Carl Higdon Abduction (1974)

The hunt and the encounter

On Friday, 25 October 1974, Everett Carl Higdon Jr., a 41-year-old oil-rig foreman from Rawlins, Wyoming, went elk hunting in McCarty Canyon in the Medicine Bow National Forest, roughly forty miles south of town. Higdon later reported that around late afternoon he fired at an elk with his 7mm Magnum rifle and noticed the bullet seemed to slow in mid-air, dropping about 50 to 60 feet away. He said he then met a humanoid figure in a dark suit that called itself "Ausso One." In his account he was offered food pills, taken into a transparent, cube-shaped craft about fifteen feet across, moved to a tower-like facility, scanned, and told he was not what they needed. He was later found dazed near his truck, which had become stuck in a mud hole about three miles from where he had parked it.

The story is widely described in UFO literature as one of Wyoming's best-known abduction narratives. Its core details come almost entirely from Higdon himself, and several retellings of the sequence differ on specifics such as the timing and the search that located him.

Investigation

The civilian investigation was led by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, a University of Wyoming counseling psychologist and consultant to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). Sprinkle interviewed Higdon at length and conducted two regressive hypnosis sessions, on 2 and 17 November 1974, using a pendulum technique and standard hypnotic procedure. Sprinkle later wrote that he found "no evidence of hoax" and that Higdon was reporting what he sincerely believed had happened. His preliminary findings appeared in Flying Saucer Review in November 1975, and a fuller chapter followed in UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (1979).

No military or federal agency investigated the case. It fell outside Project Blue Book, which had closed in December 1969.

Physical evidence and its problems

The most concrete claim is the bullet. Examiners reported that the 7mm jacket was badly deformed and that the lead core was missing. APRO's metallurgist Dr. Walter Walker and a University of Wyoming metallurgist reviewed it. The specimen is reported to have disappeared from a university safe, which means no modern re-analysis is possible. The truck's position is also disputed: some searchers reported no tracks leading to it, while skeptics would point to ordinary explanations for a vehicle found in rough terrain. Higdon was also said to have passed polygraph tests, a claim that rests on secondary reports rather than published charts.

Case for and against

Supporters point to the consistency of Higdon's account over decades, the investigator's conclusion that he was sincere, and the physical oddities of the bullet and truck. Sprinkle's hypnosis sessions are sometimes cited as evidence that the memories were not invented during a casual interview.

Skeptics have offered naturalistic explanations. Joe Nickell, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, proposed carbon monoxide exposure, high-altitude hypoxia, or a fugue state as possible causes of a disturbed experience, and noted that hypnosis is known to produce confabulated detail. He also suggested that the bullet could have come from a squib load. None of these explanations has been tested against Higdon or the physical evidence, and the lost bullet makes that test impossible now. The case therefore rests on one witness, hypnotically refreshed memory, and physical evidence that cannot be re-examined.

Current status

The case remains a staple of abduction literature and has been revisited in local media and podcasts. Higdon was reported to have died in 2022; that detail comes from secondary summaries and should be checked against an obituary before being relied upon. Independent documentation is limited to the 1970s investigator reports, and the story continues to be classed as contested: a serious unexplained report with a plausible but unproven natural explanation.