SUBJECT: GULF BREEZE CONTRAVERSY HANGS OVER TOWN FILE: UFO1256 NEWS CLIPPING SERVICE DATE OF ARTICLE: January 29, 1989 SOURCE OF ARTICLE: Tribune LOCATION: Tampa, Florida BYLINE: Jennifer Tucker ======================================================== (C) Copyright 1989 ParaNet Information Service All Rights Reserved. THIS FILE WAS PROVIDED BY THE UFO NEWSCLIPPING SERVICE AND PREPARED BY PARANET ALPHA -- PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE BBS PARANET ALPHA DENVER, COLORADO NOTE: THESE FILES ARE NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION OUTSIDE OF THE PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE NETWORK ======================================================== GULF BREEZE UFOS CONTROVERSY HANGS OVER PANHANDLE TOWN By Jennifer Tucker Tribune Staff Writer GULF BREEZE--Ringed by two story pines and six figure real estate, Gulf Breeze is a mostly unremarkable town severed by U.S. 98 in the Florida Panhandle. To visitors, its most memorable feature is a flashing neon fish pointing the way to Pensacola Beach. To 6,000 residents, its most pressing problem is a 70 mile detour around the Pensacola Bay Bridge, hit and crippled by a barge two weeks ago. In 16 years, only two murders have torn this town. In 12 years, only 10 bank robberies have occured. But in the last year and a half, more than 135 local witnesses have reported seeing something they can't identify. One prominent Gulf Breeze resident has taken more than 30 photographs of a UFO. This man, who protects his anonymity behind the name "Ed," has photographed a craft so fantastic and unfamiliar that many people believe the pictures are first rate fakes. Skeptics merely point to the east where Eglin Air Force Base, one of the country's largest military installations, lies like a wall to wall flying carpet. The Gulf Breeze stories--told to the nation by NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries" and CNN, among others--have inspired UFO researchers to undertake a dramatic debate of possibility vs. probability. Researchers agree on only one thing: Either the Gulf Breeze UFO sightings are some of the most phenomenal ever recorded, or the Gulf Breeze UFO sightings are some of the most exaggerated ever reported. Among the eyewitnesses are a federal judge, a politician and a prominent physician. THE NEIGHBORS Art and Mary Hufford don't even live in town. Their homey, ranch style house is on a sycamore lined street in Pensacola, a bridge's drive away from Gulf Breeze. But the Huffords remember, in perfect detail, an evening in early November 1987. The couple was in their car, just two miles from home, when they saw something gray, oval and silent fly over the treetops, Art says. The craft remained in view for several minutes, yet when they got home and talked about it, Art says they couldn't come up with a rational explanation. "It just didn't make any sense," says Art, a soft spoken chemical engineer with a master's degree and 25 years' experience at Monsanto Chemical Co. Both Huffords are elders in the Presbyterian church, and Mary is a sustaining member of the Junior League of Pensacola. "We thought UFOs were something that happened to Billy Bob out on a boat after too many beers," Art says, wryly. But then, several weeks after their sighting, the couple saw Ed's photographs in the Pensacola edition of the Gulf Breeze newspaper. "It was like someone had taken a picture out of our brains," Art says. "That was it." Through 1988, the couple shared their experience with others similarly affected. At social gatherings, when Art mentioned the sighting, he says people would pull him aside with whispered confessions of their own experiences. And Art is convinced that what he saw was not a product of modern technology or man made trickery. "Frankly," Art says, "the debunkers make me mad. I saw what I saw." PARTY INVITATIONS Fenner and Shirley McConnell of Gulf Breeze had sent out invitations to their annual June get together with tongue planted firmly in cheek. The front of the invitation featured a cartoon of alien creatures rollicking through city streets, and inside they told revelers it would be a "UFO watching party." Two days before the 1988 party, the couple says, their invitation sprang to life outside their bedroom window. They saw a cylindrical craft, ringed in windows and lights, hovering over Pensacola Bay. Fenner McConnell, a physician and medical examiner for Florida's District 1, says the craft came within 75 yards of the house, and at one point "I thought it was going to land on it." Shirley McConnell, a caterer, says she was overcome by "an eerie feeling," but she immediately recognized the craft from Ed`s photographs. The couple went outside to get a better look. It hovered for nearly four minutes and then "kind of drifted away," Fenner McConnell says. "I'm not saying that I believe it's from another planet," Shirley McConnell says, "but it's something I had never laid eyes on in my life. People can say whatever they want about me, but I know what I saw. Ed didn't make this up." Likewise, Brenda Pollak says the large, lighted craft she saw twice in one night during the spring of 1988 was not a figment of her imagination. She was driving east across the Pensacola Bay Bridge when she saw it the first time, looking "too big and too bright...and very different from anything I had ever seen before." Nearing her home on Shoreline Drive in Gulf Breeze, Pollak pulled into the parking lot of the city's recreation center and parked. She says she watched the craft hover over the bay--unaware that a few blocks away, Ed was taking a photograph of the very same craft. "I was exhilarated," says Pollak, a two term City Council member who works with Ed on community projects. "I can tell you now--for every one person who has reported seeing the craft, there are 10 who talk about it but don't want anyone to know," Pollak adds. "And I can also tell you if this is a hoax, it can't be Ed because it would make him look like an idiot and the community look crazy." THE RESEARCHERS Scientists can't help making comparisons. In the 1970's, a Swiss laborer named Edward Meier took hundreds of photographs of a 'spaceship' near Zurich. Although some people consider his photographs authentic, others believe they are fakes, basing their conclusions on damning photographic analyses. Nevertheless, scientists acknowledge that Meier`s pictures are remarkably clever. So it is with Ed, whose photographs have been analyzed and scrutinized by two of the country's foremost photographic experts. Moreover, the photographs--and Ed's cooperation with some UFO investigators--have caused a political rift so powerful that participants think the case could damage the future of UFO research in America. At odds are investigators with the Mutual UFO Network, a 20 year old group of scientists and 'grass roots' researchers, and the Center for UFO Studies, a non profit conclave founded by J. Allen Hynek, a leading American astronomer who died in 1986. Network directors support Ed's story; the center does not. The network bases its opinion primarily on the findings of Bruce Maccabee, a Naval physicist studying optics and underwater sound in addition to working with the FBI. The center bases its opinion on its own researchers as well as on Robert Nathan, a member of the technical staff of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. INTRICATE REPORT Maccabee, who published an intricate 90 page report examining the evidence, concludes that the photographs are real. He applied the properties of physics and various mathematical theories to determine things such as the size of the ship, the distance of the craft from the camera lens and odd angles of the photographs. More important, Maccabee says, he wasn't "biased by the idea that it's too impossible, therefore it can't be real." Critics would "rather take the approach that if the pictures could have been hoaxed then they must have been," he says. Maccabee reasons that Ed could not have performed the photographic feats necessary to pull off such an elaborate hoax. "A professional magician would have a difficult time doing this," he says. Last year, staffers at a Pensacola television station tried to reproduce Ed's photographs using a model. They gave up after their attempts failed miserably, Maccabee says. He further admonishes skeptics for questioning the look of the craft--"Nobody knows what UFOs look like," Maccabee says. And he points out what he considers to be the weighty circumstantial evidence in Ed's favor--including testimony from friends and witnesses, one of them Ed's wife. Skeptics, however, side with NASA's Nathan. Although he acknowledges that he "hasn't given the pictures the kind of care Bruce has," Nathan says a visual examination reveals glaring inconsistencies--typical of double exposures. IRREGULARITIES IN PHOTOS The spaceship is brighter and more in focus than the background, he says, and these irregularities are repeated in picture after picture. Nathan concludes that the object looks like "a gas burner turned upside down" and that its apparent lack of symmetry is simply "inconsistent with what you would expect from a highly developed society." Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies, says the Gulf Breeze case has "deteriorated into a shouting match" because his organization was forced to play devil's advocate. Investigators with the Mutual UFO Network were too quick to judge the photographs favorably, he says, and those comments biased Maccabee's analysis. "Except those intimately connected with the network, 90 percent of serious UFO researchers think Gulf Breeze is a hoax," Rodeghier concludes. Among those who agree with that assessment is Philip Klass, considered the country's premier debunker of UFOs. Although he has not seen the Gulf Breeze photographs, Klass says he has scanned Maccabee's report and finds it improbable. "Any UFO case, whether it involves pictures or not, is sort of like that old adage that a woman cannot be 10 percent pregnant. If one photo is a hoax, then they all must be thrown out," says Klass, who surmises that the photographs are too "suspect" to be real. Klass reiterates his claim by stating, "In 22 years of investigating, I have never investigated or heard of a UFO case that cannot be explained in prosaic terms." JUST THE FACTS "I deal in facts," says Jerry Brown, Gulf Breeze's 42 year old chief of police, whose carpeted office smells faintly of cinnamon and coffee. "Granted--anyplace, any time, anything can happen to you. But why would people call about a prowler and not call about a UFO that's landed in their yard?" The police chief knows Ed and likes him. Yet Brown says he's concerned about the possibility "that one person, as a practical joke...could destroy what it's taken so many years to build." Ed`s supporters, meanwhile, believe Gulf Breeze attracted the unknown visitors because of the reputation the city already had built--as a well off, well educated, open minded community. "There is a direct correlation between education and the acceptance of the UFO phenomenon," says Donald Ware, Florida director of the Mutual UFO Network. "I am convinced the reason one man was given so many photographic opportunities is because the aliens wanted us to see those pictures," Ware says. ================================================================= ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************