Flights of Fancy or UFOs? : Space: Strange encounters aren’t unusual in one small town. But mere mortals, not aliens, may be responsible.

GULF BREEZE, Fla. — As a hotbed of flying saucer sightings, this small town long ago earned its dot on the map--perhaps even the intergalactic map.

Nearby are five major military bases, including one where explosives are tested, and the skies overhead are often chockablock with blinking lights and fiery flashes. Reports of UFOs--Unidentified Flying Objects--are as common here as powdery white beaches and tourists with third-degree sunburns.

But now something more ominous seems to be hovering over Gulf Breeze, casting a long shadow over the once good-natured UFO hubbub. Three weeks ago, local police made a routine traffic stop and came up with six young soldiers, AWOL from their top secret Army posts in Augsburg, West Germany. According to friends, the soldiers had come here to witness the end of the world.

The soldiers are gone, whisked away by a team of CIA and FBI agents that swooped down on Gulf Breeze faster than swamp gas rises. Speculation as to what the GIs were up to, and why they came to Gulf Breeze, has caused a sensation here.

A Pentagon spokesman said the six were members of something called the End of the World cult. Mention was made of The Rapture, when some Christians believe the saved will be taken to heaven, as was a mission to kill the Antichrist. There also were reports that the group was preparing to ascend to heaven via spaceship.

“This was once known as a quiet bedroom community,” complains Jerry D. Brown, the chief of the town’s 15-officer police force. “But a lot of people are laughing at us because of this UFO business, and now this is what we’re getting--weirdos, nuts, people we don’t want here.”

Visits from mysterious strangers, from Earth or any other planet, are unwelcome in Gulf Breeze, an upscale community of 6,000 residents proud to be an alternative to many of the tourist-hungry beach towns along the “Redneck Riviera,” that stretch of scenic Gulf shore from the Florida Panhandle to New Orleans.

Not only is the town’s reputation under siege, but both Brown and the mayor, Ed Gray III, believe the UFO hysteria was touched off by a clever hoax perpetrated by a local home builder.

“It’s all negative for the community,” says Brown. “And the only one who has gained is Ed.”

“Ed” is Ed Walters, an affable, wiry man of 44, well-known in Gulf Breeze for his custom-built homes, his active role as a high school band booster and for his playful imagination.

Now Walters’ renown has expanded beyond this city’s two square miles with the publication in March of “The Gulf Breeze Sightings.” Co-authored by Walters and his wife, Frances, president of the high school PTA, the book relates in diary fashion what the couple says were several months’ worth of close encounters with four-foot gray aliens who sometimes speak Spanish. The visits supposedly began in November, 1987.

Due chiefly to notoriety attending Walters’ accounts, the Mutual UFO Network, a national organization that tracks strange celestial activity, picked neighboring Pensacola to hold its annual convention. Just a week before the six AWOL soldiers showed up, busloads of MUFON conventioneers toured Gulf Breeze, where they traipsed through the back yards of people who have reported sightings, stopped off in Shoreline Park to eyeball a swirl in the grass that not everyone believes was made by beavers, and gazed hopefully skyward over Pensacola Bay.

And, of course, there were T-shirts. One shows an alien family, back on their home planet, with the youngsters lamenting: “My folks went to Gulf Breeze and all I got was this lousy T- shirt.”

For many locals, however, UFOs are no joke. “It was bright blue, and it had several smaller lights around it,” said Louis F. Martin, 66, an Air Force retiree who, with his wife, Mary, was sitting under the tall pines in Shoreline Park on a recent Thursday morning. “I never told anyone but my wife here because I didn’t know what people would think. I didn’t want to look like a fool.”

“But now,” adds Mary Martin, “a lot of people are coming forward.”

Indeed, Duane Cook, editor and publisher of the weekly Gulf Breeze Sentinel, estimates that in the past 2 1/2 years, he’s heard of UFO sightings from at least 200 people, including his parents. “I don’t buy the visual hysteria bit,” he says.

Links between the AWOL soldiers and Gulf Breeze’s reputation as a UFO spaceport are intriguing, but vague. All were assigned to the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade. Each of the six--five men and one woman--had top-secret clearance in a unit charged with providing U.S. defense forces with secure communication and conducting research into “other electronic phenomena,” according to the Army. Walters says he heard that the group had come to contact him.

The soldiers were discovered after one of the men was stopped late on the night of July 13 because the van he was driving had a faulty tail light. He had no driver’s license. But after the name was run through the military crime computer, Police Chief Brown was contacted, he says, by an officer at the Pensacola Naval Air Station who told him: “Call Washington. They want this guy bad. Real bad.”

In fact, the government wanted all of them real bad. After being held briefly at the Pensacola naval base, the six were taken to Ft. Benning, Ga., and then to Ft. Knox, Ky., where the Army quickly cleared them in a routine espionage investigation, issued them general discharges and turned them loose.

Army Maj. Joe Padilla, a Pentagon spokesman, admits that the desertion of six GIs with top-secret clearance and forged leave papers, who travel 7,000 miles to a tiny town in Florida, “was not a routine AWOL.”

But, he added, after all waived their rights to present a defense, the commander at Ft. Knox decided to let them go without further punishment. Anna Foster, a Gulf Breeze psychic in whose house the five men had been staying for four days, refuses to talk about the visit. And so the locals are left to wonder.

Ed Walters tends toward the “major government cover-up” theory, the same one, he says, that has been applied to his UFO experiences. “The government can’t afford not to (discredit me),” he says. “They have to do away with me. Then the people of Peoria are safe and can go back to sleep.”

There are nights when Walters says he can’t sleep, however, because that’s when the aliens most often came. In his book, he describes being paralyzed by a beam of blue light, suspended four feet off the ground in a failed abduction attempt, and once coming face-to-face with an extraterrestrial, who communicated to him through a grinding sound in his head. He overheard the creatures discuss in Spanish a fondness for bananas. He was told repeatedly that they had come for him. “Photos are prohibited,” he was warned during one confrontation.

But Walters got pictures anyway, lots of them, and as UFO photos go, his were pretty clear.

Anonymously at first, Walters began to publish his photos in the Gulf Breeze Sentinel, circulation 4,000. The pictures show a saucer-shaped vehicle cruising over Walters’ back yard. At first, editor Cook says, he was skeptical. But Cook’s parents said they, too, had seen the saucer.

“If this whole thing were just Ed’s story and pictures, I would have gotten off the bandwagon a long time ago,” says Cook. “But my folks and half a dozen others saw what Ed saw that first night.”

One who isn’t joining those he dismisses as “Ed’s followers” is Mayor Gray. “I had a great deal of respect for Ed Walters at one time,” says Gray, a 38-year-old senior vice president of a Pensacola bank. “I was a friend of his. But I think he’s committed a fraud, a public deception for personal gain.”

Police Chief Brown, who shares Gray’s opinion, admits that he has spent considerable time trying to discredit Walters, and even checked to see if anything he was up to was illegal.

But Brown found no legal wrongdoing. “Using the city to make money is morally wrong if not criminal,” says Brown.

In June, however, News Journal reporter Craig Myers turned up a model of a spaceship that looked like those photographed by Walters. The model, constructed of Styrofoam plates and an old blueprint, was found hidden in the attic of a house formerly occupied by the Walters family. The newspaper published photos of the model, demonstrating how it could have been used to fake UFO sightings.

Days later, Gray and Brown called a press conference to announce that they had interviewed a young Gulf Breeze man, a onetime friend of Walters’ son Dan. They said the man told them he had helped Walters make phony UFO pictures by double-exposing Polaroid film. According to a transcript of an interview with Tommy Smith, Walters made his photos with models, a flashlight and colored paper.

Walters denies Smith’s allegations. And the model, he says, was planted in the house as part of a plot to discredit him. He says he can prove it was built well after his 1987 photos were taken.

Walters admits he has made money from his UFO encounters. Although he wouldn’t say exactly how much, his editor at Morrow & Co., Randy Gil, says Walters received a $200,000 advance for both the hardcover and Avon Books paperback rights. A television movie is also in the works, Gil says.

Walters has his supporters. Cook says that although he has been troubled by the fact that the only good spacecraft pictures have been taken either by Walters or an anonymous photographer called Believer Bill, too many other credible eyewitnesses have come forward.

Boots Eckert, a math teacher at the high school and a MUFON member, says that from her classroom she can see a large circle of burned grass in a nearby field that experts have been unable to explain. And recently, she adds, her son, now a Ph.D. in geology, told her he witnessed something odd when he was a boy, “but he never told me because he was afraid I’d think he was crazy.”

Some Gulf Breeze residents say they are afraid the rest of the world will think the whole town is crazy. “This has hurt the community,” says Gray, a Gulf Breeze resident for 28 years. “I get made fun of every day. I try to laugh it off. But others can’t.” As an example, Gray cites the case of a resident who recently traveled to Tampa to present a scientific paper. “She was asked not to present the paper simply because she was from Gulf Breeze and people wouldn’t take her seriously,” said Gray.

As for the sincere testimony of others, including a respected councilwoman and the county medical examiner, that they, too, have seen unexplained phenomena in the skies overhead, Gray insists he is willing to believe. “It would be naive to think we’re the only life forms in all these galaxies,” he says. “They may come. But I can tell you right now, they haven’t come to Gulf Breeze.”