The Travis Walton abduction

In November 1975 forestry worker Travis Walton was picked up at a phone booth in Heber, Arizona, days after a reported abduction, and later described being aboard a spaceship.

The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, published by the pro-UFO Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, reported that on November 5, 1975, around 6:15 p.m., Michael Rogers was at the wheel of his crew truck on a logging road through Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, some 15 miles to the south of Heber, Arizona. The crew had spent the day thinning trees with chain saws under a Forest Service contract. APRO names the crew as Rogers, Travis Walton, Ken Peterson, Duane Smith, Allen Dalis, John Goulette and Steve Pierce. Rogers, at 28, was the oldest; Walton was 22. Wikipedia puts the contract site and the reported abduction at Turkey Springs, about 12 miles south of Heber, and says the crew lived 30 miles away in Snowflake. Walton turned up days later at a Heber phone booth, then went to Phoenix with his brother Duane.

The Phoenix New Times said in 1993 that the fiercest critic of the case was Philip J. Klass, at the time a senior editor at Aviation Week, who studied it more closely than any other skeptic and argued against it in detail in UFOs: The Public Deceived, his 1983 book; the paper judged his case convincing. Michael Shermer wrote in 2012 that Walton passed a polygraph set up by a UFO group, but that Klass found Walton had chosen the questions. Shermer says Klass also found an earlier, unpublished test by Arizona examiner Jack McCarthy, who told Klass the result showed gross deception and that Walton used tricks like holding his breath.

The story reached cinemas as the film Fire in the Sky. Entertainment Weekly reported in 1993 that the studio found Walton's memories of the spaceship too vague and too like televised close encounters. Executives including Brandon Tartikoff had screenwriter Tracy Torme write a more lurid version, with Walton put through grisly experiments and chased by aliens.