from the scene.

What we need is about 75 times as many trolling / debunking members and posts.

Sounds like a buncha kids with vivid imagination hurrr hurrr hurrrrrr

originally posted by: zazzafrazz
a reply to: Kandinsky

I've got a copy of most of my ATS Live shows, I'll dig it up and link it here sometime today.

I'm boring now, I think I've 'grown up' and out of pretty much all the big cases/personalities, they are all just a fat bunch of BSers, the whole damn lot of them.

I'm still hanging by a tether to mass sightings like Westfall Australia , Ariel school in Zimbabwe etc, but the tether is thinning.

That’s great!! You’re smarter than everyone who has ever been interested in the topic!!

Blimey, Pete! You're on a less-than-peaceful roll...

originally posted by: peacefulpete

So break it down for us. Travis got 100,000 for making up his story?

I thought you were talking about $2,500?

How did you jump from 2,500 to 100,000?

Plus didn’t he go missing and then tell his story BEFORE any money was involved???????

Slow down and have a brandy or something...

The 100k was the potential prize money in a moronic lie-detector show many years later called 'The Moment Of Truth' - that Walton admits he was stupid to take part in. The $2,500 was his share of the Enquirer reward in late 1975.

Clear now? Have another shot of brandy.

nvm

originally posted by: gort51
a reply to: ConfusedBrit

7/10 is not bad.

So what do you rate the "Actual Real" Travis Walton story and performance? 2/10? 5/10?

The Travis Walton story as a whole is a 10/10 - it has everything one could wish for in the UFOtainment circuit. Walton himself has always earned a 10/10 for his low-key, consistent account.

Although there is no HARD evidence, the 5-day disappearance, the attendant world media circus (in full swing before he returned), the testimony of SIX co-witnesses (five of whom most certainly were not involved in a potential hoax), and the lack of one iota of evidence in 44 years to prove it was a hoax... it all adds up to a unique, enthralling tale.

The one problem I have is with Walton's account of being on the ship. His own descriptions involve being unable to move quickly despite his best efforts; meeting blond humanoids in blue space-suits; and discovering a 'star map' room whose controls he fiddled with. It all sounds like a classic DREAM sequence - and it's understandable why the producers of 'Fire In The Sky' dropped those details like hot potatoes. The alternative version used was just a tacky horror movie nightmare and just as unlikely.

An interesting conundrum for Hollywood. If a new film were developed that incorporated Walton's 1950s-style blond humanoids, it'd be laughed out of the cinema. As it is, the 1993 movie is a successful retelling of Walton's actual disappearance and the intrigue surrounding it (the original focus of this thread), only hitting the rocks when Walton eventually returns.

Regarding the 1993 movie again, and my criticism of the spaceship's interior scenes, producer Tracy Torme has an explanation. The video is below, but I'll summarise.

Torme says Budd Hopkins' book 'Missing Time' was the initial inspiration at a time when abductions were yet to be a cultural phenomenon. In fact, he'd wanted to film that book but his pitches failed, which led to him meeting Mike Rogers and a very shy Travis Walton in Snowflake. He even asked them to retrace their steps from 1975 as he began to learn the full story. He had early suspicions that it was a hoax, but that didn't bother him as a Hollywood producer; if anything that fascinated him MORE.

The script evolved over time at Paramount studios, not needing much fictionalisation. The blond humanoids and star-map room were in his script, but the CBS mini-series 'Intruders' - which featured similar aliens - led to Paramount nearly pulling the plug due to 'repetition' until a solution was suggested that was entirely fictionalised and distinct from 'Intruders' - including ditching any sterile alien rooms and introducing the unfortunate zipped 'Gray' space-suits. The reaction to those fictional scenes was 50/50 from critics, but I agree with Torme that the human relationships were the film's core focus.

Many ATSers may know this, but whilst promoting the movie, a witness emerged from the woodwork insisting he'd seen the UFO on the same night in the area. He underwent a polygraph test which included a question about Philip J Klass - the penny dropped that he was a Klass stooge who was intended to later sabotage the movie's publicity. One of those instances where I begin to question Klass's sanity (and obsession)!

As a side-note, Torme also realised the 'Strieber Gray' was a cultural meme by then, and Budd Hopkins told him about the 'alien hybrid' hypothesis emerging at the time, even mentioning how Barney Hill had insisted that his 'enforced ejaculation' during his 1961 experience be omitted by authors. But that's off-topic, so I'll shut up.

This thread has probably run its course, but here's one more point. If a revised movie with an accurate depiction of Walton's interaction with the aliens is ever made in future, the following reconstruction below (out of countless over the years) does get Walton's personal seal of approval as the most accurate.

Compared to some I have seen, and certainly compared to those initial cheesy colour paintings that we are all familiar with from the 70s, this does have a far more effective aura, especially in its recreation of the blue-suited blond beings (that still curl my toes, unless they are disguises themselves to eleviate Walton's nerves via familiarity - which seems logical).

Anyway, here ya go... at the 28:00 mark:

Hard not to like Travis. And he does come across well. Hadn't seen that vid before. I further agree that the witnesses sticking to their stories and the sheer amount of them help make this case somewhat remarkable in the "abduction" arena.

You pretty sure this thread has pretty much run it's course? Because I've been wanting to ask you what you think about MILABS but I wanted to do it after the adults left the room.

a reply to: ConfusedBrit

Thanks for that.....fairly much a reproduction of what he said in 1975.

So, Blondes.....Ok, thats cleared up......classic "Nordics", Venusians, The Pleiades types etc etc.

Pretty much the mainstream type of aliens of the period....Greys and Nordics.

I still dont know what to make of it all......when I was young it all made perfect logic, I had, after all, been a Chariots of the Gods fan and believer.

Just seems all too cliche now.

And Blondes......Russians? Californian Cultists on some spaced out ritual? Secret Squirrel Air Force or Naval Space Force (blue uniforms) exercise in hysterics??

Aliens from Light years away.....never to be seen or heard again?

And the Ultimate Question.........Why? Why Earth, Why only the one human, and not the whole lot of them...6.

Certainly does seem that, whom ever they were, they may have wounded him (does he have any existing scars or such like operation/skin damage on his chest?), they may have kept him simply to revive him or fix him...hence the days missing.

But the Hangar? Why other saucers around....sounds more like a Bob Lazar description. Certainly a mother ship with a huge hangar with only 3 small craft in the huge space, sounds more like what humans would do than space fairing beings, to me.

Maybe its all just a dream sequence that occurred in his mind only....a good mystery either way.

a reply to: gort51

The 'Nordics' came about in the 50s and seemed to have a popularity in rural Christian communities. They were sprung from the Theosophical groups (Adamski was into that) who imagined all their ascended masters as idealistic humans like those blonde, blue-eyed Jesus images. There were even off-shoots of neo-Nazis (Silver Shirts iirc) who got themselves on post-war watch lists as American subversives. 'Our interplanetary space brothers say white is right!!'

If Travis made it all up I don't think he was drawing from the well of Theosophy or even Orthon. He didn't sound like someone who was into any of that at the time. Instead he could have picked out popular references and blonde-haired 'Nordics' were well known. So were clinical aliens in comics and science fiction. The elaboration of the story is very basic imo and I wouldn't be surprised if it was totally made up. It's got the sophistication of high school fiction. "Then I did this and then I did that..."

On the other hand, maybe it was true and there wasn't a lot of complexity to report? How much depth can such an incident include? I always found esoteric and/or religious messages hard to swallow. Some of the more intriguing incidents (Bob Taylor, Pascagoula) were similarly linear and lacking depth so I'll sit on the fence and just enjoy them.

originally posted by: The GUT
I've been wanting to ask you what you think about MILABS but I wanted to do it after the adults left the room.

Heh.

Well, I can think of three wild theories about military intervention that did the rounds.

1) A deliberate, targeted abduction by experimental aircraft, the beam that hit Travis being an aircraft spotlight. They took him to a military base for dubious experiments before dumping him 5 days later (clothed; the 1993 movie used nakedness as a clumsy metaphor about vulnerability).

2) A military accident caused by experimental aircraft. They took Travis to a military hospital, saved his life, and dumped him 5 days later.

3) A military training exercise in the White Mountains that was incidental but influential in a plan to hoax a UFO abduction. In fact, this was a story by someone claiming to be the County Sheriff's grand nephew in a rather suspicious but imaginative 2010 email detailing how Rogers came back alone to collect Walton and devised a plan necessitating his 5-day stay at the home of an "acid freak" member of the crew from Concho called "Dallas" (I assume he means the troubled Allen Dalis who did act suspiciously after the incident). Crazy, huh?


Make of those babies what you will.

originally posted by: ConfusedBrit
Blimey, Pete! You're on a less-than-peaceful roll...

originally posted by: peacefulpete

So break it down for us. Travis got 100,000 for making up his story?

I thought you were talking about $2,500?

How did you jump from 2,500 to 100,000?

Plus didn’t he go missing and then tell his story BEFORE any money was involved???????

Slow down and have a brandy or something...

The 100k was the potential prize money in a moronic lie-detector show many years later called 'The Moment Of Truth' - that Walton admits he was stupid to take part in. The $2,500 was his share of the Enquirer reward in late 1975.

Clear now? Have another shot of brandy.

Brotha, I apologize for taking your post wrong (and I responded wrong).

I wrongly thought you were making up things. (Like, let's make up a story that he was paid a million dollars for his fictional story, lol.)

Sorry man. And thank you for explaining that part of his life story.

originally posted by: peacefulpete

originally posted by: saltlick
i met travis when he gave his little speach out here in oregon about 5 years ago. Seems like a nice genuine person. I bought his book, i read it. He signed it for me and it was shipped from his PO BOX which is from Snowflake Arizona. I totally belive him, 100 percent.

Sooo funny!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!1!!!one111!!!!!!!

saltlick:

I'm sorry, I took your post totally wrong. I thought you were making a joke about "snowflakes."

But apparently not, and I apologize for responding wrong.

Taking your post as genuine: Yes, I think Travis has one of the most genuine personal experiences ever recorded.