The Gulf Breeze UFO Sightings Celebrate Their 20th Anniversary

It was twenty years ago today. Okay, maybe not exactly twenty years ago today, but November of 1987 launched a roughly five year long period in which Gulf Breeze, Florida became the Roswell of the Emerald Coast. Hundreds of dwellers along the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico in Gulf Breeze and Pensacola Beach reported seeing strange lighted objects in the night sky following the most famous-and infamous-of the sighters. His name was Ed Walters and he produced many photos of an unidentified flying object that looks for all the world like one of those old Parkay Margarine crowns from the classic commercials. Along with Walters' photos, however, there were many other fuzzy images of things hovering over Escambia Bay that may or may not have been alien spacecraft and may or may not have been paper picnic plates.

In the wake of Ed Walters' shocking photos, residents around the area reported seeing things that, well, just ain't right. I myself worked in Gulf Breeze during this period and I have to admit...I saw nothing unusual in the skies. (Though plenty of weird stuff on the sidewalks.) It has been estimated that over 200 photos of alleged visitors from space were taken during the first year of the sightings madness. Never one to let something like the potential for instantaneous annihilation from alien overlords stand in the way of making a buck, acute entrepreneurs leeched untold millions of dollars from suckers by jumping on the bandwagon. For a while, Gulf Breeze was even home to nightclub called Area 51. Ed Walters himself wrote and published a book about his experience in which he writes that he did more than simply see the objects, but was actually visited by a four-foot tall space creature at his home.