TRAVIS WALTON DESTROYS THE LATEST FALSE ATTACK:
A REPEATED INTERNET RUMOR
IN REBUTTAL
BY
TRAVIS WALTON
Author of “Fire In The Sky”
(Copyright 2016, Travis Walton – All Rights Reserved)
<Edited by Robert D. Morningstar>
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Someone, saying they were a former Snowflake resident who went to school with my son and his cousins, has gone on internet forums like IMDb claiming to be a nephew of the 1975 Navajo County Sheriff and having the “inside story” (from his uncle) claiming that it was all a hallucination.
I will prove here that this person claiming that the Navajo County Sheriff was his uncle is a complete fraud. This isn’t the first person to try to gain status by claiming a connection to someone near the center of this incident. Even persons taking a supportive position do it by claiming to be a coworker, an ex-girlfriend, a close school chum, or even a relative.
One “pro-Travis” guy claimed to have attended a homecoming party after my return — problem is, that party was a story device for the movie and never really happened. One staunch supporter claims that my first call for help from that phone booth went to him, then the desperate call to my family came after that.
Problem is, the operator listened in on the call to my family and reported it to the Sheriff, and there was only one call made that night.
Another man bragged to the other sawyers in the chainsaw shop about how well he knew Travis and Mike,
Unfortunately Mike was standing right there, not even recognized. The first imposters came out from under the rocks before I was ever returned, one claiming to be my wife, two years before I married. One pretended to be me and called a radio talk show. The bias of skeptics is that they are never skeptical of THESE claims. One non-relative with the same last name is making a career of claiming to be my cousin and, absurdly, that these entities were really after him and grabbed me by mistake!
There are so many statements in “County Sheriff’s nephew’s” in a post (on UFO Updates) that can easily be proven false. Public documents, simple facts and verifiable records contradict his ridiculous claims.
In the first place, Sanford “Sank” Flake was NEVER the county sheriff. The basis of all his claims begin with this lie. The Navajo County Sheriff, during all of those years, was Marlin Gillespie. Sank was town marshal only, with no principle role in the investigation.
The night of the incident, the crew met with Sheriff Gillespie and his deputies at a service station closed for the night, and never went to any diner. There was no “Red Robin diner” in Heber in 1975. The first Red Robin opened 18 years later — in Pennsylvania!
The bogus “nephew” changed his claim to the “Red Onion Lounge”, but even that didn’t opened in Heber until 1995, twenty (20) years after the UFO incident.
Therefore, all those things supposedly said by the crew to the diners and by the diners are pure fiction. The incident did not occur at Young, AZ, which is many miles to the west of the Turkey Springs contract. The crew did not drink alcohol at all that day or any other work day. Alcohol was not allowed on the job. The Sheriff was asked about intoxication and told newsmen:
“I sat in their truck a short time after it happened and talked to each one for a long time. I sure didn’t spot anything — and I was looking.”
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A sequence from the movie Fire In The Sky:
Fire In The Sky alien sequence . – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsjhdoWKtXM
When attacking UFO reports the chief “debunker” attacking this case always first digs into every possible aviation and astronomical alternative explanation. He absurdly tried using the planet Jupiter, but never suggested Air Force helicopter maneuvers. In all our years working in the woods, we never saw any Air Force helicopters.
No one could possibly mistake a helicopter for a glowing metallic disc hovering less than a hundred feet away. Chopper blades would have hit the trees, to say nothing of the huge down blast of air and the unmistakable, familiar sound. Ridiculous!
The blue beam of energy was a powerful, momentary blast that one crewman described as “the brightest thing I’ve ever seen in my life” and in no way looked like a helicopter’s spotlight.
“The Brightest Thing I’ve EVER Seen In My LIFE!”
My books about this were published in 1977, 1996 and 2010, and the debunkers have never contested the basic facts; like who was sheriff, where the crew lived, where they met Gillespie, etc.
Allen Dalis did NOT live in Concho. Dalis lived in Snowflake, like every other man on that crew. Concho is not 5 miles from Snowflake! It is actually 30 miles east of town. And the job was 45 miles west. It would not be practical to travel 150 miles per day to work at Turkey Springs. I would bet that every crewman’s home was visited by lawmen during the time I was missing. It would be dumb to think that would be overlooked while a massive manhunt was underway. That’s Ridiculous!
I did not socialize with Allen off the job and don’t recall ever going inside his residence at all. It is not true that Dalis did not help in the search. He also went back again that night with the Sheriff.
I, Mike and my sister never rode together in any police car at any time in those years. MIke went back to the site that night with the Sheriff, but neither my sister nor I ever rode in a police car at all in connection with the UFO incident. I would be surprised if my sister has ever been in one in her life. That whole tale about a ride to Concho was pure fiction.
It is NOT true that Mike went back alone that night. That was movie fiction. You can’t drink and do that dangerous work.
The incident happened minutes after work ended, and the crew went back minutes after the incident. There wasn’t time to get passing out drunk. This was covered in lie detector tests.
In real life, I did not spend a single night in the hospital after the incident, that was the movie. As written in his report, the doctor who examined me did NOT discover “dirty needle marks” on my stomach and eye. The physician said that the “2 mm red spot” on my arm was “not over any major blood vessel”, which rules out the drug injection theory, even without the clean report the doctor got back after putting my blood and urine samples through the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s drug screen, which showed no trace of any drug in my body. However, even more conclusive (on that tired old drug theory) is the fact that at least 2 of the 5 or 6 polygraph tests I passed asked about any drug involvement. And of course no one thought to ask:
“How could 7 men have the same hallucination?”
It is not true that the fake nephew’s scenario is “common knowledge” in Snowflake. I’ve never heard it anywhere, but from the “non-nephew.” It is not true that I have never done any interviews in this town, and plenty of interviewers went down town to ask questions of townspeople. There’s plenty of skepticism, but never has any local citizen ever alleged the scenario claimed by the “not really the county sheriff’s nephew'”. Not one, single debunker or lawman has ever disputed the fact that all 6 crewmen went back that night.
The actual polygraph questions are a matter of record and do not remotely resemble what the “non-nephew states.” Skeptic though Sank is, he doesn’t back any of this crap and, when I asked him, could not identify who the claimed nephew was. If he had possessed any knowledge of me being “stoned out of my mind at Dalis’s house”, there’s not the slightest doubt he would have acted on it.
In 1975 he had offered theories to try to explain it away, but nothing like this nonsense. Neither my son nor either of his cousins could figure out who this “dearest friend” and classmate is, even after searching the school year book. Ken Peterson verifies that his family never owned any “dome shaped house” in Concho. I really should start suing these phonies for libel, slander and defamation of character. In my book, I take each and every charge leveled by the debunkers and, by citing independently verifiable documents and statements by experts, prove their case to be just the sort of sham(s) the “not really the County Sheriff’s nephew” has posted all over the internet.
Six persons, testifying in an American court of law (even without polygraph tests) that they had witnessed a murder would result in a justifiable death penalty conviction without a backward glance. Yet when a UFO is involved, the doubt seems never to be put to rest. Granted, there is a small % (pecentage) of error to polygraph in general, but Edward Gelb, the president of the American Polygraph Association stated about this incident:
“The odds against six people successfully deceiving a trained examiner on a single issue are over a million to one.”
But now the number of properly conducted tests on this single issue total 16 passed tests. And, 35 years later, all seven crewmen stand by their earlier testimonies to this day.
Travis Walton
Snowflake, Arizona
USA
October 15, 2016
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