The Gulf Breeze UFOtos

In one of the most famous and widely-reported UFO sightings of all time, a Florida man witnessed, photographed and even interacted with alien beings from another planet several times over the course of many months, sparking a frenzy of speculation and excitement. Then again...a Florida man...
SOURCES:
War of the Words by Craig R Meyers
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/16/congress-uap-obama-aliens-real-podcast/88699039007/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-released-scientists-trump/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/10/ufo-hearing-video-hellfire-missile/86073340007/
Professor Andrew Fraknoi

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts. Folks,
it's a huge when us to see the last.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to Hoax, a podcast about the lies we wish
were true and truths that sound like lies. I'm the
ghost of Danish Schwartz and I'm the evil twin of
Lizzie Logan.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Welcome to the show. Lizzy. Is there something you want
to say before this episode begins. There's a couple things.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is our first time recording, but our second time
talking about this particular hoax, because yesterday we had this
conversation and I had pressed the wrong button and we
didn't record.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
It, So now there is a missing podcast. Yeah, you
can build your own hoaxes about uh huh what we
might have read. Well, you might have revealed what we
might have talked about, what government secrets? You're silent. Someone
sabotaged our recorder. Yeah, that person was me.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
A sabotaged it and it literally Data had been like,
you've gotten so techy through doing this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
That's true, You've gotten.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
So good at running the recording, and then it jinxed
me and I didn't record it. All of it is
to say that Data now knows all of the information
and is not going to pretend like she doesn't know
the information.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
But the good news is I wasn't really paying attention yesterday,
so I didn't I didn't retain any of it.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I will still be surprised she doesn't have it written
down in front of her. But yeah, so we're going
to go back through the story. But this is the
second time we've talked about this.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Can I just also do an annoying bit of housekeeping
up front before I forget, so I don't forget at
the end of this episode. If you are a listener
of the show, I beg of you, please pre order
my new book. It's called The Arcane Arts. It's a
sexy magic story about a professor and grad student, and
pre orders are like the most important thing you can
do to support a book, and so that would be

(01:56):
that would just be great. Let's dive into an episode
that I know nothing about.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
You don't know anything about this, all right, We're gonna
be talking about UFOs.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Which I genuinely am excited about because that is just
UFOs as a category, is an area of hoaxdom that,
just like I have not investigated.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
An area fifty one, you might say.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
But you know, some people have their sort of pet subjects,
like when you're a kid, you're like, oh, I went
all in on the locknest momster or whatever. I just
have never really looked into UFOs. And it feels like
every three months there's like a New York Times headline
that's like, guess what aliens are real? I guess, and
I'm like, oh, are they? And then I just sort
of never look into it. Well, we're gonna.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Talk about all of that. I mean, the short answer
is like aliens are real, they're just not here. And
UFOs are real if you stick to the rigid definition
of UFO, which is unidentified flying object.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
So anything in the sky that's flying that we don't
know what it is is a UFO and is real.
So UFOs do exist, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Absolutely, So like technically a goose before you recognize that
it as a goose could be a UFO when you
are in like a paranormal circle or having like a
conversation with a conspiracy theorist. Usually UFO is a synonym
for flying saucer from outer space driven by an extraterrestrial

(03:17):
So we can use those terms interchangeably, and we are
trusting you the audience to get via context which one
we mean. And so we'll also say right off the bat,
Like a lot of UFO enthusiasts, they will point to
the fact that, you know, the government doesn't have files
about leprechauns and it doesn't have files about fairies, but

(03:37):
they do have files about UFOs.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
And you're like, well, yeah, they just have a file
of unidentified flying objects.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, because the government needs to know what's going on
up in the sky. It doesn't mean that aliens are here,
like these are different phenomena. Yeah, but yes, technically absolutely
UFOs are real. It's just that we haven't figured out
what they are.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Speaking of UFOs, my one and a half year old
son Arthur has in fact begun to identify helicopters by saying.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
That's so cute and also such an la And he
says bye to every helicopter a plane that he hears
in the sky.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
If he hears like a plane or something come by,
he just goes bye.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
I love.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
So he would be delighted to encounter any UFO and
he would probably just say bye.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
In our Crop Circle episode, this is sort of a
a good like two hand or two parter with the
crop circle episode, we talked all about the crop circle phenomenon.
We're going to just talk about one guy and his
UFO pictures. And the reason that I chose this particular
guy and these particular UFO sightings is not because it

(04:47):
is the most famous. It's not because it's particularly representative.
It's not for any reason other than the journalist who
debunked this hoax sent us an email and emailed us
his book, and the early bird gets the So that's
how you get an episode of hoax about you, is
you send us an email and send us.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
A PDF of your book. I love it. I also
do think it actually is pretty indicative of the phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
I also, yeah, we wouldn't do an episode about it
if it didn't turn out to be like a good story.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
But tell us what this thing was.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
So this is the Golf Breeze sightings. So Golf Breeze
is a community in Pensacola, Florida. It's a sleepy, little
bedroom community. We are in the late eighties right now,
so these are like, you know, sort of Reagan Republicans.
They're well to do, but you know, not rich people.

(05:36):
It's very comfortable it's sort of a small town.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
This isn't like a vacation destination, not.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Really a destination, but you could definitely have sort of
a vacation y life. They're like they go to the
beach a lot you could drive through for spring break.
And there is an airport and a naval air station
and I believe in air Force base. So there's a

(06:01):
lot of stuff in the sky around golf Breeze.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Okay, that seems relevant. People are going to be seeing
things in the sky.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
So yes, there are UFOs all over the place, but
you just have to be like it probably is a
government plane, yeah, or even a passenger plane. Yah, Because
there's an airport and there are people who like to
go out to the beach at night and watch all
of the goings on. And yes, some of the lights
are perfectly mysterious. And it's as much a social thing

(06:29):
as it is like a research group. It's a casual
interest of these people.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
A gang of people just go into the beach to
look at the pretty lights in the sky.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, like the way you might set up camp, like
looking to see if the Locknest monster will show up tonight.
But you're not like going out in a boat studying it.
It's just like an excuse to go hang out by
the lake or go hang out by the beach.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Got it.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
And one of the main guys who does this is
a man named Ed.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Walters, Ed well Ed Walters.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
The evening of November eleventh, nineteen eighty seven, Ed is
at home. He looks out his window and what does
he see but a flying saucer.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
And is this like a movie flying saucer? Like? He
does it look like a movie flying saucer? Yes? And no.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
In some accounts he will say it looks like just
like out of the movies, and in other accounts he
will say it looks nothing like out of the movies.
So his story is gonna change.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Well, to be fair to Ed, some movies have different
looking spaceships, so true.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
He grabs his camera and he takes a couple of
pictures of it, and then he runs out into his
backyard to take more pictures. But the aliens catch him
in like a blue beam of light, and he's frozen
and he can't move, and he's being slowly lifted off
the ground.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
I feel like I've seen this in the movies.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
And it also can be traced back to a story
in the sci fi periodical Amazing Stories that came out
in the sixties, and basically that's where everybody started seeing beams.
But anyway, he starts fighting it with his mind and
he's like, no, don't stop, and he like there's like

(08:14):
a mental struggle.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Good for him and the US Star Wars.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
It's very Star Wars, which is a big movie at
this time, and the UFO is like, stop struggling with
your mind, and they beam pictures into his head.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Of dogs, of dogs, of dogs. That's kind of like
a confusing message. What do they It's like, what do
you mean by that? I don't know. I don't totally know.
I guess it's pleasant.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
Maybe it's like obey, Oh, like a dog would obey
interesting be subservient to us. And then it drops him
and flies away, power of his mind. Thank you, Ed,
So I asked you this last time. You now have
a knowing what ED did. Yeah, and having a chance
to revise your answer, I'm gonna ask you again. Yeah,

(09:00):
you can answer however you want. Dana, if this happened
to you, what would be your next move?

Speaker 1 (09:05):
I will stick with my original answer, which is I
would go to a neurologist. Great, and try to get
an MRI okay, or a scan of my brain, because
if that happened to me, I would assume that I
was having severe hallucinations. Yeah, or like did the aliens
do something to you? Oh? Yeah, you know what I mean,

(09:26):
that's it side effects. Yeah, if they're beaming dogs into
my brain, I would want to know what they did. Yeah.
So yes, It's like if you get a concussion, I
would I would go to a medical professional.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Okay, well that's not what Ed does. Ed decides the
only reasonable thing to do is to go to the
local tabloid, the Gulf Breeze Sentinel, and he drops off
the photos that he took and he says, these were
taken by my friend mister X, who doesn't want to
come forward because he doesn't want the attention, doesn't want
the heat, of course, and this is what happened to him.

(09:57):
And these are his pictures. The pictures you've already seen it.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Show me again. They're like pretty good. That's the crazy
thing you'd expect. I mean, I've tried to take pictures
of the moon with my iPhone and they're bad. And
this is the eighties and he's taking a picture.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
I will say the moon is a little bit farther
away than your backyard.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Okay, these are very good pictures. It kind of looks
like the space needle, but without the needle part, just
like the top part lit up, and it does look
I would say it looks like a flying saucer in
the movies. Yep.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
It is very space age, sort of classic.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Like horizontal, you know, disc glowing blue. So good photos.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Using anonymous sources is very tricky.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Well, it's like, you can have anonymous sources, but you,
as the journalists, are supposed to know who the sources.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, you can shield their identity from the public, but
you should know where you're getting your information. So when
Ed's just like, oh, my friend took these, basically it's
just unattributed photographer.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Even for a tabloid, You're like, well, come on, give
us something like.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
That's not that's like just like printing, like a random
thing you found on the street. But fortunately someone comes
forward to corroborate that they also saw this UFO around
the same time Ed did, and it happens to be
the Sentinels editors Stepdad.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
I mean, that's convenient if they wanted to publish this story. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
It in later, like retellings of the series of events,
it will change and become unclear, like how this corroboration happened.
Because in some versions of the story, the stepdad who
used to work at the paper comes into the office
and sees the photos on the table where they were

(11:56):
doing the layout and is like, oh, I saw that,
which kind of makes sense, but also why would they
be doing a layout if they didn't already plan to
print them? Yeah, And then in other versions of the story,
they printed them, and then the stepdad saw them in
the paper and was like, oh, I saw that.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
So either way, it seems like they were pretty happy
to print this day.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
They were going to go and print them, but when
asked about it, they're like, no, we got corroboration.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
So whatever.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
But this does set off a lot more sightings in
Golf Breeze. People are calling in writing in saying, oh,
I saw UFO, I saw UFO, I saw UFO. You know,
maybe I wasn't wearing my glasses at the time, but
I definitely saw a UFO. I could tell it wasn't
from this world.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
I mean, it's glowy blue in the photo, so it's like, yeah,
something was weird, low glowy blue. I would be like that,
maybe an alien did it.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Maybe nobody else is going to get a photo.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Is anyone else getting images beamed into their head?

Speaker 2 (12:52):
To our knowledge, not from my research, but who am
I to speak for the entire population of Golf Breeze.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
You think of a dog, it's aliens. Maybe he was
just thinking about dogs.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
The Air Force is like happy to clear up their
part in it. They're like, we don't have anything that
looks like that. We weren't doing any tests that day,
and if we had sent out jets to chase away
a UFO, that would be classified and we wouldn't tell you.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
I mean great.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah. The aliens immediately come back to visit Ed again.
There are new elements being added to this story all
the time.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Ed's head hums. When they're near.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
He can hear that they have a man and a
woman on board their ship.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
This is very Star Wars.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
It's very Star Wars. They're trying to take him, so
he gets his camera and the ship is like, don't
don't take our photo.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Hm.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Whoever's on board the UFO who's communicating with him has
been speaking English with an African dialect, but then switches
to Spanish and.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Goes loose photos. So I guess they're just trying everything.
They're like, oh, clearly English isn't working. They we're in Florida,
Let's try Spanish.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
I mean they could have just like beamed him a
picture of like a camera with like a line crew
and nootos.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Now they're being polite, they're telling him the rules.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, I mean this will go against like what other
people will later theorize about like why they're coming, which
is like to pose for photos essentially, But this is
what Ed says.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
They're telling Ed no photos, but he is in fact
continuing to take photos.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
I mean basically he's trying to and a lot of
this comes from the book he'll later write. He's trying
to make himself, make himself, make himself seem like very
heroic for taking these photos.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, against the alien wishes, because.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Like he can't say that he fought an alien because
he didn't. But he's like, in taking these photos, I
was actually like standing up for my rights.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
Or he did fight the aliens in his mind he did.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
He argues with them about whether or not they're allowed
to take people because he's like, this is America. You
can't just kidnap people, and they're like, oh, like rules
of the universe, we actually are. At one point, he
aims a gun at them. I don't think he fires it,
which is good because it's actually illegal for him to
own firearms because he is a convict from some indiscretions

(15:23):
in his youth and he's not allowed to own a gun.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Well, you never know when an alien it's going to
show up, right like that is if that had worked,
that would be the NRI would have dined out on
that for fifty years. Oh my god, if he's shot
down an alien, and it's like, see, everyone should be
had everyone should have a pistol.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
On December seventeenth, the aircraft drops a liquid in Head's backyard,
which he then sends to a lab and it turns
out to be like a very weird mixture of chemicals,
but it's all stuff that we have on Earth.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
So they just they basically Dave Matthews Bands' backyard.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Literally like it's just like some stuff came out of
their ship.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
I guess good that he sent it to a lab. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
At one point, like a circle of dry grass appears
in his backyard crop circle, I guess, but not like
a cool crop show, just a circle.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
The UFOs have this interesting habit of only coming out
when Ed is around, like when his friends have just left,
or right before they arrive, or when only Ed has
a camera.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
It's very as you were telling me, because I've never
watched this television show, but very X Files.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
So this is a thing that happens on The X
Files all the time?

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Is that?

Speaker 2 (16:39):
And I am gonna just digress here spoiler for The
X Files.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
I guess.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Part of the conceit of the show is that Moulder
is a believer and that Scully is a skeptic. Yeah,
and they have to every episode, well not every episode
because there's Monster of the Week episodes, but every like
conspiracy episode, they get closer and closer to making contact
with aliens, and Mulder has to keep getting more and
more evidence of aliens. But to keep the conceit of

(17:05):
the show going, they have to have Scully never see
the evidence so that she could keep being a skeptic.
I don't know why she doesn't just take Mulder's word
for it because she trusts him. But anyway, so there's
all of these ruses that they come up with, where
like Scully's like multiple episodes where she's like unconscious when
the aliens are there, or she's like in the other

(17:26):
room when the aliens are there.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
That's what's happening to Ed. These aliens are just showing
up right when he's the only guy with the camera. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Occasionally the aliens will allow themselves to be glimpsed by
other people, like they'll just like real quick fly by. Yeah,
and other people do see him having like the head
hums sure like freaking out and being like, ah, the
aliens are nearby.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
He gets a sorry, I didn't mean to laugh at
the headhumes, but that is that is a funny way
to funny. It's funny.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
He does get like a very short, very grainy videotape
of a UFO flying through the sky. But mostly what
he has is these photos. And these are polaroids. So
I'm going to talk for a second about polaroids.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Please.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
They're not exactly polaroids as we think of them today
with the white borders. They're a little bit bigger than that.
He has what's called the Polaroid one oh eight land camera,
which has sort of like a more intense lens. I
think it has more settings and it prints a slightly
larger print, but it is essentially the same technology in

(18:33):
that it doesn't have a negative. It just creates the
one copy of the photo and then develops instantly, which.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Of course without a negative, it's hard harder to corroborate,
like whether or not this photo had been manipulated exactly.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
So it's I couldn't find whether because you know, a
polaroid sort of as we think of it classically prints
like aut about you don't have to wind the film.
H I couldn't find if this camera did that, or
if you could tinker with it so that it wouldn't
do that. But spoiler Ed will get it to not

(19:14):
do that. But yeah, So basically you can think of
like a sort of bigger, fancier, slower polaroid camera is
what he's using. There are no negatives to compare the
Prince to. There's just the photos as they appear. Okay,
and Ed is going to claim that he doesn't know
how a double exposure works or how to do one,

(19:38):
This is completely demonstrably, factually inaccurate. He has done it
as a party trick for his kids, friends, and also
a double exposure is not hard. It's not a tricky
thing to do.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
As we've learned in previous episodes on spare Photography and
the Pottingley Fairies, there are a number of relatively simple
ways to any like photos that even children can do.
It's really not hard at all. It is way beyond
ed now.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
The power of suggestion is very strong, and everybody everywhere
in Golf Breeze is claiming that they are seeing UFOs
in such a number that it the sheer number has
become the strongest piece of evidence, because like, how can
five hundred people be wrong?

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, if five hundred people see a thing, it's not
five hundred people all murder on the Orient Express getting
together for a conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
I mean, they're not all in on it. They're all
being influenced by power of suggestion, but they're not.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
All in on it. Or maybe they're all seeing something.
They're all seeing something.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
But you would think that if even a third of
these UFO sightings were real, and I don't even mean
realism in aliens, I mean realism like a plane that
wasn't supposed to be there, that the government would be
across it.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Well, maybe they are and they're just not talking about it.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Well, someone's talking about it, Dana. Do you remember from
when we talked about this yesterday what moofon stands for?

Speaker 1 (21:12):
No, but I like the cut of their jib.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah. So moofon is the Mutual UFO Network.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
They are a research organization of amateur scientists dedicated to
the study of UFOs. And they have a newsletter and
a membership and a methodology and a handbook for how
to evaluate a UFO sighting and you can report it
and they'll put it in there like register. And they
are as objective as they can be. You know what

(21:42):
someone has to be on this.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, they are all in on ED. So they hear
the story and they're like yes real.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
They're like, yeah, any someone finally took a picture.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Great, and it's a good picture. Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
But they're not the only game in town. We also
have PSYCOP that is the Scientific Committee investor getting claims
of the.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Paranormal, and this one is more scientific. They are the
Debunking Club. Okay, debunkers.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
There are the debunkers. So they notice some issues with
the film, mainly that the type of film that ED uses.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
In his camera.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
All of the pictures are taken late at night, and
to get basically anything late at night outdoors, you would
have to leave the shutter open on the camera for
a long time to get enough light to get a
picture because and I know you're thinking, like, well, there's
a lot of light coming from the spaceship. There's also

(22:38):
other things in the picture. There's trees and whatnot. Yeah,
so you would have to leave the shutter open for
a long time, which would then create.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
Blur blur.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
It wouldn't be super infocused. So if your hand moved
or the spaceship moved or anything else that's in the frame,
like if wind rustled the trees, it would be blurry.
But the photo is super crazy crystal clear. We've also
got QFO. That's the Center for UFO Studies. QFO c UFO.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Oh yeah, CUFO, Kufo, KUFO.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
That's the Center for UFO Studies, which came out of
Project Blue Book, which was something in the government, I
think the Air Force collecting stories of UFO sightings by pilots.
That was a project that they ran for a few years.
And they also think it's a hoax.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
So we have like Moufon, which is the most like
they want to believe the most, the most believing, and
then these two other more scientific debunker organizations, and they're
all here.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
They are debunking organizations who still believe that this is
like something worth looking into, not dismissing it, but they
are looking into it.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
Okay, yeah, the more skeptical, but they are investigating.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yes, So all of this is being debated, like in
the local papers and in their newsletters. So I'm not
going to go into all the minutia of all the evidence.
But this is not like a he said, she said,
where this guy printed photos people either blindly accepted them
or just recognize them for what they were. Like, people

(24:13):
were looking into could this be possible? How could this
be possible? What are the physics, what are the like?

Speaker 1 (24:20):
How far away was it? What night was it? How
long was it? Like? People are looking into people are
putting energy into figuring it out, all of.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
The sort of evidence that they possibly came. Okay, I'm
not going to go through because it's not that interesting
and spoiler it's a hoax, but they're looking into it.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
They're spending time on it being scientific.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Moufon comes out with sort of an incredible hypothesis, which
is they say that the humming is the way that
the aliens are telling ed like, hey, we're on our way.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Go get your camera. It's like when motorolla rasers before
you got a phone call on old timey speakers, like
the speakers would vibrate before you got a call.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's exactly like that. Because they want him to take pictures,
because they're trying to gradually introduce themselves.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
Even though they said no photograph.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
Is just one of the many ways that mofon ed
and objective truth are not always in alignment.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Sure, So the mof On theory is they're going to
send him these brain signals to be like, hey, get
your camera, we're coming. That he could take a picture,
so that humanity would be you know, more willing to be,
they would be more ready and prepared when when the
aliens came.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
I guess coming for what reason? Move On doesn't say,
I mean, maybe they don't know.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Maybe they don't know. I mean, who could, who are
they to know? I mean, it makes sense that aliens
want to sort of ease us into it. It's a
big it's a big revelation.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
They also say that they put something into Ed's head
and then took it out.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
Hmmm, yep.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Around this time, Ed passes a polygraph but declines a
cat scan.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Okay, well a thing about a polygraph that just kind
of means that he believes it's not like a measure
of objective truth. Nope, and he personally is like, no,
thank you to a cat scan. Yep. Which if someone
was saying that there was an alien thing, even at
one point in my brain, I would want that cat scan.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
I also feel like even if his cat scan came
back completely normal, he would be like, oh, it didn't
leave a trace. Like I don't know what he really
has to lose by undergoing like.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
Free cat scan. But yeah, So some questions.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Naturally arise on this hypothesis. Why Ed and you last
time I've had a great answer for this, and I
am really because you were like, why not go to
the President of the United States?

Speaker 1 (26:35):
And I'm like, well, maybe to the aliens, everyone is
just a person, and Ed is the same as anyone,
So why come to anyone? Yeah? I thought it was beautiful,
like they just see us as all equal. They see
us all as equal people. Any one of us is
as worthy as any other person, and so they just
chose Ed because he's a human being. So I thought
that was stunningly insightful. Why should the aliens believe in

(26:58):
human hierarchies of worth and power? That is so true.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
However, here on Earth we do have said hierarchies. Yes,
So again, if any of this is happening, where is
the government? And I understand they like move in secret,
but at some point they're gonna.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Make well, they want to talk to Ed, I imagine, right,
and I'm not saying that et is a documentary, but
like they show up in tent Elliott's house. Yeah, they
I think the EPA is the one who shows up.
So there's a government agency that's coming and you know,
doing that fumigation tent.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Well, according to the book that Ed later writes, he
is visited by two government agents.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
Okay, that's something. Two men in dark suits.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
With guns show up at his house and they say,
we have a warrant. Huh give us the pictures? Oh,
and Ed says I gave them to a reporter.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
I don't have them. And again these are Kodak pictured
or Polari right pictures? No negative, So he's like, I
don't have them.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
And the guys in the black suits are like, oh okay,
and they just leave and they leave hm, which doesn't
really sound like the Feds to me.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
No, And that also sounds like a story that can't
really be corroborated, that you could just make up. No.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
It also doesn't really make sense that they would want
photos that had already been in the paper.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, they're like, why do they care about these photos
that have already been printed and publicized.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
I don't know, it's around this time if you hadn't
put it together yet that ed has been outed. Everybody
knows that there's no mister X. Yeah, but honestly, nobody
ever believed that there was.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
A mister X in the first place. It was his friend. Yeah,
oh sure. It's like when you go to the doctor
and you're like, my friend can't get it up. Ahah.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
February nineteen eighty eight. Mofon is like, all right, let's
give you a tamper proof camera. No more of this
polaroid shenanigans. This is going to be a high quality
camera and it is sealed shut with wax.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
You are not tampering with it.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
It is a three D camera, has four lenses of
like various you know depths that all take a picture at.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
The same time. That sounds cool, So you take it
with you.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
You wait for the aliens to show up, and then
when they do, you take a picture. Great, so he does,
and when he's in I think the park with his wife,
he spots a UFO and he takes a picture. And
there is a big to do about the unveiling of
the pictures. Thirty reporters in photographers gather at the film
development shop, which is advertising as our regular customers already

(29:27):
know our services.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Out of this world. Good on them. Yep, they're the
real winners.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
See things are slowly but surely getting kitchier and kitchier
in golf breeze.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, they're taking advantage of the situation. I also find
it very brave that they're all there for the photo unveiling.
Clearly at is confident in this photo. Well he knows
what he took a picture of.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
He was there, all right, And they unveil the pictures
and it is a UFO with the good camera, I
mean good on edge.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
It is a thing in the sky, I guess by
that definition. Yes, anything it is a thing, and it
is and it's a thing in the sky, an unidentified
flying object.

Speaker 2 (30:04):
It is an unidentified flying object.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
All right, well, case closes, not a hout.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Uh that spring at his home brushing his teeth when
he gets the head hums and a voice goes, zie
haas sleep and no ooh given him a name.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
His name is Zijas. Yes, that's cute.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
And then later someone will be like, oh, maybe that's
because the Spanish word for eyebrows is like sejas. Oh yeah,
and maybe they were like giving you a nickname like
eyebrows because the aliens.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
Don't have eyebrows. Oh, the aliens.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
He basically describes them as like looking like et He's
like they're short, and they're wrinkly and they've leather skin.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
He never sees them in person. He just sees them
in like his mind.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
No, I think he meets them once and he says
they have like a wand okay, but they so they
call him Ziehas. But he's getting sick of this.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
So are they keep Do they keep sending him mental
images of dogs?

Speaker 2 (30:58):
No? At one point they send him mental images of
pregnant women, which I am not even gonna touch.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Yeah, great, maybe they're just like these are things about humanity.
We like, maybe cute dogs, the beauty of human reproduction. Yeah,
So he goes down to the beach. See there's one
of them alien spacecraft.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
He's like, stop at you, alien, no more, I want
to talk to you anymore.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
He says, no more. I'm paraphrasing. Yeah, but he says
he doesn't want this.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
He's done, even though this is claim to fame, he's
all done, all right. He's like, nah, uh mm mmm,
stop doing whatever you're doing to me. And do they
look because he's had an adversarial relationship with these aliens. Yeah,
they have a wand they're dumping stuff in his backyard,
killing all his grass.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
That's true. I forgot about the dead grass circle.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
There's a big flash and then he wakes up. He's
like flung several feet. He wakes up an hour later
and that's it. He doesn't hear from the aliens again.
It's May nineteen eighty eight. He has had twenty interactions
or sighting with the aliens and he has taken thirty
eight photos of four different like craft, four different.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
It's so the alien to have multiple ships.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah, it's like how you have like different cars or armies, different.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Mimakes of tank. I guess someone does, like.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
If we went on a trip at there's your car
in my car, right, Yeah, your husband has a car.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Once again, the military is happy to clarify its position here,
which is, we have no reason to invent something that
just hovers in the air. We don't send our planes
to people's backyards.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
To the best of our knowledge. But y'all are on
your own with that. If they were doing something sneaky,
they wouldn't say it.

Speaker 2 (32:43):
As you noted, this is happening at the exact same
time that crop circles are popping up all over Wiltshire, England. Yeah,
so people are like getting alien fever. They're getting alien fever.
When I mentioned during that episode that alien fever has
gripped the planet.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
This is a real thing in Florida. This is happening
to ed out in England. Crop circles are happening. So
everyone is like, Oh, aliens are having a moment.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Aliens are having a moment.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
It's a trend.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
So we've got ed, We've got Moufon, We've got Qfo,
we've got Psycop, and we've got all of golf Breeze involved.
The mayor is so annoyed.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
Really, he's not leaning into the kitch, not at all.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
He wants these alien loving hippies off his beach.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
He is done. He is done.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
He a little bit like the mayor in Jaws, where
he's like, you know what it is. It's like if
the mayor in Jaws was right and there wasn't a shark.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
That's true, and he's like, enough of this nonsense. He's
shot hunters enough.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
We need order and we need fun, and we are
good military loving people here in Pensacle, Florida. We have
like a minor league baseball team and we're just a
nice bedroom community. Enough with these with these crazies, and
they are attracting some crazies.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
I mean I didn't really like.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Get into it in this, but all these new age
types are come in to town, and I think there
may be bringing kind of a bad element with them.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Well, you know, if you are a new age alien
uh loving person, you'd want to be where the action is.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
I mean, eventually, like a small death cult made of
like military deserters is going to come to town. But
that's not part of our podcast.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, I mean I don't think they I don't think
the mayor was wrong to be like stop it. Yeah,
I mean again, It's like the people who believe in
aliens are going to want to be here. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Too bad though, because Tracy Tourmeae, son of jazz legend
Mel Tourmee and a former writer on SNL and Star Trek,
would go on to be a very successful sci fi
TV writer, organizes UFO Cover Up Live, which is a
big special featuring interviews with the ufologists. That's a great name, excellent.

(35:02):
Dave Barry, the very funny columnist, writes about it. There's
an unsolved mysteries about it.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
I like that a lot of comedy writers are coming
down and dealing.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
Ed's book comes out, someone's gonna turn it into a
TV show. He's gonna make a couple of million dollars
by the end of this thing.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
A million with an M.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yes, because by a spoiler like post when our story
takes place, he's gonna get divorced and he and his
wife are each.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Going to walk away with like a million bucks. Whoa yeah,
good for them.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
But now the Pensacola News Journal is across it.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
So now like not the tabloid, the real newspaper.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
Yeah, the real local but larger local newspaper. Okay, they've
been covering this like a little bit on and off,
like not reporting every sighting, but like, oh, this thing
is happening out and golf Freeze, Like isn't that interesting?

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, like a thing is happening in the town.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, and they're reporting it objectively, like if twenty people
say they saw something, you can report that twenty people
said they saw something.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
But I mean you use like a great example. Yes,
it's like the idea in journalism where it's like if
people if someone says it's raining, it's your job as
a journalist to stick your hand out the window.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, you're not supposed to say someone says it's raining.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
So finally they just come to the conclusion like, all right,
the story here is not fifty people say they saw
a UFO. The story here is either we have been
visited by aliens, in which case we should probably look
into that big news story, or there is a large
hoax fooling a lot of people in Golf Breeze, in

(36:38):
which case we should look into that.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
Yeah, they should do that news story.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah, Like that's those are the two options here. Yeah,
Craig Myers is one of the journalists assigned to cover
the whole phenomenon, and he's the guy who emailed me
Hi Craig.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Hi Craig.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
He takes his then girlfriend now wife down to the
beach to meet the UFO lover and in sort of
a way where he's like, look at all these kookie
kooks and got to love a woman's intuition. His girlfriend
is like, no, Ed's weird. Ed gives me the hebgb's
Ed's bad.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, good instincts.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
So I think they just don't know how to investigate,
like did aliens visit?

Speaker 1 (37:20):
Really?

Speaker 2 (37:20):
The only evidence they have is these photos. So what
they've decided to do is we are going to try
every way we can to figure out how these photos
were faked, and if we can't do that, then we
will take as our hypothesis that the photos are real.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
I mean, yeah, that seems like a reasonable approach. See
if the photos were faked or not.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, So they try all these different methods. They have
lamps that they reflect, you know, window that sort of
look like they're floating, and they they have like a
funny little like photo fake contest. They get good fake photos,
but they don't get any that quite look like.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
Ed's, so they haven't figured out specifically how Ed has
done it right, So the best of their knowledge.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
If they can't figure it out, then the only explanation
left is his explanation. Yeah, but Ed is a contractor
by trade, and he lives in houses while he fixes
them up and then they get sold. And so what
Craig does is he drives around to the different houses
that Ed has been living in just to see if
any of the owners found anything.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Interesting to good lead.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
And at the house that Ed was living in when
he was supposedly visited by his little Wrinkley friends, the
new owners say, you know, we actually did find something
interesting in the attic, and I'm going to show you
the picture of it again so you can describe it
for the listener.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
Okay. It is a small model of a spaceship. Yep.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
It is made of styrofoam plates glued together.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
It is the spaceship that appeared in the photos yep,
to the best my naked eye. And it also is
made of like cardboard paper. I mean great, Yeah, did
Ed make a model of the of the ships that
he saw? Like? Maybe he like saw the spaceships and
was like, huh.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
So, I mean, great question. That would be my only
like ace in the hole, my lead here, that would
be a great defense.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
But they're smart, these journalists. They write up their story
and of course they have to bring Ed in for comment,
and the first thing they ask him is have you
ever made a model of a spaceship?

Speaker 1 (39:43):
See? But the thing is Ed should know that he did.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
He should know that he did, and he definitely did,
because before they ask him this, they run they like,
inspect this model very closely. They realized that the styrofoam
is like one of the missing keys, because it is
if you put a light inside, it glows just enough.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
Oh. So it's like when they take a picture of
the syrophone. They're like, yep, we solved it.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
It's a double exposure. Yeah, the styrofoam is one of
the keys. And inside the like the back of the
paper has it's handwriting on it.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
So he made this. He made this.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
He absolutely made this. So they bring Ed in and
they're like, hey, did you ever, like, in the course
of for any reason, make like a little model of
a spaceship? Oh? And he's like, no, I took pictures
of them. Why would I need to make a model?

Speaker 1 (40:35):
I took pictures of that.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
And they're like, oh, interesting, interesting, because we found a
model boom with your handwriting, with your handwriting, it's definitely yours.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
What does he How does he react when they confront
him with this literal smoking gun not literal smoking gun.
I think it just like freaks out and leaves.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
And then he calls back two hours later and he's like, Okay,
that was planted, of course in the attic.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
My wife when.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
When we had moved out and the owners hadn't yet
moved in, My wife she just remembered, oh my god.
A neighbor called her and said that she had seen
someone with out of state plates driving into the garage
and pulling down the ladder up to the attic. So
you know what that was probably the FEDS coming to
plant the evidence.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
And then they're like, well, it has your handwriting on it,
and he's like, yeah, someone took my old papers out
of my trash and made it. Of course, there will
later be a whole.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
Thing with.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
The writing on the papers used to make the model
is a reference to a plan that Ed had for
a house and Ed is going to claim that these
are references to He's always going to say, yes, that's
my handwriting. I wrote those words on that paper. He's

(42:05):
going to say that those words were written on that
paper to plan for a house that was not even
being planned until well after the photos were taken.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
So evidence that it's fake, of course, because the photos,
if the handwriting comes from later, then it was taken
out of his trash and planted as part of a
cover up.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Post facto, the journalists will find evidence of a different
house that was made earlier than the photos were taken
that they believe those the handwriting is like from those plans. Yeah,

(42:48):
And to corroborate this, the journalist will go to like
the city archives and get like the original blueprints for
that house to try to be like, look, here's the blueprints,
here's the plans, and there's the date. Except in the
quarter that has the date written on it was like
torn off. Oh, Ed ed Ward like covered his tracks.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
He covered his tracks, but he didn't throw away his model.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Well, okay, so the model details about the model, It
technically doesn't have quite the same number of windows as
the spaceship in the photo. So people point to that
as like, well, it's not in the photo, but like,
why would someone cover it up by making a model
that doesn't have the same number of windows?

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, wouldn't someone making the model only be basing it
on his photo? Wouldn't it be perfect?

Speaker 2 (43:37):
Right? Wouldn't they just make as many as it took
to get it exactly right?

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Maybe he had like multiple models and he practiced with one.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Right, And also why wouldn't he throw it away? Well,
it was found like wedged behind some insulation in the attic.
So my theory is just that Ed had a bunch
of practice models and a bunch of stuff up in
his attic and it got like shoved back there accident,
and then when he cleaned out his attic, he didn't

(44:03):
he like missed it. Yeah, And the guy who found
it in his attic was looking behind the installation because
he was having a problem with one of his pipes,
so he was like looking for like he was like
trying to track where this like clog in the pipe
or whatever was.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
He does work at the EPA. The bad guys in
any too, So.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Ed is going to like point to that and be
like they're with the feds. But then later he's going
to say like, well, no, maybe they were Patsy's and
the Feds actually came and broke that guy's pipe to
get him a look where they'd stash the thing.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
YadA, YadA, YadA. They'll come up. I mean, that's the
thing about conspiracy theories. You can always come up with
an answer.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
They will always move the goalposts. They will always just
rewrite the truth to incorporate whatever evidence you bring forward.

Speaker 1 (44:49):
Is Moufon and these organizations like standing by him or
do they acknowledge that this is a fake.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
So Moufon is having their annual convention in Golf Breez
that summer, and so the mayor loves that. The mayor
is so annoyed. They're like, we're still having our convention.
We are going to put our top two investigators on this.
They were last year's Investigators of the Year. I think
they're like a married couple. They're kind of like the Warrens.

(45:14):
I love that the contrary knows, Yeah, should we start
a franchise obviously? Okay, yeah, hoax origins. I mean, right,
this married couple going around Sullivan moof on hoaxes. Absolutely,
So that's their reaction. Ed knows that this story is
going to come out in the Sunday Paper because kids,

(45:36):
the paper used to have extra circulation on Sundays.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
Yeah, the big stories are for Sunday.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
So he goes onto a talk show Saturday night to
preemptively explain his side of the story, which, let me
tell you, just makes more people read the Sunday Paper.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
Yeah, it doesn't seem all that convincing. Sorry, Ed.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Now Tommy Smith comes forward. Tommy Smith sounds like, but
it's not real person, real person, fake name, real person.
This is real name.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Okay, great, fake sounding name.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
He comes forward and he's like, I'm friends with Ed's son,
and three years ago Ed tried to get me to
help him fake his UFO photos and I should have
come forward then, but like, I don't know, he's no snitch.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
Yeah he was waiting until he was exposed. Yeah, but
he's like, I didn't, you know.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
I helped him a little bit when I thought it
was like a prank, and then once I realized that
he was doing fraud, I didn't help him anymore. But
now that he's been exposed, I'm gonna like tell you
how he did it. So he sort of lays out
like step by step exactly how they did all the
double exposures, like where you put the black backdrop, where
you put the like PVC pipe that they put the
little models on.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
This there was a little school project, this son. I
mean that now I'm back on board. It was like
cute bonding with his son and his son's friend.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
I don't that the son was involved. I think it
was just like his son's friend. He was weird, but
he was just like, yeah, my son is the sort
of like friend.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Who's good at photos. Baby, Okay, a little weird, but
keep going.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
He tells them how Ed made crop circles, which is
that you leave a trampoline turned over for a couple
of weeks because during one of the many interviews that
Ed gave, he had taken a reporter out to see
other crop circles, like on a hillside. It wasn't just
the one in his backyard. And later Craig is also
going to find that Ed this is not from Tommy,

(47:31):
but he's going to find out from another source that
Ed made like sort of a like the size of
a desk prop of a UFO and that is the
one that he used to create like the sightings that
other people witness.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
Oh so he like keeps puts that one in the
sky somehow.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, he would like I think he would like have
it dangle from like a kite and just sort of
like whiz by. Yeah, so that if you were already
things are it's like a hazy, dark night, and you're
already sort of looking in another direction, you would be like, oh,
yeah that No, I saw that. Yeah, I mean, and
then you're presented with a photo and you're like, yeah, no,
that's what I saw. If it's dark and night and

(48:11):
you're not looking for it, I think that's plausible. Tommy
reveals that there was another like college kid their age
involved named Hank. Hank now lives in Chicago. So the
mayor and the chief of police of Golf Breeze, this
has gotten serious go to Chicago to talk to Hank. Okay,
Hank is like Tommy is covering up the truth because
Tommy's parents are religious Zelots whose faith won't allow them

(48:36):
to believe in aliens.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
So Tommy is trying to disprove aliens on behalf of
his religious parents.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yes, So they call Tommy's parents and the Smiths are like,
we are Episcopalian. Who has ever heard of a radical Episcopalian.
That's that's very funny, which is like such a good point,
Like there.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
Are no zealot Episcopalian No.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Like it's like them and Presbyterians like they're just not
They're just like a vanilla neigh of Christianity.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah. Yeah, if anything, they.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
Were like, don't lie, probably, but no literally they're just
like we don't like no, that's like no, no, no no.
So the conference comes and goes, Ed gets lots of attention.
He uses it as a springboard to bigger and better things.
He goes on Oprah. He goes on Oprah. He goes
on Oprah to debate a debunker.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
I mean that sounds like good television.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
It does sound like good television. Ed runs for City
Council and comes in dead last. Oh and then the
top two move On investigators come out with their report
and the stars of.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
Our franchise film, Yeah, they say it's a hoax. Wow. Yes,
that genuinely is surprising to me because you'd think that
move On people would just want to, you know, prove it.
But I guess a sloppy fake makes them look bad.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Well, it divides the membership ooh, because some people are like, Okay, well,
if these investigators say it's a hoax, then it's a hoax.
But other people are like, no, this is evidence of
this thing that I believe or want to believe or
have seen or experienced, and so I I'm gonna appeal

(50:17):
the investigation or whatever. And I think it's similar to
how the Crop Circle investigators became like a less and
less serious group.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
Move On.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
I think started as amateur but like very good faith
investigation into UFOs. But if your group loses members every
time there's a debunking, then all you're left with are
the people who will never believe in a debunking.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Yeah, the people who are who would never believe a
debunking because the group is shedding that all the more
credible members.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yes, So I think that's sort of like it self
radicalizes a little bit.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
That's a good way to put it.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
But the Gulf Breeze, the finer points of it continue
to be debated, but for our intents and purposes, that
is the end of the story. At least some MOFON
members say it's a hoax. Therefore, listener, it is a hoax.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
I think there are probably several reasons listeners can be
confident that this is in fact a hoax. Yep, yep,
That Lizzie and Dana will both be on their record
as saying believe, we believe hoax. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
UFOs in general continue to be in the news.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
Yeah. Like I said, like, I feel like every ten
ten months someone's like, hey, guess what UFOs are real?
And I'm like, are they? And then I never hear
about it again.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Again they are because UFO just means thing in the
air and we don't know what it is, and.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
The government says they're reel sometimes.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Well, the Pentagon tod to study of UFOs in the
mid twenty tens. NASA has been studying them since twenty
twenty two. In twenty twenty three, there were congressional hearings
about various aircraft that people either saw or heard about
that can supposedly allegedly outmaneuver American jets and can also
supposedly alleged with the fly in ways that to our knowledge,

(52:03):
no human made craft can hmm. There are also these
reports of a government program operating since the thirties to
capture these aircraft and the pilots and then also to
cover it all up.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
Sure, why not?

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Only evidence for any of this is the testimony, and
it's testimony from credible people.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
I mean, things happen, People see things, people hear things.
I don't want to debunk anything outright.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
I'm not gonna like sit here and call somebody a
liar who like sit I'm leaving me Like, no, they're
perjuring themselves in front of Congress. But like, I think
that's very different from being like, oh, we found it
the smoking gun.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Yeah, so there are people who credibly believe they have
seen things that cannot be explained. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
During these hearings they change UFO to UAP to make
it less aliening. Yeah, to make it like less stigmatized,
which means unidentified anomalist phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Which sounds spookier.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
Actually it doesn't mean anything though.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Anything is an anomalist phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Any The phenomenon is like thing that happens. Yeah, anomalist
means like sort of looking one of a kind or
like unusual ordinary, And it's just so that's just like
weird thing that happens that we don't know what it is.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
It could be anything. I mean, I guess it's good
they're investigating weird things sometimes.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
In twenty twenty five, a whistleblower leaked footage taken in
twenty twenty four of this like orb that is, the
footage is pretty grainy. I think it makes more sense
if you're in the military and know what you're looking at.
But it's this ORB that's like flying very fast off
the coast of Yemen and it's hit by a hellfire
missile and then some debris breaks off, but the ORB

(53:48):
keeps going and there is two hour scientific knowledge no
man made object that can survive being hit by a
hellfire missile. Okay, so people were like, what the hell
is this orb?

Speaker 1 (54:00):
Personal?

Speaker 2 (54:00):
And this is I'm not getting this from anywhere except
just like genuinely, this is my theory that it's a
drone and that the missile was like broken.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
I mean that it seems plausible. It's one of those
things where it's like there's an unlikely explanation and a
more plausible explanation. It's like which is more likely. There
are aliens that have done nothing but spin an orbit
around or one missile broke.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Yeah, and there's other sort of like famous videos that
like we don't have an explanation for there's like the
tic TAC video of this like weird aircraft.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
That, like, we just don't know what it is. Who
knows what Russians are doing? We don't know.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
In early twenty twenty six, President Obama went on a
podcast and said that there were aliens.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
But I, okay, I listened to this, and I also
heard what he said afterward, Yeah, which is to clarify,
He's like, yeah, I, as a private citizen, Barack Obama,
believe like there are aliens in our vast, unknowable infinite universe,
but I have no evidence of them. Yes.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
So in response to this, President Trump was like, Okay,
I'm going to release all these UFO documents. Great, there
is some interesting stuff in those documents, which are now
like all on a website that you can see if
you google around, but there's nothing that qualifies as paranormal.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
So basically there is scientific consensus on this matter law
of large numbers. There must be aliens subwhere we haven't
met them because the universe is too big.

Speaker 1 (55:32):
I mean, the two things are true. The universe is
so vast that aliens must exist somewhere, and also the
universe is so vast we have not aliens have not
income here.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Yeah, I mean that's pretty much it.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Like space is cool enough without us having to like
make stuff up, and science is cool enough without us
having to like make stuff up.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
But you know what, I do like people who investigate,
But I also like when people investigate credibly. Yeah, which
means that when there's counter evidence, you have to engage
with it in good faith. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
I will say, if you are genuinely interested in whether
or not we've been contacted, not visited, but contacted, look
into SETI because we would be contacted by like radio
waves first, it wouldn't be like a visit, and we
might find life on other planets within our lifetime. It

(56:25):
will probably be bacteria.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
That makes more sense. I mean, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
And I do have a comment specifically for this pod.
Oh please, from astronomy professor Andrew Fraknoy. Great, thank you,
astronomy professor. He is my dad's best friend, so you
know that's my inn there. But he has this to say. Okay,
my favorite thing about UFO observations is that there is

(56:48):
a lot less to them than meets the eye. No
one can prove that we have not been visited by aliens,
but negatives are always hard to prove. The thing scientists
want is analyzable proof that we have been visited, and
so far, not one shred of a physical evidence exists
that alien spacecraft have been or are here. And why
would they come all this way? Take a short dip
into our atmosphere just enough to be glimpsed, and then

(57:10):
go away.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
That's very well said, professor, Thank you very much for
that excellent comment. And that's a beautiful place to end
where it's like, look, who knows what these aliens are
up to, But the fact of the matters, we don't
have any scientifically credible evidence at this moment. I'm sorry
we don't, but we do have pretty good evidence that
Ed was faking it.

Speaker 2 (57:33):
And if you're into space and into aliens and into science,
there's real evidence for all of those things being cool.
So go look into them in a real way. Let's
see where can the good people find you. The good
people can find us at Hooks the podcast on Instagram,
which is also where you'll get information about the future
of this podcast when we have it.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
Yeah, that's actually a very important comment. We love doing
this podcast. Our season one is coming to an end.
We want to find a future for this podcast, So
if you are a listener, I mean hopefully no matter what,
it'll just keep coming on the same feed. But please
follow us on Instagram so you can find us wherever
the future takes us.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
Yeah, I try not to spam it. It's like good content.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
It's good content, yeah it is. It's very funny always Dana.
Where can the people find you? On my Instagram at
Danish schwartz with three z's and on TikTok Danish Swartz
three z's And also you can email Hoax thepodcast at
gmail dot com and I will read those emails.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Please hoax responsibly.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
Bye.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Hoax is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Our hosts are
Danish Sports and Lindslie Logan. Our executive producers are Matt
Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima lk Ali
and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk. Our theme music
was composed by Laine Montgomery. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

(59:06):
your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Thanks for listening.