Plot
On November 5, 1975 in Snowflake, Arizona, logger Travis Walton (D. B. Sweeney), and his co-workers—Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer), David Whitlock (Peter Berg), Greg Hayes (Henry Thomas) and Bobby Cogdill (Bradley Gregg)—head to work in the White Mountains.
Coming home from work, the men come across an unidentified flying object on their drive home. Curious to learn more, Walton gets out of their truck and is struck by a beam of light from the object. Fearing Walton was just killed, the others flee the scene. Rogers decides to go back to the spot to retrieve Walton, but he is nowhere to be found. Making their way back to town to report the incident, the loggers are met with skepticism, as they relate what sounds like a tall tale to Sheriff Blake Davis (Noble Willingham) and Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner). They are suspected of foul play despite no apparent motive or knowledge of Walton's whereabouts.
After interviewing the men, Lieutenant Watters realizes there is a lot of tension between Walton and Dallis, leading him to believe this might be a murder investigation. The Lieutenant also discovers a tabloid newspaper in their truck with headlines about aliens, hinting that they used the article to concoct their story. The men are accused of murder and are threatened by Travis's brother Dan Walton (Scott MacDonald). The men are offered a lie detector test and take it. Dallis' test is inconclusive. After the testing is complete, Rogers is outraged to know that the results aren't shared.
Five days later, Rogers receives a call from someone claiming to be Walton. He is found at a gas station, alive but naked, dehydrated and incoherent. A Ufologist questions Walton but he is thrown out and Walton is taken to a hospital. Rogers visits Walton while in the emergency room, and blames the whole incident on Walton for getting out of the truck. During a welcome home party, Walton suffers a flashback of the abduction by the extraterrestrials. In his hallucination, Walton wakes up in a cocoon. He attempts to escape but has to deal with a weightless environment. After they discover him wandering around, the aliens drag Walton to an exam room for experimentation. Stripping him to his underwear and covering him with a rubber sheet, which pins him to an examination table, the aliens subject him to an extremely painful examination in which he is forced to endure a probe through his eye.
While interviewing Walton, Lieutenant Watters expresses his doubts about the abduction as merely a hoax. He notes Walton's new found celebrity because of the tabloids' attempts to profit from his tale. The film culminates with a denouement between Walton and Rogers. The closing titles state that in 1993, the loggers were resubmitted to additional polygraph examinations which they passed, corroborating their innocence.
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
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