After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia. 

The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him. 

For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface. 

This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond