10 Sci-Fi Movies You Didn't Know Were Based On Real Life Events

2. Fire In The Sky

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In Fire in the Sky, a group of loggers are accused of murder after one of their co-workers, Travis Walton, goes missing. When he reappears five days later, Walton claims he was abducted by aliens.

Although Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was inspired by alien abductions in general, this 1993 drama is based on a specific encounter with extra-terrestrials. This supposed confrontation occurred to Travis Walton on November 5th 1975. The way the aliens conduct their experiments on Walton in the film is based directly on the testimony he gave about his experience.

Despite becoming a huge news story for years, many skeptics dismissed Walton, accusing him of being a gloryhound. Even though a polygraph test seemed to validate his claims that he met aliens, UFO researcher, Philip J. Klass, discovered irregularities with the test as well as inconsistencies in Walton's abduction story.

Not only that, psychologist Susan Clancy pointed out that the movie, The UFO Incident, aired two weeks before the 'encounter', which had scenes that were suspiciously similar to Walton's testimony.

Walton's abduction story might be absolute bunk but at least it inspired a pretty entertaining movie.

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James Egan has been with Whatculture for five years and prominently works on Horror, Film, and Video Games. He's written over 80 books including 1000 Facts about Horror Movies Vol. 1-3 1000 Facts about The Greatest Films Ever Made Vol. 1-3 1000 Facts about Video Games Vol. 1-3 1000 Facts About James Bond 1000 Facts About TV Shows