Seeing is Deceiving

UFOs, UAPs, You, Me, and History

“If we're the most intelligent things in the universe, well, that's just depressing.” - Rekha Sharma, Canadian Actress

In a park along the Intracoastal Canal near Gulf Breeze, Florida, we set up our camera to record a UFO. The craft had appeared so regularly to local residents that they had given it the nickname of “Bubba.” I was skeptical of seeing an object of any sort but was amazed by the number of people gathered around concrete picnic tables beneath the palms and along the shoreline. While the photographer stood at the ready to make history with a UFO video, I wandered around and talked with people and listened in on conversations.

“It came up out of the water, right there.” A man in his sixties, I thought, pointed out toward the Gulf of Mexico. “And it was in the afternoon while we were sitting here having a picnic. Right at this table.”

“What did it look like?” a woman nearby asked.

“What they all look like, I suppose,” he said. “It wasn’t a disc but it was round, had porthole-like windows, a red light on top, and a yellowish red power source on the bottom that you could see as it rose up.”

“You’re sure that’s what you saw?” she asked. “That’s pretty incredible.”

“I know what I saw, ma’am, and it was clearly a Type 2, Zeta Reticuli craft.”

His answer made him sound credulous. Had he seen so many UFOs or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) that he knew their planets of origin and their make and model numbers? This kind of speculation and self-proclaimed expertise has long been one of the problems encountered by serious researchers of the phenomenon. The gathering of data has been burdened by too much faith and not enough science. It has also been partially debilitated by cultural ridicule.

“Yo, Bubba!” The female voice called out from the inland side of the park. “Same place every night.”

It was a light, motionless and pulsating, about twenty degrees above the horizon. My photographer colleague, Kirk, was already recording as two smaller glowing orbs were released from Bubba and floated toward the ground. Aircraft lights moved across the horizon through a busy skyway created by Eglin Air Force Base, Pensacola Naval Air Station, and Pensacola International Airport. I pulled the antenna out of my brick cell phone and dialed information to get the numbers for air traffic control towers at all three locations. I reached the supervisor in each, and had, essentially, the same conversation with all three managers.

“Are you all seeing this light out there to the northwest?” I asked.

“Yep. See it all the time.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“No clue.”

“You have it on radar?”

“Nope. No signal.”

“Does it ever show up on radar?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Kind of dangerous with all this flight activity around here, isn’t it?”

“You’d think, but it’s never caused a problem. Eglin and NAS have scrambled a few times to try to chase it down but it was gone before the jets even got close.”

“Well, okay. Thanks.”

Bubba, after about five minutes, began to look more like a plasma than just a white light. The size fluctuated but the shape was constant. We later saw in the recording what we thought represented a kind of superstructure to a craft, but we could not be sure. Bubba began to spin, noticeably, at a high rate of speed. A couple of observers in the park yelled, “Go, Bubba, go!”

And it was suddenly gone.

The Gulf Breeze Sightings became internationally famous over a few years after pictures were made public by a town councilman. Ed Walters was accused frequently of creating a fraud to publish a bestselling book on the phenomenon. When I interviewed him, he seemed more like a frightened husband and father than a hustling conman. No one has ever proved his pictures from the early 90s were fake, though amateur investigators claimed to have discovered a phony UFO in his attic after he moved from Gulf Breeze.

Paper Plate Bubba

The basic shape of the model is similar to the craft photographed and published, though the photo editing skills to make it look real would have been extremely advanced for the early 90s. The experiencer, too, did not have the profile of a man determined to pull off a major scam on his hometown, friends, family, and researchers. Walters had been elected to the town council and was a successful homebuilder in his community, and he never wavered from his insistence the UFO he photographed was real and a recurrent part of his family’s life.

The Real Bubba?

As the drone, UFO, UAP, and orb flap continues over New Jersey and elsewhere along the U.S. East Coast, and around the world, there are historical facts related to the phenomenon that are worth remembering. Most of the information used to argue the existence of craft controlled by non-human intelligences (NHI) comes from anecdotal narratives, hypnotic regressions, and not independently verifiable evidence. There are, however, a few recorded incidents that seem to offer incontrovertible proof of otherworldly contact.

One of the most profoundly disturbing UFO sightings occurred in 1967 at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Ten Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) in deep underground firing silos were taken offline and rendered useless without explanation. Robert Salas, a 26-year-old U.S. Air Force Lieutenant, who was on station at the underground launch center, got a call from a security officer above ground. He gave a frenzied description of an oval-shaped form enclosed in a pulsating, glowing orange-red light, which was hovering over the installation.

The Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) also described a silent object making unusual but controlled maneuvers like flying very fast and coming to a dead stop before reversing course and making ninety degree turns. A similar incident had occurred only eight days earlier at Malmstrom, and had gone unreported, while ten other ICBMs had been momentarily and temporarily decommissioned in the previous year by mysterious lights and crafts at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. During the minutes the ICBMs were offline at both locations, the U.S. was without defense to any incoming nuclear attack. (82-year-old Salas is interviewed in the brief piece below.)

An incident that also defies logic or any prosaic explanation occurred in 1964 during the test launch of a nuclear missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Robert Jacobs, who later became a respected professor at a major U.S. university, was the officer in charge of optical instrumentation and was commissioned with filming test launches of missiles loaded with dummy warheads. The first such launch became historic for unexpected reasons. As the rocket reached speeds of 11-14,000 mph, the film captured a UFO flying next to the weapon as it rose into the atmosphere. Beams of light were fired at the warhead on the tip of the missile by an unidentified disc-shaped craft. The UFO circled the rocket and emitted the beam until the warhead was destroyed and the missile tumbled from space. Jacobs, shown the film by his commanding officer the next day, was told to never speak of the incident, and he did not until 1996. (A clip of the actual film of a UFO firing the beam at the warhead is below. The first few seconds of the rocket video appear to have been added to the brief black and white film of the UFO’s attack.)

@thegalienUFO dismantles test nuke warhead #ufodisclosure

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Although lights and inexplicable objects in the sky have been part of the human experience for centuries, the modern UFO phenomenon began mass awareness near Roswell, New Mexico. The U.S. Army Air Force issued a news release in 1947 that claimed the military had captured a crashed disc on a nearby ranch. Reports went out worldwide over wire services and then the Department of Defense retracted the statement and covered up any incident with an argument it was a high-altitude weather balloon that had crashed to earth. The lie has never really gotten traction. Roswell was also close to White Sands Missile Range, which was where the first ground zero tests of a nuclear bomb were being conducted. Visitors from the unknown might have been curious about our explosive endeavors and risks to the planet as we prepared to bomb Hiroshima, Japan.

Over the subsequent decades, it became axiomatic that UFOs were going to appear near nuclear facilities. The sightings of “Bubba” and other craft near Gulf Breeze may have been connected to the fact that nearby Eglin Air Force Base is frequently reported to be America’s largest depository of nuclear weapons. As the bomb that was to be dropped on Japan was being engineered at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, scientists and residents reported frequent UFO sightings, which were also happening concurrently at the Hanford site in Washington, the location of the world's first large-scale plutonium production reactor where fuel for bombs was manufactured. As recently as 2010, a large scale communications failure took 50 ICBMs offline for nearly an hour after military witnesses described multiple UFOs over Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

Two of the most significant occurrences of UFOs over nuclear military operations overseas were at Rendlesham Forest in the United Kingdom in 1980 and two years later at Byelokoroviche, Ukraine missile site, which was then a part of the Soviet Union. Rendlesham is the location of the RAF Woodbridge base, used by the U.S. Air Force and reportedly a storage facility for nuclear weapons. Military personnel reported odd lights and a triangular shaped craft with unusual markings like hieroglyphics. A memo by the Deputy Base Commander also indicated inexplicable radiation readings on detectors.

Declassified documents from the Soviet Union, meanwhile, describe the 1982 Ukraine sighting as a pulsating light that caused a nearby missile system to enter a combat-ready state and initiate launch sequences for ICBMs. Military personnel became alarmed when they were unable to stop the missiles from being armed, but they returned to normal status after several minutes. The U.S.S.R., according to Kremlin documents, had several UFO sightings at nuclear weapon facilities and operations over the seven decades that transpired after Roswell.

The current flurry of UAP sightings, which seem to have begun in New Jersey, has led to unbridled speculation of cause and purpose. Two types of phenomena appear frequently in videos. They are apparent drones and white or colored orbs, which many witnesses describe as being like plasma. A few reports have emerged of an orb shooting down a drone, but verification is lacking on those claims. Theories include the notion that non-human intelligences are operating the orbs, which are thought to be looking for traces of radiation to indicate nuclear facilities and weapons. Drones are believed to have been launched by the U.S. military to take down the orbs. Social media is now flush with videos posted globally of the phenomenon, no longer contained to the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

What is this all about? Who the hell knows? One observer with significant credentials, who I interviewed during the 90s, has recently suggested the U.S. government is laying a predicate for a huge false flag event to implement population control. Whatever might be happening, mainstream media is no longer chuckling over UFO stories. In fact, network television news recently recorded one of the plasma orbs during a day time appearance over New Jersey. Circumstances are suddenly being taken seriously by journalists who used to interview witnesses and write sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek stories about “little green men” asking, “Take me to your leader.” The ETs seem to realize the waste of time that would be while trying to achieve any existential ends. (Video below is of a plasma orb, recorded by ABC News).

When Kirk and I sent the video of Bubba to our managing editor in Houston, he immediately dispatched another photographer. He wanted us recording at all times in case a UFO emerged from the Intracoastal Canal or flew by during daylight. We waited, as commanded, for a week, and, of course, saw nothing. In our own way, though, we made journalistic and paranormal history. Kirk, Victor, and I became the only news crew to ever be paid overtime for an entire week while providing the singular service of sitting on a sunny Florida beach, waiting for a UFO to land.

Humanity still waits.