Customer Reviews

Fire in the Sky: The Walton Experience

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Walton captures your attention on the first page and never lets go. His skilled writing style is eclipsed only by the abduction experience itself. After a brief but delightful introduction, you are taken on a wild and terrifying journey through the unknown, as you bounce between the surreal world of alien abduction and the repercussions back on terra firma. Walton displays uncommon courage by delving into his own psyche, before, during and after his abduction. With impeccable logic, and verifiable facts, he successfully counters virtually every known criticism from his detractors. Walton should be lauded for avoiding personal interpretation in the telling of his experience. And yet, in a chapter dedicated to speculation, he satisfies our natural curiosity. Walton does such an expert job of answering our questions along the way, you may feel totally sated by the time you get to "The Making of Fire." Don't cheat yourself by skipping this chapter. Apart from explaining the reasons the movie departed from fact, it is a fascinating look into the world of movie making, with captivating portraits of the cast members. This book should be thoroughly enjoyable to UFO buffs and newcomers alike. Those less familiar with the UFO culture may be a little put off by Walton's defensive stance, the bulk of which is thoughtfully confined to an appendix, but hardcore enthusiasts will appreciate his candor and thoroughness.

For readers not familiar with the story, Travis Walton was one of a team of seven forestry workers engaged in a tree-thinning contract near Snowflake Arizona on 5 November 1975. At the end of their working day all seven men experienced a close encounter with a UFO on the mountain road home. On sighting the craft over nearby trees the driver, Mike Rogers, stopped and whilst the other six loggers stayed in the pick-up truck, Travis approached the craft on foot and was then seen to be struck by a beam of light and knocked off his feet. His companions fled in terror but on returning to look for him 15 minutes later found no trace. Naturally they had to report this extraordinary event, as Travis was missing, and met with incredulity and suspicion. They were suspected of Travis's murder and of fabricating the UFO story to cover it up. An exhaustive search effort through the mountains by police and local volunteers yielded no result, but Travis unexpectdly turned up five days after his disappearance several miles away at the roadside dirty, dehydrated and traumatised. He wanted to return to his quiet private life and adjust to his strange experience, but due to the publicity surrounding the disappearance was reluctantly catapulted into the international media spotlight. The case was extensively investigated by the authorities, resulting eventually in a film of the incident and a controversy which raged for decades. All seven witnesses stuck to the story, incredible as it was, passed lie detector tests and went through a great deal of trouble as a consequence. It's a very famous case.

Travis's book is essentially an autobiography with the abduction event and its extended consequences at the centre of the story. I read the updated 1996 edition, to discover the author to be a thoughtful and literate writer with a deep philosophical outlook and a wide range of serious interests. Travis turns out to be much more interesting than you might expect if you were only slightly familiar with his abduction story or even if you saw the Tracy Torme film "Fire in the Sky."

The book is divided into four parts:

1. The Incident: in which the events of 5 November 1975 and its aftermath are described in full, including the problems faced by Mike Rogers (the gang boss and Travis's life-long friend) and his team following Travis's abduction; the involvement of the police and out-of-state law officers in investigating the disappearance and the suspicion which fell on the other members of the crew. What Travis remembers of the abduction is also described in full - to many, the most interesting part of the story

2. Analysis: wherein Travis tackles head-on the questions of belief and of speculation about the abduction, its implications for the existence of intelligent non-human life, what he later learned about the involvement of government agencies in covering-up the UFO subject and an exploration of the ET hypothesis

3. Latter Days: in the 1996 edition of the book the narrative is brought up-to-date and includes details of the harassment Travis and the crew endured from debunkers, the international media attention and the eventual making of Tracy Torme's film with which, overall, Travis was very pleased. He explains the reasoning behind the decision to dramatise the abduction event in the film such that it deviates in detail from what he remembers and why the resulting dramatic effect on the audience is appropriate to the story, and why one of the loggers in the crew had to be left out of the film for legal reasons. It's a good insight into the workings of Hollywood and the film industry in general

4. Appendices: a long section with a major expose of the late Philip Klass and his nefarious methods, always out to attack any evidence about the UFO subject and suspected of working for the CIA. Travis has quite a lot to say about this, as well he might

At 370 pages the book is quite long but a good, rewarding read. It covers the entire history of the case including the involvement of law enforcement agencies in Arizona and the polygraph testing, gives a good rounded portrait of Mike Rogers and the other loggers and what subsequently happened to them. It's well written and edited. A collection of colour plates reconstructing the abduction and the entities encountered by Travis is included, painted from memory (don't judge until you read the account and see the images). This edition also contains 16 pages of monochrome photographs of all the main characters in the narrative and drawings of the craft made by Travis and the other witnesses.

People who know Travis personally hold him in the highest regard. He is a private family man who likes to live a quiet life and reported to be principled, honest and consistent. No-one ever has a bad word to say about him. He still speaks about the incident 35 years later if asked to do so and his talks are always enjoyed as engaging, informative and relevant. He's a bright guy who did not welcome all the publicity surrounding the abduction and although he knows it happened to him, is open-minded enough to not try to fit the events into any particular belief paradigm. He is older and wiser than when the original event happened in 1975, more mature and reflective. This maturity and depth in the writer makes the book more interesting than it might have been if written by a younger Travis.

I was surprised to discover any good hardback copy of "Fire in the Sky" has become a collectors' item, and so you're unlikely to find a good copy cheap. If you can find (and afford) a good one, it's definitely worth buying and is an essential part of any collection of UFO/abduction literature. I give the book five stars because of its unique story, logical structure, informative and interesting writing, literary style and soul-baring honesty.


Postscript June 2010: I personally met the author in Snowflake in May 2010, and now have a copy of the new 2010 edition of "Fire in the Sky". This new edition contains 36 additional pages to bring the story up-to-date, a few revisions and corrections from the earlier edition, plus a new organization of the illustrations. The new edition is paperback but otherwise identical to the previous hardcover, and should cure the shortage and the high prices the book has commanded for several years - so now's the time to buy your copy new.

Travis in person I found to be as intelligent, principled, straightforward and 100% genuine as everyone else who ever meets him testifies him to be. He told me that, had he known what trouble the abduction was going to create for him over the years, he would have stayed in the truck instead of getting out to walk underneath the thing. He continues to live a quiet family life in Snowflake, never speaks about the event unless asked and wishes it had never happened.

This is excellent book, must read if you are interested
in studing of UFO and our Big brothers from Cosmos.

On opposite, the movie "Fire in the sky" is real disappointment,
since it does not reflect what really happened,
but rather shows those extraterrestrials as bad and evil.

Have they really been so cruel and bad as shown in movie
they would not let Travis go back, or even worst...
After all, it was him who approached the craft, nobody
pulled him out of the truck on that day.

The book is based on real event, and I highly recommend
reading the book, written by Travis Walton.

Travis had the misfortune to stand under an alien spaceship in the middle of the night and was contaminated by the anti-gravity force field of the ship. He was then taken aboard to receive a flush-out treatment, Hollywood later portrayed as a nightmarish experience. Correlated with what is known of the UfO phenomenom, there is no reason to doubt his experience. What I learned is that our alien brothers may not have complete control on where to land since they were unable to return him where they had picked him up. Incidents of this type are extremely rare and show how careful our visitors are not to be portrayed as invaders. A lesson in cosmic brotherhood is learned. As to why they come and visit us, this is altogether another story in need of a more profound inquiry before reaching any conclusion.

I saw the film version years ago and it scared the begeebers out of me. Thanks to the talents of Industrial Light and Magic of George Lucas fame, the aliens were granted the most sinister and dangerous depiction. Years later, still curious about Walton's story, seeing him keep up a web site and a modest speaking tour per year I felt it was time to fetch the book from the library and see if the book was divergent from the film or perhaps, better put, the other way around.

I read the first tense and amazing chapters of the book where the main story is told. Before I knew it the main facts as they are known were told and what remained was the rest of the book. In summation, 20% of the book is the story as Travis knew it and as he gathered from those other woodsmen who were out with him that day. It is actually a short story that covers all of 5 days, although to Walton it seemed a few hours. I was surprised about several things. That the aliens never once attempted to communicate in any verbal or mental way to Walton. That he was unsure of their motives and what exactly they did to him, regardless of the work that hypnotic regressive therapies revealed after the fact. What remains hidden is what exactly happened and to this day it would seem to haunt them all. That they saw a UFO up close is not without precedence, with many other sorts of up close sightings that stretch back to just after world war 2, when the modern era of sightings began. That he saw alien life forms is also recounted by many other people. What is unusual is the total lack of closure for the participants.

If there was some sort of accident and he was not supposed to get zapped by whatever it was that hit him, you would think he would told so in whatever manner by the aliens. That he saw two distinct types of aliens without knowing what they were or where they came from is frustrating and leaves so much unanswered. Did I think he hallucinated the entire thing? Not without explaining the eye witness accounts of the other 6 men, all of whom have not changed their story these many decades later. So, if some sort of close encounter of the 4'th kind happened to poor Walton, the event left so much dangling and unanswered that it remains a mystery, even now. Is it possible that a mental projection was forced into his mind so that he only thought he saw humanoids? In my imagination I cannot rule it out entirely. Possessed of superior technologies and perhaps advanced psychic abilities, it is not out of the realm of all possibilities that they projected a field around him so that these impressions were apparent.

There is iron clad evidence that strong EM fields applied to our brains can cause the appearance of strange sights, including seeing alien beings. Dr. Persinger, who works up in Sudbury, Ontario at the Laurentian University, has carried out many years of this exact type of research, developing his "helmet", which once on the test subject, who sits comfortably in a chair, an EM field is applied to their brains and voila, the test subjects seem to see things that are not actually there in the room. So, does that again mean that Walton hallucinated what he saw on board the ship, if in fact he was actually on a ship? Impossible to determine one way or the other. He seemed no worse for wear after he was let go, with a weight loss and dehydration seemingly the only odd thing about his adventure. That he also had a 5 day growth of facial hair seems to support the facts as they were known, that he was somewhere for 5 days and he was not able to shave or eat. What all of it means, no one it seems really knows.

The other 80% of the book I skimmed over as I found it to be one long tedious and as I say, over the top defense of his credentials and all the lie detector results. All of that part of the book sounds like he was desperately trying to preserve his dignity, as the many years of being called a liar and an opportunistic peddler of tall stories has obviously ground him down. I could have enjoyed the book without knowing all that and of how the film was made. What I was interested in is how the script evolved to represent a story on film that was in some ways quite different than his own version. The aliens in the film were as creepy as you can possibly believe. The one thing that Travis did say bothered him more than anything was being looked at by the ugly (my phrase) aliens, who had large bug eyes that seemed to have no human looks to them. Those eyes unsettled him more than all. Why they were so disturbing I'm not sure but he made sure to mention this quite a few times.

All in all, the book is interesting but the first 1/3 is the only part worth paying much attention to. It is by far one of the strangest abduction and close encounter stories I've ever heard. Asking whether one believes in the story is by now irrelevant. We were not there, there were 7 people in total (if I have my numbers correct) who saw the UFO up close. They also saw Walton get blasted. What we make of it remains as unsettled as the story itself. Very odd, spooky and weird.

Along with Betty and Barney Hill's story, the Rozwell incident, and the Area 51-Bob Lazar stuff Travis Walton's intriquing experience makes for some pupil-dilating, pulse-quickening occult reading. If it's science fiction, it leaves "2001", "Star Wars", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Hangar 18" and all the rest of them in the dust. If it's not...what is it? Did Travis tap into another level of reality? Or did he expose himself to a *natural* phenomena which electrocuted him, and caused him to wander around the Arizona woods in a semi-conscious state where his dream chemistry took over his brain for awhile?
Travis uses alot of space (printed page space, that is) to try to convince us that although he has a definite history of risk-taking and has a super inquisitive mind, he does not have the fertile imagination or the inclination to cook up such a story. He dispenses plenty of sentences in a defensive stance against the criticisms of folks such as Philip Klass, the noted UFO debunker. The final chapter is a tedious counterpoint to Klass' summation of the situation as...bunk.
The most interesting is Chapter 8, "The Aliens". It is absolutely fascinating; finely written. But it is revealed that these details originated in a question and answer hypnosis session.
That transcript, along with the actual interviews with his friends who claim they all witnessed the mysterious object's effect on Travis, is also not provided, and this technique (used effectively in Fuller's "The Interrupted Journey") makes up in riveting "realism" what it loses in literary quality.
On one TV documentary about fifteen years ago Walton came across as a very down-to-earth (pause) individual who sincerely wants the world to know that *something* happened to him in '75, and he's got many witnesses to that fact. He conveyed his message briefly and convincingly. Here we have a 170-page book running at 370 pages!
By the way, the color artwork is attractive.

The Travis Walton case is one of the most compelling experiences for the possibility of alien abduction. Numerous witnesses saw Walton surrounded a beam of light by an unknown UFO before he disappeared for several days. Walton was later found.

During and after the experience Walton and the UFO witnesses passed a lie detector.

This book details the Walton's disappearance and how this event affected his life.

Highly recommend.

There is no question that this is the real thing. I am not happy with the pictures, but much of what Walton says particularly his description of the aliens rings true. For those who want only the information on his abduction experience you might be disappointed, it is good but much of the book is about his and his crewmembers experiences resulting from the abduction. However, the story of an abduction only begins with the event. What happens afterward is often has more effect than the aliens. Read it all particularly if you suspect or know that you may have had a similar experience. What tipped me off, even though it rang true from the start, is his description of the aliens' skin, chalky white. The big aliens, unlike the little grays, have chalky white skin. Like the one that did a brain scan on me. However even though you are not into this kind of thing it makes exciting and revealing reading.

The Flying Fisherman. (about.com.UFO's and aliens)

What Happen To Walton that Day in Snowflake,Az, I'm not a big fan Of Aliens but I believe some things are unexplained. Creeps you out, did it really Happen? is there other things out there? Im not a Skeptic nor a big Believer but It's creepy.

In its day, this book about an alien abduction experience, was something of a shocker. In a nutshell, a group of young men working as lumberjacks drive home one evening only to be stopped in their tracks by a glowing object in the sky. They get out of their vehicle, Travis Walton gets beamed up, the rest flee. Back in the town, and without Travis, they have to explain his disappearance. People start suspecting that one of them killed Travis and so a missing persons/possible homicide investigation gets underway. The men are given a polygraph test - they pass, and so they seem to be telling the truth about Travis and the UFO.

Then Travis turns up five days later and doesn't look the best. He tells a story about an alien abduction and he becomes a national celebrity. It certainly makes quite an interesting read. A 22-year-old forestry worker goes missing, six witnesses passing a lie detector test, say that he was last seen with a huge UFO, later he turns up to tell the tale. For years this encounter was heralded as one of the most important accounts ever of a UFO abduction and it certainly had me fooled too. I was a firm believer, no doubt about it, Travis Walton had indeed been abducted by aliens and had enough witnesses to prove it.

You must read this book, but please note that a lot of new information had since come to light which has debunked the entire story. I refer to the articles "Profitable Nightmare of a Very Unreal Kind" by Jeff Wells (from The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 6 January 1979), "Ground Saucer Watch" Memo on the Walton Incident and "Fire in the Sky" -- The Walton Travesty by Anson Kennedy which can be found on the internet. Basically the lie detector tests where botched and Travis even failed a number of them. The person who conducted these tests was paid to never talk about them again, but he did. When you couple this with the facts that the Walton's have a UFO history and their original statements in the missing persons case are somewhat suspect because his family said that he would "turn up" because "UFOs are good" without expressing any emotion of loss and the refusal of the family and Travis to talk to anyone who doubted their story ended up with numerous researchers/reporters/investigators simply walking away from the case. The Waltons sold their story to the National Enquirer and it is not the same as how the events actually occurred. So basically the book is good and believable until you do a little more research and find that the story has been twisted and the participants in the story did indeed fail numerous polygraph tests. So it just goes to show how a little more checking out here and there can make all the difference when drawing your conclusions.