Travis Walton - An Independent Witness

An Independent Witness

During the early stages of publicity for the film, Walton was contacted by a man who claimed to have been hunting with his wife in the same area where Walton saw the UFO. The man reported that they had seen a disc that shot a beam of blue light, then flew off into the sky. As an active military intelligence officer, the man said he had reported the sighting to his superiors, who told him to keep quiet unless Walton's coworkers were actually charged with a crime related to the disappearance.

Walton judged the man's story plausible, and notified Tracy Tormé, who had written the screenplay for Fire in the Sky. Tormé arranged for the man to undergo a polygraph administered by Cy Gilson, who had conducted the polygraphs on the logging crew nearly 20 years before.

Gilson asked the man two sets of questions: The first regarding the UFO sighting and the man's claims to being a military intelligence officer; the second concerning whether the man was colluding with anyone (specifically Klass and/or the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) in order to discredit Walton, and whether a military superior had indeed ordered the man to keep quiet about the UFO report. The man insisted his account was truthful.

Gilson decided that the man was lying about all his claims and, furthermore, that he deliberately tried to mislead Gilson and fool the polygraph. Walton speculated that if the man had passed Gilson's exam, his presumed associates would have stepped to the fore with evidence to discredit Gilson's polygraph methods and thus discredit the loggers who had early been deemed truthful following Gilson's exams. There was some precedent for suspicion due to Project Alpha, a 1979 effort by James Randi to use stage magicians to demonstrate that parapsychologists could be fooled by sleight of hand. However, in Project Alpha, the undercover magicians were instructed to admit their plan if asked directly if they were faking. This contrasts with the Walton case "eyewitness" who stuck to his story even when directly asked if he was lying.

Walton named Klass as a suspect in arranging the seemingly phony eyewitness, but Klass denied the charge: "I WOULD NEVER ENGAGE IN SUCH TRICKERY, KNOWING THAT IF IT WERE EXPOSED THIS WOULD RUIN MY REPUTATION AS A TECHNICAL JOURNALIST AND AS A UFO RESEARCHER. Nor would CSICOP."