The following text is a letter to the editor that appeared
in the July 5, 1990
issue of the Gulf Breeze Sentinel. It is from
Dr. Bruce Maccabee and disputes
recent UFO hoax charges made
against the Walters family.


----------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Editor:


Ed Gray may know how to govern the town of Gulf Breeze, but he
obviously
knows little about the UFO subject.
He claimes that he knew early on (over
two years ago) from
"logic and common sense" that the Walters sightings were a
hoax,
yet he admits that he had "no conclusive proof the sightings of Ed

Walters were fabricated." However, the lack of conclusive proof
did not prevent
him from making, about two years ago, a public
statement that he believed the
sightings to be a hoax." He does
not explain the "logic and common sense" that
led to his statement.
However, I suspect that what he really means is that, so
far as he
knows UFOs don't exist and hence photos of them must be fakes.
If he
had studied the subject more, or had paid more attention to
the reports of many
of his own constituents, he might have been
less positive in his conclusion.
Perhaps he should talk to Ken
Fortenberry, the Managing Editor of the
Pensacola News Journal
regarding the reality of UFOs.
He claims that the
"many other sightings by well respected
citizens," sightings which he
couldn't dispute, were a result of
"the power of suggestion and the very real
occurrences of so much
air traffic in our area." As experienced UFO
investigators know,
this sort of explanation can account for some sightings of
the
"nightlights" or "daylight disc" type in which the witness' description
is
vague or differes only slightly from the descriptions of
conventional objects
in the sky. However, this cannot explain
sightings of distinctively unusual
objects with strange flight
dynamics (e.g., able to hover silently at low
altitude), nor can
it explain reports of daytime or nighttime sightings,
sometimes
by many witnesses at once, of structured objects which are

distinctively shaped UNLIKE conventional objects.
Mayor Gray says that
during the two years between his first
public statement and the present time he
was dismayed to see
the Walters sightings had been turned into a book since he
knew
it was a hoax. He claims that he received numerous phone calls
about the
subject and either mentioned his opinion that it was a
hoax or else he
"declined to discuss it because I was fed up with
the topic." Perhaps being
"fed up with the topic" prevented him
from reading any of the generally
available literature on the
subject and thus informing himself about the
nationwide and
worldwide occurrences of sightings by all sorts of people. If
he
attends the MUFON symposium he will learn how seriously
this subject is
treated by scientific invesitgators from around
the world.
Mayor Gray says
that the first "break" came with the discovery
of the model. He attempts to
explain how this discovery came
about by suggesting that Ed "miscalculated
how safely buried
under insulation in his former residence's attic the model of
the
UFO would be. He didn't want to chance the model being discovered
should
he move it and thus left it there, or he carelessly forgot
about it since it
had been several months since he had used it.
That the Mayor should try to
"rationalize" the discovery of the
model is understandable (he must have some
justification for how
it happened to still exist and be found), but his
rationalization is
silly. If Ed's sightings were a hoax based on that model
then he is
a "genius" in carrying it off thus far. It is hard to imagine
that
this genius would be so stupid as to silmply hide incriminating
evidence
under insulation. It is much more likely that he would
destroy it. Even Tommy
Smith, the formerly anonymous witness
against Ed, realizes that (assuming Ed
hoaxed the photos) Ed would
not let any incriminating evidence be found. He
states in his
testimony (the truth of which is not proven) that "Ed was
pretty
careful with that stuff. Anything he was worried about he
usually
burned." But as Mayor Gray listened to Mr. Smith he
somehow missed this clue
that Ed would have burned any
models.
We now know that the model is not
evidence against Ed. Not
only is it clearly not what appears in Ed"s photos,
but it didn't
even exist before September 1989, about two years after Ed's

first photos. (I don't expect the mayor to now claim that Ed made
a model in
September 1989, nearly two years after his reported
sightings, and then hid it
in the house which he hadn't lived in
since December 1988.)
Apparently the
testimony by Tommy Smith was the "last straw"
for Gray who decided to once
again, and forcefully this time, state
his position.
Although this testimony
was convincing to Gray, I have found ten
items that are discussed in the
testimony which have technical
errors. I will mention just three. I would not
expect Mayor Gray
to have realized the errors in the first two of these items,
but I
should think that one or both of the reporters would have realized
there
was something "fishy." On the other hand, even the Mayor,
I should think,
would have questioned the third item.
The first items were the subject of a
letter I sent on June 18th
to the Pensacola News Journal. One item has to do
with the
explanation of how the model was supposedly supported while
Ed
photographed it. According to Mr. Smith, and more or less
as illustrated in
the PNJ (Sunday, June 17), Ed had a "tripod
set up with a flashlight pointing
straight up," and sitting on the
flashlight "was part of a PVC pipe that was
black and he had it
sliced at an angle, and he would tape the spaceship on top
and the
flashlight would shine up and illuminate the spaceship." This
method
of mounting the model would block the back side of the
"power ring" at the
bottom of the model from the direct view of the
camera. Hence every one of
Ed's photos, if made this way, would
show a rather wide black gap in the more
distant part (the lowest
portion in the photos) of the "power ring." I suggest
the reader
look at the pictures in Ed's book to see in how many cases the

complete ring is visible. The light coming up through the pipe
would directly
illuminate the top of the model leaving the bottom
relatively dark (depending
upon the exact size of the pipe relative
to the model), in contrast to the
actual photos which have a very
bright bottom.
The second item involves the
Nimslo stereo camera. According to
Mr. Smith, "from what he (Ed) told me, he
went out and took a
picture of an airplane landing at night." This
explanation is
completely contradicted by the photographic data. First, the

images recorded by the camera do not at all look like an airplane
at night.
Second, the stereo effect (parallax) created by the two outer
lenses of the
camera show that the photographed object was no
more than 100 ft. from the
camera (the actual range estimate is
40 to 70 feet). At that range the length
of the object, as determined
by the length of the image and the camera optics,
was less than
6 feet. An airplane full of micromidget UFOnauts perhaps? The

above information on the results of the analysis of the Nimslo
photos has been
available for two years in a document published
by the Fund for UFO Research
entitiled "A History of the Gulf Breeze
Sightings." More importantly, the size
information was immediate
available to the reporters for comparison with
Smith's testimony
because it is on page 301 of The Gulf Breeze Sightings by Ed
and
Frances Walters. (Reporter Myers told me he had read the book.)
The
third item is one that almost anyone who has a lawn can
understand. When
asked about how Ed created the circle on dead
grass in the field behind his
house, near the high school, Mr.
Smith said, "If I remember correctly, he told
me that he turned a
small trampoline upside down for a while and jumped up and

and down on it." This is patently rediculous. Aside from the fact
that a 13
foot diameter circle would require more than a "small"
trampoline to cover it,
the grass in that circle was somehow
killed during the winter (the circle was
discovered in February
1988) and remained dead for several months as the grass
around
the circle turned green and grew during the spring. I have a
photograph
taken in May showing the circle still brown. At the
time that the circle was
found there was a suggestion that some
chemical was used to kill it, but no
residue was found. One would
think that as silly an explanation as this would
have at least raised
the eyebrows of all who were listening.
What led Mr.
Smith to claim, in all seriousness, apparently, the
latter two explanations
for the Nimslo photos and the circle?
According to Mr. Smith Ed TOLD him.
Yet these explanations
(airplane and trampoline) CANNOT BE TRUE. Hence there
must
have been fabrication on someone's part. There are several

possibilities, two of which are: (a) Ed admitted to Smith that he
(Ed) faked
the Nimslo photos and faked the circles, yet Ed lied
to Smith about how he
faked them; (b) Ed told the complete truth
to Smith but Smith, for some reason,
didn't tell the complete
truth to the interviewers; (c) Ed told the complete
truth to Smith
but Smith forgot what Ed had told him and made up explanations

on the spot to satisfy the interviewers.
None of these explanations for
Smith's statements makes any
sense. If he didn't remember what Ed had said,
why not simply
say, "I don't know." If Ed trusted Mr. Smith so explicitly as
to
admit to him that he faked the Nimslo photos and the circle,
then why
wouldn't Ed tell him exactly how the fakes were done?
(Why hide the true
explanations from Mr. Smith who, according
to Smith, had watched Ed create
double exposure fakes?) On the
other hand, if Ed told Mr. Smith how the fakes
were done, then why
wouldn't Mr. Smith tell the investigators?
There is, of
course, at least one other possible reason for why Mr.
Smith told the
investigators about the "airplane and trampoline
explanations." I suppose that
the reader can imagine what it is.
Mr. Gray says that he wrote the
published letter while "in route
back from meeting an accomplice to Ed
Walters...", Hank Boland.
Hank was the only non-Walters family member
mentioned by
Smith as being involved in the hoax. Hank has vehemently denied

any involvement in a hoax and instead has testified that he, too,
saw the UFO.
This testimony was first recorded by the MUFON
investigators in February
1988. His testimony was "voice
stress analyzed," with no stress being found at
key points in his
testimony.
One would think, considering the gravity of
this matter, that Hank's
rejection of Mr. Smiths's testimony (which leaves Mr.
Smith as the
only person claiming to have first hand knowledge of the hoax)

would at least give Mr. Gray some cause to question Smith's
testimony.
However, it apparently didn't phase the Mayor. He
simply got around Hank's
testimony by accusing him of being
one of Ed's accomplices. Furthermore he
explains Hank's being
"dragged deeper into Ed Walters' ploy" as the "greed
factor". Mr.
Smith had already testified that Hank was "to get all movie or
TV
rights." But if this is so, where is Hank's money (I'm sure
he'd like to
know)? One would think that Hank, if he had made a
deal with Ed and Ed didn't
follow through, would be WILLING to
testfy against Ed.
According to Mr.
Gray, Hank was not the only accomplice; Ed's
whole family was involved. I
expect that Ed's family members
will have something to say about this.
Mr.
Gray is confident that the news media will report the fine
details of how the
hoax was carried off because "they must
save face in the fact that they were
taken in by the scheme as
were so many others." No doubt the newsmedia will
publish all
sorts of details, including those which support Ed's testimony.

Mr. Gray criticized the MUFON investigators for "being so
wrapped up and
biased in pursuit of the story that they fell
headfirst into that trap." He is
clearly not aware that this
investigator, at least, started off assuming that
the photos were
faked and that the whole story was a fabrication. He could
read
the last chapter in Ed's book (or even the first few pages of that

chapter) to find out how I approached the case. The MUFON
investigation
required many hundreds of man hours of analysis
and study of the photographic
evidence testimony and a similar
intensive study of Ed and his activities over
a six month period
(Nov. 1987 -- May, 1988). The MUFON investigation included
the
reports of over a hundred other witnesses in the area. Only after
all of
this exhaustive effort did MUFON officially endorse the
case. By way of
contrast, the Mayor relied on "logic and reason"
(unbiased of course) and the
testimony of one person, Smith
(who is contradicted by another person,
Boland!).
The Mayor's "unbiased" approach comes through forcefully in
the
transcript of the conversation with Mr. Smith, which has been
published by the
Sentinel. At the very beginning the Mayor
thanked Mr. Smith for coming forward
("I can't tell you how
much I appreciate.......you getting with us....") and
then said he
wanted to "get to the bottom of this whole issue and this whole,

in my opinion< hoax." The Mayor then said "....but right now we're
trying to
deal with the facts." Mr. Gray criticized the MUFON
investigators for having
"no expertise in investigating." On the
other hand, the interview of Mr.
Smith is not exactly a model
of good investigatory technique.
Mr. Gray is a
courageous man and a clairvoyant. He knows he is in
for an argument and he
correctly predicted in his letter that his
statement would bring forth an
avalanche of comments from
"Ed, his supporters, and MUFON members aimed at
discrediting
not only persons who are coming forth, but me as a skeptic in the

public eye." What Mr. gray should realize is that information which
deserves to
be discredited will be discredited. Those who loudly
proclaim discredited
information will have to suffer the consequences.
At the beginning of his
letter the Mayor says he is thankful that
he has been fortunate to serve in
public office as Mayor for the
last six years. I suggest that if he wishes to
remain in that
position for another six years he should stick to the city
budget
and ignore the UFO controversy raging around him.

Bruce Maccabee


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