Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  When the film was released, Carmen Reed was interviewed on a number of different news talk shows, and she claimed that she had “always” been sensitive to spirits.20 Carmen Reed now markets herself as a “Spiritual Advisor” and has a website advertising her abilities and retelling her story in the Southington house. “As an intuitive child, I always had an imaginary friend named Jaco. He was and still is my spiritual guide. I could always see into someone’s spirit and know whether they were good or evil. The priests call that the gift of discernment. I always look for the good, in most there is more good than evil, but sadly that is not true for all people.”21 Naturally, such an assertion begs the question of why it took her son being placed in a psychiatric institution before she was aware of any demonic or spiritual activity in the home (though she does claim that she can use her “gift” at will and often does not).

  Perhaps the only “truth” touched upon by the Snedekers’ story as told in the book, In a Dark Place, has to do with Carmen’s concern for her son’s new friend and his sudden interest in heavy metal music. At the time of the supposed haunting of the Southington house, the nation was awash in fears of satanic cults and the influence of Satanism in heavy metal music. Known as the satanic panic, parents feared that their children were being led down destructive paths through listening to this new form of music. Rumors of Ozzy Osborne biting the head off a bat at a concert and reports of teenagers committing suicide or murder under the influence of these musicians spread rapidly across the nation. Likewise, these fears were projected in the story of the Snedeker haunting. Carmen laments Philip’s new friend “Cody,” whose parents aren’t home very much and who introduces Philip to heavy metal music. Under Cody’s influence, Philip begins to listen to the music day and night, reading heavy metal rock magazines and isolating himself from the family. “By Christmastime, Stephen [Philip] had obtained a battered old leather jacket on the back of which he put a skull and crossbones and the logo of some heavy-metal group that combined an upside-down cross with a bloody dagger.”22 This was the quintessential image of what every parent in the 1980s feared: their child increasingly isolated, increasingly rebellious, and spurred on by music that celebrated Satan. During the eighties, the fear of your child becoming a Satan-worshipping monster was in the back of every concerned, middle-class, suburban parent’s mind. In the book, that is eventually what Philip becomes—a loner, listening to satanic music, who eventually makes a deal with the devil and gives himself over to the evil presence lurking in the basement and eventually goes on to sexually attack his own cousin and succumbs to insanity. “Stephen [Philip] was his own company. He stayed downstairs when he was home, the electric squeals of his heavy-metal music muffled by the closed and latched doors. Sometimes he could be heard, alone in his room, laughing…”23

  Each time the story is retold we are driven further from the truth. Garton claims to have made up a large portion of the book In a Dark Place. For an author of Garton’s talents, the book is poorly and hastily written, similar to Jay Anson’s rendering of The Amityville Horror. The film The Haunting in Connecticut deviates even further from the truth by adding séances, bodies hidden in walls, priests, and a fire that destroys the house. The Haunting in Connecticut is the grossest rendering of Hollywood truth to date. The assertion of truth in the film amounts to a family who said they once lived in a haunted house, and nothing more. To that end, Hollywood could probably make any haunted house story a “true story” because there is no limit of people who claim to have had experiences in a haunted house. However, the Southington house had gained a bit of fame in the 1980s when the story was first reported in the papers; then the book was written and the family began to make the rounds on the talk show circuits. With the story having been told to the media in the past, the film appeared to have a stronger base in reality, but that reality was not reflected in the film. It deviated so far from the story that it is more fiction than fact. Given Garton’s damning testimony that he made up much of the book because the family couldn’t keep their story straight, it would appear that even the “true” story is a far cry from reality.

  FIRE IN THE SKY

  On November 5, 1975, Travis Walton was reported missing in the small town of Heber, Arizona. He was reported missing by his friends and coworkers who had been working with him that day on the Mogollon Ridge of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. They were loggers assigned to thinning the mountains under a Forest Service contract that would allow for better growth, watershed, and land usage. Although Travis was reported missing, he was not reported lost or injured; rather, the six men with him that day reported that he had been abducted by a flying saucer. What happened after that became national news and sparked a multiday search; it also became one of the best-documented and most controversial UFO abduction cases in history, and in 1993 became the film Fire in the Sky.

  But first, it began as a real incident. Here are the facts of the incident. On November 5, Travis Walton was reported missing. The six men who reported him gone—Allen Dalis, John Goulette, Dwayne Smith, Kenneth Peterson, Steve Pierce, and Mike Rogers—claimed that a UFO had struck Walton with a “ray.” The Associated Press reported on November 11, 1975, “Walton disappeared last Wednesday after leaving work with six other woodcutters in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. His six companions said Walton jumped from their truck when he saw a light overhead and followed it down the forest road. Moments later, the men said, the light ray struck him and he vanished.”24 The men’s explanation was obviously met with skepticism from authorities; an immediate search of the mountain range began, but no trace of Walton was found. The men were all subjected to a lie detector test administered by Cy Gilson, which they all passed with the exception of Allen Dalis, who angrily quit the lie detector test halfway through, therefore rendering the results inconclusive.

  The men were largely suspected of murdering Walton; however, five days after the incident Travis Walton called his brother Duane from a payphone outside Heber, Arizona. Walton was taken to his brother’s home in Phoenix, but not before contacting Ground Saucer Watch—a UFO research organization that had approached Duane and warned him of possible dangers coming from the government and shadowy organizations. However, upon making contact with GSW, the Waltons decided that the organization was a sham and returned to Duane’s house. Travis’s brother “fended off the media by telling them I had been taken to a hospital in Tucson.”25

  Walton then began to work with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) with financial backing from the National Enquirer. APRO and the National Enquirer funded the testing by doctors and psychologists to evaluate Walton’s condition. Travis met with the local sheriff who had originally been given the report on November 11 and sat down with reporters from the National Enquirer on November 13. Travis claimed that he had been held against his will on a UFO and examined by creatures. “I looked frantically around me. There were three of them! Hysteria overcame me instantly. I struck out at the two on my right, hitting one with the back of my arm, knocking it into the other one … The one I touched felt soft through the cloth of its garment. The muscle of its puny physique yielded with a sponginess that was more like fat than sinew.”26 Travis claimed that while aboard the UFO, he had been able to move around the craft and encountered two “humans”—a man and a woman—and at one point found himself in a room in which he could see nothing but stars and could control the rotation of the craft by the use of a device.

  Travis originally scheduled a lie detector test with Cy Gilson but abandoned the appointment. Instead, Walton was administered a polygraph under the guidance of Dr. James Harder, one of APRO’s scientists and a professor of civil engineering at the University of California. The results were inconclusive; “The theory behind a lie detector is that people register stressful physiological responses when they lie. He noted that I was still extremely agitated when talking about my experience. He counseled that, if a test was performed, the results should not be taken too seriously.”27


  However, Travis was given a polygraph at a later date by Cy Gilson and passed. All seven men were given a polygraph before the release of the film Fire in the Sky nearly 20 years later and, once again, all passed, including Allen Dalis, whose results had originally been inconclusive. That is where the indisputable facts end; Travis was reported struck by a beam of light from a flying saucer by his six coworkers and subsequently disappeared, a five-day search of the mountains involving helicopters, men on horseback, and vehicles found no trace of him, Travis reappeared on November 10 claiming that he had been taken against his will aboard a UFO, and all seven men, for all intents and purposes, passed multiple polygraph tests. But for many, this does not equal the truth, and Walton’s experience to this day is highly controversial and derided by skeptics offering any number of theories that range from LSD-induced psychosis to a hoax engineered by Mike Rogers in order to get out of his logging contract. Walton was personally attacked by any number of skeptics.

  While we accept that “based on a true story” entails undisputed facts mixed with personal accounts which can generally not be verified, how does the film Fire in the Sky stand up to the actual story?

  First and foremost, there are people missing from the film. Fire in the Sky only has five other workers with Walton, whereas in reality there were six. Ken Peterson refused to sign the permissions to be portrayed on film and the studio went ahead with the filming without him. They also cut out Walton’s brother-in-law, Grant, who originally received the phone call from Walton and left out Walton’s eldest brother, Don, in favor of the intimidating Duane. The film only lightly touched upon Travis’s strange experience with GSW in a short scene right after he is picked up by his brother Duane and his girlfriend, and it left out much of the story of the National Enquirer’s involvement as well as the involvement of APRO, which are considered to be some of the most controversial parts of Walton’s story. Obviously, being backed by the National Enquirer, a national tabloid known for its sensationalism and occasional fiction, would stir suspicion of a hoax for monetary gain and fame. Of course, a film must be cut for length purposes, but it would seem that this would be an important aspect to leave uncut. The film also portrays the men as being pushed by law enforcement into taking a polygraph test to prove their story and their innocence, when it was the men who actually requested a polygraph, knowing full well that no one would believe their story. The majority of the film rests largely on the ambiguity of whether or not Travis was abducted by aliens or murdered, so skewing of the motivations for the polygraph may have been a tool for building suspense in the film. Many people in 1995 were probably unaware of Walton’s story, so the murder suspicion was a useful vehicle for the plotting of the film.

  However, the film does not completely buy Travis’s story and there are many allusions and knowing nods to the skeptics’ arguments. Firstly, there is the tabloid that the sheriff finds in the workers’ truck. Some skeptics claim that Walton was fascinated with UFOs and that recent television programs depicting true stories of alien abductions had led him to commit a hoax for the fun of it. Most notably was the 1975 made-for-TV movie The UFO Incident, based on the story of Betty and Barney Hill and starring James Earl Jones. Skeptics also support this idea due to the ease with which Travis’s mother accepted the story and believed that aliens had taken Travis. The skeptics’ viewpoint is largely represented by James Garner’s character, Sheriff Frank Watters, who is never convinced of the UFO story.

  But it is not the small things left out or the little things placed in the film that differentiate it from the “true story”; rather, it is the fictionalization of Walton’s experience that marks the biggest departure from the real story.

  Travis Walton himself feels that his character was misrepresented in the film; he was portrayed as a young, carefree, harmless troublemaker with nothing more on his mind than riding his motorcycle and marrying the girl he loved, who happened to be his best friend’s sister. While Walton did marry his friend’s sister in reality, he claims that his more serious, intellectual side was completely overlooked. Walton expressed his concern in a letter to the producers, “In earlier versions of the script there were scenes and dialogue that displayed the more philosophical, thinking side of my personality … But now with all the chopping and shuffling involved in the rewrites, a critical factor has slipped away. Inadvertent as this may have been, in this script I have become not much more than a one dimensional character, a wild, irresponsible risk seeker.”28 This was certainly true about all the characters in Fire in the Sky; each is nearly a cardboard cutout of a character: the bad boy, the boss, the local sheriff, the religious man—though no one can really blame Walton for the director’s ineptitude. Travis spends a fair amount of time discussing his interest in philosophy and learning, repeatedly attesting to his intelligence in his book to the point where it becomes obvious that Walton is suffering from small-town paranoia—trying to show people that he is more than just some back-woods bumpkin. He even directly addresses the issue in the beginning of his book, pointing out that small towns are derided in the media as being backwards and filled with uneducated people. “I have news for them. I’ve seen both sides and I can tell you that rural communities have no corner on tunnel vision.”29 It is true that many people living in the metropolis of the modern city regard places such as Snowflake, Arizona, with a certain disdain, but Walton does an impressive job in the beginning of his book explaining the small-town mentality and showing that the “educated elite” in the cities are sometimes just as dumb and backward as the rural folk they ridicule. Certainly, human prejudice and stupidity knows no particular location. But Walton should not be so paranoid, because his book is quite well written and a testament to his intelligence, compassion, and wisdom. Whether or not you believe his story, the book is a fantastic account of some deeper human truths as well as a great look inside the Hollywood machine that can turn a true story into a fictional story at the drop of a hat and the word of a producer.

  But the greatest fictionalization of the story comes in the portrayal of the UFO and Travis’s experiences inside the craft. First, the scene in which the characters see the UFO was changed. The craft appears huge, as if it takes up the entire sky, and it swirls with a lava-like red glow. While this special effect made the craft appear more frightening and primal, the actual craft measured approximately 20 feet across and about 8 feet high and glowed bright yellow.

  More importantly, however, were Travis’s experiences inside the craft. While the scenes portrayed in the film were some of the few parts of the film actually praised by the critics, they were a far cry from Travis’s original story. The creatures in the film are grotesque, the craft itself is dirty—a floating gothic garbage dump. The creatures are portrayed as malevolent and powerful, and Travis is subjected to torturous experiments with medieval instruments in a dingy and dark operating room. The reality of Travis’s story, however, is quite the opposite. While he did feel somewhat powerless in the craft and, obviously, completely out of his element, he actually felt that he could easily overpower the creatures physically and that they were, in fact, afraid of him—the way the trainer at a zoo might be afraid of the tiger he is training. While they were superior in their technology and intelligence, they were inferior as far as physical ability. When Travis began to resist them, they quickly exited the room and left him alone, just as a trainer may leave an agitated animal that could easily cause great physical harm. His description of the creatures is uncanny:

  Their bald heads were disproportionately large for their puny bodies. They had bulging, oversized craniums, a small jaw structure, and an undeveloped appearance to their features that was almost infantile. Their thin-lipped mouths were narrow; I never saw them open. Lying close to their heads on either side were tiny crinkled lobes of ears. Their miniature rounded noses had small ovals. The only facial feature that didn’t appear underdeveloped were those incredible eyes! Those glistening orbs had brown irises twice the size of those of
a normal human eye’s, nearly an inch in diameter! … But strangely, in spite of my terror, I felt there was also something gentle and familiar about them. It hit me. Their overall look was disturbingly like that of a human fetus!30

  Furthermore, the craft itself was not a dirty, dingy, floating Gothic castle, but rather a well-lit, clean, and seamless craft—smooth and quiet and utterly beyond Travis’s understanding.

  After Travis became aggressive with the creatures, they promptly left, and Travis found himself able to wander around the craft. He did not see the creatures again but instead found four humans, three men and a woman, who were attractive, tall, and physically well built, wearing some form of spacesuit. None of them said a word to Travis, but led him calmly to a room in another area of the craft, and laid him on a table; he has no memory of what happened after that. The next thing he remembers is waking up on the side of the road in Heber, Arizona.

  Walton’s story obviously differs greatly from the gothic horror depicted in the film; however, it should be noted that it is the gothic motif of UFO abduction stories that contributes to the overall fascination with the phenomena, though to date there has not been an abduction report that resembled anything close to what was portrayed in the film sequence. But how does Walton’s experience stack up against other abduction claims?

  The late Budd Hopkins was one of the world’s most recognized authorities on UFO abductions; his life was dedicated to telling individuals’ stories about their experiences. He authored several books and works with psychologists and psychiatrists to uncover these stories, which often go unreported. One of the hallmarks of the UFO abduction experience is the inability to recall the events surrounding the abduction; thus, hypnosis is used to help the individuals recall their experience. What generally happens, and what Budd recorded, is that the individuals will see the UFO, usually in the form of a light or a craft, and then suddenly find themselves back in the same place, unharmed, but with several hours having passed of which they have no recollection. This fact prompted Hopkins to title one of his books Missing Time. However, in the days, weeks, and months following the sighting, these people will find themselves in the grip of an unknown and inexplicable fear or depression, prompting them to seek help from either a psychiatrist or a ufologist, or, in many cases, simply bury it deep inside and never talk about it.