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
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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.
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