by Dave Barry
On December 5, at The Zoo, a privately operated zoo in Gulf Breeze, a wedding ceremony was held for giraffes. This really happened. Their names are Gus and Gigi.
On August 19, a Gulf Breeze man was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake as he
(the man) examined a potted plant in the garden shop of the Wal-Mart store in nearby Fort Walton Beach. Just two days later, at a Wal-Mart in North Fort Myers, a woman examining a potted hibiscus was bitten by another pygmy rattlesnake. Wal-Mart officials were unable to explain this rash of pygmy-rattler attacks and described it as “unusual.”
Well, of course, I needed no further convincing. I grabbed my camera—you have to be ready—hopped on a plane and was off to conduct my investigation.
THE TOWN OF GULF BREEZE
Gulf Breeze is a small residential community just across a bridge from Pensacola, way at the far western end of Florida, almost in Alabama. It is the opposite of Miami, geographically and in many other ways. It is not even in the same time zone as Miami. Miami is in the Eastern Time Zone and Gulf Breeze is in about 1958. In Gulf Breeze, when you buy something at a store, the counterperson usually smiles and says, “Y’all come back ‘n’ see us now, n’kay?” Whereas in Miami, the counterperson doesn’t usually say anything because he or she is having a very important personal telephone conversation that cannot be interrupted just for some idiot customer.
I begin my investigation by driving through downtown Gulf Breeze. Even at slow speed, this takes less than five minutes. It appears to be a normal beach-oriented town, very quiet in the off-season. There are a lot of things in the sky, because this is an area of extremely heavy air traffic: Nearby, besides the commercial airport in Pensacola, are the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Eglin Air Force Base, and several other airfields. Almost any time you look up, you see a plane or a helicopter. In looking around, however, the only phenomenon I notice that does not seem to have an obvious earthly explanation is a bumper sticker that sayS BUSH 88.
But you never can tell. As you know if you ever watched “The Twilight Zone,” there are times when everything seems to be perfectly normal, and then suddenly, without warning, something happens, something that you know is somehow ... wrong, and you start to hear that piercing high-pitched electronic-sounding “Twilight Zone” music—deedeedeedee deedeedeedee—and the hairs on the back of your neck, even if you use extra-hold styling mousse, stand on end.
Little do I realize, as I drive through the quiet town of Gulf Breeze, that before I leave, I am going to experience that very feeling. More than once.
The Newspaper
My first stop is the Gulf Breeze Sentinel. The Sentinel is a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 3,500, soaring to 4,500 in the summer. It is not the kind of paper that practices the kind of snide, cynical, city-slicker style of journalism exemplified by this article. It’s the kind of newspaper where many stories consist mostly of local people’s names. You can get into the Sentinel merely by having your birthday. Also there are many photographs of local boards, clubs, civic groups, etc., engaging in planning activities. In the November 19 issue, there’s a front-page photograph of a man smiling and holding up, for no apparent reason, bags of Hershey’s Kisses, accompanied by the caption:
Dave Bozeman, manager of the Piggly Wiggly, is planning now for the Annual Gulf Breeze Christmas Parade. Piggly Wiggly plans to have several entries, including the Folgers Race Cars and, of course, the Pig!
In short, the Sentinel seems to be your basic small hometown paper doing hometown stories about hometown people. Except that in the same November 19 issue, right above the Piggly-Wiggly manager, is a story headlined:
UFO SIGHTED OVER GULF BREEZE
Below this are three photographs of this thing, shaped roughly like a fat disk with a glowing, tapered bottom and a small, glowing protrusion on top. There are regularly spaced dark marks going around the side. The thing is in fairly clear focus. It appears to be hovering in the evening sky; you can see the dark blurred shapes of trees in the foreground.
The “story” accompanying the photographs consists entirely of the text of an anonymous letter to the newspaper, allegedly written by the photographer, who says he took five Polaroid pictures of the thing from his yard on the night of November 11.
“I was reluctant at first to show [the photographs] to any one, says the letter, but my wife convinced me to show them to Ed. Ed in turn said that the photos should be shown to the press. ... I am a prominent citizen of the community, however, and need anonymity at this time. I know what I saw and would feel much better if I knew I was not alone.
“Let me reassure you that this is not a hoax.”
It was “Ed” who brought the photographs to the Sentinel, according to Duane Cook, the editor and publisher. Cook, 43, is a former computer salesman who took over the paper from his stepfather in 1980. Cook thought the pictures looked convincing, and “Ed,” whom Cook knows, said the photographer was responsible. So Cook decided to go ahead with the story, but he was still “nervous a little” about it until the morning of November 19, when the paper was just about to go to press. On that day Cook’s stepfather and predecessor as editor, Charles Somerby, and his wife (Cook’s mother), Doris Somerby, stopped by the paper. Cook showed them the Polaroids.
They did not act surprised. They said they had seen the same object. On the same night.
Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee
“I lost all fear of going to press with it,” Cook says.
The Witnesses
If you called up Central Casting and asked for two people to play the parts of the Reliable Witnesses, they would send you Charlie and Doris Somerby. He’s 69 and, before his newspaper career, served as a naval communications officer in World War II and Korea. She’s 67 and holds the world indoor record for grandmotherliness (when I visit their home to interview them, she has an actual apple pie cooling on the kitchen table).
The Somerbys say that on November 11, while taking a walk at sundown, they saw an object out over the bay headed toward Gulf Breeze. It made no sound, they say, and it did not look like any kind of aircraft they had ever seen. They watched for some mention of it on the evening TV news, but there was none. Until Cook showed them the photographs, they had not planned to say anything about it.
I ask them, several times and in several ways, if they’re sure that the thing they saw over the bay looks the same as the object in the photographs. They say they’re sure. Driving away, I am convinced they’re telling the truth.
The Story Spreads
When the Sentinel published the UFO pictures, people started calling. “We got a half a dozen calls from people who saw something that night,” says Cook. His staff started collecting these reports, and ran them as a front-page story in the November 25 issue. A local TV station did a story about the UFO, showing one of the Polaroids blown way up. “That was impressive,” says Cook.
Then another local TV station did a story about it.
Then United Press International did a story about it.
And then it happened, the event that distinguishes an interesting but basically local story from a story with potentially shocking Worldwide Implications: The National Enquirer called.
Yes. The paper that is frequently way ahead of the media pack on major Hollywood divorces; the paper that obtained and published the now-historic photograph showing Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap because he was too much of a gentleman to push her off; the paper that once offered a reward of $1 million for “positive proof” that extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting the Earth; this paper was now calling Duane Cook of the Breeze Sentinel.
The Enquirer sent a reporter, who wanted to take the photographs back to the paper’s home base in Lantana, Florida, for further analysis. But by that point Cook had been in touch with the state director of the Mutual UFO Network (more on this later), who had advised Cook that these photographs could be very valuable and he should not let them out of his sight. So the Enquirer flew Cook down to Lantana, where, Cook
says, “They gave [the photographs] the most thorough going-over, and they couldn’t find any flaws.” They made Cook an offer: $5,000 for the right to publish the photographs before anybody else—if the Enquirer decided to use them. But before they made that decision, they wanted a second opinion. So they flew Cook and his photographs all the way to the world-famous NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory at Cal Tech in Pasadena, California. There, Cook says, “they took a series of photographs of the photographs,” the idea being that they would analyze them further and give the results to the Enquirer.
Five thousand dollars. NASA. This was getting very exciting. And there was more to come.
The New Evidence
Two more photographs arrived at the Sentinel. These were taken with a 35mm camera, and although the quality is worse than that of the Polaroids, they appear to show the same object. An anonymous letter claims the photographs were taken in June of 1986—over a year before the Polaroids were allegedly taken.
Then somebody stuffed a manila envelope into the Sentinel mailbox containing nine more photographs; again the quality is poor, but they appear to show the same object. The accompanying letter is signed “Believer Bill,” who claims he took the pictures with a toy camera—which also was stuffed into the envelope—that his children had left in his car.
Then “Ed”—remember “Ed”? The one who brought in the original photographs—gave the Sentinel a very clear Polaroid that he says he took in his backyard; it shows, very clearly, three of the objects.
At this point the Sentinel was turning into the Galactic Clearing House for UFO Evidence. The photographs had become so common that the last two sets, which seemed to suggest that a regular alien invasion was going on right there in Gulf Breeze, ran on page four of the December 24 issue. The page-one story was the Christmas parade.
But Duane Cook, the editor, is hoping that the UFO story isn’t over.
“I would be delighted if, whoever they are, they have decided to communicate, because they’ve been watching us for some time now,” he tells me. “My main fear is that we won’t be adult enough to welcome them. My contribution would be to condition people’s minds to the possibility that they do exist, so that we can learn from them. In fact, maybe ...”—Cook pauses, then shakes his head. “No, that sounds grandiose.”
“What?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, looking at me carefully, “maybe that’s why I’m here.”
Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee
The Ufo People
Duane Cook is not alone. A lot of people are convinced that extraterrestrials are watching us. There are more than 200 UFO-oriented organizations worldwide, according to The UFO Encyclopedia, which bills itself as “a comprehensive A-to-Z guide to the UFO phenomenon” and which cheerfully and uncritically passes along all kinds of fascinating UFO stories. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the entry about a “contactee”—a person who claims to receive regular visits from extraterrestrials—named Howard Menger:
According to Menger, a rash of sightings around his New Jersey home was followed by regular social visits from the Space People. He performed favors for his alien friends and even acted as their barber, cutting their long blond hair in order that they could pass unnoticed among the earthlings. Menger was rewarded with a trip to the moon, where he breathed easily in a surface atmosphere similar to Earth’s. He brought back some lunar potatoes, which reportedly contained five times the protein found in terrestrial potatoes. Their nutritive value could not be proved, however, because Menger had supposedly handed them over to the U.S. government, which was keeping them a secret.
Not all the UFO believers, however, are Froot Loops. A lot of people who definitely qualify as Responsible Citizens have claimed they saw something strange in the sky. in 1973, Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, reported that he had seen a UFO in 1969, just before a Lions Club meeting (although we should bear in mind that, as president, Carter claimed he was attacked by a large swimming rabbit). Other celebrities who, according to The UFO Encyclopedia, have reported UFO sightings include: Jackie Gleason, Muhammad Ali, John Travolta, Elvis Presley, Orson Bean, and, of course, William Shatner.
Many “sightings” have turned out to be hoaxes. Many others have turned out to be man-made or natural objects—airplanes, weather balloons, satellites, planets, stars, etc. And some remain unexplained. The mainstream scientific community tends to believe these are probably ordinary phenomena that could, with sufficient information, be identified. The UFOlogists tend to believe they are evidence that extraterrestrials are here. The debate rages on.
The federal government has, reluctantly, played a major role in the UFO controversy. The Air Force, in an operation called Project Blue Book, collected and investigated UFO reports from 1948 until 1969, when the project was dropped because, the government says, it was a waste of time. Many UFOlogists, however, argue that the government wasn’t really trying to solve the mystery but to discredit the witnesses, and is now engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up evidence of extraterrestrial visits, just as it has refused to release the lunar potatoes. Some of the conspiracy theories are pretty spooky, as we will see.
The Man From Mufon
On my second day in Gulf Breeze, I drive out to Fort Walton Beach, about 40 miles east, to visit Donald Ware, the Florida state director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). MUFON describes itself as “an international scientific organization composed of people seriously interested in studying and researching” in an effort to provide “the ultimate answer to the UFO enigma.”
Ware, who spent 26 years in the Air Force and flew two combat tours as a fighter pilot, appears to be a very straight arrow, a serious man with serious eyes. And he takes the Gulf Breeze sightings very seriously. After a MUFON field investigator—there are more than 50 in the state—examined the Polaroids and interviewed some of the witnesses, MUFON released a “preliminary evaluation” stating that the Polaroids show “an unknown of great significance.”
Ware tells me that this is going to be “an important case that will be discussed by UFOlogists all over the world.” As he talks, he backs up various points by pulling papers from his files, which he began amassing back in 1952, when he saw lights over Washington, D.C., in what turned out to be a famous UFO incident.
“After 12 years of study,” he says, “I decided that somebody was watching us. After 10 more years of study, I concluded that someone in our government has known this since 1947.”
Solemnly, Ware hands me a book containing a reproduction of what are alleged to be Top Secret U.S. government documents. These documents state that in 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, the U.S. government secretly recovered a crashed flying saucer and four alien bodies.
And President Harry Truman set up a secret group of top scientists, called “Majestic 12,” to study the aliens and their craft.
And this whole thing has been kept secret ever since.
Ware is looking at me intently.
“Well!” I say brightly. “Thanks very much for your help!”
The Key Here
I’m sitting in my motel room, thinking. The more I think, the more it seems to me that, whatever is going on in Gulf Breeze, the Key Figure is “Ed.” He’s the one who brought the first set of Polaroids to the Sentinel, allegedly on behalf of the photographer. He’s the one, according to Duane Cook, who took the later Polaroid showing three objects. He’s the only photographer who isn’t totally anonymous. I decide I need to talk to him. I call Cook, the Sentinel editor, and ask him to ask “Ed” to please get in touch with me.
Less than an hour later, I hear a tapping at my motel window.
The Visit
“Ed” does not introduce himself, except to say: “I’m the guy you’re looking for.” He’s about my age, 40. He’s articulate, mechanically inclined, and very sharp.
We talk for about an hour. Right away he admits he took the first set of Polaroids. He says he invented the story about being the intermediary because he was a
fraid that if his name got in the paper, he’d be ridiculed. “I have a family,” he says. “I’m a successful businessman. Everyone in this town knows me.”
“I know what I saw is real,” he says.
He becomes more agitated as he talks. He tells me he has seen the UFO six times. He says that what has been published in the Sentinel is only the beginning of the story.
“There is more,” he says. “But it’s scary.”
He leans forward.
“There is this thing,” he says, “and it can shoot a blue beam out of it. I got a picture of it doing it.”
He shows me the picture. It’s another Polaroid, showing the now-familiar object, with what appears to be a faint bluish ray of light coming out of the hole in the bottom.
Now the conversation gets weird. “Ed” says he was once trapped in the beam. Frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn’t move a muscle.
While he was in the beam, “Ed” believes, the UFO beings put some kind of “mental input” into his brain, so they could communicate with him, but something—jets, maybe—scared them off, and now the beings keep coming around because they’re trying to get the mental input back. He knows when they’re nearby. “I can hear a hum,” he says.
He also hears voices, speaking in Spanish and some kind of strange “consonant language.” He has heard the voices at night, near his house, out by his pool pump. He wishes that, whoever they are, they would hurry up and take their mental input back and leave him alone.
“This has f-ed up the last two months of my life,” he says.
I tell him that a lot of people would say he was crazy, or lying.
He says he knows that, but he has something that will shut everybody up.
