#1597 - Travis Walton

**Travis Walton** (0:02)
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

**Joe Rogan** (0:04)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Travis Walton** (0:06)
Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
Hello, Travis.

**Travis Walton** (0:16)
Hello, Joe.

**Joe Rogan** (0:17)
Pleasure to meet you, man.

**Travis Walton** (0:18)
Well, pleasure to meet you. I'm a long-time fan.

**Joe Rogan** (0:20)
Oh, thank you. Well, I guess I'm a long-time fan of you, too, because I'm a long-time fan of your story. I'm a long-time fan of... I mean, you have... There's probably two of the most famous abduction stories, UFO abduction stories ever, Betty and Barney Hill and you. Those are the two ones.

**Travis Walton** (0:39)
Unavoidable. It's nothing I've ever promoted.

**Joe Rogan** (0:42)
Yeah, I mean, it's not like you asked to be abducted.

**Travis Walton** (0:46)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:47)
How old were you at the time?

**Travis Walton** (0:48)
I was 22 at the time.

**Joe Rogan** (0:49)
You were 22, and this was in 1975?

**Travis Walton** (0:52)
75, November of 1975

**Joe Rogan** (0:55)
So you were working as a logger? Is that what you were doing?

**Travis Walton** (0:59)
Yeah. The movie has a crew of five, but there were actually seven of us out there. And to me, the idea that people would want to deny that this ever happened is incredible, you know? You have seven people, all identical testimony, all passing law enforcement lie detector tests. This would have been adequate testimony to convict somebody of murder in a death penalty case.

**Joe Rogan** (1:29)
But you understand why people would be skeptical, right?

**Travis Walton** (1:32)
Yeah, I do.

**Joe Rogan** (1:33)
I mean, a completely unique experience that only a handful of people report that they've ever had ever in their whole, I mean, the history of people. How many people have a story like yours? It's so rare. Of course, people are going to be skeptical.

**Travis Walton** (1:49)
Yeah, I can forgive that. But you know, when they look at the evidence and say, well, never mind the evidence. Okay.

**Joe Rogan** (1:58)
What's interesting to me, one of the things that's interesting is you've never changed your story at all. So it's always been the same since 75 to today. Every time you've told it, it's always the same story. And also the guys that you were working with, you didn't even get along with all those guys.

**Travis Walton** (2:12)
No, actually, you know, that very morning I'd had a fight with Alan, you know, he was he'd gone out to my girlfriend's house and told her, dump that guy, come with me. You know, we got in a fight there in Mike's backyard, and he tried to do a spin kick on me and fell on his can. And, you know, Steve remembers that little set too there. So that's that scene in the movie where Alan cuts a tree that nearly hits me. That really happened to him.

**Joe Rogan** (2:42)
Wow. So they would have had incentive to say you're full of shit. And in fact, when you did get abducted and they told the police, the police thought that they had killed you.

**Travis Walton** (2:56)
Yeah, they were suspected of murder from the get-go. And that led to a lot of friction at the polygraphs. Alan's mom was telling him, oh, they're going to frame you. You're going to hang, because as far as they knew, I'd never show up again. Maybe a mountain lion ate me or something. So the idea that it was going to be rigged, and Alan was the fall guy, led to a lot of friction.
But it was something that they all testified. They were interviewed by separate deputies. But they were basically describing the same thing, but just interpreted. One guy said it was a foot-by-beam that hit me. Another said that it looked like a long blue flame. Another compared it to a bolt of lightning.
But they were all basically saying the same thing. In the movie, the beam comes on, holds the actor for a length of time, and then tosses him back. But it was, according to what they say, now, I didn't see the beam. I just was unconscious. I just felt this stunning force. And they said it threw me back, you know, 10, 20 feet. And one of the men happened to be looking in the other direction. He said, lit up the entire forest lighter than daylight. But hitting the ground, and I described that in the book. And immediately after this report came out, that we were professional skeptics determined to shoot the whole thing down, you know. This one skeptic on Larry King had two different versions of why you shouldn't believe it. One saying, in my book, I described hitting the rocky ground, and saying that the medical exam didn't show any bruises. There should have been bruises, he says. And then, on the very same show, he says, the ground was covered with a thick carpet of pine needles, which should have caught fire, they should have burned. So you can't have it both ways, but you run into that with people that are trying to build a case. I don't care if they self-contradict.