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 TGBS many years ago was the alien's name for Ed. So I checked out a copy of the book from the library and started skip-reading through it again. (Some books aren't worth a full read.)

Originally Ed tried to stay in the background, calling himself Mr. X (definitely no relation) when he submitted the Polaroid snaps from his first UFO encounter to the Sentinel, a local newspaper. On page 243 of TGBS it's mentioned that a Sentinel editor received a call from a woman who suggested that since the aliens spoke Spanish at times that Zehaas was really "cejas" (pronounced "See-hass"), the word for eyebrows. Ed wrote that since he had curly eyebrows maybe the aliens were eyebrowless, impressed by his prominent ones.

Yeah, right.

Ed's story doesn't hold up for a number of reasons. As X. Dell explains at his blog Ed faked a photo one time of a "demon." After he moved away from the house where all the weird stuff went down, the new owners found an UFO model similar to what was seen in Ed's photos hidden under some attic insulation.

Even without this revelation I find it hard to buy Ed's story with its old-style sci-fi pulp magazine details like a small alien who appears in a metal suit with a futuristic cattle-prod. Or the UFO that looks like something out of an old TV series like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. And don't get me going about the hack-writer name for an alien, "Zehaas."

I haven't read the two books by Ed that followed TGBS so I don't know if the Zehaas mystery was ever explained. Going by what is offered in TGBS it seems that Ed might have been working towards a story that he was part alien or had some sort of alien connection. You know, the trite SF story about a prince from another world who is exiled to Earth as a baby because the bad guys on his own world have killed off the rest of the royal family. Or maybe his world just went BOOM! but he got away.

This isn't anything new outside of science fiction. In an article entitled "Alien Memories And Dreams" paranormal writer Brad Steiger observes:

"The whole matter of sensible men and women who claim alien memories and persistent dreams of extraterrestrial origin invites extensive speculation. Are these people, because of their higher intelligence and greater sensitivity, rejecting an association with Earth because of all the inadequacies and shortcomings, which they witness all around them?

"Does the mechanism of believing oneself to be of alien heritage enable one to deal more objectively with the multitude of problems, which assail the conscientious, and caring at each dawn of a new day?"

Steiger collects information on human hybrids with alien DNA with his Starseed Questionnaire. I don't know the validity of all those who claim to be "Star People" but if Ed Walters and his "Zehaas" rap was intended to go in that direction, faked Polaroids and a concealed UFO model undermine any of his claims.