Dave Barry: Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

“Ed” shows it to us again, then looks at us.

“That’s incredible,” we say, almost simultaneously.

As soon as we leave, the photographer tells me that something is wrong. The film “Ed” uses in his Polaroid has an ASA rating of 80, which means it is relatively slow to react to light. This means that the shutter must stay open a relatively long time, especially in low light. And this in turn means that a moving object, even if photographed by a skilled photographer, would look blurred. “Ed” has stated repeatedly that the object moves almost constantly—as it does in the videotape—and yet in almost all of his photographs, the object is in fairly sharp focus.

“It just doesn’t look right,” says the photographer.

Neither does the videotape, at least to my eyes. The jerky motion of the object makes it appear small, almost toy-like, and fairly close, although “Ed” insists it is “as big as a house.”

Some other things are strange. Why, if “Ed” could sense the impending arrival of the object, didn’t he ever call his neighbors to be witnesses? And why, when he realized the object was visiting repeatedly, didn’t he get a better camera? I asked him both of these questions several times; he never really answered.

But the most troubling evidence is “Ed” himself. He acts agitated, manic. Not to put too fine a point on it, he acts a little crazy. Of course, maybe this is normal behavior if aliens have put a mental input in your head. But still, I am getting skeptical. And I am not alone.

Philip Klass is the nation’s, if not the world’s, leading UFO skeptic. The UFOlogists do not like him (MUFON’s Donald Ware suggested to me that Klass has a “mental problem”). Klass retired last year after 35 years as senior electronics editor of Aviation Week magazine, but his involvement with UFOs is through an organization called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, of which he is chairman of the UFO subcommittee. In that capacity, he has spent a lot of time debunking various UFO claims. For example, he recently issued a report charging that the “Majestic 12” documents—the ones that allegedly prove that the government has dead aliens stashed away—are obvious forgeries. I must admit I found that story a tad hard to believe myself. It’s not that I don’t believe the government would try to hide dead aliens; it’s that I don’t think the government would succeed, since every time the government tries to do anything secretly, as in the Iran-contra arms deal, it winds up displaying all the finesse and stealth of an exploding cigar at a state funeral. If there really were dead aliens, I figure, there also would be daily leaks about it from High-Level Officials, and huge arguments among influential congresspersons over whose district the multimillion-dollar Federal Dead Alien Storage Facility would be located in.

Anyway, Klass, as you might imagine, is very dubious about the claim that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors.

“I can think of no more exciting story,” he says, “than to say I have investigated a UFO case for which there was no earthly explanation. In the 22

years I have been investigating, I have never found a single such case.”

But what about the photographs?

“Photographs are the easiest things in the world to fake,” says Klass. “Even the UFO believers are very, very skeptical of them.” Klass is especially suspicious of Polaroids, because they have no negatives, which are often useful in the detection of hoaxes. He thinks it’s suspicious that no negatives were included with any of the photographs anonymously submitted to the Sentinel.

“The odds against those photographs being authentic are jillions to one,” he says.

But what about the witnesses?

“Once the report gets out that there are UFOs in the area, you get all kinds of me-tooers,” Klass says. “Ninety-eight percent of all people who report seeing UFOs are trying to be honest. But we’ve been brainwashed by what we’ve read and been told. And eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.”

That’s also the opinion expressed by astronomer Robert Young in a letter to the newsletter of the Astronomical League. Young says that, having investigated “a couple of hundred UFO reports”—all of which turned out to have prosaic explanations—he has concluded that “no eyewitness report of a UFO can be taken at its face value.” He adds that “waves” of UFO sightings “end when editors tire of them. ... My experience is that when news stories stop, the calls stop too.”

I call Dr. Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s the one the Enquirer flew the Polaroids, Duane Cook and all, out to see. He’s the one who’s supposed to be doing the scientific photographic analysis. Only he’s not. He says he’s suspicious of the photographs, both because of the way they look and because more than one set of them came from the same source.

“I’m way off in the nonbeliever corner on this one,” says Dr. Nathan. “Unless something changes, I don’t care to use government equipment on this. I have the feeling that somebody is perpetrating a hoax.”

If it is a hoax, the question is, Why? I am no psychiatrist, but I think the answer is suggested by John Keel, author of several UFO books. Keel argues that the modern era of UFO sightings was launched by a pulp science-fiction magazine called Amazing Stories, edited by a man named Raymond Palmer. In 1947, Palmer published a story about fiendish alien beings controlling life on Earth through the use of rays. Suddenly, Amazing Stories was deluged with mail from readers who insisted that the story was true, because they had been affected by the beings.

“Palmer had accidentally tapped a huge, previously unrecognized audience,” writes Keel. “Nearly every community has at least one person who complains constantly to the local police that someone—usually a neighbor—is aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim, is ruining their health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair and teeth fall out and broadcasting voices into their heads. Psychiatrists are very familiar with these ‘ray’ victims and relate the problem with paranoid schizophrenia.

“In earlier times, [the paranoiacs] thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or the devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for their woes. ... Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of these people focus for their lives.”

Back in Miami, I call “Ed” one morning. I tell him my theory, which is that he really does think he’s being hounded by aliens but that he has faked all the photographs, using different cameras, in an effort to get others to believe him.

“Ed” tells me that since I last saw him, he was attacked by the beam while he was driving alone. “I was blown off the road and had to crawl underneath the truck,” he says. He says he gave a full report on this to the people at MUFON, for their ever-growing data bank.

He also says that two armed men from the “Special Security Services” of the Air Force (he didn’t get their names) came around with a “material seizure warrant” and demanded his photographs. He says he didn’t want to send them to Duane Cook, so he told them he gave the photographs to me.

So that’s the situation in Gulf Breeze, as far as I know it. Of course, there are some unanswered questions. For example, if “Ed” is faking the photographs, how is he doing it? And—this one still bothers me—what did the Somerbys see?