ONE of the world’s most famous “alien abductees” says he feels vindicated as people are finally starting to believe his extraordinary story.

And after five decades Travis Walton, who went missing for five days in the mountains of Arizona, still insists he was snatched and experimented on by extraterrestrials with large eyes and no hair.

Travis, then a lumberjack, disappeared without a trace back in 1975 after he and his crew of loggers claimed to have seen a huge UFO – which they originally thought was a fire – in a forest .

Cops originally suspected Travis’s crew members of murdering him – until he bizarrely reappeared five days later saying he had been taken into a space craft by alien creatures.

Travis, who says he is still fearful of the ‘beings’ that took him, has spent years trying to fight back against sceptics – taking numerous lie detector tests and even writing a book debunking every theory that has been put forward.

Speaking to The Sun, “When I go out in public now, instead of ‘there’s that crazy guy’ and now it’s, ‘Hey, can I get a picture with you?’

“People from authoritative sources talk to me, such as police officers – many of the officers I’ve encountered see things when they’re out on patrol.

“Various NASA employees have sought me out. There’s a general shift in perception that this is a genuine, real phenomenon.”

Travis says he and his crew saw a fire in the sky in front of them on November 5, 1975 as they were leaving work, then realized it was a clearly defined metallic disc as they got closer.

They pulled up and saw what they believe to be a spaceship and Travis got out of the car and walked towards it.

The spaceship began to make loud noises and Travis dived for cover behind a log.

Then as he tried to stand up, he was knocked down by a ray of blue light  – similar to a laser beam – and thrown into the air.

Crew members told cops they thought he had stepped on a landmine because it threw him at such force – they believed he had died.

When he came round he found himself on a spaceship surrounded by small creatures he believes were aliens.

Speaking at a festival to mark the 75th anniversary of the infamous Roswell UFO crash, he said: “They weren’t little green men. They were small and stature, hairless, and very large eyes,”

He continued, “I think there’s other reports with similar descriptions, but I don’t think that necessarily means that they all come from the same place or the same family.”

“It was very blurry and I had some double vision but I could see the outline of these forms around me. I thought they were doctors but when my vision got clearer and I could see these were not doctors – I just flipped out,” he added.

“The one that was closest to me – I tried to hit it away – but I felt like I could hardly move my arm.

“It was more of a push than a hit because I was so weakened but the creature felt soft and lighter than I expected. It fell back into one that was standing near it,” Travis explained.

“I backed away and bumped up against a shelf and looked around and saw an array of tools or instruments and I very quickly just grabbed one and started flailing at them.

“They stopped and stood there staring at me and that stare was in my nightmares for many years after that. I couldn’t tolerate that stare.”

Travis says he managed to escape through a door and into a narrow passageway then into another room with a control panel in it.

A human being dressed in what looked like a space helmet then appeared and took him to a separate room where he was put on a table and given a mask which rendered him unconscious.

The next thing he knew he was waking up on the road about 15 miles from where he disappeared just outside the nearest town of Snowflake, Arizona.

While it sounds far fetched Travis and the crew members have taken 12 lie detectors to prove their story.

Travis, who had no idea he had been gone for five days, managed to walk into town where everyone who saw him described him as looking “devastated” and “shell shocked”.

But Travis faced a battle to get people to believe what happened to him – and faced scrutiny from local people and the sheriff’s office and then members of the public once his story hit the news.

Travis even underwent a battery of psychiatric testing to prove he was mentally stable.

“People were desperate to explain it away, ‘Oh he was hallucinating on drugs’,” he said.

“Well what about the fact that I had blood and urine samples put through the Maricopa County medical examiners, drug screenings showed no trace of any drug whatsoever in my body…

“If it’s a drug hallucination, how do seven people have the same hallucination? It just doesn’t happen. In every detail they’re saying the same thing, it’s ridiculous.

“The evidence presented regarding what happened to us, would’ve been sufficient to convict somebody of murder in an American court of law – it would have been an open and shut case.

“You got seven people testify about the same thing, let alone the fact that they all passed lie detector tests, there are seven witnesses saying this happened.”

Travis said while he has accepted what happened to him he still harbors fears for what abducted him.

“I still experience fear about it,” he saId.

“I was surprised, my son and I and his girlfriend saw one of these giant black triangle UFOs back in 2001.

“It flew right up, stopped right over the top of us.

“And my son said, ‘Dad, dad should we pull over and take a picture?

“I said, no, no, keep going. And I was surprised at myself that I still have that much fear.”

He added: “I would, if I had the opportunity to learn it, I would like to think I would be open to discovering exactly what happened to me. That I could overcome my fear and find out.”

Travis stands by his story to this day and says people can “take it or leave it.”

While he says he’s “sure” the government knows what happened to him – hit out at possible theories that the government orchestrated the whole thing as part of a disinformation campaign.

“I still believe that what happened to me was extra terrestrial,” Travis said.

“Some people have speculated that the government did this.

“They think they actually took midgets and surgically altered them to create this whole impression to frighten our strategic enemies.

“It’s so far fetched, there’s no way that was not humans with surgical alterations.

“These were definitely beings not of this earth.”