In October 1974, 41-year-old oilfield foreman Everett “Carl” Higdon left Rawlins, Wyoming for a solo elk hunt in the Medicine Bow National Forest. The Medicine Bow’s rugged pines and rocky peaks set a peaceful scene for his outing. That afternoon Higdon drove about 40 miles south toward McCarty Canyon (part of the national forest), parked his truck when the road grew rough, and hiked up into the high country. As the sun was setting, Higdon finally spotted five elk grazing in a clearing. Calm and focused, he raised his new 7mm magnum rifle and squeezed the trigger – but what happened next was anything but normal.
According to Higdon’s own later account, the rifle produced no kick or report. The slug he fired appeared to slow to a crawl and then drop to the ground some 50 feet ahead. The elk never even flinched. Confused, Higdon recalls picking up the misshapen bullet (which showed no lead core and was inexplicably flattened) before something stunned him. The next thing he knew, it was 11:30 p.m. – he was being shaken awake in the dark by friends who had driven out to check on him. He had no memory of the intervening hours. At the hospital, a nurse asked his name and he couldn’t answer. He didn’t immediately recognize his own wife, Margery, and was highly disoriented and sensitive to light.
As Higdon’s memory slowly returned, he told doctors that when he pulled the trigger, nothing had seemed to happen – no recoil, no sound – and the bullet had “hung in the air” before dropping. When Margery washed his jacket, she found that very bullet in a pocket – turned inside-out and flattened. Ballistics experts later said no earthly force could have done that to a bullet. Meanwhile, Higdon’s truck was found three miles from where he parked it – sitting deep in a mud bog and with no tire tracks leading to it. How it got there was a mystery no one could solve. Doctors ran X-rays and tests on Carl and found no physical injuries at all, yet all evidence of his decades-old tuberculosis (which had scarred his lungs) had vanished – as had kidney stones he’d long suffered.
With no conventional explanation, Carl and Margery Higdon turned to hypnosis. Under regression with Dr. Leo Sprinkle, Higdon began to recall the missing half-hour. He described waking on the forest floor to find a 6-foot-tall humanoid looming over him. This being had yellowish, lipless skin, small deep-set eyes, two short antennae, and wore a skintight black suit – almost like a diver’s wetsuit. In perfect English it asked “How you doin’?” Carl answered, “Pretty good” and stayed as calm as he could. The creature introduced itself as “Ausso One” and offered Carl a small packet containing four pills for nourishment. Carl took one out of a compulsion he couldn’t explain. Then Ausso invited him aboard a strange cube-shaped craft that sat nearby. Carl suddenly found himself inside that windowless cube – along with Ausso, two other similar beings, and even the five elk he’d been hunting. Without any sensation of flight, the craft zipped through space; in less than a minute they arrived on another world some “163,000 light-years” away.
Outside, Higdon followed Ausso to a tall metallic tower under a dark sky. Inside the tower was an elevator that brought him up into a small chamber. On the floor were platforms; Ausso placed each elk on one and told Carl to stand on another. A high-tech scanner emerged from the wall, circling each platform. Carl remembers the scanner moving slowly over him, then beeping. Afterward Ausso informed him – telepathically – that “the elk are what we needed, but you’re not”. Carl’s abductors returned him to Earth, teleporting him back into his truck. They even pointed the creature’s drill-like hand at his pocket and retrieved the pill packet before vanishing. Minutes later, as in reality, Carl awoke to the deputies shaking his truck.
This hypnotically-recalled narrative – as incredible as it sounds – neatly explains the unexplained facts. The misplaced truck (in boggy terrain) could have been carried there by Ausso’s craft. The alien account fits why the bullet was flattened (Ausso One showed it to Higdon after flipping it inside-out) and why Carl’s chronic illnesses were gone (the “pills” from Ausso One seemingly healed him). Dr. Sprinkle noted that Carl’s story never changed in decades, that he passed lie-detector tests, and that Carl had gained nothing from telling it. Sprinkle told In Search Of in 1978: “I find … no evidence of hoax. No evidence of psychotic reaction”. Indeed, Higdon never exploited his tale for profit or fame.
Despite skeptics, no better explanation has emerged. Researchers point out that hundreds of pages of medical and police records (and even Project Blue Book files) shed no light on what happened to Higdon’s truck or bullet. In the 2010s, Margery Higdon published a first-person account of Carl’s experience in her book Alien Abduction of the Wyoming Hunter. For many in UFO research, Carl Higdon’s 1974 incident remains one of the most compelling abduction cases on record – a Wyoming elk hunt that ended with a trip across the galaxy.