I think there was never a time when Ray Stanford was "a pretty respectable UFO researcher," although there have been periods of his life when he fooled some individuals and groups into perceiving him as such-- in very many cases, to their eventual disillusionment. Pick any period of his life--beginning with his original incarnation as a teen-age contactee, as documented in his 1958 book (
Look Up!) claiming that he'd had multiple contacts with Space Brothers and their craft (on one occasion, he claimed, they hit him with a ray that gave him cosmic consciousness)--and I will show you remarkable UFO-related claims that were later repudiated by Stanford himself, or convincingly discredited by others, or (quite often) simply abandoned, without any substantiation ever being produced. I have already set forth many such episodes in the ten "Ray Stanford Close Up" posts that are still archived on this forum, and in my replies to other inquiries here, which may be accessed through use of the search tool or by clicking through to my profile.
As to the 16mm film taken by Stanford in Corpus Christi, Texas, on July 28, 1979, I would refer readers to my deteailed February 2019 write up,
here. The bottom line is found in the NICAP analysis, which -- 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."
This 1959 episode remains the only instance that I have encountered, in my studies of Stanford's long "career," in which he promptly sent purported UFO evidence to truly independent analysts. Since then, Stanford's common practice is to make a public claim to have obtained some remarkable UFO-related evidence (movies, physical fragments of spacecraft, etc), make public predictions that the proof will eventually be released after some contingencies have been met, perhaps show manipulated images to selected gullible individuals, and then... nothing. No truly independent analysis of original source material, no evaluation independent of Stanford's subjective or dishonest claims.
Stanford's recent (September 15, 2020) repudiation of his previous claims to have taken a photo, at the Socorro dynamite shack in 1964, of a Zamora-like craft (landing gear, even), is a good example of Stanford's general "research" approach. This photo had been the subject of detailed, expansive public claims by Stanford devotees such as Chris O'Brien, for years. I have described and documented this recent, all-too-typical Stanford episode in an update
here.