Are you all familiar with Travis Walton's encounter? I recommend reading The Walton Experience, his book on the subject. Of course, he may be something of an unreliable narrator but I still do think it's worth perusing his accounts.
On November 5, 1975, a seven-man logging crew was working a job in the Sitgreaves National Forest. Among this group was 22-year-old Travis Walton. It had been a long day of work, the sun was dipping down out of sight, and as the land grew dark around the men, the temperature was starting to drop. It was time to pack it in for the day. As their truck rumbled along, the men noticed something peculiar: A bright light cutting through what should have been almost total darkness. As the truck got closer to the light, they could make out its source: Something was hovering in the air, about twenty feet above a clearing. It was a large, saucer-shaped object, emitting a high-pitched buzzing sound and giving off a bright light that stung their eyes to look at. The truck slowed as the driver, a man named Mike Rogers, struggled to take in what he was seeing. The silent awe inside the truck was broken by the sound of someone pulling the handle on one of the doors, and stepping out into the night. It was Travis Walton, moving almost without thinking as his coworkers watched in shock. Travis didn't listen, he kept inching closer to the lights.
Travis couldn't explain why he needed to get closer to the strange thing in the sky, he just did. Something in his gut was pulling him toward it, a magnetic force that he couldn't resist. It looked beautiful, strange, perfect and terrifying, lights dancing around in the clearing, something futuristic in the middle of an almost untouched forest. As he neared the aircraft, he wondered if it would take off, startled by his presence. But it didn't, it stayed right where it was. He kept walking, until he was standing right underneath the thing, looking up in an open-mouthed trance. There was an almost imperceptible shift in the air, like the crackle before lightning strikes, and then a blinding beam of blue-green light shot down from the ship, engulfing Travis in its searing glow. Travis flew into the air, knocked back over ten feet by an invisible force that tossed his body like a ragdoll. He collapsed to the ground, and, terrified, the truck full of loggers sped off and left him there.
A little while later, Mike cranked the engine, and turned the truck around. Finally, they reached the clearing Travis had wandered into. The ground was distubed where Travis had walked across it, and there was the spot where he had fallen...but Travis was gone. No corpse, no blood, no bits and pieces of charred flesh. Travis Walton had disappeared into thin air. He was officially declared a missing person, and a thorough investigation began. Local residents put together a search party, combing the forest for any signs of the man, while police began to suspect foul play. Naturally, suspicion fell on the six other loggers who had been with him that night. They were each brought in for interrogation, and were given polygraph tests to determine the veracity of their stories. But each man recounted the events the same way, down to the last detail, and none of them failed the polygraph.
They were eventually cleared of suspicion, and the hunt for Travis continued. Five days after he had first disappeared, Travis's brother-in-law, Grant, received an unexpected phone call late at night. He answered, and heard Travis's voice on the other end. He was calling from a phone booth in Hebrew, Arizona, and he had no idea how he got there. Grant and his brother Duane picked up a shivering, confused, ten-pounds-lighter Travis and brought him back home. One question lingered: Where had Travis gone, and what the hell happened to him? He sought help from a hypnotherapist to unlock the mystery of that lost time, and what he found was something no one could have predicted. He had been abducted, and kept captive for five days, by aliens.
It's rare for an abduction to include so many eyewitnesses, I find it so compelling! What do you think?
It can't have been the same Travis that came back...