The Gulf Breeze Sightings

Gulf Breeze sits on a peninsula between Pensacola Bay and Santa Rosa Sound, west of Eglin Air Force Base. On November 19, 1987, the Gulf Breeze Sentinel, edited by Duane Cook, printed an anonymous letter. "On the night of November 11th I took the pictures you now see before you." The writer called himself Mr. X. He described "a dull gray-blue 'thing'" about the size of a small house that "glowed from the bottom." In January 1988 he told ufologists who he was. Ed Walters. A local contractor.

November 11, 1987. About 5 p.m. Outside his home office, Walters saw a "glowing bluish-gray craft." It had large black squares that looked like windows, smaller portholes, diamond shapes and horizontal lines around its body. It rocked back and forth, but it did not spin. It "glided along without a whisper of sound." Then came the beam. "The blue beam had hit me like compression," he wrote. It held him still and lifted him off the ground. A voice spoke in his head. "We will not harm you." He took five photographs.

It did not stop. On December 2, Ed and Frances Walters watched an object drop and hover about 100 feet above their pool. Later that night, he said, a small creature with big black eyes stood holding a silver rod. On December 28 he shot more than 90 seconds of videotape. On January 12, 1988, on Soundside Drive, a blue beam shot down five times. Each time, he said, it left a creature behind. On January 25 a 10-foot circle of dead grass was found near an earlier landing site. On May 1, at Shoreline Park, he used a stereo camera. Afterwards he could not account for an hour and fifteen minutes.

Other residents spoke up. Councilwoman Brenda Pollak saw orange lights along the treetops. Fenner and Shirley McConnell reported a disc-shaped craft over the water. In October 1988, Unsolved Mysteries told the story, with Walters appearing as "Ray."

MUFON investigators arrived on December 4, 1987. Director Walt Andrus called it "the best case we've ever had." Navy optical physicist Bruce Maccabee said "there is a good chance it's the real thing." A February 1988 polygraph examiner concluded that "Walters believes his photos are real." Not everyone agreed. In April 1988 the Center for UFO Studies called it an apparent hoax. Physicist Willy Smith found double-exposure trickery. Robert Nathan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said "many of these images are double exposure photographs."

June 1990. Robert and Sarah Menzer, the new owners of Walters' former house, were tracing a water line in the attic. Under the insulation lay a model about 9 inches wide, made of foam plates and drafting paper, with punched-out windows. Pensacola News Journal photographers used it to nearly duplicate some of the pictures. Reporter Craig Myers said "I recognized it immediately." Days later, Tommy Smith Jr. said he had helped fake photos. Walters said the model had been planted by debunkers or the government. A MUFON reinvestigation by Rex and Carol Salisberry concluded that "Mr. Walters knows more about the model than he has admitted."

Ed and Frances Walters published The Gulf Breeze Sightings in 1990 and UFO Abductions in Gulf Breeze in 1994. Red lights kept appearing over the town into the early 1990s. Sceptics explained them as road flares carried by balloons. In 1994, The X-Files had Mulder say he knew the Gulf Breeze photos were fakes the first time he saw them. The debate over the photographs has never fully closed.