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a hoax. works. The French ufologists, who were familiar with the Travis Walton case, understood the relevance of the disappearance of Franck Fon- taine, like Walton, he had vanished in close proximity to a group of other witnesses. Like Walton, he had been the subject of an intense 143 PURPLE JUSTICE which he was familiar. But the statements of the three witnesses—who were from a diametrically opposed cultural background—did not give him much to go on. It was logical for GEPAN to conclude the case was The ufologists came into the case enthusiastically, recognizing that it could fit into an abduction and missing time pattern with which they were now well familiar. It is important to recall that a few years previ- ously, the Travis Walton episode had introduced the first documented instance of the disappearance of a witness in connection with a UFO observation. On Wednesday, November 5, 1975, seven men who were working in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest saw an object come close to the ground. It was a flattened disk, about eighteen feet in diameter and half as thick. When one of the men, Travis Walton, went closer to investigate, he was hit by an intense bolt of bright, blue-green light that knocked him unconscious while his co-workers panicked and drove away. When they came back, the object was gone and Travis was nowhere to be found. He reappeared near Heber, Arizona, five days and six hours later. When he regained consciousness, he was lying on his stomach. He saw a curved, gleaming object floating in silence above him. Soon it shot up into the sky. Placed under hypnosis by Dr. James Harder, a hard-core extraterres- trial believer who is professor of engineering at the University of Cali- fornia in Berkeley, Travis Walton remembered meeting several kinds of entities aboard the craft, including three small humanoids with elongated "huge, luminous brown eyes." With them was a tall, kind man in a blue suit. I have met with Travis Walton and with the crew boss, Mike Rogers, who had seen the craft and the beam. I am satisfied they are telling the truth as they experienced it, although I am not ready to take the hypnotic data literally, for reasons I have explained in detail in previous