Calling his sister collect after midnight, Walton begged for help when her husband answered the phone. Grant Neff picked up Walton’s brother Duane and the two drove to Heber to pick up Walton after informing Mrs. Kellett of his call. The telephone operator who handled the collect call called Sheriff Gillespie to let him know of Walton’s reappearance; Gillespie then called Deputy Glen Flake and asked him to keep a lookout for the men returning to Snowflake.
Flake missed Neff, Duane, and Walton on the way in, so he went to Mrs. Kellett’s house. It was after 2:00 A.M., but the lights were on and Duane was outside siphoning gas from one car to another. He made no mention to the officer that Walton had been found and Flake did not reveal the information the telephone operator had provided.
Duane did not inform the deputy that Walton was inside Mrs. Kellett’s house, nor did he tell him of the physical examination Duane had performed on Walton. During the exam, Duane found no bruises, burns, or evidence of any physical injury except for a red mark on the inside of Walton’s right elbow. Walton’s physical condition was curious given his reported violent encounter with the blue-green beam.
In any case, Duane decided to drive Walton to a doctor in Phoenix after the deputy left. They made an abortive attempt to see a hypnotherapist, but Duane backed out saying that Walton was not ready for regressive hypnosis. It was not until the afternoon of November 11 that a cursory exam by two doctors was performed. Like Duane, they found no evidence of physical injury, except for the mark on Walton’s arm. One of the doctors, Howard Kandell, stated it “was compatible with a puncture wound such as when somebody takes blood from you.” He went on to note that Walton claimed he had not noticed it before, in spite of the fact that both Duane and the hypnotherapist had seen the mark earlier.
More telling, though, were the results of the urine analysis performed on a sample from Walton. It showed no trace of drugs, but also no trace of acetone. After going without food for more than a couple of days, the body begins to break down its own fat. The waste product of this is acetone, and it is excreted in the urine. If Walton had been without food for several days, his urine should have shown some traces of acetone. Also, Walton later claimed to have lost ten pounds during his missing five days.
The doctors who examined Walton were members of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and it was at this time that APRO became intimately involved in the case. It is also at this time that the National Enquirer became involved. Coral Lorenzen, who had made the arrangements for the doctor’s examination, received a call from the National Enquirer about the case. She convinced the paper to pay Duane and Walton’s expenses while being “sequestered” in a local hotel in exchange for exclusive rights to the story.
When Duane finally called Sheriff Gillespie to inform him of Walton’s reappearance, he told the sheriff they were in Tucson where Walton was receiving a check-up. He changed the story in a later phone call, saying they were at a private home in Phoenix. At Gillespie’s insistence, Duane reluctantly agreed to let him interview Walton. The Walton brothers refused to allow Gillespie to record the interview, but Travis did agree to take a polygraph exam later in the week.
Seven days after Walton had disappeared and two days after his sudden reappearance, his story was hitting the local newspapers. The Tucson Arizona Daily Star quoted Duane as saying, in part: “I’m not a UFO buff and neither is my brother” — this flatly contradicts Duane’s earlier statements to UFOlogist Fred Sylvanus.
Gillespie had scheduled Walton’s polygraph examination for Friday, November 14, but Walton did not show up. The excuse was that the press had “laid siege” and Duane did not feel Walton was ready to face the press. This is curious, since a team of reporters from the National Enquirer had been interviewing Walton already. Also, Duane could have had the polygrapher come to the hotel where Walton was staying if he was concerned about exposing Walton to the media.
Some of the most damning evidence that the entire case was a hoax surrounds the various polygraph examinations and the behavior of the principles involved, Duane and Travis Walton, and Mike Rogers. APRO announced on February 7, 1976, that both Travis and Duane had passed an exam given by George Pfeiffer, who worked for Tom Ezell and Associates. But that test was flawed in a number of respects: Pfeiffer allowed Walton to dictate a number of the questions he asked. While it is not uncommon for polygraphers to allow the test subjects and/or sponsors to outline the general area to be probed, allowing the subject to dictate specific questions violates the basic principles of polygraphy and should invalidate the test results. Also, Pfeiffer was relatively inexperienced, having been practicing only two years. This inexperience expressed itself when he judged Walton’s “No” answer to the question “Before November 5, 1975, were you a UFO buff?” to be truthful. Walton’s answer directly contradicted information provided by both his mother and brother Duane and by Walton himself during an earlier psychological examination.
Later in March of 1976, when Pfeiffer’s employer Tom Ezell had reviewed the charts, he concluded that it was impossible to determine if Walton and Duane were answering the test questions truthfully. Ezell stated in a letter to Phil Klass: “Upon review of this examination, I find that to me it is not acceptable. In the first place I would not be a party to an examination in which the subject dictated the questions to be asked … Because of the dictation of the questions to be asked, this test should be invalidated. Also, upon examining the resultant charts, I find that I cannot give an opinion one way or another” whether the subjects had been truthful or not. Yet this is the examination to which Walton refers when he states he has passed a lie detector test.