The Carl Higdon encounter

Carl Higdon, an oil well driller, said he met a being named Ausso while elk hunting in Wyoming on 25 October 1974, and was taken to another planet.

Carl Higdon, an oil well driller aged 41, claimed that he met a visitor from another world and talked with it on 25 October 1974, as he hunted elk in the Medicine Bow National Forest, to the south of Rawlins in Wyoming. His work crew had gone down with flu that morning, which gave him a free day in prime elk season. He drove south out of Rawlins with a new Remington Magnum rifle of seven-millimetre bore.

According to a 1975 account, Higdon aimed and shot, but the bullet covered only some 50 feet before falling. A noise made him look round, and he saw what he called a sort of man, who gave his name as Ausso and invited him along. Higdon replied that he supposed so. The man extended a limb toward him, and Higdon found himself sitting inside a see-through cubicle beside Ausso. He said he was then carried to a faraway planet and brought back to Earth. The story rests on Higdon's own telling, and its sources are of mixed standing.