Dave Barry: Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

But I have to admit that I AM a little bitter about this business of dying nine years early. According to the researchers, a major reason for this is that left-handers have a lot more accidents than right-handers. I know why this is: We read books backward. Really. When left-handers pick up books, they tend to start reading from the last page. This saves us a lot of time with murder mysteries, but it’s a bad habit when we’re reading, say, the instructions for operating a barbecue grill, and we begin with “STEP 147: IGNITE GAS.”

I myself have always been accident-prone, especially when I attempt to use tools designed for right-handed people, the extreme example being chain saws, which should not even be legal to sell to left-handers. I had one back during the Energy Crisis, when I had installed a wood-burning stove in our fireplace in an effort to reduce our energy consumption by covering the entire household with a thick, insulating layer of soot. Near our house was a large tree, which I realized could supply our soot needs for the better part of the winter. So one day I strode out and, drawing on my skills as an English major, started making strategic cuts designed to cause the tree to fall away from the house. I even called my wife out to watch the tree fall, and of course those of you who are familiar with situation comedies have already figured out what happened: The tree, which was clearly right-handed, fell in the exact wrong direction, chuckling audibly all the way down and missing the living room by maybe six inches.

My wife, who thought I had planned to have the tree do this, said, “That was great!” And I replied, “Wurg,” or words to that effect, because my brain was busy trying to get my heart going again. Speaking of which: Some scientists think that left-handed people’s brains work completely differently from right-handed people’s brains. I read an article once that theorized that left-handers are a different species from right-handers. Isn’t that silly? As if we were aliens or something. What nonsense! Planet foolish this over take will we day one.

What follows is a story I wrote in 1988 about a spate of UFO sightings in the town of Gulf Breeze, Florida. The sightings eventually gained national attention, and there are still a lot of people in the UFOlogy community who believe that Gulf Breeze is frequented by extraterrestrials. The guy I identified only as “Ed” in this story is Ed Walters; he became a big name on the UFO circuit and wrote a book. A number of people have claimed that Walters perpetrated a hoax; in 1990, a man living in Walters’s former house said he found a model of a UFO—which looked like the one in Walters’s photos—in the attic.

OK, there is definitely something strange going on in Gulf Breeze, Florida. The two most likely explanations are:

1. Somebody is perpetrating a hoax and a bunch of other people, through inexperience, imagination, or ignorance, are falling for it.

2. Intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe, driving craft with fantastic capabilities, have come to Earth, and they are observing us, and they have a Paralysis Ray and—this is going to make some South Floridians nervous—they apparently speak Spanish.

After spending a few days in Gulf Breeze checking things out, I’ve decided for myself which of these two possible explanations is closest to the truth. Here’s the story as far as I know it; see what you think.

THE WIRE STORY

On December 3, the Herald published this item in a roundup of wire-service stories from around the state:

GULF BREEZE—Pictures of what was labeled as a glowing unidentified flying object published in the November 18 edition of the Sentinel of Gulf Breeze have prompted a half-dozen residents to report similar sightings.

Duane B. Cook, editor and publisher of the weekly, said the object looks like the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, but he hopes it’s an alien spacecraft. He said the state’s Mutual UFO Network will examine the three photos taken November 11 near the town that appeared with a letter written by the anonymous photographer.

Here at Tropic we are always on the lookout for stories of potentially intergalactic significance, so I immediately checked the Herald files to see if any other strange unexplained phenomena had been reported in the Gulf Breeze area. You can imagine how my pulse quickened when I discovered that:

On December 5, at The Zoo, a privately operated zoo in Gulf Breeze, a wedding ceremony was held for giraffes. This really happened. Their names are Gus and Gigi.

On August 19, a Gulf Breeze man was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake as he

(the man) examined a potted plant in the garden shop of the Wal-Mart store in nearby Fort Walton Beach. Just two days later, at a Wal-Mart in North Fort Myers, a woman examining a potted hibiscus was bitten by another pygmy rattlesnake. Wal-Mart officials were unable to explain this rash of pygmy-rattler attacks and described it as “unusual.”

Well, of course, I needed no further convincing. I grabbed my camera—you have to be ready—hopped on a plane and was off to conduct my investigation.

THE TOWN OF GULF BREEZE

Gulf Breeze is a small residential community just across a bridge from Pensacola, way at the far western end of Florida, almost in Alabama. It is the opposite of Miami, geographically and in many other ways. It is not even in the same time zone as Miami. Miami is in the Eastern Time Zone and Gulf Breeze is in about 1958. In Gulf Breeze, when you buy something at a store, the counterperson usually smiles and says, “Y’all come back ‘n’ see us now, n’kay?” Whereas in Miami, the counterperson doesn’t usually say anything because he or she is having a very important personal telephone conversation that cannot be interrupted just for some idiot customer.

I begin my investigation by driving through downtown Gulf Breeze. Even at slow speed, this takes less than five minutes. It appears to be a normal beach-oriented town, very quiet in the off-season. There are a lot of things in the sky, because this is an area of extremely heavy air traffic: Nearby, besides the commercial airport in Pensacola, are the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Eglin Air Force Base, and several other airfields. Almost any time you look up, you see a plane or a helicopter. In looking around, however, the only phenomenon I notice that does not seem to have an obvious earthly explanation is a bumper sticker that sayS BUSH 88.

But you never can tell. As you know if you ever watched “The Twilight Zone,” there are times when everything seems to be perfectly normal, and then suddenly, without warning, something happens, something that you know is somehow ... wrong, and you start to hear that piercing high-pitched electronic-sounding “Twilight Zone” music—deedeedeedee deedeedeedee—and the hairs on the back of your neck, even if you use extra-hold styling mousse, stand on end.

Little do I realize, as I drive through the quiet town of Gulf Breeze, that before I leave, I am going to experience that very feeling. More than once.

My first stop is the Gulf Breeze Sentinel. The Sentinel is a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 3,500, soaring to 4,500 in the summer. It is not the kind of paper that practices the kind of snide, cynical, city-slicker style of journalism exemplified by this article. It’s the kind of newspaper where many stories consist mostly of local people’s names. You can get into the Sentinel merely by having your birthday. Also there are many photographs of local boards, clubs, civic groups, etc., engaging in planning activities. In the November 19 issue, there’s a front-page photograph of a man smiling and holding up, for no apparent reason, bags of Hershey’s Kisses, accompanied by the caption: