Now just to get one thing out of the way, even though it says “Based on a true story” at the end of the opening credits of Fire in The Sky doesn’t mean it’s is a 1:1 retelling of the mysterious events in and around Snowflake, Arizona in November 1975. The legitimately fucking terrifying abduction sequence, especially the part where our very stupid hero Travis stumbled into the cocooned and putrified remains of a fellow alien kidnapping victim who met a gruesome fate, did not happen in real life. Travis Walton’s experience on the spacecraft was a lot more inscrutable and idiosyncratic.

It may not have actually happened in real life either but at least in his version the interior of the alien ship was hygienic and clean and doesn’t make a Russian army field hospital look like Cedars-Sinai or NYU Langone in comparison. Also our other hero Mike Rogers’ younger sister probably didn’t overact that badly when asking “Where is he Mike?!? Where is he Mike?!? Where is he?!?” after he tells her Travis got sucked into an alien spaceship like a chimp being shot with a tranq dart and hauled away for a thorough examination by primatologists. And that goddamned town hall scene was so lame but not even a tenth as lame as the brief glimpse of a wise old indigenous American man, with the native pipe music playing for like 10 seconds as he knowingly stares at the search party near the site of the alleged alien abduction. Then the movie just completely forgets about him, like the studio cut the rest of that “subplot” for pacing but fucked up and left his cameo in.

Travis Walton really did disappear for five days in 1975. His crewmates were during that time really suspected of murdering him. They really did mostly pass the polygraph tests though one was inconclusive. Travis Walton himself also passed multiple polygraph tests in the years since he and his coworkers claimed he was taken. None of that means he was really abducted by aliens.

Whether or not that happened there is actually one pretty extraordinary detail to the film: After Robert Patrick was cast as Mike Rogers he started calling Mormon relatives in Arizona to ask them about the local culture (The LDS church gets only brief mention in the movie but most of Snowflake and thus these guys are deep green Jell-o in real life) and found out that the real Mike Rogers is the husband of a distant cousin. “I called him, we spoke, [and] I asked him specifically about how he was feeling during all this. I wanted to know his emotions. And he said to me during the abduction and the subsequent conversations afterward, that he could not control his emotion. And I tried to utilize that during the film,” Patrick told geek site The Companion in a 2022 interview.