In August, 2001, Donald Burleson informed me that he
had analyzed the Lubbock Light photo images and found a
cellular structure. He sent me an image which looks like
a collection of hexagonal cells. Looking at the image I was
reminded of images in a video obtained by Ed Walters in 1991
during the "dock sighting" incident. I retrieved my copy
of the tape and proceeded to view the images again after
many years.
I was surprised...maybe a little astounded....
Perhaps you will be, too.
The following textual description of the sighting has
been publicly available in book form for many years.
The publisher would not allow space to include the
interesting video images. Hence the it was necessary to supply a verbal description.
But now, for the "FIRST TIME ANYWHERE!" you can see
the images themselves.
I present............
THE DOCK VIDEO UFO SHOWS
CELLULAR STRUCTURE
THE FOLLOWING is an extract from the book,
UFOS ARE REAL, HERE'S THE PROOF
by Ed Walters and Bruce Maccabee
(Avon, 1997)
HERE is Ed's report of the sighting:
(from page 25)
UFO ON THE DOCK OF A BAY
FEBRUARY 21, 1991
7:40 P.M.
As reported in my book, UFO Abductions in Gulf
Breeze, the local UFO sightings were happening almost
nightly. Often I would join the MUFON research team for a
sky-watch if I knew where they were scheduled to meet.
On this night I was returning to Gulf Breeze on the
Bay Bridge and decided to drop in on the MUFON team who
often met at the foot of the bridge. I entered the parking
lot and to my surprise there was not a person to be seen. I
assumed the sky watch was being held at South Shoreline Park
and as I was leaving, I notice a very distant red light
hovering in the sky to the south. If the MUFON members were
at the park, then they would have a much closer point of
view.
Curious about this distant sighting, I went by my
house on the way to South Shoreline Park and picked up my
video camera, just in case. Minutes later when I arrived at
the park, there was nobody in sight. The park was
completely empty, not even a single fisherman or the
occasional teenage couple looking for romance. I was alone
and a little bit nervous. Much like whistling in a
graveyard for the comfort of hearing a sound, I began
talking to myself and recording on the video camera. While
holding the camera on my shoulder, and without looking
through the viewfinder, I walked out on the two hundred foot
pier. I scanned the horizon showing the distant lights of
Pensacola Beach, the Gulf Breeze shore line and the Beach
Toll Bridge. There was nothing unusual in the sky which is
where my attention was really focused. At the end of the
pier, I turned from my left to right and then once again
began to look to the south where I had seen the red light.
Suddenly, several hundred feet in front of me the
UFO was there, hovering high over the water. Still holding
the video camera on my shoulder, my attention was on the UFO
and not the camera. To be very candid, I did not give a
rat's ass about delaying my departure for the sake of asking
the UFO to say cheese. Besides, in this cat and mouse game,
I knew who was the cat and who was the mouse. I spun to my
right and put my ass and elbows in the air. In other words,
I ran like hell.
If you choose to believe the UFO to be friendly,
then surely there are those who would throw caution to the
wind and raise their arms to welcome the UFO. But, you see,
I'm not so sure the UFO is friendly. I have felt its
powerful blue beam (Chapter one, The Gulf Breeze Sightings)
and had good reason to flee.
Surrounded by a half dozen or more other witnesses I
might have stayed (but probably not). I was alone so I ran
without looking back. The dock boards thumped under my feet
and the still recording video camera swung wildly as I raced
to the shore line.
Safe at the door of my truck, I looked back and saw
nothing but a quiet park with an empty dock. There was no
sign of what I had seen. No sign of the UFO that looked so
menacing against the dark night sky. With a brilliant red
bottom, its black disk shaped silhouette was darker than the
sky. Around its edge were six or eight white lights.
Perfectly still in the sky, it hovered over the water at
about 30 degrees elevation.
Once again I was confronted with a problem; Show
and tell or not? I knew it was important to the MUFON
research team, so several days later I decided to show only
a few of the investigators the tape. But before hand, they
understood that I did not want any mention of this to any
body, nothing said to bring attention to me and my family.
The local UFO controversy was still raging and I didn't need
to throw fuel on the fire.
(HISTORICAL NOTE by BSM: this occurred almost a year after
Ed and Frances Walters published THE GULF BREEZE SIGHTINGS
and the controversy over his early photos from 1987 and 1988
was continuing. For further information see the article
about "Bubba" sightings elsewhere at this web site.)
The video tape captured a few seconds of the UFO
before I turned and ran. Unfortunately the dark silhouette
of the craft can not be seen, only it's red underside and
the surrounding white lights. What appears to be the UFO
moving downward is actually the camera moving upward as I
first turned, looked up and saw the UFO. What seems to be
the UFO moving to the left is really the camera movement as
I turned to the right and began to run. As for the rest of
the tape all that can be made out is me mumbling under my
breath and running down the dock. Occasional streaking from
street lights caused by the swinging camera can also be
seen.
Video evidence is very powerful. It eliminates
trick photography such as double exposures, and posed models
hanging from a tree. It captures the moment, the action
and the reaction of the UFO and the witnesses. My video
tape of this UFO sighting clearly qualifies as proof that
"something" was in the sky several hundred feet out over
Santa Rosa sound. Was it a UFO from outer space? Maybe,
but whatever it was, it was there, it was big, and it was
surrounded by lights with a bright "power light" at its
base.
The following is my discussion of the video from page 81.
VIDEO ON THE DOCK
On February 21, 1991, Ed decided to visit the Bay
Bridge viewing site in the hope of seeing the red light UFO
again, but no one was there, so he went to Shoreline Park.
No one was there, either, but he decided to stay anyway. He
walked out to the end of the pier where he could get an
excellent view of the sky all around him. He had his
camcorder with him and he turned it on. The video recorded
his statement that it was Thursday at about 7:40 PM. About
1 minute into the video he said that when he was at the
bridge looking south, "I thought I saw just a few seconds of
a red light, but, uh, could have been a helicopter I guess.
Sure looked funny."
He kept the camera running while continually moving it
around to show the distant lights along the shorelines.
Suddenly, at 2 minutes and 16 seconds into the video, a
bright red light appears at the top of the field of view.
At this time there are no other lights in the field of view
(indicating that he was pointing the camera upward since
there were lights all around the horizon). Evidently Ed
just happened to be looking in the right direction to see
the UFO when it appeared. He was startled by its appearance
and he uttered a few choice words. The red image appears
initially at the top of the frame and then moves rapidly
down toward the bottom where it remains for several frames
and then moves upward to approximately the center of the
field. However Ed did not hold the camera steady and so the
image moves around quite a bit.
Ed pointed the camera at the UFO for only a short
period of time, approximately 3 2/3 seconds (about 109
frames of video showing the UFO), before he panicked and
turned toward the shore. The camera recorded his panic and
the sound of him running to shore (about 100 steps on the
wooden dock taking about 35 seconds) and then the sound of
him running to his truck (another ten seconds). The video
shows shore lights streaking around as Ed waved the camera
around while he was running. By about 3 minutes and 30
seconds into the tape Ed had reached his truck and at that
point he turned to look for the UFO. He didn't see it any
more. He then explained on tape that he was startled
because it appeared "almost right in front of me." Again he
mentioned that there is no one else there. A few seconds
later the video shows lights on the dashboard of his truck
as he is leaving and he records the time as 7:40 PM.
Because of the camera motion the video contains only
about half a dozen frames which show some of the finer
details of the red light UFO. However, these frames do show
a structure which is intriguing. The UFO image appears to
be generally elliptical in shape with an outer whitish
region and a red glow from its center. The dimensions of
the ellipse are roughly 15 mm by 20 mm on a 13" diagonal
monitor screen. By experiment I have determined that the
effective focal length of the camera optics and 13" monitor
is about 540 mm. Hence the angular size of the long axis of
the ellipse is about 20/540 = 0.037 radians. Multiplying
the ratio of the image size to the focal length by the
distance yields the object size as measured transverse to
the line of sight. Hence, if the UFO had been 1,000 feet
away then it was about 37 feet wide (1,000 x 0.037). If it
were closer or farther away then it was proportionally
smaller or larger (e.g., 18 feet if 500 feet away, etc.)
Frame-by-frame analysis shows that the outer whitish portion
of this elliptical shape seems to have a cellular shape
consisting of black "holes" surrounded by white boundaries.
Ed said that he could see white light around the red center.
The video supports this. Note that this is a fixed focus
camera and the previous video of shorelights shows that it
was focused as well as it could be. Therefore the observed
image structure is not an artifact of the camera; the
structure actually is characteristic of the UFO.
Apparently the UFO dimmed and faded to "non-existence"
just before Ed turned the camera so far to the right that
the UFO image went off the screen (at the left). The UFO
images in the last two frames that show the UFO image are
stretched by camera motion (as are many of the previous
images) into elongated "hot dog" shapes. The right end of
each of these last two elongated images is brighter then the
left end. In particular, the right end of the next-to-last
stretched image is essentially at full brightness while the
left end of the last stretched image is at essentially zero
brightness. Since the left end of the last image is several
centimeters from the edge of the screen (about 0.04 radians
from the edge of the field of view) it appears that the UFO
faded out during the time of two frames of video or in 1/15
of a second (30 frames per second is the video rate).
(END extract from the book)
CELLULAR IMAGES IN THE VIDEO
Most of the 109 frames of the UFO were stretched
by camera motion as Ed reacted to the sudden
appearance and then turned and ran. About half a dozen
frames are sufficiently clear to show a periodic cell-like
structure in the image. Several of the images were obtained
during the brief moments when the camera was not moving
(typically when reversing direction of motion). These are
quite clear, as illustrated below. However, before looking
at the UFO images, consider the images of known lights
nearby
and distant shore lights, which make barely visible and
often diffuse "glows" in the image.
As expected, the nearby lights create images that are
overexposed, while the distant light images are often as
low brightness as the random noise level (snow) in the
video. Note that the nearby lights and the building are
in good focus. (Ed's camera was an old Sony with fixed
focus.)
What follows are some unprocessed and some video
processed images. They clearly show the cellular structure
mentioned above. They also show that there was a source
of red light on the bottom of the UFO nearly at the center
of the roughly oval image. Because of the red light this
may fall into the general classification of "red Bubba"
sightings that were occurring quite often in Gulf Breeze
and the vicinity (including some in Pensacola) in 1991 and
1992 (see elsewhere in this web site for more information
on the Bubba sightings).
The next image is a bit fuzzier, typical of most of the
small number of images that show the cellular structure.
The white cellular structure appears generally to be
darker at the right side than at the left. Why that is so,
and for that matter, why there is cellular structure, and
for that matter why the object appeared at all, is a matter
for speculation.