Legends, Hoaxes and the Big Lie: Gettin’ His MUFON

Edited 11/2/10 for accuracy.

Three days after the Gulf Breeze Sentinel published his UFO photographs, Ed Walters claimed that the aliens made a return visit. He rushed out with his Polaroid camera. The aliens forbade him to take snapshots. So he photographed them anyway. Changing tactics, the aliens tried to distract him by telepathically sending images of nude women into his brain. Undaunted, Walters kept clicking the shutter.

Almost two weeks later, Walters heard a baby crying and a conversation in Spanish from his bedroom. He and rushed into his yard with the camera in one hand, and a gun in the other. This time his wife, Frances accompanied him and witnessed the flying disc for herself. The encounter didn’t last long, so they went back to bed thinking there wouldn’t be anything further. But when a dog’s bark woke him at 3:00 in the blessed AM, he, again armed with camera and gun, went into another room, pulled the blinds, and found himself staring eye-to-almond-shaped-eye with an alien. Frances crawled over to Ed, who said he would have shot if the creature had entered the house. Instead it turned away.

The following day, 3 December 1987, the Sentinel published another UFO, taken by a woman only identified as ‘Jane,’ purportedly taken the previous year. From then on, the newspaper found itself swamped in UFO reports and sightings from all over town.

Deciding he needed help, Walters then sought out UFO organizations in order to report his experience and get some help in dealing with it. Still claiming to represent a Mr. X, he eventually talked to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), which dispatched investigators Don Ware and Charles Flannigan to the Walters’ place. They questioned him for awhile, gave him a form to fill out, and left it at that.

From then on, UFOs kept showing up at his door. Walters claimed that the aliens came back on numerous occasions. Sometimes, they abducted. Sometimes, they seemed like they just wanted to talk to him. They apparently implanted something in his brain. All the while, Walters kept taking pictures. When he could, he took samples of various fluids spewing out of the ship.

MUFON enlisted the help of NASA photoanalyst Dr. Robert Nathan to determine the authenticity of the Walters photographs. Although he could not definitely prove them fakes, Dr. Nathan was suspicious enough not to endorse them as genuine.

Yet, there were other witnesses reporting UFOs in Gulf Breeze during this time. Most of them didn’t know Ed Walters. But at least one of them did: specifically a teenager using the pseudonym Patrick Hanks. Hanks was really Walters’ friend Hank Boland, who confirmed that he saw the uniquely shaped flying saucer with Ed on 27 December 1987.

If you’re asking why a middle-aged man had one teenaged friend, truth was he had a lot of them. And they would shed important light on this case before all was said and done.