Gulf Breeze

Gulf Breeze and Ed Walters's Photographs

From November 1987 a contractor named Ed Walters brought a series of photographs of a glowing object with a row of ports along its underside to the local paper in this Florida town — anonymously at first, then under his own name. Within two years there were some forty pictures, and Gulf Breeze had become a place of pilgrimage. In 1990 the new occupants of the Walters house found a model made of foam and film in the attic, matching the object in the photographs. Walters said it had been planted. Meanwhile other residents, police officers among them, were reporting lights over the sound in those same years, and some of those reports have nothing to do with Walters. The case remains a classic of how one disputed witness drowns out everything else.