Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990                   TAG: 9005130269
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by Paul Dellinger
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

UFOS: OUT OF THE TABLOIDS, INTO HARDCOVER

You probably saw something about it in supermarket tabloids or one of their television equivalents: A Gulf Breeze, Fla., man identifying himself only as "Mr. Ed" had seen, photographed and even videotaped some of the unidentified flying objects spotted over his part of the state by numerous residents between late 1987 and mid-1988.

One the one hand, the photographs seemed to prove the existence of unusual aircraft of some kind. On the other hand, nobody but the mysterious Mr. Ed ever saw the actual craft he photographed.

Mr. Ed is now revealed to have been Ed Walters, a building contractor who at first tried to keep his identity out of the publicity limelight. And the story he tells in this book, written with his wife in alternate short bursts (some chapters are only a page or two long), and including 35 of his controversial UFO photos, is more fantastic than even tabloid TV suggested.

Walters not only tells of repeated encounters with UFOs, but of telepathic contact with their occupants - contact which provoked memories that seemed to mean he had been abducted several times during his life for brief periods by UFOs.

This is either proof of UFO visitations, or a hoax perpetrated both by Walters and members of his family. There is no middle ground. Even an assumption that Walters was hallucinating would not explain the UFOs that other family members report seeing wink in and out of view.

Walters has convinced some people of his claims - Duane Cook, editor of the Sentinel, Gulf Breeze's weekly newspaper; Budd Hopkins, a specialist in supposed abductions by UFOs; and physicist Bruce Maccabee who insists the photos are not faked. And yet, even Walters' own descriptions of what happened and why outsiders failed to spot the UFOs he photographed with his Polaroid convey the feel of a stage musician who has just astounded his audience with a magic trick and defies it to explain how the trick was done.

The photos constitute the backbone of the book, and readers can judge for themselves how real the UFOs look. Even if the story is fiction, though, it's still a pretty good story involving close encounters of the worst kind.