The Carl Higdon Abduction | An Alien Scours the Galaxy for Food

An oil-rig foreman goes elk hunting on a routine Friday afternoon. He raises his rifle, fires — and watches the bullet drift through the air like it’s underwater, then drop harmlessly to the ground fifty feet away. Six hours later, a search party finds him slumped in his truck, unable to recognize his own wife. In between, he claims, he was taken across the galaxy by a being who wanted to know what Earth animals tasted like.

This is the file on Carl Higdon.

A Hunt That Went Sideways

October 25, 1974. Carl Higdon, a 41-year-old oilfield foreman and Korean War veteran from Rawlins, Wyoming, borrowed a company truck and drove into Medicine Bow National Forest for an afternoon elk hunt. Around 4 p.m., in a stretch of wilderness called McCarty Canyon, he spotted five elk grazing in a clearing, raised his rifle, and fired at the largest bull.

The bullet didn’t behave like a bullet. Higdon watched it slow to a crawl, travel roughly fifty feet, and fall to the ground — deformed, as though it had struck something invisible, but otherwise intact. While he stood there trying to make sense of it, a figure stepped out of the trees.

It called itself Ausso One.

The Thing in the Clearing

By Higdon’s account, Ausso One stood over six feet tall, with yellowish skin, no visible chin or neck, bristled hair standing straight up, and two short antennae on its forehead. Its right hand was a cone-shaped stump. It spoke telepathically, in broken English, and asked Higdon a simple question: was he hungry?

Higdon says he swallowed a pill Ausso offered him and didn’t feel hunger again for days. Then he was led aboard a transparent, cube-shaped craft — small on the outside, roomy within — where he sat across from Ausso and a second, similar being while the five elk floated in beside him, immobilized.

Ausso explained the trip. His planet, he said, was roughly 163,000 light-years away, had no seas fit for fish, and sat under a sun too harsh to tolerate directly. He was out hunting and gathering breeding stock — Earth’s wildlife included.

The Planet, the Scan, and the Return

Higdon described arriving somewhere else entirely: a landscape studded with towers roughly a hundred feet tall, each topped with rotating, buzzing lights. Under one of them, a scanning device passed over his body. Ausso One’s verdict was blunt — Higdon was “not what we need” — and he was sent home.

He landed hard, a few feet from his truck, which had somehow relocated to a mud hole miles from where he’d parked it, with no tire tracks leading in. Disoriented and vomiting, Higdon radioed for help around 6:30 p.m. A search party — including his boss and the local sheriff — found him at 11:30 p.m., incoherent and unable to place his wife, Margery.

What the Records Actually Show

Strip away the alien and a few things did happen that night, and they’re on paper. Hospital exams at Carbon County Memorial found Higdon’s eyes red and light-sensitive, and — more strangely — X-rays showed old tuberculosis scarring on his lungs had disappeared, along with kidney stones he’d had for years. Margery later found the deformed bullet in his pocket; ballistics examiners couldn’t reproduce the damage without destroying a slug outright. Higdon passed a polygraph administered by the Wyoming Highway Patrol.

University of Wyoming psychologist Dr. Leo Sprinkle, a known UFO researcher, ran multiple hypnosis sessions with Higdon starting in November 1974. Higdon’s account stayed consistent across sessions — he even sketched Ausso One and the craft from memory. Sprinkle later said on the record, in a 1978 episode of In Search Of: “There seems to be no evidence of hoax. No evidence of psychotic reaction.”

None of that proves an alien met him in the woods. A deformed bullet, a relocated truck, and a clean polygraph are consistent with something unusual happening to Carl Higdon that day — they aren’t independent confirmation of what he says that something was. No one else saw the craft. Hypnosis is well documented to reinforce false memories as confidently as true ones, and a polygraph measures stress, not accuracy. Skeptics have pointed to a bad batch of ammunition for the bullet, and disorientation or exposure for the rest.

The Verdict

Higdon never sold the story, never chased publicity, and repeated the same account without embellishment until his death in 2018. That consistency is unusual for a hoax and doesn’t require one — but it’s also not evidence of extraterrestrial contact, just evidence that Higdon believed what he was telling people.

What’s left is a well-documented strange night with no independently verifiable alien in it: real medical records, a real bullet nobody can explain, and a story about a hungry visitor from 163,000 light-years away that rests entirely on one man’s word.