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.