Carl Higdon Abduction, Medicine Bow National Forest, 1974

Carl Higdon was 41 in the autumn of 1974. He was an oil-rig foreman in Rawlins, Wyoming, an Air Force veteran, married, with four children. On Friday, October 25, he took a day off to hunt elk.

It was about 4 p.m. near the north boundary of the Medicine Bow National Forest, south of Rawlins. Higdon saw five elk. He raised his new 7 mm magnum at a bull and fired. No recoil. No sound. In his words, "the bullet only went about 50 feet and dropped."

Then he saw the being. About 6 feet 2 inches tall, in a black suit and black shoes, with a belt bearing a star emblem. Its legs bowed outward. Its head was slanted, with no chin and thin hair standing upright. Where a right hand should have been, a cone-shaped device stuck out of its sleeve. It floated over the snow toward him. In Higdon's account, it was called Ausso. It greeted him with "How you are you?" and gave him pills.

Ausso pointed the appendage. Instantly, Higdon was inside a transparent cubicle, floating like the beings around him. There was a chair with restraining bands, a helmet with wires, and a console of three lettered levers. A mirror showed the five elk. Below was a basketball-shaped object he took to be Earth.

Ausso pointed at the largest lever. The cubicle felt like it was moving. At the destination stood a tower about 90 feet tall, with a rotating brilliant light. Higdon was told he was not what they needed. Then Ausso pointed at the longest lever, and Higdon found himself standing on a slope. He slipped and fell, hurting his neck and shoulder.

Higdon later found himself in his truck and radioed for help. His wife Margery, friends Don and Marilyn James, Sheriff Charles Ogburn and others went looking. The Jameses and Margery saw a large moving "star" flashing red, green and white in a wide arc for about 20 minutes. They found Higdon at about 11:30 p.m. His truck sat in a mud-hole about 3 miles from where he had parked it, in terrain the searchers said it could not have crossed. Some seven hours were gone. At Carbon County Memorial Hospital, Dr. R. C. Tongco diagnosed amnesic shock.

APRO took up the case. Psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming, with art teacher Rick Kenyon, who drew the being, used hypnosis in November 1974 to explore the missing time. Sprinkle wrote: "Indirect evidence supports the tentative conclusion that Carl Higdon is reporting sincerely the events which he experienced." APRO metallurgy consultant Dr. Walter Walker said the bullet "had struck something extremely hard with great force." Higdon also passed a polygraph arranged by the National Enquirer.

No official government inquiry is documented. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969. Because most of the encounter was recalled only through hypnosis, it has been particularly called into question by skeptics, a point tied to a 1984 Skeptical Inquirer article on psychology and UFOs. Hypnosis can produce confabulated memories, critics add. No hoax was ever documented.

The Rawlins Daily Times broke the story on October 29, 1974. In 1978, In Search of... revisited it in "UFO Captives", hosted by Leonard Nimoy. David Paulides later set it beside the 2009 disappearance of Mark Strittmatter in the same forest. Carl Higdon died on January 26, 2022, in Temple, Texas. His afternoon in the woods is still called Wyoming's most famous alien abduction.