Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (36 page)

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Authors: Lynn Waddell

Tags: #History, #Social Science, #United States, #State & Local, #South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), #Cultural, #Anthropology

BOOK: Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles
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formation and notes a star in the background that was used to estimate

the UFO size. “I shot this with my 35mm camera shutter at ⅛ a second

to capture the light changing in intensity. You can’t see that with the

naked eye.”

“I’m convinced that’s a 2-foot diameter red light on the bottom of an

8-foot diameter unmanned vehicle,” Don adds, pointing to one of the

red dots. “We weren’t familiar with it then, but we learned more later.”

Given Art’s earnestness and their seemingly scientific calculations, I

begin to dance around the black hole of UFO mysticism. At this point,

Art’s not saying the lights are alien spacecraft. He’s building the case

adi

that they don’t look or move like any aircraft known to man. It all

ro

sounds perfectly plausible, especially considering that more than five

lF

hundred other people officially reported seeing the same things.

egn

Perhaps sensing I’m beginning to follow them, they delve into the

irF

more fantastic—that these unidentifiable crafts were piloted not by

humans, but by aliens. “They are smarter than we are,” Art says. Once,

091

the lights appeared exactly halfway between two different groups of

sky watchers. “They knew where we were. It’s like their way of saying,

‘You guys think you can sneak up on us but this is the way it is.’” On

another occasion for strategically placed sky watchers, he says, “They

put on a show right in the middle of all of us.”

The UFO sizes and colors were different, so they gave them nick-

names. They called ones with quickly pulsating lights “shooter-outers”;

others they called Bubba and Tinker Bell. Don says, “We did that be-

cause we didn’t want to freak people out if they overheard us talking

about them in a restaurant.”

The red lights were most common. But the ones with rings of light in

a perfect circle were the hardest to explain away as possibly man-made,

Art says. “They were doing 360-barrel rolls and all this stuff silently. It’s

like they were saying, ‘Here, watch what I can do.’”

After watching the Blue Angels stretch the boundaries of physics

the day before, I wonder aloud if what they were seeing was some ex-

perimental military craft. After all, Gulf Breeze sits in the crosshairs of

five Navy airfields, and that’s not counting both an international and a

smaller private airport. Plus, Eglin’s Hulbert Field is less than 40 miles

away. But Art and Don have logical answers to the most obvious ques-

tions. These aren’t simple men. It’s clear they’ve turned these questions

over in their heads like rocks in a tumbler until their explanations come

proof

out polished.

“Make no mistake about it, if we’ve developed a new propulsion sys-

tem they [the military] wouldn’t have been able to keep it quiet as long

as they have,” Art says. (He has a point when you consider the leakage

of thousands of U.S. confidential documents to WikiLeaks; Uncle Sam

has a hard time keeping secrets.) He argues that the military wouldn’t

be able to resist employing any supersonic craft given that the nation

has been in two Gulf wars since the sightings. “And even still, you don’t

pick a residential area to test drive your highly secretive experimental

craft. It doesn’t make sense.”

Although they make some logical arguments that something strange

a

was occurring quite regularly over Gulf Breeze, the questionable impe-

re

tus for it all—Ed Walters’s photos—can’t be overlooked.

ivi

Art and Don still believe Walters’s photos are authentic.

r n

Art reinvestigated Walters’s photos for MUFON after the model was

eil

found. He and Don go into great detail about the paper used inside the

a

model, saying it was a house plan that Walters had drawn up more than

19

a year after he took the UFO photos. “Someone apparently had been

1

going through his trash on a regular basis and thought, ‘Aha! Now I

can discredit him!’” Don says. Their primary suspect is the Committee

for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP),

which was later renamed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).

Now, this may sound like the paranoid delusions of men who’ve

spent ten years in a closet watching
The
X-Files
. But it’s actually the

consequence of a UFO soap opera that’s been going on for decades. CSI

has spent as much time and energy trying to disprove MUFON and

other UFO believers as the believers have exerted to prove extraterres-

trial life exists.

Reporter Craig Myers details the extent to which some of Walters’s

debunkers have gone in his book
War
of
Words:
The
True
but
Strange
Story
of
the
Gulf
Breeze
UFO
. CISCOP (CSI) put out streams of scientific reports, press releases, and mocking journal articles debunking

the Gulf Breeze sightings. And then there were the local naysayers. The

Gulf Breeze mayor and police chief even flew to Chicago to interview

someone who tried to confirm the photos were fake.

With no means to judge the truth of either side’s claims, I figure it’s

time for the question people have been asking since Ed Walters’s pho-

tos starting appearing in newspapers: Why Gulf Breeze? Why would

aliens pick a small bedroom community on the fringe of Florida to re-

proof

veal themselves to the world?

Don theorizes that maybe the aliens sensed the community is more

educated and therefore more open to accepting them. He says a Gal-

lup poll showed a correlation between level of education and belief in

extraterrestrials.

Art is more philosophical: “I think part of the answer is we weren’t

in charge of their agenda. We were not controlling where these guys

chose to appear and where not to appear. I think they just took their

light show somewhere else. There are UFO sightings all over the world.”

By Art’s and Don’s accounts, Bubba, Tinker Bell, and the shooter-

outers stopped performing over Gulf Breeze in mid-1992. They didn’t

adi

reappear until the end of that year, and then with no more frequency

ro

than in any other small town in America. They still hear of occasional

lF

UFO sightings over the bay, but Art saw his last UFO in 1998. Why the

egn

flying saucers left is as much a mystery as why they appeared.

irF

Don and Art have a theory about that, too.

They gently lay out the foundation of their hypothesis. Don, it turns

291

out, communicates with an alien friend through a New Age medium, a

channeler. Through her, Don asked his alien friend why his kind weren’t

showing up anymore. “He said to me, ‘As a military officer you should

know that if you keep doing the same things over and over again, and

there are people who want to interfere with what you’re doing, that

makes it too easy for them.’” Don looks me in the eye. “Not all those

who want to interfere are human.”

I later learn that MUFON ousted Don from its board in 1993 because

he proselytized his channeling-derived theories to members. The board

characterized the psychic technique as “fringe” and unscientific.

This was all before Don and Art came up with their second theory on

why the Gulf Breeze sightings stopped. They believe Gulf Breeze was

caught in the cross fire of feuding extraterrestrials.

Art and Don got their confirmation from Oscar, a man they learned

about from a visiting UFO researcher. Oscar had his own alien friends—

ones he claimed he could see, making him a “contactee” in UFOlogy

parlance, or someone who has communicated directly with ETs. Think

Richard Dreyfuss in
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
. As an aside: Oscar, a former soldier, also told a UFO investigator that the military had

captured and abused extraterrestrials back in the 1960s. After he spoke

out in protest, he claimed the military declared him mentally ill and

discharged him in an effort to discredit his allegations.

proof

Of more interest to Art and Don, Oscar had allegedly talked with

Tau Cetians, telepathically, of course. Tau Ceti is an actual star, part of

the whale-shaped constellation Cetus. Burning hot and 11.9 light-years

from Earth, the faraway star has been greatly fictionalized as having

strange intelligent life forms in
Star
Trek
episodes and countless sci-fi

novels.

Art and Don’s theory takes an even more surprising intergalactic

twist. “Oscar said the Tau Cetians, who were peace-loving and nonwar-

ring, were getting fed up with the bug people,” Art explains. He goes

on as casually as if he were talking about the Florida Gators playing

the Florida State Seminoles in football. Seems the Tau Cetians were

a

irked that the “bug people” were manipulating and defrauding the U.S.

re

government, so they decided to crash the party. The resulting alien war

ivi

left the Tau Cetians no time to wink at the sky watchers in Gulf Breeze

r n

before they left.

eil

The clincher, Art says, is that Oscar’s alien friend told him the inter-

a

galactic war started in mid-1992 and ended toward the end of that year,

39

the same time as the break in the Gulf Breeze UFO sightings.

1

Stuck on the bug people reference, I forget what relevance any of

this has to their theory on why the UFO sightings stopped. My brain’s

been taken over by images of the giant arachnids from the campy sci-fi

classic
Starship
Troopers
. I get Art to elaborate on these creepy aliens.

They actually aren’t all that imaginative. He says they’re just called bug

people because they have big bug-like eyes. They look more like the

gray-skinned, slant-eyed humanoid aliens typically portrayed in 1950s

sci-fi films and innumerable alien novels.

I fumble for a response.

The Faithful

Inside the meeting room at the Gulf Breeze Recreation Center, people

are taking their seats for the presentation. Many are retirees dressed

in slacks and dresses as if they’d come from church. About fifty people

show up.

The speaker is Randy Koppang, a California UFOlogist and coauthor

of the ominously titled
Camouflage
through
Limited
Disclosure:
Decon-structing
a
Cover-Up
of
the
Extraterrestrial
Presence
. Koppang has been studying UFOs for more than twenty-five years and looks like he’s been

doing it a cave. He’s a lanky bearded man with sleepy eyes and wire-

proof

frame glasses. He speaks in a monotone, citing a litany of UFO books,

reports, dates, and planetary names that I have no idea even exist.

Cover-up theories are mired in the data. A couple of men in the audi-

ence momentarily doze.

During the break people snack on store-bought cookies and sip lem-

onade. I need a double dose of Red Bull, but settle on fresh air. Outside,

Michael, a husky bearded man says he drove three hours from Hatties-

burg, Mississippi, just for the presentation. He hands me a handwrit-

ten flier advertising his paranormal netcast,
Conundrums
.

Michael’s been interested in otherworldly phenomenon since he saw

a brightly lit alien craft about twice the size of his parents’ Ford Galaxy

adi

hovering over their house back in 1973. “Seeing something like it got

ro

me to thinking,” Michael says. “There’s nothing we have here that could

lF

do that. So where is it coming from?”

egn

Art comes out. He’s not hanging around for the rest of Koppang’s

irF

opus, but isn’t opposed to talking more about his alien experience and

how it changed him. He’s still a man of science with a strong Chris-

491

tian faith, but says he’s now more open to new possibilities for man’s

existence, potential new answers for the mysteries of life. “I was

amazed when I started slowly getting into the possibility of intelligent

alien life. They have been here for thousands of years. God may have

upgraded our species. Who knows?”

Turns out, Art has also been to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. He

had a reading with a psychic whose business card I had picked up in the

camp’s bookstore months prior. Worlds collide.

Trying to find Ed Walters proves as difficult as spotting a TRUfo. He

claimed to have UFO sightings through the late 1990s and even wrote a

couple more books. One,
UFOs
Are
Real
, was coauthored by Bruce Mac-

cabee, a former Navy physicist turned UFOlogist. Maccabee writes me

that he hasn’t had any contact with Ed in years and doesn’t even have

his e-mail address.

Art tells me Walters now lives in Pensacola, going by a different last

name and running a telephone business. His latest address on Pen-

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