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The incredible and terrifying events that unfolded on the evening of 3^rd November 1975 were to shatter the lives of Travis Walton and his six colleagues. As they drove home to Snowflake, Arizona, after working in the forest, the crew noticed a strange, bright light coming down through the trees. As the truck screeched to a halt, Walton and his colleagues were confronted with an awesome sight.

‘When we got around the trees, we all saw the source of the light - boom - less than 100 feet away, a metallic disk hovering in the air, glowing,’ Walton recalls.

His more cautious friends remained in the truck while the impetuous Walton leaped out and ran towards the craft. He did not want to miss the chance of seeing it up close. As he stood almost beneath it, his bravery left him. He turned to run back to the truck. He never made it.

Mike Rogers, the crew boss, saw a ‘blue bolt of energy’ strike Walton’s back. Panicking , Rogers instantly floored the accelerator and drove away. A few hundred metres down the road, realizing he had left his friend for dead, Rogers drove back, only to see the spaceship rise rapidly into the sky and disappear. Walton was nowhere to be seen.

Facing a murder charge

After five days and a massive police search, there was still no sign of Walton. But, just as the police were about to charge the crew with murder, Walton reappeared.

He was discovered naked in a phone booth on the outskirts of town, seriously dehydrated, delirious and half dead. Finally, after months of recovery, he was able to remember fragments of what had happened. He had recalled being taken a space craft. ‘I was lying on a table... I saw several strange creatures standing over me. I became completely hysterical and flipped out. I knocked them away, but I felt so weak I collapsed. They forced me back on the table, placed a mask on my face and I blacked out.

Telling the Truth.

What is significant about the Travis Walton case is that it is one of the few abductions observed by independent witnesses. It is also unusual because Walton was missing for five days. In most contemporary cases, the abduction experience lasts for only a few hours.

Over the years, sceptics have tried to debunk Walton’s claims. The rarity of abduction reports in the 1970's meant Walton and his friends were subjected to years of ridicule and accusations of trickery. Yet all the men subsequently passed lie-detector tests and the case has withstood years of rigorous investigation.

The abduction phenomenon, which is characterized by specific and highly distinctive episodes reported consistently by thousands f people from around the world, is generally a modern occurrence, confined to the post-war period.

The First Encounter.

Researchers now acknowledge that the abduction phenomenon began on 20^th September 1961. Betty and Barney Hill were driving through New Hampshire around midnight when they spotted a ‘pancake-shaped object with two rows of windows’ which appeared to be following them. Eventually, Barney pulled off the highway and crept to within 25 metres of ‘an enormous ring-shaped craft with projected fins and whirring red lights’ in the air.

Terrified, the Hills sped off, but moments afterwards, the car began vibrating. Then they heard an unusual beeping sound, and a haze seemed to fall over them. Later, when the Hills arrived home, they discovered that both their watches were two hours slow. They could not remember what had happened to them in their ‘missing’ two hours.

Afterwards, both were plagued by disturbing dreams. Eventually, they agreed to undergo a technique known as hypnotic regression therapy to discover what had happened to them.

Hypnotic regression allows subconscious or buried memories to emerge. Under hypnosis, the Hills described being taken onboard the UFO ‘by bald-headed alien beings, about five-feet tall, with greyish skin, pear-shaped heads and slanting cat-like eyes.’

Betty in particular provided a vivid picture of what seemed to have taken place during the period of ‘missing time’. She remembered being subjected to a medical examination. She said samples of tissue were taken and a long needle was inserted into her navel as part of what she called a ‘pregnancy test’. She was also shown a star map of Zeta Reticuli. Betty believed the aliens were showing her where they came from.

Abductee or Contactee?

The characteristic nature of abduction cases, which started with the Hills in the 1960's, contrasts sharply with the notorious and colourful events described by various people, known as ‘contactees’, whose dubious encounters with aliens filled the American tabloids in the 1950's.

The first and most famous contactee was George Adamski, who claimed to have been visited by various human-like aliens who gave him rides in UFO’s to Venus, Mars and Saturn. Adamski and other contactees were soon discredited, but their fabrications put the credibility of UFO research back years. It took until the early 1980's before first the UFO community and then the public were taking claims of alien abduction seriously.

Talking of Aliens.

In June 1992, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chaired the Abduction Study Conference. This was the first scientific debate on alien abduction and was an attempt to allow leading investigators to present their evidence and provide a forum for serious scientific discussion.

Attending the MIT conference were three of the world’s leading experts whose research provides much of the evidence supporting the alleged reality of alien abduction. Budd Hopkins is responsible for much of the pioneering investigations into abduction. Dr David Jacobs, associate professor of History at Temple University, has been investigating UFO’s for 25 years. And chairing the abduction conference was perhaps the most influential academic to join the abduction camp, Dr John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

One of the outcomes of the conference was the realisation that a huge range of different people had described the same type of abduction procedure, the same details about what they are subjected to and the same type of aliens involved. To abduction researchers, this was strong evidence that abduction is a reality. If alien abduction was some form of delusion, the accounts would be fantasy driven and thus differ wildly. Yet they all fall into similar and repeated patterns.

Under Alien Control.

When inside the craft, abductees are under the total control of the aliens. They are usually asked to strip, placed on a table and subjected to often painful and frightening types of invasive surgery. Once returned, most people’s memories of the events have somehow been wiped clean and cannot be accessed without hypnosis.

Dr Mack cites evidence from several of his cases. He says, ‘there are several types of physical evidence for abduction: people return with fully healed scars on their bodies that were not present the day before. Also, strange implants... are located on CAT scans; some have even been removed and studied.’

So far, chemical analysis of the implants show that they are made up of elements found on earth. A colleague of Dr Mack’s, a nuclear biologist, ran tests on one implant taken from the nose of an alleged abductee. The implant was not a naturally occurring ‘biological subject’ but may have been manufactured fibre.

Sceptics maintain that no reliable evidence for abductions exists outside the victim’s imagination. The area that receives the heaviest criticism has been the process by which the hidden memories are extracted using hypnotic regression techniques.

Unreliable Memories.

Kevin McClure, a member of The Society for Psychical Research, claims that many abduction researchers using hypnosis are not qualified psychologists. And McClure accuses those who are qualified of implanting memories. McClure also states that False Memory Syndrome (FMS) may be responsible for explaining abductees’ reports. FMS is a disorder where a memory has been created by the subconscious to replace some childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse. Sceptics of alien abduction argue that many abductees are subconsciously using an alien abduction experience as a screen to hide a traumatic experience from their past.

Artificial Stimulation.

Psychologist Susan Blackmore claims that abduction experiences can be artificially induced by stimulation of the temporal lobes. This theory was demonstrated by a Canadian-based research team who designed a device that generated a magnetic field that, when applied to the back of the brain, simulated an alien abduction experience in someone who has never claimed to have had one.

Albert Budden, author of Allergies and Aliens, has a similar explanation. He is convinced that alien abduction is caused by electromagnetic pollution. Budden believes that the electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere is strong enough to affect the temporal lobes of abductees brains, causing an alien-abduction-like experience. ‘It is clear,’ he states, ‘that all abductees are electrically hypersensitive, and that their experiences are a symptom of their allergic reactions to an exposure to electromagnetic fields in the environment.’

But none of these theories cuts any ice with researchers like Hopkins, Jacobs or Mack. To them, the evidence for alien abduction overwhelms any psychological reasons put forward by the sceptics.

Researchers are positive that Travis Walton was not suffering from any mental illness when he was abducted. Also, it is unlikely that all six of Walton’s colleagues would have had hallucinations of their friends abduction at the same time. And the lie-detector tests show that they believed what they saw.

Sources: The X Factor