It wasn’t our intention to zero in on all the UFO hot spots I’d written about in Alien Nightmares, but our vacations seemed to be gravitating toward those haunted places.
Cayuga Lake, NY was where it all began for me back in the sixties. The city of Ithaca at the south end of Cayuga Lake had racked up over 1,000 UFO sightings in 1967-1968 which began my lifelong series of UFO alien visitations.
Decades later, we drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Cayuga Lake, New York for a lake vacation and family visit. We passed through Wytheville, Virginia on the way. Wytheville had been the location of another UFO flap in 1987-1988 with over 1,500 reported UFO sightings. That landed us in two UFO hot zones during one road trip.
The very next road trip took us to Gulf Shores, Alabama which is a mere 40 miles west of Gulf Breeze, Florida where 250+ sightings of UFOs occurred from 1987 through 1992. None of these trips were intentionally to go looking for UFOs. Maybe UFOs just happen to like the same vacation spots that we do.
When we prep for a vacation, I study maps, and when I looked at the map of the area around Gulf Shores and Gulf Breeze, I noticed a very big, unmarked gray area on the map. It did not appear to be a national park or national forest, nor was it a body of water. There were only a couple of roads that passed through and the rest was a big gray blank.
At the northern end of this mysterious gray area was the city of Crestview, Florida. To the west was Milton, Florida and to the south was Valparaiso, Florida and then the Gulf of Mexico.
The unmarked section of the map started just 20 miles east of Gulf Breeze where all the UFO sightings had taken place. My alien conspiracy meter kicked into high gear.
I zoomed in as far as the map would let me zoom and the area appeared to be military. Just north of Gulf Breeze at the westernmost end of the gray area was Choctaw Navy Outlying Field. The surrounding roads were labeled Eglin AFB (Air Force Base) which was located near the center of of the gray area.
Other indicators that the entire gray area was a military compound were road names such as Military Road 257, Eglin Territory Site C-6 Road, Naval Outlying Field Santa Rosa, 77th Special Forces Way, Colonel Greg Malloy Road, and an entire network of roads all labeled Eglin AFB. In addition, there were airfields such as Eglin Test Site B6, Eglin Field Nr 2, Duke Field AFS, and Hurlburt Field. The map showed several air strips, and satellite images depicted quite an elaborate military compound.
Bordering the gray area in the civilian sector were more airports and airfields: Garcon Field, Whiting Field NAS, Peter Prince Field, Harold Nolf Heliport, Holley Nolf, Owls Head Farm Airport, Cuchens Airport-02fl, DeFuniak Springs Municipal Airport, Northwest Florida Regional Airport, and several others. Could they have jammed any more airports into the area? Even the biggest cities in the country don’t have this many airports.
According to the official spiel, the Eglin AFB compound predates the UFO wave by decades going back to the 1930s and 1940s, and it was used as a testing ground for both weapons and aircraft, with an emphasis on research and development of new aircraft and military technologies. We all know that the government has a history of spinning stories, so rather than believe the government, I dug a bit deeper into books that were published before the UFO wave and indeed, the dates match up so there’s no conspiracy in backdating.
A UFO skeptic would conclude that the unidentified flying objects seen in this vicinity were obviously military in origin and indeed, the military had quite a complex from which it could launch test aircraft and military prototypes.
On the other hand, a UFO believer would see the military complex as evidence that something otherworldly was definitely flying the Gulf Breeze, Florida skies. Either the military had positioned itself to keep tabs on the UFOs, or UFOs were hovering overhead to see what the humans were up to with the latest military technology. Maybe it was a standoff, with both sides eyeballing each other.
Way more interesting than all the landing fields and military jargon, however, were the patterns that looked like concentric circle crop circles, polka dotted fields, and even an arrow that points to a small building. Civilians may never get a closer look at the mysteries hidden in the gray area, but if I were a UFO, I’d sure be hovering overhead to scope it out!
So could the Gulf Breeze wave of UFOs be explained away as military aircraft being tested? Or were UFOs drawn to the military base to keep tabs on our military advancements?
My particular vantage point as a UFO abductee puts me in the believer category, so I believe that UFOs were flying the Florida skies right along with the military. For a glimpse into the bizarre world of an alien abductee, I’ve shared my story of decades long multiple abductions in the book Alien Nightmares: Screen Memories of UFO Alien Abductions which is available in several formats, including an audiobook.