Seven forestry workers were riding in a pickup truck about 12 miles from Heber, Arizona when they saw an object in a clearing 25 yards from the road. It "looked like two pie pans, one upside down", and was hovering about 15 ft above the ground. It was about 15 ft in diameter and 8 ft high, and bore some markings; it glowed with a yellowish light.

One man, Travis Walton, jumped off and ran toward the UFO; as he came underneath it, a blue ray shot down from it and knocked him to the ground. The other six drove off as fast as possible, but subsequently returned, finding no trace of Walton.

Five days later, he called his family from a phone booth outside Heber, where he was picked up, unshaven and exhausted, with a puncture mark on his arm. Later he recalled returning to consciousness in a hospital-like room. His whole body ached, his vision was blurred and he felt weak and thirsty. Above him a luminous rectangle, three feet by one and a half and composed of seamless metal, gave off a soft white glow. A plastic device extended from his armpits to his rib cage and curved around his chest. The air was wet and heavy, and he had some difficulty breathing it.

Still his first impression was that he was in a conventional earthly hospital, even if he could not understand why the nurses had not removed his clothing. Travis saw three figures dressed in loose-fitting orange one-piece suits standing near him, one to his right, and the other two to his left. As his vision cleared, he recoiled in shock and horror as he realized these were not human beings.

They were short, shorter than five feet, and they had very large, baldheads, no hair. Their heads were domed, very large. They looked like fetuses. They had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. They had very large eyes---enormous eyes---almost all brown, without much white in them. The creepiest thing about them was the eyes. Their mouths and ears and noses seemed real small, maybe just because their eyes were so huge. Their hands had five fingers. The beings looked frail, with soft marsh-mellow like skin.

Travis staggered to his feet and shouted at the beings. He struck out and pushed one of them into another. From the ease with which he was able to knock them back, he deduced that they weighed relatively little. Then he grabbed a cylindrical tube off a shelf that jutted from the wall. Assuming from its appearance that the tube was made of glass, he tried to break the top off so that he could threaten the beings with its jagged edges. But the object proved unbreakable. Nonetheless, Travis waved it threateningly in their direction.

Keeping their distance, they "just stopped and kind of thrust their hands out, like they meant no harm or stop." After a short, tense standoff, the beings turned around and exited quickly out the door immediately behind them. Shortly thereafter Travis himself ran out of the room and headed left into a curving corridor three feet wide. In short order he came to an open room on his right. It was round, domed, and apparently empty of anything except a high-backed metal chair in the middle. The chair was supported by a single center leg, since its back was to him, Travis could not be sure that someone was not sitting in it, but he decided to take a chance. Moving slowly and quietly with his back pressed up against the wall, he positioned himself so that he could glimpse the chair's occupant, but there wasn't anyone in it.

When he stepped toward the chair, the light began to fade. He stepped back, and the light returned. He stepped forward again and suddenly was surrounded by stars. He could not tell whether the walls, ceiling, and floor had become transparent, revealing the deep space through which the craft presumably was moving, or star-like points of light had been projected, planetarium-fashion, on all surrounding surfaces. Except for the fact that the walls were still vaguely visible, the effect was like sitting in a chair in the middle of space. There was a panel of buttons on the right armrest along with a screen with vertical black lines. The left armrest held a lever.

Travis pushed a couple of the buttons, but nothing happened. Then he sat on the chair and pushed the lever forward. The black lines on the screen moved, and the stars started rotating, though keeping their relative positions all the while. Frightened and disoriented, Travis pulled his hand off the lever, which then returned to its original position on its own. The stars stopped rotating and were frozen into their new positions. Eventually Travis walked over to the wall and then as he stood beside it, he heard sounds and looked at an open doorway behind the chair. There he was startled to see a human figure wearing a transparent bubble helmet over his head. Shock followed relief as Travis reflected that he was among his own kind.

The man looked like a deeply tanned, muscular Caucasian, about six feet two inches tall, perhaps 200 lbs. He had sandy blond hair long enough to cover his ears, and he was dressed in a tight-fitting, bright blue coverall suit with a black band or belt across the middle. He wore black boots. In his excitement Travis failed to appreciate just how odd the man's eyes looked. A "strange bright golden hazel," they were not really the eyes of a human being.

The figure motioned to Travis, who approached with a series of frantic questions to which the only response was a "tolerant grin". Travis thought the man had said nothing because his helmet blocked out his hearing, maybe they were going some place where the man would remove the helmet, and then they could talk. Led by the arm, Travis was taken into the curving, narrow hallway, until they came to a closed door to their right. It opened into a tiny "metal cubicle" of a room that the two entered as the door closed again behind them. Travis asked where they were going, but his companion again ignored the question. They then entered an enormous room that Travis thought of as an airlock or a hangar. Inside it the air was fresh and cool with gently flowing breezes, almost as if they were outside, and the light was a bright as sunlight.

Travis descended a short, steep ramp and looked around him. The ceiling was sectioned into alternating rectangles of dark metal and those that gave off light like the sun shining through a translucent panel. The alternation of the light and dark panels reminded Travis of a checkerboard. The ceiling itself curved down to form one of the larger walls in the room. The room was shaped like one quarter of a cylinder laid on its side. A craft that looked like the one he had seen in the woods was in the room, except that it was considerably larger, perhaps 60 ft in diameter and 16 ft high. To his left were two similar but smaller vehicles parked close to the wall. A silver reflection nearby looked as if it could have come from a third craft, but he was not sure because the large ship mostly obscured its source.

The two walked across a floor of springy green rubber-like material to a door in the hangar room. It opened from the middle and brought them into a hallway six feet wide and eight feet high. They walked some 80 feet past a number of closed double doors. They finally came to another pair of doors at the end of the hallway. As they slid silently open, Travis saw two men and a woman sitting in the room. They were dressed like his companion and even bore a family sort of resemblance to him. Like him, they were good-looking and perfectly featured. The woman, who appeared to be wearing no makeup, wore her hair longer than the men did.

The three were not wearing helmets, which gave Travis false encouragement, "Would somebody please tell me where I am?" he asked desperately. The beings only looked at him with pleasant expressions on their faces, and the helmeted man sat him down in a chair before leaving through another door, entering a corridor, and departing to the right. As Travis continued to talk, the woman and one of the men stepped over to him, one on each side, and took him by his arms to a nearby table. Though initially cooperative, Travis grew less so when he realized that they were not going to tell him anything. He shouted at them, but they continued to look on him with the same silent, kindly look, which amounted to a small, toothless grin. Even as he struggled the beings managed to force him on his back.

Once he was down, he noticed that the woman had in her hand something that "looked like on those clear, soft plastic oxygen masks, only there were no tubes connected to it. The only thing attached to it was a small, black, golf ball-sized sphere." She placed it over his mouth and nose, and as Travis prepared to rip it off his face, he lost consciousness.

The next thing he knew, Travis was lying on his back on the highway just outside Heber, 10 miles from the place where he had seen the light in the woods. In the darkness he saw one of those round craft hovering about four feet over the highway. It was hovering there for just a second. He looked up just as a light went out, like a hatch closing, or just a light going out. A white light just went off on the bottom of it. The craft was dark, and it wasn't giving off any light at all. Travis ran to the gas station and tried the first of three phones.

Google map of this location.