by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
This is the last of a series of blogs looking at the Gulf Breeze, Florida, UFO flap that started with the publication of a photograph of a clearly-defined, lit-up UFO in the November 19, 1986, Gulf Breeze Sentinel. More followed from the same photographer who remained anonymous for over a year and was mostly referred to as “Ed” or “Mr. Ed.” The director of the Mutual UFO Network, Walt Andrus, met with Ed, and Andrus, along with Bruce Maccabee, local MUFON investigators, and the editor of the Sentinel, Duane Cook, became staunch supporters of Ed’s claims that the photos were of real craft taken during encounters which included attempted abductions and psychic communication. Just as word got out that Ed had made a publishing deal and received a $200,000 advance, a double exposed photo alleged to have been taken by Ed as a party trick was brought to the attention of the press by a teenager, Nick Mock, who said he was there at the time. The photo showed a ghost behind another teenage guest, Jennifer Bloomfield, and she came forward and confirmed the story. This was evidence against Ed’s claim that he didn’t know how to make double exposures. In the August 6, 1988, Miami Herald there is an article (page 11 of the pdf) covering the publishing deal and the photo. It was written by Sidney Freeberg headlined “Flash! UFOs are Real!” with the subhead, “Is ‘Mr. Ed’ Giving Us the Horse Laugh?” and at the end of it, Freeberg presents Ed’s full name and aliases: “He is Edward Daniel Walters, alias Daniel Edward Walters, alias Daniel Walters, alias Daniel Hanson.”
Walters’s book, titled Gulf Breeze Sightings, cowritten with his wife, Francis, was published on March 1, 1990. As Walters and his supporters defended the case in the press, the article (the second page is here) by Craig Meyers headlined “Gulf Breeze UFO Model Found” appeared in the June 10, 1990, Pensacola News Journal. Included is a photo of Meyers’s hand holding the model and a double exposure made with it at the Journal that is remarkably similar to Walters’s photos. According to Meyers, it was found in a house that Walters used to live in by the new owner who was looking for a water line in the attic while in the midst of installing a new ice maker. Walters claimed it was planted and is quoted as saying, “The debunkers will go to any lengths to discredit me.”
Meyers wrote a book about his investigation titled War of the Words that was published in 2006. In it, he describes the circus atmosphere in the normally quiet community caused by the photos and the hundreds of sightings reports from local residents that followed. According to him, Walters, a contractor, had built several houses in the area and lived in them before the eventual owners moved in. Meyers found the addresses, contacted the current residents, and interviewed them asking if they’d “found anything unusual when they moved in, such as books on UFOs, photos of UFOs, dark rooms, model UFOs, heck, even real UFOs.”
When Meyers got to the house where Ed and Francis had claimed to have taken several photos in 1987 and 1988, the new owners, Robert and Sarah Menzer, told him about finding a model “a few weeks ago” under some insulation in the attic. Sarah Menzer went to get it, and when she brought it back, Meyers recognized it: “It was the Gulf Breeze UFO.”
Meyers describes it this way:
“It was a saucer made of two Styrofoam plates attached – one facing up and one facing down – to a strip of drafting paper that made up its midsection. Tiny portholes were punched through the paper strip, in the center of black squares that had been drawn by professional drafting pens. Underneath were two smaller Styrofoam bowls glued on top of each other to form a power ring. A hole had been cut in the bowls and the bottom plate, creating an opening into the model’s hollow interior. The tip of a plastic tube stuck up through the center of the top plate – shaped sort of like a test tube.”
According to Meyers, the significance of the Styrofoam became apparent when lit from inside as it “glowed like a Chinese lantern.
Further linking the model to Walters were notes written in his distinctive writing style on the inside of the drafting paper. Meyers investigated and found that the paper was from plans for a house Walters had built.
Before publishing the article, Walters was invited to the office to comment. To avert a possible claim that he had built the model as an illustration for what he had actually seen, he was asked if he had ever built a model of a UFO. He answered, “No,” and laughed, and it was then that he was shown the model and asked to explain it.
Walters and his supporters offered many arguments to support his allegation that the model had been planted, including the claim that the drafting paper was from plans for a house that wasn’t built when he took the pictures. Meyers was able to determine, with the help of arch-debunker Phillip Klass and the mayor of Gulf Breeze, that this was not the case. He infers that Walters attempted to cover his tracks by going to the building records room at City Hall and tearing out a corner of the blueprints showing the dimensions of a house he’d built six months before the first photo was published. It was from the plans for this house that Meyers believed the strip of paper came from.
As this was happening, Meyers was invited by Channel 3 News reporter, Mark Curtis, to come to the mayor’s office to hear from someone who was, in Curtis’s words, “in with Ed early on.”
That person was Tommy Smith, then 22, who had been a friend of Walters’s son. He was interviewed over the phone with Meyers, Curtis, Mayor Ed Gray, and Gulf Breeze Police Chief Jerry Brown present. A transcript (page 5 of the pdf) of the interview appears in the June 21, 1990, Gulf Breeze Sentinel under the headline “Who is Telling the Truth,” with the subhead, “Smith Says he Saw Pictures Faked.” Walters had legally changed his last name in 1989 to Hanson in honor of his stepfather (as Meyers discovered when he ran into difficulty following his paper trail), and Smith refers to him as Ed Hanson.
According to Smith, he thought that Hanson had been playing a joke when the first photos were published and asked him about it. After a month, Hanson had him come over, and with his sometime accomplice present, referred to as Hank, told him that the photos were all part of a practical joke. Smith describes the models Hanson used much the same way Meyers did and how the photos were created by shining a flashlight up through a PVC tube stuck in the model, taking a picture, not advancing the film, and then making another exposure.
Smith also explained methods Hanson used with other cameras, including one prepared by MUFON that was sealed with wax. According to him, in that instance, Hanson took pictures with the camera held sideways “of an airplane landing at night.” He remarked that those photos “weren’t as clear as the other shots of the spaceship.”
While this might have settled the case of Walters’s/Hanson’s photos in the minds of most investigator/researchers in the UFO community (not Andrus, even after he reopened the case and his investigators found evidence of a hoax), there was still the fact that there had been hundreds of sightings reports from area residents. Among the first of the independent witnesses were two people who wrote letters to the Sentinel, signed “Believer Bill,” and “Jane.” According to Smith, the first one was Ed and the second one “was either Ed or Hank.”
There had also been reports of a red UFO which are addressed in the article (page 14 of the pdf) by Zan Overall headlined “The Gulf Breeze RUFOs” published in the March/April 1992 International UFO Reporter. Overall points out that the first sighting occurred on September 12, 1989, when Walters arrived late at a MUFON meeting and brought members out to look at red light in the sky. Overall speculates that it could have been a flare suspended by a balloon and says that in a phone conversation with Smith, Smith said that Walters had described generating UFO reports while living in Costa Rica by inflating garment bags with a hair dryer and then suspending a candle under them.
A reporter who worked for the Sentinel, Kimberly Blair, provided some insight into some of the other reports in a six-page article published in the July 8, 1999, Pensacola Independent Weekly, Vols. 1 and 2. Terry Evans references the article in a September 24, 1999, post (pages 638 and 639 of the pdf) on UFO Updates and says that while joining local residents in a skywatch, Blair saw that they were pointing at planets and saying they were UFOs. Evans quotes her:
“The next morning I reported my findings to Cook. I laughed as I told him that I could not believe that the group thought the planets were UFOs. I remember the look on his face and the tone he used … he leaned forward in his desk chair, stared me in the eyes and said firmly, ‘Write it up as a UFO report’. I was stunned! Confusion and realization washed over me on the way to my desk. I sat down and re-thought the conversation. Did I not make myself clear? Confusion gave way to relief. Now I knew … this was all a scam and the paper was playing along.”