Word has gotten around through the UFO social media that Ray Stanford had passed away last weekend after suffering a heart attack.
To try to encapsulate Ray’s entire life within a few paragraphs is simply impossible. When he was still a teen, he and his twin brother Rex left their home state of Texas and embarked on a journey to seek the truth behind flying saucers, which brought them in contact with some of the prime personalities of that fascinating subculture of mid-XXth century Americana.
All quests for knowledge must necessarily pass through disillusion, though: In California, they visited the home of George Adamski, who felt compelled to come clean with the boys (Orthon only knows why) and told them the real reason why he’d decided to become a Saucer Superstar in the first place:
“I made enough wine for all of Southern California. I was making a fortune…” and if it hadn’t been for the repeal of Prohibition, he wouldn’t have got caught up in this “Saucer crap.” And inebriated Adamski then took Ray and his twin brother Rex on a tour of his workshop and revealed how he’d faked his famous flying saucer photos using a Chrysler hub cap and a set of ping pong balls.”
“A” is for Adamski: The Golden Age of the UFO Contactees
The Stanford twins then fell under the wing of George Hunt Williamson: another ‘heavyweight’ in the Contactee scene, who was one of the original ‘witnesses’ of Adamski’s alleged encounter with the Venusian Orthon in the Mojave desert. Unlike the old Polish immigrant, who claimed his rendezvous with the ‘Space Brothers’ always took place on the physical plane, Williamson preferred to establish contact with the extraterrestrial emissaries through ‘channeling’; a method Ray also adopted, since he seemed to have a natural knack for entering into psychic trances. Borne out of these experiences was the book ‘Look Up’, published in 1958 by Essene Press (a publishing company run by another Contactee, John McCoy). A famous cover for Fate magazine in 1956 is purportedly based on a close encounter at a beach involving the Stanford boys and other people—including some bewildered police officers.
Ray and Rex went so far as to travel to Peru that same year (not an easy feat at the time for a couple of young Americans with no money) to visit the ‘Abbey of the Seven Stars’ commune established by Williamson, Dorothy Martin, Dr. Charles Laughead and his wife Lillian, at the foot of Lake Titicaca, where they were following the clues received from their interplanetary teachers to search for ‘lost cities’ to no avail—Doroty Martin and the Laugheads were no strangers to failed psychic predictions, as the famous book ‘When Prophecy Fails’ gives testament to.
The relationship between Williamson and the Stanford boys did not end in good terms, as Ray eventually accused George of lifting information from ‘Look Up’ to use in one of his own books without credit or permission… and also because Williamson allegedly attempted a sexual pass on teen Ray.
In 1964 Ray was also one of the first investigators on site at Socorro, New Mexico, after patrolman Lonnie Zamora had a close encounter with a white egg-shaped object and two small humanoid occupants, making it one of the most important CE3 cases in historic record. Ray interviewed Lonnie and other witnesses who claimed to have observed the UFO before and after it touched ground, and he even managed to find a rare metal sample presumably scraped from the craft’s landing gear; as recounted in his book ‘Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry’, the piece of metal disappeared under rather shady circumstances when Ray loaned it to a NASA scientist who worked at the Maryland Goddard Spaceflight Center for analysis.
In 1971 Ray founded the Association for the Understanding of Man (AUM) through which he published several books about channeling and Fatima prophecies. It was during this time that he engaged in what could easily be interpreted as ‘cult-like’ endeavors, when he tried to gather funds to build an actual ‘time machine’(!) as instructed by his psychic guides. Researcher Douglas Dean Johnson, who personally knew Stanford during those years, has amassed a lengthy dossier on him which can be found here.
But then Ray gave a complete 180° (again, only Source knows why) by disavowing the psychic approach to UFOs, and he proceeded to devote all his efforts into trying to attract and gather scientific evidence of UFO activity using lasers and other equipment, under the Project Starlight International (PSI)—the irony of the acronym should not go unnoticed.
The quality of the evidence obtained by PSI largely depends largely on whom you ask. Unlike the old Contactees who were eager to show their blurry photos to anyone who bothered to pay attention to them, Ray showed an extreme zealousness in protecting his material for fear of losing control over it (like he did with the Socorro sample) or being misinterpreted. People like the late Chris O’Brien, filmmaker James Fox, or even some friends of mine, made the pilgrimage to his Maryland home over the years where they spent whole evenings going through Ray’s gargantuan Power Point presentation, composed of vague imagery which he maintained only trained physicists could properly interpret.
Chris Lambright’s book X Descending arguments that one of Ray’s films served as a major inspiration for propulsion scientist Leik Myrabo, who worked for years trying to develop a viable method to send payloads into orbit using laser propulsion, until he retired in 2011. The irony is that Lambright’s book doesn’t really show any of Ray’s original footage, but rather he created computer renders based on what he allegedly observed in said footage. Skeptics would be excused to dismiss such claims, although over time the PSI material did manage to receive attention from other scientists interested in the UFO phenomenon, such as Kevin Knuth; which suggests there might have been something worth analyzing in Ray’s data after all—what will happen to it after his passing is anyone’s guess at this point.
But Ray’s yearning for official validation in his work did manifest eventually later in life, not in the ufological arena but in the field of paleontology, when he started to collect serious scientific recognition for his discovery of fossilized material and dinosaur tracks. Such findings could either be a testament of his outstanding pattern recognition abilities (which can often degrade into pareidolia) or to a genuine ‘sixth sense’ which he learned to control in a more productive manner than the channel messages he was trying to receive in his earlier years.
By now these brief lines should hopefully have provided a glimpse into Ray Stanford’s fascinating yet contradictory nature. I personally never met the man, nor engaged with him via email or such; but the several podcast interviews of him I managed to listen over the years (the Radio Misterioso and Paracast archives are highly recommended) painted in my mind the picture of a highly charismatic individual, who was very quick to anger if you dared to disagree with him—in one of his appearances on Greg Bishop’s RM show, Ray berated acting co-host Walter Bosley for several minutes when he proposed the Air Force’s alleged interest on his PSI experiments had more to do with ‘perception management’ procedures rather than genuine interest in UFOs.
Yes, Ray Stanford’s life was a contradiction in many ways, and he probably became his own worse enemy with his stubborn refusal to permit his material evidence to be properly fact-checked and peer reviewed.
…. And yet, I can’t help feeling a tinge of sadness by his loss. Here’s a man who lived life under his own terms, not anyone else’s. Who felt the sting of curiosity about the really big questions of existence at an early age, like many of us, and sought such answers out there in the big wide world—with his brother at his side—instead of reading some dog-eared book in a library. A trailblazer and a herald of change to the UFO subculture, when it gradually abandoned the supplicancy of Contacteeism in favor of more progressive methods to prove the reality of the phenomenon using the tools of science, as crude and inadequate as they may still be when facing a presence which may be irrupting our world from a completely different level of reality—to quote one of my favorite movies which just happened to turn 50: we’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Farewell Ray Stanford, Contrarian Contactee. May future generations grow with better eyes to see the world you were trying to glimpse at, the way your own eyes (both three of them) managed to find that which had been right under our feet all along.
