Ray's X-Blog

What's Wrong With This Picture? January 24, 1988. Evening. Cloudy. A somewhat secluded road, a few houses around, far apart. A pickup truck pulls over. The driver gets out. He walks down the road, shouting, daring someone to show themselves. His name is Ed Walters. The passenger gets out, holding a video camera, taping the event. He is a newspaper editor who was contacted by Ed that a UFO might appear. His name is Duane Cook. Cook has been following Ed's story for some time, a story involving the strange appearances of a UFO, aliens sending mysterious messages to Ed via telepathy. Ed is a contractor in Gulf Breeze, Florida, who claims he hears a humming sound inside his head before a UFO appears. As on other occasions, the humming starts low, then grows to such intensity that it becomes painful. So why doesn't Cook think all of this is just in Ed's head? Because Ed has submitted pictures to Cook's paper, images showing an otherworldly craft hanging in the n...

Martin Gardner Shouldn't scientific thinking and logic work together? Recently the Skeptical Inquirer magazine published an issue remembering the late Martin Gardner, a founding member of CSICOP/CSI (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, renamed Committee for Scientific Inquiry). I first encountered his work in Fads and Fallacies in the Name Of Science, a classic book in the skeptical field. In a SI tribute by Ray Hyman this detail leaped out at me: Gardner would sometimes write a book review by just reading its index. Hyman wondered how Gardner could read and review so many books with his busy schedule. Gardner replied that in most cases he didn't actually read a book, he just scanned the index for the info he needed to write his review. As I've mentioned before, sometimes I skim-read / skip-read a book, i.e., I'll peruse a few passages and jump around from spot to spot. When writing a review I mention this, letting the reader know...

Are You There Zehaas? Its Me, Kal-El Memory trigger. Over at his blog, The X Spot , X. Dell (no relation) has been running a series of posts dealing with Ed Walters and the Gulf Breeze sightings. In November 1987 a resident of Gulf Breeze, Florida, contractor Ed Walters, was nearly abducted during a UFO encounter, zapped by a blue beam. The aliens started to abduct Ed, lifting him off the ground with the beam, but he fought back. He screamed "Aagghh!" and the aliens dropped him and left. Thus begins Ed's story in the book, The Gulf Breeze Sightings (1990), co-written (as such) with his wife Frances. (I don't notice any discernable differences in writing styles between Ed's and Frances's sections.) As explained in the book, the aliens kept showing up now and then, telepathically saying stuff to Ed like "Zehaas, in sleep you will know." When X. Dell mentioned the name Zehaas it triggered a memory. The main detail I had retained after reading T...