ON THIS PAGE:
- Travis's story of what took place aboard the alien craft has striking similarities to Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction stories, both in the sequence of events and specific details.
- Travis may also have been influenced by other science fiction sources available to him at the time, including Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a flying saucer comic book.
"They were talking about it the week before... [Travis] would talk about what would happen if he got abducted by aliens.
Steve Pierce, UFO Classified Jun 24, 2022
Was Travis taken aboard an alien spacecraft for an out-of-this-world adventure? Or did his imagination dream up his incredible meeting with aliens?
Neither.
There was no flying saucer. And the tale Travis returned to tell was so similar in detail to a couple of Heinlein's stories, it seems more likely it came from Heinlein's imagination, not his own (perhaps unconsciously, if he'd read the stories years earlier).
Below is a side-by-side comparison with Have Space Suit - Will Travel, and some additional comparisons to Universe, designated [U], by Heinlein. This research was inspired by UFOlogist Karl Pflock who noted some of these similarities in his article in the Fortean Times (Jan 2001).
Neither.
There was no flying saucer. And the tale Travis returned to tell was so similar in detail to a couple of Heinlein's stories, it seems more likely it came from Heinlein's imagination, not his own (perhaps unconsciously, if he'd read the stories years earlier).
Below is a side-by-side comparison with Have Space Suit - Will Travel, and some additional comparisons to Universe, designated [U], by Heinlein. This research was inspired by UFOlogist Karl Pflock who noted some of these similarities in his article in the Fortean Times (Jan 2001).
The Walton Experience (1978) reprinted as Fire in the Sky (1996) - Travis Walton |
"Have Space Suit - Will Travel" The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1958) - Robert A. Heinlein |
"Universe" Astounding Science Fiction (1941) Dell paperback (1951) Orphans of the Sky, part 1 (1963) - Robert A. Heinlein |
A first-hand account of Travis Walton's abduction. |
The control room scene features a similar planetarium to Have Space Suit Will Travel. Excerpts below are designated [U]. |
|
Setting the scene: A 22-year-old "naive country boy" [his words], Travis, is out driving in the forest at night. He encounters a flying saucer. He gets zapped with a blue beam and wakes up aboard the craft... |
Setting the scene: An 18-year-old "country boy", Kip, is out walking in a field at night. He encounters a flying saucer. He gets zapped with a blue light and wakes up aboard the craft... |
Setting the scene: On a generation ship whose population doesn't know it's on a spaceship, young Hugh discovers an incredible spherical control room... |
In the comparison below, Travis's story is on the left, Heinlein's on the right. Regular font indicates direct excerpts. My bolding emphasizes similarities.
The abduction and waking up
The Walton Experience/Fire in the Sky - Travis Walton |
Have Space Suit - Will Travel - Robert A. Heinlein |
[Travis steps almost underneath the flying saucer and is struck by a blue beam or flame that knocks him unconscious.] |
[A flying saucer nearly lands on top of Kip, and he's knocked unconscious. He later learns the aliens have a "blue light" to achieve this. It leaves him "limp as wet string" on recovery.] |
[Travis wakes up fully clothed, thinks he's in a hospital.] |
[Kip wakes up fully clothed, thinks he's in a hospital.] |
The [ceiling] fixture was a luminous rectangle about three feet by one and a half feet... gave off a clear, soft white glow. |
There weren’t any light fixtures; the whole ceiling glowed [white]... |
The floor and ceiling were shaped like a slice of pie with the point bitten off... Three of the walls were each about twelve feet in length... |
The room was about ten feet across, four-sided but wedge shaped |
The metal of the walls had a textured, gray matte appearance, dull and nonreflective. |
[Kip describes the walls as being like "elephant hide"] |
The only sounds I heard were those of movements, and of my own voice... Nothing moved and no sound could be heard. |
The ship ached with silence—no throb, no thump, not even those vibrations you can sense but not hear. |
[Travis grabs an 18" transparent rod as a weapon and tries to break it into a sharp point] |
[Kip grabs a 5-foot pointy metal pike to smash open a door] |
Aliens
The Walton Experience/Fire in the Sky - Travis Walton |
Have Space Suit - Will Travel - Robert A. Heinlein |
[The aliens] were a little under five feet in height. [In more recently interviews Travis says they were three to four feet tall.] |
[The alien] was no more than five feet tall. |
[Travis specifies how the aliens are approximately human (before describing the differences)] They had a basic humanoid form: two legs, two arms, hands with five digits each, and a head with the normal human arrangement of features. But beyond the outline, any similarity to humans was terrifyingly absent. |
[Kip specifies how the alien is approximately human (before describing the differences)] He wasn’t human but that wasn’t what hurt. Elephants aren’t human but they are very nice people. He was built more like a human than an elephant... I mean he stood erect and had feet at one end and a head at the other. |
[Alien eyes] fixed me with an intense stare—a look so piercing it seemed they were seeing right through me... It was impossible to avoid their compelling stare. Those eyes were the creepiest, most frightening things I had seen in my entire life. |
[Alien eyes] They scanned. They scanned like radar, swinging up and down and back and forth. He never looked at you and yet was always looking at you. |
NOTE: Immediately after he returned, Travis described the aliens wearing tight-fitting blue coveralls. This changed to loose billowy orangish-brown coveralls, as reported in his book 3 years later and illustrated by Mike Rogers.
Control room
The Walton Experience/Fire in the Sky - Travis Walton |
Have Space Suit - Will Travel [HSSWT] and Universe [U] - Robert A. Heinlein |
There was a curving hallway about three feet wide outside the door. |
They carried me around a curved corridor, into an inner room [the control room] [HSSWT] |
I saw a round room about sixteen feet across with a domed ceiling about ten feet high. |
The ceiling was hemispherical [HSSWT] [The control room] was spherical, the interior of a great globe. [U] |
Equally spaced around the room were three rectangular outlines resembling closed doorways. |
“There are seven doors, spaced around the main shaft in the same bulkhead as the door to the Main Control Room. We’ve never been able to open them.” [U] |
The room was totally empty except for a single chair that faced away from me… I hesitated to approach the high-backed chair… There were some buttons and a strange lever on the arm of [the chair]. |
There was sort of a nest in the middle surrounded by what could have been a very fancy coffee maker or a velocipede for an octopus; I was glad Peewee knew which button to push... [HSSWT] In the geometrical center of the sphere Hugh saw a group of apparatus about fifteen feet across... The chairs had high supporting sides, or arms, and mounted in these arms were the controls [U] |
[disorientation] As I gradually approached [the chair], a very curious thing began to happen. The closer I got to it, the darker the room became! Small points of light became visible on, or through, the walls, even the floor. I stepped back and the effect diminished. |
[disorientation] He glanced away from [the control chairs] to the inner surface of the globe which surrounded them. That was a mistake. The surface of the globe, being featureless silvery white, had nothing to lend it perspective. It might have been a hundred feet away, or a thousand, or many miles. [U] |
The matte gray of the metal wall just faded out to be replaced by the glinting, speckled deep-black of space. |
Over me were star images, thousands of them, in a black “sky” [HSSWT] |
I thought: Maybe this is a planetarium-type projection or. . . Good grief! What if this is actually some kind of a viewing screen showing where this thing I’m in is? |
The ceiling was hemispherical like a planetarium. [HSSWT] “You weren’t looking directly at the stars at all, but at a kind of picture of them.” [U] |
My God, the sweet earth could be millions of miles away! |
facing toward me... green and lovely and beautiful, was Earth! [HSSWT] |
On the right arm… a square of approximately twenty-five colored buttons… The colors were bright, lit faintly from within. |
shining up through the surface of the chair arm [were] eight bright little beads of light arranged in two squares, one above the other. [U] |
I could see stars all around me… the effect was like sitting in a chair in the middle of space. |
It was suddenly not a floor we were on, but a platform, apparently out in the open and maybe 30 feet in the air. [HSSWT] ...the countless suns lay before him--before him, over him, under him, behind him, in every direction from him. He hung alone in the center of the stellar universe. [U] |
[Travis fiddles with the controls in the hope of finding a way out. He causes the starscape to move, but doesn't dare continue.] |
[Kip discovers the craft can't be navigated across the Moon to safety because they're missing a sort of key that slots into the nest.] [HSSWT] |
Humans and the base
The Walton Experience/Fire in the Sky - Travis Walton |
Have Space Suit - Will Travel - Robert A. Heinlein |
[Four humans are on board working in league with the aliens. Travis constantly asks questions of them, demanding answers.] |
[Two humans are on board working in league with the aliens. Kip constantly asks questions of them, demanding answers.] |
[A human takes Travis off the ship via an elevator/airlock, down a ramp into a hangar, through a door that opens like an aperture, down an 80' straight corridor with an illuminated ceiling, and into another room. Travis has described this as a "building" and a "base" in interview.] |
[On Pluto the humans take Kip out of the craft via a drawbridge, along a long elevated road, through a long straight tunnel with a glowing ceiling with door panels snapping open and shut behind him, through an airlock and into an underground base.] |
[The humans put Travis in a chair as he resists, and the woman puts a mask on him to knock him out again] it looked like one of those clear, soft plastic oxygen masks... The only thing attached to it was a small black golfballsized sphere. |
[A human forces a “big capsule” into Kip's mouth to knock him out again.] “Better swallow it,” he said. “You got five bad days ahead." |
[Travis wakes on the road, having lost five days.] |
[Kip wakes up five days later on Pluto.] |
Conclusion
Have Space Suit includes additional characters such as the 11-year-old girl genius Peewee, and two distinct alien species, and covers a much longer period of time overall (the final third turns into the Star Trek Next Generation pilot episide where humanity is put on trial) but if you strip the story down, Kip's experiences and movements inside the ship, and outside it, and even some of his thoughts, mirror Travis's very closely and happen in the same order.
In the Fortean Times (Jan 2001), Karl Pflock - a UFOlogist but skeptical of this particular case - points out the similarities to Universe and ends the article with this:
"Recently, I wrote to Walton querying the matter, at first circumspectly, then quite directly. While he responded candidly to other questions I asked, he completely ignored this issue. A follow-up missive has gone unanswered."
In the Fortean Times (Jan 2001), Karl Pflock - a UFOlogist but skeptical of this particular case - points out the similarities to Universe and ends the article with this:
"Recently, I wrote to Walton querying the matter, at first circumspectly, then quite directly. While he responded candidly to other questions I asked, he completely ignored this issue. A follow-up missive has gone unanswered."
Other science fiction influences
You'd think a real alien spaceship would look somewhat different from anything the most creative Hollywood production team could come up with. Instead what we get is aliens and spaceships that match the era, in this case the mid-1970s. Thanks to Curt Collins and Peter William Shelley for most of the ideas below.
Star Trek
Compare the color, shape, and buttons of Captain Kirk's chair with Travis's description of the control chair he found in the planetarium:
Star Trek
Compare the color, shape, and buttons of Captain Kirk's chair with Travis's description of the control chair he found in the planetarium:
"I hesitated to approach the high-backed chair... It seemed to be made of the same dull gray metal was almost everything else. It had a single leg that curved into the floor like the leg of the table in the first room. The chair was angular, with rounded edges. There were some buttons and a strange lever on the arm of it." (p. 140-41)
|
The medical device across Travis's chest sure sounds like this one from Dr McCoy's medbay:
"I felt something flat pressing down lightly on my chest. It felt cool and smooth... A strange device curved across my body. It was about four or five inches thick and I could feel that it extended from my armpits to a few inches above my belt. It curved down to the middle of each side of my rib cage. It appeared to be made of shiny, dark gray metal or plastic." (p. 129) |
2001: A Space Odyssey
Compare the buttons and screens in the cockpit in this movie to Travis's description:
"On the right arm, there was an illuminated, lime-green screen about five inches square. Under that, a square of approximately twenty-five colored buttons. I looked for symbols or written words and found none. The screen had a lot of black lines on it that intersected each other at all angles. The lines had short little dashes intersecting them at regular intervals. On some of the lines, the dashes were widely spaced; on others, there were many closely-spaced dashes. The buttons below the screen were arranged in about five vertical rows, with one color for each row: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The colors were bright, lit faintly from within." (p. 141)
Compare the buttons and screens in the cockpit in this movie to Travis's description:
"On the right arm, there was an illuminated, lime-green screen about five inches square. Under that, a square of approximately twenty-five colored buttons. I looked for symbols or written words and found none. The screen had a lot of black lines on it that intersected each other at all angles. The lines had short little dashes intersecting them at regular intervals. On some of the lines, the dashes were widely spaced; on others, there were many closely-spaced dashes. The buttons below the screen were arranged in about five vertical rows, with one color for each row: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The colors were bright, lit faintly from within." (p. 141)
Flying Saucers comic book
The April 1967 issue of Flying Saucers #1 (Dell Comics) featured a story called "Far Out Physical" by D. J. Arneson and Sam Glanzman, with several similarities to Travis's abduction tale.
The April 1967 issue of Flying Saucers #1 (Dell Comics) featured a story called "Far Out Physical" by D. J. Arneson and Sam Glanzman, with several similarities to Travis's abduction tale.
A man walking in the woods finds a flying saucer, is zapped by an alien's beam, and wakes on a table with something attached to his chest (see Star Trek reference above). The aliens perform procedures on the man beneath a hanging fixture.
"The [light] fixture seemed to be suspended lower and closer to me than to the ceiling... I was lying on was a raised table of some kind." (p. 128) |
The aliens are short, with large smooth white heads, don't speak his language, and wear orange collarless coveralls without zippers or buttons.
"A creature was looking steadily back at me with huge, luminous brown eyes the size of quarters! [with a "catlike appearance" p. 133]... Their thin bones were covered with white, marshmallowy looking flesh. They had on single-piece coverall-type suits made of soft, suedelike material, orangish brown in color... I saw no buttons, zippers, or snaps. They wore no belts. The loose billowy garments were gathered at the wrists and perhaps the ankles. They didn’t have any kind of raised collar at the neck." (p. 130-32) |
The aliens release him after what seems like 20 minutes, and he discovers he has missing time.
"the conscious period was - you could tick it off in terms of minutes or hours"... [I was in the control room for] "only just minutes" (Travis Walton with Curt Jaimungal, Aug 8, 2021) |
Read on...
Why did they do it? You'll never gue$$.
(c) Charlie Wiser 2021