Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - A Huge Alien Abduction Scam - The Travis Walton story

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Travis Walton claims to have been abducted by aliens in Arizona 1975. His story is later made into a movie called Fire In The Sky

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slash special offer. One night in Arizona, It's late. And a logging crew, they're driving back to town after a day at work. And suddenly, boom. They see a super bright light in the sky, shining down on them through the gaps in the trees. And the guys, they're all like, what the hell is that?

So they drive closer to the source of the light and they stop. And they're thinking, it might be a flying saucer or something. And one of the guys, his name's Travis, he jumps out of the truck and he starts walking toward the light. And he stands under the saucer right in the spotlight. And suddenly, pow, another beam. A light hits Travis and it sends him falling backwards and he's not unconscious. And his coworkers, they're still in the truck and they panic and they're like, oh shit, and they

speed away. Then, sometime later, Travis wakes up and he's lying on a raised table inside what appears to be a metallic room. And he notices he's surrounded by three creatures, aliens, and they're all looking down at him. And Travis freaks out and he jumps off the table and he grabs a cylinder object and he starts swinging it around hoping that they'll back off, and they do. Then Travis leaves the room through an exit, and he eventually ends up in a different

room, and there he meets a different kind of alien. This one actually looks human. So this humanoid alien escorts him to a different structure with three more humanoid-looking aliens, and they lay him down on a table, and they place a breathing mask over his face, and he passes out. Sometime later, he wakes up, and he's lying on the highway in the middle of nowhere, about 30 miles from where he was abducted. And it felt like he had only been gone a few hours,

but in reality, he had actually been gone five whole days. And he's confused, but he walks to the nearest phone booth he can find, and he calls someone to come pick him up. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Ray, an alien abduction story? Did this really happen? Well, to figure that out, let's back this up. So one night in Arizona, it's late,

and a logging crew, they're driving back to town after work. And suddenly, boom, they all see a super bright light through the gaps in the trees. And Travis, he gets out. And pow, a beam of light hits him and it sends him falling backwards. And his co-workers in the truck, they panic and they speed away. And about 15 minutes later, the co-workers in the truck, they're like, damn it, we shouldn't have left him. We have to go back.

So they go back. And it's really dark and they don't find anything. No Travis, no bright light in the sky, nothing. So what can they do? They alert the police. And police are like, uh, so your friend? got zapped by a bright light in the sky and now he's missing? Okay. So police go and they search the area and they don't find anything and they start looking

at these guys like they murdered Travis and are just making up this whole crazy story to cover it up. So then police require all six of these coworkers to take a polygraph test, which it's now known that polygraph tests are like total pseudoscience bullshit, but this is all happening in 1975. So I guess at this time police are still using them? So anyway, six of these guys take a polygraph and they're asked about whether or not they murdered Travis and five of them passed the test and one of them actually doesn't. Then a few days later, that's when Travis returns. He wakes up about 30 miles from where he was abducted and he walks to a pay phone and he calls someone to pick him up. And from there, they take Travis to a hospital and he's fine, he's not hurt, but of course

everyone wants to know what really happened to him. Did he really get abducted by a flying saucer or something? And so Travis starts telling his story and the media is all over this news because it's fascinating and kind of crazy. And ultimately he ends up taking two polygraph tests himself, one he passes and one he fails because again, it's total pseudoscience. Regardless, he's getting hit up by reporters. And the National Inquirer interviews him and his coworkers and they pay them a few thousand dollars each for their story, and this is actually a photo of them each holding up a check that they got. And then that story comes out, and boom, now they're all semi-famous. And Travis, he seems to be all about it.

Like, he's doing interviews, he goes on TV, he's speaking at UFO conventions, and he writes a whole ass book about his experience, and eventually that book gets turned into a movie called Fire in the Sky. And I'm not going to lie, when I was a kid, that movie scared the shit out of me. For real. But anyway, after all that, after Travis's crazy experience in that UFO for five days, his story becomes the most famous alien abduction story in American history. Until 46 years after the abduction.

It's now 2021. And Travis, he's much older, but he's still out there. He's talking about this. He's still speaking at alien UFO conventions. He even goes on the Joe Rogan podcast and tells his story. They came around. table and the three of them were coming towards me. And Bro hasn't changed his story at all, like he's still running with it.

But then, one day, all that changes. Because one of his old coworkers, this guy, Mike, Mike gets mad at Travis. Mike was the one who was driving the truck that night. Apparently there's a remake of the movie Fire in the Sky in some stage of development, and Travis was allegedly trying to cut Mike out of this deal. And so Travis and Mike they get into it, and Mike gets mad, like really mad. So, after all these years of playing along with this alien UFO story, Mike goes on Facebook one day and he drops a bomb. He makes a post saying,

I, Michael Rogers, hereby give notice that I am no longer to be considered a witness to Travis' alien supposed abduction story. And then he later clarifies in a reply comment saying, I don't believe Travis is an honest person, and therefore I want nothing to do with him. Not only that. At some point, Mike is on a phone call with a movie producer who's working on some other movie project about Travis's abduction. And on this call, Mike doesn't know he's being recorded and he admits the whole thing was a hoax. Because creating a UFO hoax, okay? Yeah. I don't know how. What you're saying is, you and Travis together hoaxed this. Yeah. I mean, Travis's brother, Wayne helped him. Now, to be fair, later, Mike tries to walk back that explanation. But unfortunately, Unfortunately, it's too late, he already admitted it was all fake on recording.

And so UFO nerds everywhere hear this news and they're like, no, it can't be! We thought it was real! So how did these two unassuming logger guys from Arizona fake a whole ass UFO abduction? Well, they've never gone into detail about how they faked it, but here are some leading theories that I sort of like pieced together. So all of his life, Travis has always been sort of a UFO enthusiast. He talks openly about seeing flying saucers and about wanting to be abducted by aliens. And he's also apparently a known prankster and bullshitter.

And one day, back in 1975, he and Mike, they get an idea to pull off this UFO hoax and prank everyone, including some of the other co-workers who were in the truck. They allegedly weren't in on this. And the theory is that they had someone with a spotlight sitting up in a lookout tower. And lookout towers sit above the trees and they look like, this and when it's dark you can't really see them and there actually just happens to be a well-known lookout tower in that area that Travis was abducted in and so anyway they're driving home that night and they have another friend in the lookout tower shine the spotlight down on them in the truck

and they stop the truck and Travis gets out to investigate while Mike who's driving the truck he pretends to freak out and this freaks all the other co-workers out and Mike drives away Because remember, none of the other co-workers said they saw a flying saucer specifically. They said they saw a bright light in the sky, which technically they did. Likely, a light in a lookout tower. And as far as the whole Travis meeting aliens part, I mean, there were no witnesses to that other than Travis himself. So that makes it easy to just make that up. So apparently it was all fake.

Sorry, UFO nerds.