Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (37 page)

sacola Beach is a $200,000 step up from his former home. But no one’s

around. Ed doesn’t return my calls.

Sky Watch

Despite assurances that UFO sightings are a rarity, after dark I head to

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Shoreline Park anyway. From the road it looks like undeveloped wood-

lands. Farther inside it opens up to a blanket of asphalt so brightly

lit you could read a magazine in your car. Beyond, covered picnic ta-

bles line the grassy banks of the dark Santa Rosa Sound. The circle of

scorched grass that Ed Walters had once photographed has grown in or

been paved over. A few trucks with boat trailers are scattered through-

out the lot. Water ripples up a boat ramp just beyond the picnic area.

There’s hardly anyone around. A dad walks the bank with his lit-

tle boy. Beneath a pavilion, a couple of Goth teenagers look eternally

bored. The water is bedded with rocks and sharp-edged oyster shells

mired in mucky sand. The lapping of high tide against the seawall

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makes it relaxing just the same. A long wooden pier reaches out into

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darkness. Far beyond, across the sound, hotel lights cast a halo over

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Pensacola Beach.

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I take Alan’s advice for a successful UFO viewing: “Ask them to come.

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Intend it with your mind.” I telepathically send a welcoming message

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into the universe as I try to escape the shoreline lights and stroll to the

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end of the pier. The humid summer night sky is aglow with stars, a half

1

moon, but nothing is moving except the tide and the Goth kids heading

toward their beat-up Corolla.

I search for Cetus, the whale constellation. I can’t find it. Bubba and

Tinker Bell aren’t flashing me, either. I stretch back on the pier and

gaze above at the splatter of diamonds and feel the allure of sky watch-

ing. A rest on the water contemplating what may live on a distant star

is not a bad way to spend an evening, especially if you’ve brought along

friends and a cooler. Too bad I left mine at home.

Aliens on Board

Unfortunately for me, the red trolley UFO tour is sold out. But after

spending a couple of days in Gulf Breeze, I have the sense that aliens

have implanted more than mere beliefs in stargazing and dolphin heal-

ing. A corny local music video called
Gulf
Breeze
UFO
made in the goofy tradition of Weird Al Yankovic plays on the TV of a local bar. A midcentury Futuro house on Pensacola Beach has been fashioned to look like

a UFO equipped with a ramp leading to its front door and a resident

green bug-eyed alien peeking from one of its portholes.

I catch up with Denise Daughtry, the creator of the UFO tour per-

formance. She’s also the president of Winterfest of Pensacola, the non-

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profit that owns the red trolleys. She tells me there’s recently been a re-

surgence of interest in the legendary sightings. Enough time has passed

that the bug people and their zippy spacecraft have reached cult status.

She calls my attention to the upcoming Greyhound Pets of America

annual Hound Dog Howliday, which this year is themed around UFOs

and includes an alien costume contest for dogs. The promotional photo

shows a slender canine in a silver lame coat with goggles and springy

antennae.

A true testament of cult appeal is the popularity of the trolley tour

and its onboard play,
Planet
X:
An
Alien
Love
Story
. Every performance has sold out since the tour began in 2010, Denise says. People have

adi

traveled from as far as Indiana just to join the wacky spectacle. “It has

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absolutely no redeeming value. We’re just doing it for fun.”

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She says she stresses that point to out-of-state callers lest they

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expect a serious presentation of Gulf Breeze’s UFO history and get

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pissed-off after discovering it’s a spoof. “I tell them I don’t believe in

UFOs. Some will say that they do, but it’s OK with them. They want to

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come anyway.”

The midcen-

tury Futuro house,

constructed in

Pensacola Beach

decades before

the Gulf Breeze

sightings, is a stop

on Red Trolley UFO

tour. Photo by

James Harvey.

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The moving play’s plot charts the adventures of Ned Walters, who

is trying to escape the affections of a creepy green alien who has borne

his love child. Extraterrestrials have stripped Ned’s memory of his

alien affair. (Ed Walters claimed to have no memory of his alien abduc-

tions until he underwent regressive hypnotherapy.) Ned tries to fight

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off the alien woman through the entire tour, which also stops at Shore-

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line Park for an encounter with a couple of Sleestaks—yes, the hissing

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reptiles from
Land
of
the
Lost
. The trolley moves on to the iconic UFO

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beach house where alien eggs are hatched. Along the way, guests eat

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alien food (green Jell-O molded in the shape of baby ETs), make hats

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out of tin foil to prevent alien mind control, and listen to the song from

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the
Gulf
Breeze
UFO
video.

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The tour host always asks if anyone in the audience has seen a UFO,

and invariably someone has. “Many begin with ‘I have a college educa-

tion’ as a disclaimer,” Denise says.

Denise, in her sixties, finds the belief in aliens absurdly funny and

jokes that there’s a local theory that military aircraft pilots put on fake

alien aircraft shows just to scare the locals. She’s lived in Pensacola long

enough to remember seeing the hordes hanging out by the Pensacola

Bay Bridge. She originally hails from New Orleans, where she was quite

the bon vivant, putting on highfalutin parties that made local society

columns. She moved to Pensacola by marriage to a former local news

anchor and is trying her best to bring a little Big Easy to the rather se-

date local culture.

Her Gulf Breeze UFO parody has met some sour faces, including

one at home. Her husband, David, a member of the theatrical group’s

cast, takes UFOs rather seriously. He had his own freaky craft encoun-

ter during the sighting years and even attended the big MUFON con-

vention in 1990. When she first shared her idea for the UFO tour, he

refused to have any part of it. “He didn’t like me making fun of UFOs.

What can you say about that? We’re talking UFOs! How can you be seri-

ous about that?”

The tour also hasn’t set well with city leaders, who would prefer the

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town to be known as a quiet upscale enclave close to the white sands of

Pensacola Beach. “They hate it and are trying really hard to ignore us.”

She’s not exaggerating. Gulf Breeze City Manager Edwin “Buzz”

Eddy denied knowing about any UFO tour when I spoke to him ear-

lier on the phone. “From what I’ve heard it was a hoax,” he says of the

UFO sightings. “If tourists think that might be interesting, that’s great.

But we don’t try to promote it. It’s not a significant part of our local

culture.”

Denise is not a woman easily deterred. She’s making the UFO tour

a full-blown enterprise. She and her trolley crew are designing T-shirts

and alien memorabilia based on the UFO theme. For giggles, her crew

of aliens made a facsimile of the infamous paper-plate UFO model,

which they plan to ceremoniously present to the city’s historical soci-

ety on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the sci-fi classic
The
Day

the
Earth
Stood
Still
. A stand-in for the film’s star alien, Klaatu, will officially award the Styrofoam craft outside Walters’s former home. They’ll

leave behind a historical marker in the front yard that says: “We came

in peace for all mankind. . . .”

An advertisement for the UFO trolley tours, provided by Winterfest of Pensacola.

Photo montage by Denise Daughtry. By permission of Denise Daughtry.

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I later learn that although the local news crews couldn’t resist cap-

turing the mockery, representatives from the historical society were a

no-show.

I hit the road with images of amorous bug people doing loop-de-

loops in their green amphibious craft. By the time I’m home, it all feels

like some crazy dream—perhaps implanted by aliens. I’ve returned to

reality Florida-style in St. Petersburg, a city where about the only alien-

looking things are sunburned Canadian tourists.

But as I bring my space gear back into the house, I spot something

that makes me wonder if I’m still in the
Twilight
Zone
. Underneath my

dining table, all by itself and there for no good reason I can think of, is

a

the business card of Art Hufford’s Cassadaga psychic.

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Showtown’s Last Showman

proof

Along the fair midway beyond the Zipper ride, beside the flying swings,

and across from a cotton-candy cart, towering walls of sideshow ban-

ners depict freaks of nature. On a small stage in the midst, a lively old

man in a red-sequined coat eloquently sells the fantasy of what’s inside

the red-and-yellow circus tent behind him. Ride-weary adults lugging

stuffed animal prizes and their antsy children crowd around to listen.

Showman Ward Hall is in his element. “This is a program of the events

you will see on our stage. Twelve acts alive,” he says pointing to the

colorful banners of Tarantula Girl, Cobra Girl, the Human Blockhead,

Zamora the Gorilla Girl, and a dozen others.

In any other dress or environment, Ward would cut a grandfatherly

figure. He’s short with a broad face, receding gray hair, big-framed

shades propped on a broad nose, and hearing aids the size of quarters

in ears that are a cartoonist’s dream. Here on the sideshow platform,

he’s giving such a spirited bally, as showfolks call the pitch, that you

would never guess he’s eighty.

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“You’re going to see the Queen of Kerosene drinking gasoline like

you and I would enjoy an ice tea,” Ward says, peering into the eyes of

his audience. “A sight to behold is Unique Monique from Hamburg,

Germany, pictured on that first painting. And ladies and gentlemen,

she looks just like that picture. A woman alive who visibly does not

have any head at all. And when you see her today it is a sight to behold.

“The strangest of them all is a seventeen-year-old girl from Leslie,

Minnesota. Her name is Angela Perez. Angela has a normal head and

an absolutely beautiful face but that is all that is beautiful and normal

about her. Because from the neck down she has a body that looks like

a tarantula spider. It’s not pretty. It’s not nice. When you look at her it

may shock you. But you will never forget the spider girl.”

Ward’s hyperbole is so lyrical and rhythmically punctuated that you

want to believe everything he’s saying is real and you don’t really care

if it’s not. As a final enticement, he introduces a taste of the show.

A toothless elderly dwarf in a silver-sequined jacket, stage name