Ed and Frances Walters claimed that the dozens of photographs and a 1 minute, 38 second video that Ed shot in a six-month span, from November 1987 to May 1988, were those of spaceships over their home in Gulf Breeze, a Pensacola suburb.

They weren’t alone. A city council member said he saw a bright orange object fly over on March 17, 1988. A retired newspaper publisher said he saw it too. So did a doctor, a chemical engineer and his wife. About 100 witnesses in all backed the Walters' claims. 

Gulf Breeze is not the first place in Florida to report sightings. Indian legends, settler folklore, police affidavits and numerous formal reports to the Mutual UFO Network all detail people's convictions that something's out there in the skies over Florida, and they saw it.   

Ed Walters didn't just see the ships, he says. They burned his grass and shot a beam of unearthly blue light that once froze his legs to the ground and another time missed his wife by inches while he captured the encounter on film.

He reported hearing in his mind both the instructions of the aliens and discussions of earthlings he believes were being held aboard the ships. He said he saw an alien standing outside his window and by his bed. There's a 90-minute stretch for which he said he can't account that he said ended with him waking up face down on the beach, sand on his mouth. He believes he was a victim of an alien abduction.       

The Walters called the encounters "The most astounding multiple sightings of UFOs in U.S. history" in their book The Gulf Breeze Sightings, which was followed by another book four years later.

"What, naively, we did was think that by writing it down, it would stop people like you from calling,'' Francis Walters laughed in a 1996 telephone interview with this writer for my book Weird Florida. "How wrong we were."

Critics said the whole thing was a hoax. A reporter said he found a UFO model in Walters’ attic. And others challenged the photographs as double-exposure prints, the products of a faulty Polaroid and pictures of red balloons. The naysayers hadn’t changed their minds. See this 30-year anniversary of the sightings in the Pensacola News-Journal in 2017. Others still insisted it really did happen.

Walters, a building contractor by profession, told me in 1996 that he could not explain why his personal ordeal stopped at the end of that six-month stretch.

"Often, there are questions like that that can only be answered by the beings responsible for the UFOs, whatever they might be,'' he said. "It's not something that's within our grasp to even understand.''