Abduction Junction

Last week I swirled around the alien language of the great movie Arrival and emerged with a new edit for my old tattoo. Color me human but in my world, the measure of the most meaningful thoughts and experiences are those that generate a tattoo. Lately most of my future ink ideas have to do with outer space because I mentally commute between here and there pretty regularly. Though I have to admit before I launch into this week’s topic that I don’t think aliens do this actual commute.

I obsess over deep space, always have, and specifically the alternate life forms that I believe are surely out there, so much that—ding, ding, ding—it’s time for another trilogy, All About Aliens. Week 2 of my extraterrestrial exploration has me recounting the gray day last year when I had the pleasure of attending the annual UFO Fair in Pine Bush, Orange County, and happening upon this oddly-haired gentlemen signing copies of his abduction book:

Who’s that with the bad hair dye and/or toupee at the green table? None other than Travis Walton, whose supposed real-life abduction inspired the classic movie Fire in the Sky of 1993, dubbed by some online as the “most underrated sci-fi movie of the last 30 years,” mainly due to its harrowing ending sequence of Travis (played by D.B. Sweeney) getting prepped for his alien exam in unbelievably tortuous fashion, which I won’t spoil but it’s a…lot. After a pretty normal small town drama spent navigating disbelief and the mystery of what happened to Travis for his missing five days via rocky marriages, precarious friendships, courtrooms, bars and pickup trucks, this sudden 180 degree turn to terror brought back flashbacks of that “Is it safe?” scene from Marathon Man and had me covering my poor exposed eyeballs. [You can watch the worst of it here on YouTube, though I don’t recommend it if you’re prone to nightmares or want to watch the full movie someday, which I found by borrowing the DVD from my local library]. Less triggering perhaps is hearing the real Travis (who I was too shy to approach at the fest) in a handful of interviews (like here in audio for two hours with Joe Rogan), examining the differences between his experience and its film iteration.

On Nov. 5, 1975, a group of young loggers (Travis was 22) were finishing their day in an Arizona forest when the men, who Travis said didn’t really get along, noticed said “fire in the sky” which they drove toward before they drove away in fear. They were in an area prone to lightning typically so at first they assumed there might be a forest fire whey they saw the low bright light. Travis was alone in his desire to run toward what resembled a metallic hovering spacecraft upon closer approach. He thinks he got knocked out by a force field and was lifted into the ship while his coworkers fled in panic, only to resurface five days later, naked near a phone booth conveniently, where he was able to call his sister.

In various interviews, he described the real life spaceship as more mechanical inside, less organic. He was not levitating outside the ship as shown and thinks the creatures were only trying to revive and repair him after what was an accident and not examine or abuse him as depicted. He also harbors no ill will for the abandonment of his crew (of seven not five as in the film) as he understands they thought he was already dead. In The Walton Experience original book of 1978 (later reprinted as Fire in the Sky after the movie), he describes easily fighting the aliens back with a beaker. They weren’t prepared for any combat and were quite passive. There were a few human-looking aliens who put a mask on him. The others more typically “alien” in appearance were hairless and small with huge eyes, grayish white skin, 3-4’ in height, and wearing, somewhat humorously, orange-brown overalls.

Travis clearly hasn’t become rich from this experience (bad hair, poly suit) but has rather gone through life seeming a bit miffed by the attention (as in this Phoenix New Times article which came out along with the movie release, describing him then as a woodcutter turned purchasing agent for a wood-molding firm). He is skeptical of other abduction stories and of alien travel in general but remains steadfast in his own only somewhat accessible story, after the help of hypnosis, defending it alone against the obvious attacks that it’s a hoax.

“If what they’re saying about the number of abductions is true, this is amazing,” says Walton, smiling slyly. “I try not to pass judgment on other things that are going on, but I do have to say that it’s my perception that there’s a whole lot of nonsense out there, too. There’s certainly a core of reality here, but frankly, this seems to bring out a lot of crackpots.”

Despite his skepticism toward the claims of other “abductees,” Walton grows vaguely hostile when the slightest shadow of doubt crosses his own version of the 1975 excursion.

The 2023 UFO Fair, of which Travis was the only living artifact served, attracted crackpots, tinfoil hatters, and thousands more. Other fun things from the fest included alien art (I bought a bunch of $5 framed prints from Similar Alien), all manner of neon “all I got was this lousy” abduction tees, a sorely under-participated costume contest, and interesting weirdos (who should have been corralled into the costume contest). Permanent fixtures of this UFO-prone town include the Pine Bush UFO & Paranormal Museum, which I’ll have to get to another time when it’s not packed with festival-goers, and the terrible Cup & Saucer Classic Diner, where the browning iceberg salad and soggy freezer fries are…out of this world.

Pine Bush, though not known for any of its own abductions, has a long reputation for being a magnet for supposed spaceship sightings since as early as the 1950s and with a heyday and swarms of people gathering in fields to skywatch in the 1980s-90s, giving it the name of “UFO Capital of the World” in this Times Union article. One such reported witness, in the same year the Fire in the Sky film happened to come out, was Bruce Cornet, geologist and amateur photographer, who captured some unique sky phenom pics in which an unidentified aircraft, too low and slow to be a normal plane, exhibits a change in light patterns where it stops and/or swirls at various points along route.

By the 2000s, the popular open fields of Pine Bush were getting developed and the sightings, and mass parking, were harder to come by. Much like how North Tarrytown rebranded itself as Sleepy Hollow from fiction and became Halloween-town when our massive General Motors car production plant shut down in 1996 leaving the village potentially destitute, Pine Bush has since “doubled down” on its otherworldly roots by creating a festival in 2008 which attracts almost equivalent to its population annually, hiring a new “tourism director” position, and opening in 2021 the UFO museum focused on the many reported sightings across New England and the Hudson Valley.

So what is it about Pine Bush that would, hypothetically, make it so attractive to extraterrestrial visitors?

Despite decades devoted to documenting the area’s paranormal goings-on, C. Burns [who runs the Pine Bush Anomaly Archive] and Linda Zimmermann [regional paranormal expert] aren’t quite sure how to answer that one. But you can’t be submerged in this world for so long without throwing a few theories at the wall. And these run the gamut, from alien-attracting mineral deposits on the banks of the nearby Shawangunk Kill, to the region’s large deposits of magnetite—a highly magnetized iron—and quartz.

“My theory is they’re fascinated by us and studying us,” says Zimmermann, “We study all sorts of species that we’re curious about, so that’s my best guess—they’re curious about these strange humans.”

Travis, all the way across the country in well-meaning Snowflake, Arizona, agrees in his Rogan interview that there’s curiosity, even kindness, driving his abduction—not malice—though he was “utterly traumatized” by it. What were they looking to achieve with their mission and from his specific if accidental encounter? He can’t say, but doesn’t want to share his murky story “to inspire fear,” but point to “the fact that I was returned at all as being significant.” Much like the aliens in Arrival were here to communicate not weaponize, he doesn’t subscribe to people being kidnapped and probed “willy-nilly.” If aliens had sinister intentions, “it’d be a done deal”—they wouldn’t be lurking and so sporadically, just doing.

These strange humans, meanwhile, seem to either really want to believe, or not at all. Next week I’ll talk more about the “Other” and explore if that mean us, them, or both.