Alright, so I've told this story a hundred times, and it still gives me chills. And I'm telling you the truth here. But I'll tell it again because people need to hear it. November 5th, 1975. I was twenty-two years old, working on a logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. We were doing tree-thinning work for a federal contract, out at a place called Turkey Springs, about fifteen miles from Heber, Arizona. Hard work. Long days. Cold nights. You know how it is. There were seven of us on the crew. My buddy Matt Reynolds was the boss and driver. Then you had Alan Davis, Jack Gordon, Danny Smith, Keith Patterson, Sam Porter, and me. We'd been working together for a while, and Matt was like a brother to me. That's important to understand later, when people started accusing them of things they didn't do. So that day, we worked until past sundown. It was around six ten in the evening when we finally packed up our chainsaws and oil cans and piled into Matt's crew-cab truck. I was sitting in the front passenger seat, right next to the door. We were bouncing along this bulldozed trail through the forest, tired, ready to go home. And that's when one of the guys spotted something through the trees. A gold-colored glow, just filtering through the thickets.
Matt slowed down as we came around a right-hand turn, and then we all saw it. There was this, this thing, hovering about fifteen feet above a clearing, maybe ninety feet from where we were. Structural. Solid. Shaped like two pie pans placed rim to rim. It was glowing with this incredible golden light. shaped craft sightings were common in the Southwest in the 70s - Isaiah' And there was this sound, this high-pitched beeping that we could all hear, even inside the truck. I don't know what came over me. I should have stayed in that truck. But I'd always been curious about this stuff, you know? I'd talked to my brother Derek about UFOs before. We'd even said if we ever saw one, we'd try to get close. So when I saw that thing hovering there, I called for Matt to stop. I barely waited for the truck to halt before I jumped out. The guys were yelling at me. 'Get back here!' 'Be careful!' 'Tyler, don't!' But I was already moving at a fast walk toward this woodpile the crew had stacked earlier. I wanted a better look. The craft was at about a sixty-degree angle above me now. I could see it clearly, this metallic disc, just sitting there in the air like gravity meant nothing to it.
I stood there staring up at it for a few seconds. Then I got spooked. Something felt wrong. The air felt charged, electric. I stepped back a couple of paces, thinking I should get back to the truck. That's when it happened. A beam of light, blue-green, shot down from the bottom of that craft and hit me square in the upper body. The best way I can describe it is like getting kicked by a mule while sticking your finger in a light socket. It lifted me off the ground. My arms went out straight. And then it threw me backward, maybe ten feet, and I hit the ground hard. The last thing I remember is the cold dirt against my face. The guys in the truck saw the whole thing. They thought I was dead. They thought that beam had killed me right there. Matt panicked, and honestly, I don't blame him. He floored it and got out of there. They drove about a quarter mile down the road before they stopped and looked back. grandfather saw his friend get hit by something similar in 1952, never the same after - Dana' That's when they saw a light rise up from the clearing and streak off to the northeast.
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