On Tuesday evening, April 9, 1991 a "sky watch" was held at South Shoreline Park in Gulf Breeze. Most of the people attending the meeting were walking out on the pier, while others were busy setting up cameras and various measuring devices. The time was ten minutes after 8 p.m., when I heard someone yell "There it is!"
I looked towards the northeast and I immediately saw a birght red object. I had just gotten my binoculars out of the car. Andrea Baker came running over and got my extra pair out of the car and we both steadied the binoculars on top of the car and wateched the object hover for about four minutes.
Gary Watson, MUFON Chief Investigator, arrived and stopped his car near us. He set up his camera and started taking some photographs with infrared film. The rest of the group was out on the pier about 500 feet from our observation point near the back of the parking lot. A Portable Elevation and Azimuth Scope (P.E.A.S.) was set up on the pier and at our location in the parking lot. The P.E.A. scopes accurately located the object as being 29,000 feet away on a line to 60 degrees (east, northeast). That location is approximately a half mile northeast from the Gulf Breeze K-Mart.
The object moved slowly towards the south. A small airplane appeared to go under the red lighted object. The object remained stationary as the plane passed moving northward. As we watched, the red light changed to a bright white, the reappeared as red. Moments later it just disappeared.
There were a total of 30 witnesses and permission was obtained from all of them for the use of their names in a formal report. But the most remarkable part of this UFO sighting were the people in the direction of K-Mart who confirmed the sighting and therein confirmed the accuracy of the P.E.A. scopes.
MUFON field investigator, Joe Barron, interviewed the witnesses who confirmed the UFO sighting from near the K-Mart location. Bob Simpson, his sister and his daughter, an airline flight attendant, were on their way to shop at K-Mart.
Bob said, "As we pulled out onto Highway 98 at the light at Oriole Beach Road, we saw a very bright red object to the east, northeast at about 25 degrees. It did not move. Its size was very big. It took four fingers at arm's length to cover the object. It was a solid structure, dull silver or white in color and we saw it for about one and a half minutes. Our attention was diverted and when we looked again, it was gone. At the time we reporeted our sighting, we had no knowledge of the other witnesses at South Shoreline Park.