GULF BREEZE, Fla. — Santa Rosa County Commissioner John Broxson was always a skeptical person.

He never believed the stories of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster or unidentified flying objects.

But something happened nearly 20 years ago to make him change his mind on at least one of those phenomena.

Broxson was entertaining friends at his home in the Villa Venyce subdivision when something outside caught his attention. He went out for a closer look.

Something bright was hovering above his home: a parade of lights of different colors and intensity. He quickly had his wife, Christina, and their friends come out to see it for themselves. No one knew what they were watching.

The unidentified flying object hovered for several moments before quickly flying straight until it was out of sight.

“Frankly, I saw something that blew my mind,” Broxson said. “It’s a mystery to me. It just looked like something I wasn’t expecting to see.

“I didn’t want to see one and have people thinking I was weird. That’s the only time I can recall seeing something that weird.”

Broxson was not alone in having an unexplained sighting. This month marks the 20th anniversary of when former Gulf Breeze resident Edward Walters first saw a UFO flying above his yard, launching a period of sightings, seekers and fame for the area. Skeptics say the UFOs were part hoax, part imagination and part misidentification (Eglin Air Force Base and Pensacola Naval Air Station are nearby), but believers are undeterred.

Walters has said his Nov. 11, 1987, sighting was the first of more than 100 sightings and abductions he experienced over a six-year period. He wrote three books on UFOs and the Gulf Breeze sightings, but has since moved to Pensacola and no longer speaks to the media.

While Walters was the most outspoken person at the time to report seeing UFOs in Gulf Breeze, he was not the only person. People from around the world visited in hopes of seeing something unexplained after The Gulf Breeze Sentinel ran a story and photo about Walters.

Many of those people were not disappointed, said Don Ware, eastern regional director of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON.

Between 1987 and the end of 1993, when most of the sightings ended, Ware said hundreds of people reported seeing UFOs in Gulf Breeze. Walters and others took more than 125 photographs of supposed UFOs just between Nov. 11, 1987, and May 1, 1988, Ware said.

“I think probably over half the people in America have seen something in the sky that they didn’t know what it was,” Ware said. “Most of those people have probably seen an alien vehicle. I know I have seen alien vehicles.”

MUFON is a national UFO investigative organization founded in 1969 in Illinois. Ware, a Fort Walton Beach resident who retired from the Air Force in 1982, has spent much of the past 25 years investigating UFO activity.

Ware became fascinated by UFOs after a series of sightings over Washington, D.C., in July 1952. He said he saw his first UFO on Sept. 12, 1989.

The Gulf Breeze sightings set off a media frenzy, and the community of about 6,000 residents became one of the country’s UFO capitals.

“These phenomenons happened so often that Gulf Breeze became the center for these E.T. observations,” Broxson said. “I thought (the Gulf Breeze sightings) had been a hoax all this time. Just some people seeing something with very active imaginations.”

After his own sighting, Broxson became less skeptical.

Questions over the validity of the UFO sightings started almost as soon as the sightings themselves.

Phillip Klass, an investigator for what is now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, studied the Gulf Breeze sightings and wrote his own book declaring them a massive hoax.

Klass died a couple years ago, but CSI executive director Barry Karr said he believes the accuracy of his former colleague’s work.

“I really don’t think there’s any question the Gulf Breeze sightings were a hoax,” Karr said. “There are things in the sky that can’t be identified, especially near an air base. Just because it can’t be identified doesn’t mean it’s a visitor from another planet.”

The biggest piece of evidence pointing to a hoax was a UFO model constructed from drafting paper and paper plates reportedly discovered in Walters’ former home after he had moved out.

Ware said he believes CSI workers planted the model and then informed the media of its location to debunk the validity of Walters’ sightings.

“They try to debunk all the things that people see that they don’t want understood too well,” Ware said.

Karr laughed at the idea his organization planted the model to debunk the UFO stories.

“That’s just hilarious,” Karr said. “No, our organization did not plant the model. We’re not that large of an organization.”

Karr said he believes after word of the UFO sightings in Gulf Breeze started to break, everyone wanted to see one so much that they let their imagination get carried away.

One video he has seen of a “Gulf Breeze UFO” ended up being a flare shot into the air. Karr said pieces of the flare are clearly visible falling away from the larger flare in the tape.

During the late ’80s and early ’90s, UFOs became synonymous with Gulf Breeze. Businesses up and down the Emerald Coast took advantage of the UFO sightings to profit off the experience.

Club 51, the adult entertainment club on U.S. Highway 98 in Wynnhaven Beach, was originally called Area 51 after the supposed hidden military base in Roswell, N.M. UFO Motors was a used car dealership that operated in Midway for several years. A 1993 Associated Press article reported that Gulf Breeze restaurants sold a four-scoop UFO Sundae and a UFO Vegetarian Pizza. Stores also sold UFO jewelry, watches and books.

Nearby Pensacola even hosted the International UFO Symposium in 1990.

While it’s been about 14 years since the period of the Gulf Breeze sightings ended, people still look to the sky and occasionally see something unexplained.

Cedric Cadow of Okaloosa Island never believed in UFOs. That changed after he said he saw two last month after leaving his home.

Cadow saw two bright orange oval discs hovering above Fort Walton Beach. The two discs emerged from behind the clouds and one hovered stationary while the other descended toward the ground, eventually going out of sight before coming back up.

The two UFOs then sped away, one to the east and the other to the north, in a flash of light that did not make any sound. It all lasted about 12 seconds, Cadow said.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I almost fell to the ground. I had never seen anything like it before. I thought it was all (garbage) before. It’s not.”

Source: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20071117/APN/711170625

LARNACA Airport-bound planes and birds are commonly seen in the skies above Cyprus, but only last week there was a report of a UFO spotted over Limassol town and since an earlier article on UFOs in Cyprus, The Gazette has received many accounts from readers of their unexplained encounters.

Anthony in Nicosia contacted the Gazette to share his experience, “just last week at 10:10pm we had a sighting of a UFO while we were travelling in the Kyrenia area that lasted for two minutes. It was an oblong shape, like a rugby ball on its end and was glowing very bright orange. It came from the coast inland near a village called Catalkoy in small but rapid zigzags then stopped and hovered for approximately 30 seconds before making a smooth ascent at 45 degrees up to the east towards a very bright star. It then disappeared. A friend had sighted a similar event at the same spot a month previously ”

It is just the latest in a series of incidents of unidentified objects in our skies. A local TV cameraman posted a clip he filmed on the popular Youtube website of a ’strange craft’ in the skies of Limassol.

The three-minute video shows a circular object hovering over the city. The UFO was a bright orange orb, which later changed to a rugby-ball shape.

There have been several sightings of UFOs on the island in the past five years. One of the earliest accounts of a UFO in Cyprus was in 1950, when two American soldiers described a “small, round, bright object flying fast, straight and level for 15-20 seconds across Nicosia”.

Last month, a computer programmer and his girlfriend who were on holiday in Paphos had an experience which left them confused and dazed.

The man told a UFO news website, “It happend on Sunday 9th September at 1am. That night my girlfriend and I were lying down on sunbeds staring at the stars. After a while I sat on the sunbed looking and talking to my girlfriend when behind her over the rooftop I saw a circular irregular light moving quite fast. By the time I told her about it, it was already 45 degrees on my right.

She saw it as it was reappearing behind a building and finally it disappeared again behind trees. It moved quite fast and at a constant speed along an east to west straight line.”

Last year a resident of Pygra had a similar experience: “The sound of my dogs barking alerted me to something. It was 1.30 in the morning and I headed out to try and discover what they were barking at. I noticed a bright light coming towards me, which then stopped and hovered. With binoculars, I could see it was a triangle-shaped object with amber, green and white lights. It was moving erratically left to right, back and forth - hovering there, observed by me for around 45 minutes. I tried to video it with a powerful zoom but the camera wouldnt operate. I checked the camera by filming other parts of the sky and the house and it operated perfectly. it simply wouldn’t let me video the object. This thing then went behind a tree and stayed there.”

In 2002, the self-styled Egyptian UFO Hunter, Dr.Ibrahim shot a five-minute video of a UFO above the carpark at Larnaca airport. The film shows a green ’shaking’ object and can be seen on his website. (http://www.ufo-egyptian-hunter.org).

An unidentified flying object was also spotted over Kyrenia in 1998. It was seen on the Nicosia-Kyrenia road by a family from Kyrenia who were on their way home after visiting a friend’s house.

They said an object “like a flying saucer” with white revolving lights had appeared around 50-100 metres above their car and that it had then followed them.

In July, a crowd of 100 stunned stargazers brought a UK town centre to a standstill when five mysterious UFOs were spotted hovering in the sky.

Drinkers spilled out of pubs, motorists stopped to gawp and camera-phones were aimed upwards as the five orbs, in a seeming formation, hovered above Stratford-Upon-Avon for half an hour.

The unidentified flying objects lit up the otherwise clear night sky above Shakespeare’s birthplace in Warwickshire.
According to multiple surveys over the last several decades and from different countries, 5-7% of people have seen a UFO - equivalent to 15-20 million Americans - and 10-15% know someone who has seen a UFO.

Several hundred thousand UFO sightings have been documented over the last 50 years, and the total number of UFO sightings is estimated to be in the millions.

There are thousands of sightings reported each year. Only a small percentage of those who see a UFO report the sighting.

Source: http://www.famagusta-gazette.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=69&twindow=&mad=
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On Saturday night a local organization was asking ghosts what they like on their waffles.

The Indiana Ghost Trackers, a state-wide organization that investigates the paranormal, held their monthly ghost hunt over the weekend. The group examined two locations about an hour southwest of Purdue; a cemetery and a supposedly haunted abandoned home. The location was undisclosed due to fears of vandalism.

Ryan Brewer, a junior in the College of Technology who said he grew up in a home with paranormal activity, has been with the group for about a year. He got into ghost hunting because he wanted to learn about something he’s been told doesn’t exist.

“There’s a whole side of the Bible that says, ‘yeah, there’s a spirit world and you shouldn’t mess with it,’” he said. “And that kind of is in the back of your mind.”

Brewer’s group of 10 was led by Andy Bowen, 25, of Lafayette, a man who enjoys the allure of being a ghost hunter.

The trackers began the cold night walking around the cemetery, staking out their surroundings before choosing a spot to record EVPs, electronic voice phenomena.

EVPs occur when a recording device picks up sound that was not heard by anyone during the recording. Many ghost hunters consider EVPs to be possible evidence of the paranormal.

The EVP work involved everyone getting into a circle and asking conversational questions to any entity in the area.

“Have you ever played kickball?” Bowen said during one session.

In order to maintain the integrity of their work, all participants had to announce any sound made during the recording, such as a burp or a passing car.

A half-hour drive down winding dirt roads to the second location was lengthened when the group took a wrong turn, but seclusion made the home all the more impressive.

Faux blood-stained hand prints attested to the residence’s most recent use as a commercial haunted house. But eerier than the abandoned props were stories about suicides and residents gone mentally insane.

“Definitely primed for something evil, that’s for sure,” said Brewer. “If I was going to go visit Satan I figure that’s where he lives.”

A walkthrough of the home revealed broken windows, discarded wrappers and crumpled cans of Busch beer, but no paranormal activity.

At 1:30 a.m., the group packed up and left with no obvious evidence of the otherworldly. But the night wasn’t over yet for everyone. Brewer planned to go home and spend hours reviewing all the recordings captured with the hope of catching a ghost.

Source: http://www.purdueexponent.com/?module=article&story_id=8376

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich may have been ridiculed for saying he had seen a UFO, but for some former military pilots and other observers, unidentified flying objects are no laughing matter.
 
An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.

“Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns … which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters,” they said in a statement released at a news conference.

The panelists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.

The subject of UFOs grabbed the spotlight in the U.S. presidential race last month when Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he had seen one.

Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported to have claimed UFO sightings.

Most turn out to be misidentified aircraft, satellites or meteors. A panelist who once worked for Britain’s Ministry of Defense said 5 percent of incidents cannot be explained.

But the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper investigations, UFO activists say.

“It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?” remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.

The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credibility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations through the U.S. Air Force or NASA.

“It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angst out of this issue,” said former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.

The Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 in what was known as Project Blue Book. Investigators concluded that the incidents posed no threat and there was no evidence of space aliens or a super technology in operation.

“Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations,” the Air Force said on its Web site.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071112/ts_nm/usa_ufos_dc

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Researchers have found a 10-million-year-old jaw bone in Africa they believe belonged to a new species of great ape that was close to the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans.

The fragment was found along with 11 teeth in volcanic mud flow deposits in the Nakali region of Kenya, and suggested the creature was somewhere between the size of a female gorilla and a female orangutan, and fed on nuts, seeds and fruit.

“The teeth were covered in thick enamel and the caps were low and voluminous, suggesting that the diet of this ape consisted of a considerable amount of hard objects, like nuts or seeds, and fruit,” Yutaka Kunimatsu at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute said in a telephone interview.

“It could be positioned before the split between gorillas, chimps and humans,” he added.

Kunimatsu said it was hard to determine what the new species, Nakalipithecus nakayamai, looked like.

“We only have some jaw fragments and some teeth … but we hope to find other body parts in our future research. We plan to go back next year. We will try to find bones below the neck to tell us how the animal moved,” he said.

Published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the finding is significant as it gives credence to the theory that the evolution from ape to man may have taken place entirely in Africa.

Prior to this finding, there had been so little fossil evidence in Africa dating between 7 to 13 million years ago that some experts began to surmise that the last common ancestor left Africa for Europe and Asia, and then returned later.

But Kunimatsu said the findings suggested that the ancestor of African great apes and humans likely evolved in Africa.

“Now, we have a good candidate in Africa. We do not need to think the common ancestor came back from Eurasia to Africa. I think it is more likely the common ancestor evolved from the apes in the Miocene in Africa,” he said.

The Miocene is a period of time extending from 23.03 million to 5.33 million years ago.

“Some apes (then) left Africa and migrated to Eurasia. They then became orangutans in Southeast Asia. Today’s orangutan evolved from the apes that left Africa,” he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071112/sc_nm/ape_human_africa_dc

SAN MARCOS, Texas - The results are in: The ugly, big-eared animal found this summer in Cuero is not the mythical bloodsucking chupacabra. It’s just a plain old coyote.
Biologists at Texas State University announced Thursday night that they had identified the hairless doglike creature.

San Antonio television station KENS provided a tissue sample from the animal for testing.

“The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote (Canis latrans),” bioligist Mike Forstner said in a written statement. “This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero Chupacabra is a Texas Coyote.”

Phylis Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 90 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she could get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

Forstner said the testing provided an opportunity to demonstrate how science answers questions.

Chupacabra means “goat sucker” in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.

“This is fun, not scary, but if people are worried about the chupacabra, it is probably even more important that we explain the mystery,” he said. “Folks can fear what they don’t understand, and a big part of the goal in science is to explain the natural world.”

He said additional skin samples have been taken to try to determine the cause of the animal’s hair loss.

Original: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071102/ap_on_sc/mythical_chupacabra