Fire in the Sky. Very interesting UFO mystery. What do you think really happened?

TS, you are accurate that the Movie did not tell the true story. In fact, it only got one part of the whole story correct. The movie was right when it portrayed Walton as struggling financially before he was "abducted." Now while he has claimed he has "never asked for money" that doesn't change the fact that he made lots of money on the movie royalties, book deal, and subsequent interviews and talks. What really happened? A guy down on his luck found a clever way to make some money.
 
Hard to tell but dont every abduction case have similar recounts?
 
TS, you are accurate that the Movie did not tell the true story. In fact, it only got one part of the whole story correct. The movie was right when it portrayed Walton as struggling financially before he was "abducted." Now while he has claimed he has "never asked for money" that doesn't change the fact that he made lots of money on the movie royalties, book deal, and subsequent interviews and talks. What really happened? A guy down on his luck found a clever way to make some money.

If it was indeed a hail mary get rich quick scheme, you gotta hand it to the guy. I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would think something like this would actually work. You also have to hand it to the others involved and their dedication to keeping the lie going.

That is what gives me pause to completely write it off as a hoax though. The other witnesses involved who aren't/weren't cashing in(I think some are dead), never waivered on their account of events. I would imagine that someone would've become jealous by now and outed him as bullshit artist.
 
If it was indeed a hail mary get rich quick scheme, you gotta hand it to the guy. I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would think something like this would actually work. You also have to hand it to the others involved and their dedication to keeping the lie going.

That is what gives me pause to completely write it off as a hoax though. The other witnesses involved who aren't/weren't cashing in(I think some are dead), never waivered on their account of events. I would imagine that someone would've become jealous by now and outed him as bullshit artist.

I was reading above, and some skeptic had a fair hypothesis. Basically, Walton and his brother set up some flares and balloons in the woods. The other guys weren't in on it. They get there, Walton gets out and acts like something bad is happening. His brother speeds away with the guys in the car like they all need to be scared. They comeback later and Walton's gone. Now these guys really believe they just saw something terrifying.

I suspect that as years past they realized that Walton had pulled the wool over their eyes, but after years of saying they saw a UFO, it was too embarrassing to recant.

Also, I don't think Walton likely realized how big it was going to become. Like, I don't think he was thinking "Movie deals." He was probably just thinking maybe he could make a few hundred bucks doing an interview or two for his local papers and maybe get a few more customers for his logging business because they are curious to meet him. Finally, it may seem like a huge "hail mary" but Walton wasn't a particularly educated guy. He lived in small town, he was a logger, there wasn't exactly a lot of other get quick rich schemes available to him. He just needed a little notoriety to make a little money to pay off some debt.
 
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I was reading above, and some skeptic had a fair hypothesis. Basically, Walton and his brother set up some flares and balloons in the woods. The other guys weren't in on it. They get there, Walton gets out and acts like something bad his happening. His brother speeds away with the guys in the car like they all need to be scared. They comeback later and Walton's gone. Now these guys really believe they just saw something terrifying.

I suspect that as years past they realized that Walton had pulled the wool over their eyes, but after years of saying they saw a UFO, it was too embarrassing to recant.

Flares and balloons? I find that to be even more unbelievable than it being a UFO. I know people want to believe that rednecks are dumb as shit, but they aren't children. That would have to be one hell of an elaborate setup to fool grown men. Like Hollywood elaborate.

If it is a hoax, I'd imagine they're all in on it. I don't think questioning the validity of Walton's story is nearly as embarrassng as convincing people for decades that you saw a UFO.
 
If it was indeed a hail mary get rich quick scheme, you gotta hand it to the guy. I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would think something like this would actually work. You also have to hand it to the others involved and their dedication to keeping the lie going.

Yeah a part of me respects that. That's creative as hell. These days there's a whole market for this sort of thing. But in 1975 I doubt there was. He's one of the pioneers of that whole subculture.
 
Haha oh you gotta check this out! I got curious and looked up the release date of Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. It came out Nov. 15, 1977. Travis Walton released his 1st book The Walton Experience January 1, 1978. lol!

Pretty enterprising of Walton to ride the UFO pop culture wave that I'm sure Close Encounters created. 6 weeks after the movie hit theaters he releases his book. Clever. Scummy... but clever.


But then again the actual incident happened 3 years before that, in '75. So if he and his brother tricked the other loggers with some elaborate flying saucer stunt back then, then Walton was ahead of the UFO pop culture wave.
 
Flares and balloons? I find that to be even more unbelievable than it being a UFO. I know people want to believe that rednecks are dumb as shit, but they aren't children. That would have to be one hell of an elaborate setup to fool grown men. Like Hollywood elaborate.

If it is a hoax, I'd imagine they're all in on it. I don't think questioning the validity of Walton's story is nearly as embarrassng as convincing people for decades that you saw a UFO.

It's really quite surprising what the mind will conjure up when it is in a state of fear. Victims of crimes for example will often describe their perpetrators as much larger than they actually turn out to be. Social experiments have been done to demonstrate that eyewitnesses will often add details that were never present. Not because they are lying, but because as it turns out when your mind can't make sense of something, it will go ahead and fill in the details for you.

When people are shown this picture:

images


They report seeing one triangle laying over another. But there are actually no triangles in this picture at all. When you point that out to them and analyze it with them, sure they can see it in retrospect, but the first thing their mind does is fill in the blank space and tell them they are seeing triangles.

So here you have two brothers coming up with a hoax. They are driving through a dark, eerie forest at night with their unsuspecting colleagues. In the distance, they see bright ominous lights in the forest. Travis starts saying in the car, "OMG what is that? That doesn't look right!" His brother starts chiming in, "I don't have a good feeling about this. Somethings not right about this." By doing that, they would have primed the minds of the others in the vehicle. They would be nervous (which causes the brain to exaggerate potential dangers, like when you jump at a noise you hear in your house when you are watching a scary movie), and now their confused brains are ready to fill in the unexplained gaps. So when they see something they have never ever seen before, weird colorful lights in the forest sky, it doesn't matter if it is balloons and flares, their brains are already turning it into something for them and that something is scarey because their brains have already been primed to look for danger.

Finally, it's silly to say you are more prepared to believe it is a UFO. The principal of Occams razor says that the explanation that requires the least amount of assumption is A) the most likely explanation. B) should be ruled out first before moving on to different hypotheses. So the explanation I've provided does not fit Occams razor well because it requires a lot of assumptions. But it requires far far far far fewer assumptions than an alien race exists, they created interstellar space travel, they discovered Earth in all the vast universe, they came to some small wooded area in the middle of nowhere, and they abducted a human being. Of course it requires less assumption to say, perhaps human beings did something human beings have been known to do in the past, create a hoax.

BTW, have you ever seen the show UFO Hunters. In that show three "UFO investigators" investigated a UFO sighting in Morris Town New Jersey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morristown_UFO_hoax

After investigating, they concluded it was a UFO of massive size and couldn't possibly have been, as some suspected, flares on pipes with balloons. As it turns out, it was a hoax! And the hoaxers documented the entire hoax in process which they revealed later. So can some loggers in the woods be tricked into believing balloons and flares are a UFO. Sure, heck, UFO investigators can be tricked as well.
 
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It's really quite surprising what the mind will conjure up when it is in a state of fear. Victims of crimes for example will often describe their perpetrators as much larger than they actually turn out to be. Social experiments have been done to demonstrate that eyewitnesses will often add details that were never present. Not because they are lying, but because as it turns out when your mind can't make sense of something, it will go ahead and fill in the details for you.

When people are shown this picture:

images


They report seeing one triangle laying over another. But there are actually no triangles in this picture at all. When you point that out to them and analyze it with them, sure they can see it in retrospect, but the first thing their mind does is fill in the blank space and tell them they are seeing triangles.

So here you have two brothers coming up with a hoax. They are driving through a dark, eerie forest at night with their unsuspecting colleagues. In the distance, they see bright ominous lights in the forest. Travis starts saying in the car, "OMG what is that? That doesn't look right!" His brother starts chiming in, "I don't have a good feeling about this. Somethings not right about this." By doing that, they would have primed the minds of the others in the vehicle. They would be nervous (which causes the brain to exaggerate potential dangers, like when you jump at a noise you hear in your house when you are watching a scary movie), and now their confused brains are ready to fill in the unexplained gaps. So when they see something they have never ever seen before, weird colorful lights in the forest sky, it doesn't matter if it is balloons and flares, their brains are already turning it into something for them and that something is scarey because their brains have already been primed to look for danger.

Finally, it's silly to say you are more prepared to believe it is a UFO. The principal of Occams razor says that the explanation that requires the least amount of assumption is A) the most likely explanation. B) should be ruled out first before moving on to different hypotheses. So the explanation I've provided does not fit Occams razor well because it requires a lot of assumptions. But it requires far far far far fewer assumptions than an alien race exists, they created interstellar space travel, they discovered Earth in all the vast universe, they came to some small wooded area in the middle of nowhere, and they abducted a human being. Of course it requires less assumption to say, perhaps human beings did something human beings have been known to do in the past, create a hoax.

BTW, have you ever seen the show UFO Hunters. In that show three "UFO investigators" investigated a UFO sighting in Morris Town New Jersey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morristown_UFO_hoax

After investigating, they concluded it was a UFO of massive size and couldn't possibly have been, as some suspected, flares on pipes with balloons. As it turns out, it was a hoax! And the hoaxers documented the entire hoax in process which they revealed later. So can some loggers in the woods be tricked into believing balloons and flares are a UFO. Sure, heck, UFO investigators can be tricked as well.


Nice post, man. And I would add to what you said about their minds being primed to look for danger, these guys are loggers out in the woods after a 12 hour shift... is it possible they were smoking weed at the time as well? Yes it is. Walton passed a drug screen 5 days later, but were the other guys even tested?

tsoukalos.jpg


they coulda been this high ^
 
I've looked into the Walton story a few times and have listened to some radio shows where he was a guest. I'd need to go back and review the case to be able to offer any specifics, but after everything I've seen and heard over the years I think the case could be legitimate. There seems to be too much evidence IN FAVOR of the story to just write it off as a hoax.

That doesn't necessarily mean that every word is true. It just means that there may be some extraordinary core of truth.
 
So the explanation I've provided does not fit Occams razor well because it requires a lot of assumptions.

Exactly. I'm not saying it isn't a hoax. I'm just saying that version of it seems highly unlikely. Too many pieces would have to fall into place for it to be pulled off perfectly, and hold up for decades afterwords.

More likely scenario is that they're all in on it, and mutually benefitting from it in some way.
 
lol at anyone who believes this. some people just love beibg bsd to.
 
Exactly. I'm not saying it isn't a hoax. I'm just saying that version of it seems highly unlikely. Too many pieces would have to fall into place for it to be pulled off perfectly, and hold up for decades afterwords.

More likely scenario is that they're all in on it, and mutually benefitting from it in some way.

Although, earlier you were saying quite the opposite. You stated that the scenario that they are all in on it is what gives you pause to call it a hoax:

That is what gives me pause to completely write it off as a hoax though. The other witnesses involved who aren't/weren't cashing in(I think some are dead), never waivered on their account of events. I would imagine that someone would've become jealous by now and outed him as bullshit artist.

In otherwords, one hypothesis was that all people were involved, but you felt that seemed unlikely because someone would have said something. That was when I moved down the Occams razor to a higher level of complexity, because you felt their was evidence against the easist explanation. Only then did I propose an explantion of slightly more complexity. The slightly more being, perhaps it was a hoax, but only some of the people involved were in on the hoax. The additional details I provided were not my set in stone hypothesis, but just a narrative describing how such a hoax could be accomplished.
 
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OK I just finished watching this speech. It's an interesting and entertaining talk. The 50 mins go by quickly. And it's compelling, to me, from a psychological standpoint....but I DON'T mean that in a good way.

My impression: he's COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT. He doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. He strikes me as a pathological & downright shameless liar. I take back what I said a couple posts earlier about nobody wanting that kind of fame or attention....this motherfucker is an obvious attention seeker, and LOVES this attention. He also seems extremely petty, vindictive, and spiteful towards several people he's speaking about in this story.





Cliffs:

- He speaks somewhat more intelligently than I was expecting. He's not exactly an eloquent speaker, but he's better than I thought he'd be and the speech IS entertaining.

- He shamelessly promotes the hell out of his book, and says he is trying to get a remake of the Fire in the Sky movie made, to depict the alien events the way he says they actually occurred. This asshole even asks the audience to write the studio to let them know they want a remake made (yeah good luck with that).

- He's now come to believe that the alien craft was about to take off, and that's when the beam of light knocked him out, accidentally. He thinks it was like a circuit that his body grounded when he approached the disc, and the aliens took him aboard and put him on the medical table to help revive him. He says they were probably trying to help save his life.

- At first he speaks at length in great detail about the craft; how it looked; what the other loggers said when they saw it; what he was thinking upon seeing it; how it sounded; the beam that hit him; etc. That part was very interesting I'll give him that.

- After all this great detail, when he gets to the most interesting part (when he's fighting off the 3 grays from his karate stance) he then says he's running out of time, and fucking skips right through that segment as quickly as possible.

- THEN, after saying he's running out of time and blurs right through the part everybody really wants to hear....this motherfucker goes into great detail and length again, about some famous debunker who apparently pissed Travis off. He goes into personal attacks about the debunker, and even says through the Freedom of Information Act, he was able to dig up letters that the CIA sent to the FBI about whoever this debunker guy is, and he says that the guy was found mentally unfit for duty and says that is "PROOF" that the CIA is using the debunker guy as a government shill to discredit his story. (During this part of the speech Travis pegged out my bullshit detector so hard that it fucking broke).

- He says the youngest logger on the crew most certainly WAS crying and scared out of his mind when the crew got back to town and talked to the sheriff. Travis says "i'm not attacking his toughness or anything....but he was crying. Everybody saw him cry. He says he wasn't. But he was." He says the guy in later years denied crying and even came to Travis's house to fight him because Travis wrote in his book that the guy cried. Travis wants to make sure everybody knows this guy was most definitely crying. It's REAL important that people know that. (Travis comes across as a piece of shit during this part of the speech).

- He talks at length about the crew member crying. And that was AFTER Travis decided to skip right passed all the best parts about fighting the aliens off, due to time constraints.








Holy shit man I can't believe people like this actually exist. Travis strikes me as a total scumbag. This guy has a very used car salesman type of vibe to him.


Watching him tell this story, I have little doubt that the guy hoaxed all this solely to sell books and make a movie. And damn, I have NEVER seen somebody try to milk a story the way he is, for every single penny he can squeeze out of it. Just wow.


Good post, agree with you on Trav's character.
 
Although, earlier you were saying quite the opposite. You stated that the scenario that they are all in on it is what gives you pause to call it a hoax:

I said it gives me pause. Not that it completely discredits the theory of it being true. It also doesn't mean that because I think that scenario raises questions, I have to accept, or even lend an ounce of validity to your alternative theory. I think your theory is nearly as ridiculous as an actual alien abduction. Deal with it.

In otherwords, one hypothesis was that all people were involved, but you felt that seemed unlikely because someone would have said something. That was when I moved down the Occams razor to a higher level of complexity, because you felt their was evidence against the easist explanation. Only then did I propose an explantion of slightly more complexity. The slightly more being, perhaps it was a hoax, but only some of the people involved were in on the hoax. The additional details I provided were not my set in stone hypothesis, but just a narrative describing how such a hoax could be accomplished.

Type "Occams Razor" again. I dare you. I double-dare you, motherfucker.

Jesus. Somebody learned a new term this month.

I'm well aware of what you were doing. No need for the play-by-play breakdown.
 
I love that anything "aliens" has such a huge cult following in America..

This stuff has been loved for a long ass time now. Roswell, Men from outer space, early Sci Fi comics for kids... Its been apart of popular culture for some time now...

Personally I love aliens and abduction stories.
 
Yeah trust me, the aliens are still creepy. I believe they were puppets or something. Definitely better than CGI.

And seeing the movie now as an adult, the mystery and investigation parts are way more interesting than the alien part. They made sure to allude to several possibilities. Robert Patrick tells Travis that he's a dreamer...hinting that he is fantasy prone personality. Travis is marrying Robert Patrick's sister, and it's unclear if Robert Patrick is cool with that or not (possible motive for murder). They made sure to include that the Dallis guy and Travis hated each other. They made sure to include that Robert Patrick wasn't gonna finish his contract with the forestry service on time...and with Travis going missing...he has an excuse to not finish (another possible motive to hoax this). They also mentioned that newspapers would pay well for a story like that, and that Robert Patrick was behind on mortgage payments. The investigation part of the movie is underrated.


I think a poll asking people's interpretations of extraterrestrials could be very interesting. In a person's mind what does an image of extraterrestrials appear like?

Alien
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
E.T.
Fire in the Sky
Independence Day
Signs
 
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