Mike Rogers' ex-wife: A new perspective

Mike Rogers, crew boss and family man, and the sketch of the UFO he drew for the local paper in Nov 1975

Travis Walton is one of the world’s most famous alien abductees. His story has survived largely because of the six witnesses who have never recanted, including logging crew boss Mike Rogers.

Recently I corresponded with Mike’s ex-wife “K”. In 1975 she and Mike were married with four very young daughters and living in Snowflake AZ.

K is an eyewitness to the events following the UFO sighting and “abduction”. She volunteered her vivid, detailed memories along with a harrowing account of domestic violence at Mike’s hands. She has had no involvement in Mike’s UFO activities and was unaware of much of the research on this case or last year’s drama – Mike’s taped confession (which he then retracted) and revelations about Gentry lookout tower being used as the UFO.

Instead, K has her own perspective on the story – what she went through, what she believed or was told at the time, and the real reasons her marriage to Mike ended.

Headline in the local paper after Travis returned

K recalls that three of Mike’s crew shared a room upstairs in their home: John Goulette (K’s brother), Allen Dalis, and Dwayne Smith. K thinks Mike’s sisters (Dana and another) also lived in a second upstairs room at the time. Travis lived with his mother who “talked like a truck driver but I got a kick out of her.”

A quick look at the family tree:

• Mike Rogers was married to John Goulette’s sister K.
• Allen Dalis would later marry another of John’s sisters.
• Steve Pierce says he scored a “touchdown” with Mike’s sister Dana shortly before the UFO event.
• Travis Walton would later marry Dana (her second marriage after a shotgun wedding in high school).

“I was right in the big middle of that whole nightmare. It was hell.”

Let's revisit the events of Nov 1975 through K's eyes.
 
On the evening of the 5th, K was aware that the crew had not returned home as it got late. At 7:30 a cop came around asking for Mike, and half an hour later her brother John and some of the crew showed up. (Travis writes that Mike, Ken, and Allen had returned to the site with Sheriff Gillespie and other police, so it would be John, Steve, and Dwayne who came home.)

“I was in the living room by the fireplace and John came in and sat down by me," K recalls. "I asked where Mike was. He told me what he knew. I was totally shocked.”
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K says that during the night all of the guys woke up at different times screaming, including Mike. In retrospect she finds it “odd the way Mike acted when he woke up screaming.”

​K confirms the other accounts that while Travis was missing, the crew were questioned by county deputies who suspected Allen Dalis had killed Travis and the others were covering it up. Government investigators also questioned the crew and threatened her: “You know, whole families have been known to disappear.” She didn’t know what he meant but was concerned for her family and brother (John).

K describes herself as being “pretty brainwashed by Mike” during their marriage. She believed the UFO story and that the men passing their lie detector tests corroborated the story. (Three of the polygraph questions asked if the crew had harmed Travis and the fourth asked if they saw a UFO – hence they were able to answer truthfully and pass. Read more here.)
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When a local radio station “You’re On the Air” covered the ongoing search for the murdered logger in the woods, K angrily called in to tell them “the real story. UFO and all.”

“Then all hell broke loose.”

The town was inundated with reporters. The people in this small Mormon community began to ignore her or act “weird”, as they believed Mike and the crew were evil. They were “against the whole idea” of aliens.

Then, one of Travis’s brothers called Mike to say Travis had returned. While taking the call, Mike “looked like he was about to faint… like he had seen a ghost.” Again K found his behavior odd in retrospect. K thinks he went to meet with Travis and Duane immediately after this call, whereas Mike recalls he did not see Travis for several days (although the timing of this call is not clear – that is, when exactly Duane told anyone that Travis was back).

Reporters came from everywhere, including overseas, to interview the crew and Travis. One group of people “started chasing Travis in the living room because they believed he was some kind of God”.

Travis Walton failed to show up for a lie detector test for the sheriff after his return

Nightmare

In the years since, K says she has tried not to remember the “nightmare” of those days following Travis’s disappearance.

On this Alien Addict podcast (Sep 2, 2022), Mike Rogers claims Travis Walton's alien abduction ruined his life, giving as an example the breakup of his marriage the following year. K says their break-up was not related to the UFO: “He was mentally and physically abusive.”

She felt unable to leave because Mike threatened her several times with a gun to her head, saying if she took the kids he would kill her. When she did finally leave, he came after her with a rifle. Her boyfriend knew of the previous abuse and managed to disarm him.

She and Mike Rogers were Mormons, married in the temple, and she gives two reasons for their divorce: his abuse, and his desire to join the Church of the Firstborn, a polygamous Mormon sect in Mexico.

Years later: “I finally did outgrow his threats and go back to court and get joint custody of our children.” (The older ones had left home by then.) “His kids have very little love or respect for their father.”

“The incident was a hoax”

K told me that Mike told at least two of their children, a few years ago, “that the incident was a hoax” and that they pulled the stunt as payback because the crew “would smoke pot on their breaks”. I can well believe this was Mike’s motivation for agreeing to participate. (He may not have known that the National Enquirer prize allegedly motivated Travis.) With no knowledge of how the UFO may have been hoaxed, K believes it was based on Mike and Travis’s previous UFO encounter, which Mike says was in 1970. Travis spent a lot of time in the woods at his mother’s boyfriend's summer cabin (a few miles from the UFO site) and K tells me UFOs were sometimes seen there.

Travis Walton's story in the National Enquirer, Dec 16, 1975. The tabloid offered $100,000 for Best UFO Story of the Year. After failing their polygraph, he was paid $2500, and the crew split another $2500.

Witness Steve Pierce has hinted in recent interviews that he thinks Travis spent the five days he was missing in that cabin, and K assumes he was somewhere with his brother Duane. Travis has allegedly told producer Ryan Gordon that he hid out in the Gentry Tower cab with a forest service worker accomplice (who operated the interior lights and spotlight beam), five miles from the search party’s epicenter at Turkey Springs.

I have received a comment from one of K’s daughters, not one whom Mike spoke to about the UFO incident (they have not talked in 6 years). Regarding a possible hoax, she said: “If you have told a lie to the whole entire world then you owe the whole entire world the absolute truth, the whole entire truth, not leaving out a single ounce of detail, and absolutely for FREE.”

As for whether Mike might one day come clean, K assures me: “Mike won't admit to anything unless he benefits from it.” She calls both him and Travis egotistical, abusive, deceitful, “excessive compulsive narcissistic manipulators”, and says she “learned the hard way” that neither can be trusted. She is cordial at family gatherings but otherwise avoids them.

The Star article examining Travis Walton's hoax (Aug 10, 1976)