At approximately 6:15 PM on November 5, 1975, a seven-man logging crew under contract for forest-thinning work at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in east-central Arizona was driving back to Snowflake after completing a day's cutting. Near Turkey Springs, in a remote stand of ponderosa, the crew's lead driver, Mike Rogers, stopped the truck when they saw a large golden disc hovering silently among the trees perhaps twenty feet above the ground, about one hundred feet from the road. Twenty-two-year-old Travis Walton, in defiance of the shouted warnings of the other men, jumped from the truck and walked toward the object. A blue-green beam of light struck him, throwing his body backward through the air. Convinced he had been killed, the terrified crew fled.
Within minutes, Mike Rogers and the others returned to the clearing. Walton was gone. They alerted the Navajo County Sheriff's Office, and over the following days a massive search was mounted by state police, family, volunteers, and deputies. No physical trace of Walton was ever found in the forest.
Five days later, on the night of November 10, Walton called his brother-in-law from a gas-station payphone in Heber, twelve miles from the logging site. He was dehydrated, disheveled, and suffering from what appeared to be residual confusion. In subsequent interviews and under hypnosis, Walton described waking aboard the craft surrounded by three short, bald, humanoid beings with oversized heads and large dark eyes. A tall man in a blue coverall then led him into a hangar-like space where other human-appearing figures performed an examination before placing a mask over his face.
Two of the loggers failed later polygraph examinations; five passed. Walton himself passed multiple polygraphs conducted over the years. His 1978 book The Walton Experience and the 1993 film Fire in the Sky cemented the case in popular culture. It remains among the most widely corroborated abduction events on record, involving six adult co-witnesses to the initial encounter.