For those that have never read this piece;
Ray and his identical twin brother, Rex, came of age when UFOs were booming. The first wave of sightings occurred in 1947, when Ray was 9. At 15, in 1953, Ray devoured George Adamski’s pulpy alien-contact tract, “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” and began corresponding with Adamski.
Later, a photo Adamski took of a flying saucer was revealed as a cheap hoax, a metal lid with light bulbs as landing gear. Ray still stings from that deceit. He spits out Adamski’s name like a hard seed.
Ray built rockets and won first prize in the 1955 Texas state physics competition. Despite obvious talent, he never managed college. Instead, he moved to Austin and became a psychic. Whoever came up with the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” may have had Ray Stanford in mind.
Starting in 1961, he made his living leading a group of paranormal explorers called the Association for the Understanding of Man. He charged $35 for psychic readings, and the group sold recordings and transcripts of Stanford’s readings, in which he made contact with veiled entities who offered their opinion on the Fatima miracle, the nature of Christ, or whether the readee had a dread disease. Rex, meanwhile, became a professor of psychology at St. John’s University in New York, where he studied ESP, among other things.
Two big donors — an Austin real estate mogul and a Texas oilman — helped launch Ray Stanford’s next venture in the early 1970s, the one that catapulted him to middling media glory: Project Starlight International.
Donning white jumpsuits and green goggles, Stanford and his merry band of alien hunters built a landing pad in the hills west of Austin. It was ringed with spotlights that flashed odd rhythms. A chunky device shot a laser into the sky that transmitted, via pulses, messages of peace. It was totally disco.
Stanford would wave at the sky and shout, “LAND OVER HERE. WE HAVE NO WEAPONS.”
Big VHS video cameras, magnetometers and gravitometers were at the ready to document any fly-bys or landings.
This was a time in America when UFOs made the nightly news. Saucers over Phoenix. Cigars buzzing Buffalo. A streaking flash in Utah. The late 1960s to the late 1970s saw a fevered peak of the UFO craze, and Ray Stanford was smack in the middle of it. No, he never became as famous as Barney and Betty Hill, whose alien abduction story launched a Hollywood-mythological-industrial complex that climaxed during the nine-year run of “The X-Files.” But he worked the media and clawed at the center of the fray.
He made the Phil Donahue show.
He chased a lot of UFOs. Er, AAOs. He documented it all. And he’s showing me everything. For seven hours, Ray Stanford reels through 437 PowerPoint slides. That’s Part 1.
Deltoids. Shuttlecraft. Saucers. Motherships. Beam-ahead propulsion. Time-shifting. Dimensional leaps. Military men. NASA labs, coverups, a green glass globe on the moon.
It would take Fox Mulder another decade to chase it all down.
Toward the end — it’s nearly 6 p.m.! — I’m feeling faint from lack of food and drink. Reverting to his less preferred term, Stanford says, “This is as good evidence you’ll see for UFOs anywhere.”
I want to believe. I do.
“The universe is so damn strange.”
“The aliens, are they trying to create religion?”
“I’m not saying this is true, but maybe we’re just something for them to play with.”
“It may be a tourist operation? This could be Disneyland for them!”
Ray Stanford more than believes. He has invested his life in documenting UFOs. And perhaps, I think, just maybe, his wildest notions lie a nanometer inside the realm of possibility. A city in space, green globes on the moon, astronauts conversing with aliens — much of it is easy to debunk. But who am I to say that time-stopping, dimension-hopping aliens do not exist? A negative cannot be proven.
And that, of course, is the crux of why the alien hypothesis will never die. There’s no way to exclude all possibility.
Anything can and might happen. An enormous pterosaur may have landed in your backyard 112 million years ago and you —
you — dig up the handprint! I mean, what are the chances?
So the aliens live on, in Stanford’s mind, and on his computer, and who knows, maybe up there, too.
***
Iam back in Stanford’s office.
Again, I ask him why he thinks he sees the AAOs and the footprints.
He tells me a story from his childhood. When he was 6 or 7, a big redheaded 9-year-old smacked him on the head. “Rattlebrain!” Stanford shouts, tearing up. “I had this rattlebrain for at least three years.”
The blow rewired his brain, he tells me, turning him into a “walking, talking detector.”
I am in no position to disagree.
Stung by criticism of his UFO hunting, Stanford keeps that part of his life out of view of some of his dinosaur collaborators. Bakker, for one, didn’t know about Stanford’s past. “It’s more of a religion” than a science, Bakker said of UFO hunting in general.
“You can wound him deeply by saying he’s a crackpot,” says John Young, 40, a computer programmer whose father was a member of Project Starlight. As a 5- and 6-year-old,
Young ran around the UFO landing pad, enthralled by the light show. “Lots of people give Ray a hard time, but he’s the real deal — a maverick, an eccentric gentleman, just a supercool guy. He is 100 percent what-you-see-is-what-you-get. He’s a genuine dude. He is doing it because he wants to learn the truth, not to sell copies of the DVD. There is no DVD. He’s just that way.”
Young pauses, dramatically: “He’s a searcher.”
I think about that. Like all of life’s profundities, the lesson Ray Stanford has to offer the world may be a simple one: Keep your eyes open. Keep looking. A hidden world, a universe trapped in time, a realm so foreign and bizarre as to stretch all credulity, may be lurking just beneath your feet — or, maybe, just maybe, winging over your head.
Brian Vastag is a Post science reporter. To comment on this article, send e-mail to wpletters@washpost.com.