Justice Fodor

A pen name of Dean (used 2-8-19 to 8-1-21)
Ray Stanford Close-Up No. 7:
Stanford's Public Claims That the U.S. Air Force
Offered to Scramble F-4 Jets Any Time Stanford Asked


"Bergstrom [Air Force Base, Austin, Texas, in 1973] Intelligence tried to get an agreement from me to call a 'hotline' number at their command post for them to scramble their F-4 Phantom reconnaissance aircraft, should we have a [UFO] sighting. . . . to grant me the power to initiate a scramble based on my personal discretion. Note that it costs a lot of money to scramble jet aircraft, which is exactly what the intelligence officer making the proposal promised they would do in response to any call from me, day or night, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. . . . Can I prove what I just said about the request made by Intelligence at Bergstrom AFB to have me call their command post and scramble multiple F-4s? Bet on it. I can and will . . . My finger, de facto, was on the scramble button. I am proud of the trust that they placed in me." -- Ray Stanford, post to UFO Updates listserv, March 2, 2004​

"The United States Air force trusted us, knew us, and had great confidence in us. And I can prove this. I will ultimately be proving this, in the next couple of years or so, because I have tape recordings that prove it." -- Ray Stanford, Radio Misterioso interview, March 8, 2009​

"By the way, we did get daylight pictures of the craft close enough that you can see inside. And if you want to say they've got an Air Force pilot that is about three or three-and-one-half feet tall, and has a bald head and pointed ears, go ahead." -- Ray Stanford, Radio Misterioso interview, March 8, 2009​

On March 8, 2009, Ray Stanford was interviewed on a podcast called Radio Misterioso, hosted by Greg Bishop, co-hosted on this occasion by Walter Bosley. The program was about one and three-quarter hours long. The entire podcast file (44 mb) can be heard or downloaded from http://radiomisterioso.com/audio/Ray_Stanford_3_8_09.mp3

During the long interview, Stanford told stories from as early as 1954 and as late as 2007. In a sometimes jumbled fashion, he related a substantial number of personal UFO encounters, claiming to have taken movies or other photographs during many of them. He referred to having taken movies of multiple motherships, motherships docking with each other, and other multi-UFO displays. He related an event in 1957 in which a group of UFOs seemed to comply with his mental commands. Stanford referred repeatedly to images he had obtained that he believed showed proof of plasma fields, quantum fields, interactions of fields between multiple craft, et cetera. "We have thousands of [movies] frames and photographs" demonstrating such exotic field effects, Stanford asserted.

Beginning at about minute 50 in the complete interview audio file, Stanford engaged in a contentious exchange with co-host Walter Bosley, who was identified as a former U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer. Bosley said he had been involved in protecting security on highly classified research projects. Bosley excited Stanford's anger by suggesting that some of things Stanford reported might be explained as classified U.S. military activity. Stanford's rebuttal consisted of repeated statements along this line: "It's B.S., and you don't know what you're talking about, at all."

During this exchange (at about 57 minutes), Stanford described a UFO event that he said he had witnessed in Austin, Texas, on October 15, 1954. "We triangulated it. It was a mother ship. It was elongated thing. And it had objects going to and fro. The thing was 1400 feet long, and it was at 19 miles altitude. . . And objects were going to and from it. We optically tracked these. We had a total of 13 witnesses. We had motion picture camera, and two different sets of still pictures from a 63-mile baseline. The fastest object to move from this traveled at three-quarters the speed of light in the atmosphere." [italics added here for emphasis]

(I do not believe that I have previously encountered this particularly remarkable UFO-evidence claim by Stanford. The date he gave for it -- October 15, 1954 -- pre-dates even the UFO encounters-contracts that Stanford reported in detail in his 1978 book Look Up -- the "first contact" reported in Look Up occurred on November 6, 1954. Perhaps Stanford, in his obvious agitation regarding Bosley's remarks, provided a date different than the date he intended.)

At about 58 minutes, in response to Bosley's repeated assertion that Air Force activity accounted for some significant portion of UFO sightings, Stanford said, "By the way, we did get daylight pictures of the craft close enough that you can see inside. And if you want to say they've got an Air Force pilot that is about three or three-and-one-half feet tall, and has a bald head and pointed ears, go ahead." Stanford provided no further details regarding the occasion on which these "daylight pictures" of an alien pilot were obtained, or what has happened to them since.

Near the end of the 2009 interview, Stanford said he was working 12 to 18 hours a day to prepare his various evidential films "with a lot more diagnostic material" for examination by unnamed "physicists and aerospace engineers."

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I am linking here, for educational and journalistic purposes, a single 18-minute excerpt from the March 8, 2009 Radio Misterioso Ray Stanford interview, in order to facilitate discussion of two specific Stanford claims pertaining to the U.S. Air Force.

In the linked excerpt, Stanford related two separate conversations with officers of the U.S. Air Force, which ostensibly occurred six years apart. Stanford said he had an audio recording of the second conversation, and that he intended to release the recording within a couple of years, in order to demonstrate the high confidence that the Air Force placed in Stanford and in Project Starlight International (P.S.I.), a UFO-related project of which Stanford was the founder and director. (Aspects of P.S.I. have been discussed in several earlier posts in my "Stanford Close-ups" series of posts on this forum.)

At the very beginning of the excerpted segment, Stanford said, "The United States Air force trusted us, knew us, and had great confidence in us. And can prove this. I will ultimately be proving this, in the next couple of years or so, because I have tape recordings that prove it."

Stanford's Claim that an Air Force Intelligence Officer
Told Him of "Reason to Believe" of Undercover Alien Operatives


In the Radio Misterioso interview, Stanford described his personal sighting of a cigar-shaped UFO in 1967, near Austin, Texas, which he reported to personnel at Bergstrom Air Force Base, located southeast of Austin. (This base was shut down in 1993.) Elsewhere, Stanford described this as a sighting of a "blue-white, cigar-shaped UFO above the area of the Mansfield Dam outside Austin, back on June 24, 1967."

In the Radio Misterioso interview, Stanford related the subsequent visit of an Air Force intelligence officer to his residence (apparently this also occurred in 1967). Stanford said that the USAF intelligence officer suggested that a red car that was also present during Stanford's UFO sighting may have been occupied by "alien operatives that look like humans, that will pass as humans, but are aliens." The officer said, "I have reason to believe . . . that there were alien operatives working there that could not be distinguished from human beings." Stanford did not claim to have a recording of this conversation.

Stanford's Claim That the Air Force
Offered to Scramble Jets if Stanford Called


Stanford also related a UFO sighting that he said had occurred at the facility operated by Project Starlight International, in the hill country northwest of Austin. (Stanford did not give a date for this incident in the podcast interview, but in a different interview he said it occurred on October 22, 1973.) Soon after the UFO vanished (somehow avoiding being photographed), two USAF F-4 Phantom fighter jets swooped over "within 50 feet of our heads," Stanford related.

"A few weeks or a couple of months" later, Stanford said, an Air Force intelligence officer from Bergstrom AFB called Stanford; this is the conversation that Stanford said he recorded. Stanford said that the officer acknowledged that the two jets had been scrambled over the P.S.I. site because the UFO had been tracked on Bergstrom's radar, and at one point those viewing the radar thought the UFO had landed at the P.S.I. site.

The unnamed USAF officer then gave Stanford a control-center phone number, and promised that two F-4 Phantoms would again be scrambled any time Stanford called to report that a UFO was in sight from the P.S.I. location, according to Stanford.

Stanford said that he resisted the offer, on grounds that fighter jets would scare away any UFO and interfere with the gathering of data. The officer responded, according to Stanford (this is found at about 15 minutes in the uploaded interview segment), "Well, if you ever change your mind, all you have to do is call this number and we will scramble, because we know that you would not report something as a UFO that was not really a UFO."

Stanford concluded:

I have a tape recording of this conversation, and it will ultimately be released in detail, with an officer's name, and so on and so forth. And I can say, therefore, if people want to say that I don't have credibility, or that the project [Project Starlight International] and its works does not have credibility, name any other UFO organization in the world that was ever offered such a thing. There are none. And so I think that's a pretty good backup from a pretty good source that had a lot of intelligence on our operation.​

At another point, Stanford suggested, with some heat, that the recorded conversation somehow would refute persons such as Richard H. Hall, who had raised questions about his credibility. (See my thread "Ray Stanford Close-Up No. 4: His Claim of a NASA-Goddard Cover Up of His Socorro-UFO-Metal."

(Hall died on July 17, 2009, only four months after this interview.)

Regarding the scramble-on-request offer, I found that Stanford had earlier made substantively the same claims, in writing, in a submission to the UFO Updates listserve on March 2, 2004. The full text is found here: Re: The Illuminati - Stanford

Here are excerpts from the 2004 Stanford post:

More interestingly to you, perhaps, is the fact that during that call, Bergstrom Intelligence tried to get an agreement from me to call a 'hotline' number at their command post for them to scramble their F-4 Phantom reconnaissance aircraft, should we have a sighting.

I never seriously considered calling the command post because scrambling of the F-4 Phantoms could cause a UFO to leave the area before we could use our extensive array of equipment, but intelligence at Bergstrom had enough confidence in our ability to distinguish a bona-fide 'UFO' from conventional aircraft, natural phenomena, etc., as to grant me the power to initiate a scramble based on my personal discretion. Note that it costs a lot of money to scramble jet aircraft, which is exactly what the intelligence officer making the proposal promised they would do in response to any call from me, day or night, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. They had thoroughly investigated me, my background, and my project and had good reason to trust our ability to distinguish a bona-fide UFO from more prosaic things. . . .

Can I prove what I just said about the request made by Intelligence at Bergstrom AFB to have me call their command post and scramble multiple F-4s? Bet on it. I can and will, when, in a forthcoming publication, I publish text of the recorded conversation with the Air Force intelligence officer making the request. Can I give the date, the time, the name, the rank of the intelligence officer, and even the secret number into the Bergstrom command post to scramble jets, etc? Bet on that, too.​

Once that is published, any skeptic claiming that the USAF did not take UFOs seriously, had better be able to explain the plea Bergstrom AFB Intelligence made to me and my project. My finger, de facto, was on the scramble button. I am proud of the trust that they placed in me.​

Would I have been a 'traitor' to Ufology to have 'pressed' that button? I don't think so. Certainly, it would have been fun. Wow! What a thrill that might have been, had I done so.​

My comments on this claim: I believe that Stanford was probably correct in asserting that no other civilian UFO researcher has ever reported that he was told, by an official representative of the U.S. Air Force, that military jets would be scrambled any time that the researcher called a base control-center number, reporting a UFO. Therefore, the recording that Stanford claimed to have of this conversation would be of considerable interest to those who study the relationship between the U.S. military and UFO phenomena.

Unfortunately, although Stanford posted this claim to UFO Updates nearly 15 years ago, and repeated it in the Radio Misterioso interview nearly 10 years ago, and despite having on both occasions volunteered very explicit promises to release proof ("bet on it," "all of this will be proven in time," et cetera), I have been unable to find any record that Stanford ever actually released any such recording.

However, if any reader is aware that such a release did occur, please post a URL where the recording can be obtained -- or if permissible, upload the audio file itself into this thread. All who read this, be sure to click "Watch Thread" at the top of this page, so you will receive a notification if such an audio file is uploaded here.

That way, you won't have to hold your breath watching and waiting.
 
Last edited:

Justice Fodor

A pen name of Dean (used 2-8-19 to 8-1-21)
Ray Stanford's July 28, 1959 UFO movies

"We conclude that the [July 28, 1959] films themselves are authentic records of some object in the sky, but that they do not substantiate the verbal report and do not constitute significant evidence of UFOs as the matter now stands."-- NICAP, The UFO Evidence (1964), pages 90-92​

In one segment of the Radio Misterioso interview with Ray Stanford, conducted on March 8, 2009, at around 1 hour 15 minutes in the full program, Stanford spoke of a UFO event that occurred July 28, 1959, at Corpus Christi, Texas, at which time Stanford was 21 years old. During this event, two movies were taken simultaneously of a single object (three or four feet of 16 mm film taken by Stanford, and an 8 mm film taken by somebody else).

This case is noteworthy in that Stanford shipped the unprocessed film from both cameras to Max B. Miller, who at that time put out a UFO newsletter called 'Saucers'. Miller arranged for the processing and did an initial analysis. The Fall/Winter 1959/1960 issue (and final issue) of 'Saucers', uploaded here, contains both an account by Stanford (pp. 20-22), and analysis by Miller (in three separate editor's notes, found on pages 20, 23, and 26). Miller wrote, "The 8mm footage lacks sufficient resolution . . . . The 16mm film is excellent . . . but the UFO sequence is extremely short, comprising not more than three or four feet. However, one or two scenes are identical in the 8mm and 16mm films, making simulation exceedingly improbable."

There is a muddled Project Blue Book file on the case, which labeled the bright object in the 16mm movie as Venus.

There is a more instructive analysis conducted by NICAP personnel, including Miller as a photographic advisor, which appears on 90-92 in The UFO Evidence, edited by Richard H. Hall (the first volume, originally published in 1964), as no. 42 in the series of "photographic cases." (The pertinent pages are uploaded here as a PDF file.) The NICAP analysis, after ruling out Venus, stated: "We conclude that the films themselves are authentic records of some object in the sky, but that they do not substantiate the verbal report and do not constitute significant evidence of UFOs as the matter now stands."

I comment here on these July 28, 1959 movies not because they contained strong UFO evidence -- based on the NICAP analysis, they did not -- but because of the way that Stanford handled the films. He shipped the unprocessed film to an apparently independent analyst, Max B. Miller (who it seems was later used by NICAP as a general photographic advisor for awhile). Later, Stanford lent what was apparently the original developed film to NICAP for independent analysis. Both of those acts were commendable -- and in striking contrast to the manner in which Stanford has handled most of his innumerable other claims involving photographic and other evidence in later years.
 

Attachments

  • UFO Evidence 1964 Vol I - Stanford movies 7-28-59.pdf
    354.4 KB · Views: 164
  • Saucers Fall-Winter 1959-60 Stanford July 28 1959 movies.pdf
    9.8 MB · Views: 168

Justice Fodor

A pen name of Dean (used 2-8-19 to 8-1-21)
On March 8, 2019, Ray Stanford gave a long interview on a podcast called UFO Classified, during which he clarified that the alien-pilot image, discussed near the top of my Original Post above, was taken on October 15, 1984 -- not 1954 as he stated in the 2009 interview. I have posted a commentary regarding the additional details that Stanford offered regarding this incident in the following post:

Ray Stanford Close-Up No. 9:
Stanford Swipes at His Critics; Plus Alien Fingers,
"A Major Government Operation," and
the Stanford-Goddard-NASA Connection
 
Last edited:

nivek

As Above So Below
Bump...

...
 
Top