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.

Read next

St. Paul and the UFO Landing Pad

In 1967, for Canada's centenary, this Alberta town built itself a UFO landing pad — a raised concrete structure with a map of Canada made from stone from every province and a plaque inviting any visitor from space to land. It was opened by Canada's minister of national defence, Paul Hellyer, who arrived by helicopter. Forty years later Hellyer became the first former defence minister anywhere to state publicly that extraterrestrials exist. The pad is still there and remains the town's landmark, with a tourist office beside it. In more than fifty years no landing has been recorded.