Legends, Hoaxes, and the Big Lie: Who’s Zoomin’ Who

Sometimes we can tell when someone has perpetrated a hoax. Sometimes, we know that somebody’s hoaxing someone, but it’s difficult to tell just who’s playing whom. Maybe both parties are playing each other. Then again, maybe someone else is getting the drop on everybody.

One of the most well-known UFO stories in the last twenty-five years happened in Gulf Breeze, a tiny city in northern Florida. On 11 November 1987, a fairly well-to-do business contractor named Ed Waters claimed that at 5:00pm he saw something “unusual” from his front yard. He rushed into his home office to snatch an old Polaroid camera that he frequently used for work, and hustled to his porch where he took a series of photographs of what appeared to be a flying saucer. In his words:

It seemed to be nearly as big as the houses below it and three times as high. It glided along without a whisper of sound. There was no hum, no wind, not a single disturbance of the air, trees, or houses as it passed over them. While rocking back and forth, it did not seem to spin, so I never saw all sides, only what is in the photographs...A lot of small details don't show up in the pictures. Central between the large black squares that look like windows were small openings that I believe were portholes. Some of the portholes were lit, some were not. There were also some diamond shapes between some of the large black squares and, unseen on the photos, there were definitely horizontal lines going around the main body.

Figure 1. Early Ed Walters UFO photograph


Okay. Big deal. People shoot UFO photos all the time. But Walters’ story had one sensational detail: the damn thing abducted him:

Bang! Something hit me. All over my body, I tried to lift my arms to point the camera. I couldn't move them ... I was in a blue light beam. The blue beam had hit me like compression. It was pressing me firmly, just enough to stop me from moving ... The best I can tell, this all took less than twenty seconds. Then my feet lifted of the ground. I screamed. A voice groaned in my head. 'We will not harm you.' I screamed again. The deep computerlike voice said, 'Calm down.' But it was in my head, not my ears. I screamed, as well as I could, 'Put me down!' A few seconds passed as I slowly rose away from the pavement...The voice came back, but now it seemed to be female. An easy hum filled my head. Suddenly, from within my head, came the sharp vision of a dog ... The hum continued. I had the sensation I was four feet above the ground. Wham! I hit the pavement hard and fell forward onto my knees.

Walters immediately told his wife, Frances. According to them, they first decided to keep the experience to themselves. On second thought, however, they decided that the public should know, lest they face the same peril. So, on 17 November 1987, he went to Duane Cook, the editor of the Gulf Breeze Sentinel, a local newspaper. Claiming to represent a man whom he called ‘Mr. X’ (no relation), Walters presented him with the photos, along with a letter explaining their origins.

Soon afterward, scores of local citizens claimed that they too had seen unusual craft, making Gulf Breeze one hell of a UFO hot spot.

At the center of that hot spot would stand Ed Walters. And his UFO encounters would heat up dramatically over the next few years. But his encounters with skeptics would heat up even more.