Dean
Adept Dabbler
I Am Justice Fodor
by Douglas Dean Johnson (@ddeanjohnson on Twitter)
(beginning Phase II of the reality check on Ray Stanford's UFO-evidence claims)
Yesterday, in one of the Ray Stanford threads, a brand-new registrant on this website, "Theo," asserted that "Justice Fodor," author of the popular "Ray Stanford Close Up" series that has appeared on this forum beginning in February, 2019, is really me, Douglas Dean Johnson (@ddeanjohnson on Twitter).
"Theo" beat me to the punch! Beginning in mid-June, I have already posted several commentaries about Ray Stanford, on this forum and elsewhere, under my own name, and I already had in the works an intended post claiming ownership of the "Justice Fodor" material. "Theo" moved up my timetable only slightly.
"Justice Fodor" is indeed a pen name that I adopted starting February 8, 2019, in order to challenge, with document-based material, some of the many current and past public claims by Ray Stanford relating to UFOs, aliens, and related matters. I hereby formally and with pride claim authorship of all of the materials published on this website under the pen name Justice Fodor. If anyone wishes to cite any of those posts in the future, they can attribute the material to "Douglas Johnson, writing under the pen name Justice Fodor" -- or just simply attribute it to me directly. I stand by every word that I wrote, and every document that I uploaded, in the eleven "Ray Stanford Close Up" threads.
A bit of backstory: As a young man just out of college, interested in UFOs and certain metaphysical questions since high school, and possessing insufficient discernment, I became personally associated with Ray Stanford for about three and one-half years (late 1974-early 1978). During this period, I became Associate Editor of the Journal of the Association for the Understanding of Man (AUM), which was the (now long defunct) non-profit organization that was formed around the perception that Ray Stanford was a high-caliber psychic oracle (trance oracle). Project Starlight International (PSI) was not a legally separate organization, but rather a project of AUM. I actively participated in virtually all aspects PSI operations for three years, and became Associate Editor of the Project Starlight International Journal of Instrumented UFO Research. Also (to my later embarrassment), I did substantial editing work on the manuscript for Stanford's privately published 1976 book Socorro 'Saucer' in a Pentagon Pantry.
In gathering information for some of the fine points discussed in the Justice Fodor posts, or in running down specific documents, on occasion I have consulted with others, including some other former Ray Stanford associates. I will say nothing about any collaborators, or about those who may have adapted or promoted some of my writings, or spoken on these matters on platforms other than this one. I alone am accountable for the entire contents of the Justice Fodor posts.
If you are new to this subject, click here to reach a list of links and topics for the eleven "Ray Stanford Close Ups." Aside from the main essays, there is a lot of additional good material in the commentaries and updates that appear in each thread. Perhaps during the months ahead I will muster the motivation and time to integrate some of this scattered material into a more unified narrative.
Back in early 2019, not long after the first Justice Fodor post appeared on this forum, one of Stanford's fans (who later converted) asserted that Justice Fodor was engaged in "dig[ging] up rubbish" and "character assassination." Justice Fodor replied (Feb. 13, 2019):
WHY A PEN NAME?
So, why did I employ a pen name? It was because in early 2019, I feared that entering into a public controversy with Ray Stanford regarding our past association, and regarding his various UFO-related claims made during the period of that association or during the ensuing decades, could blow back on innocent third parties, such as my professional clients, with possible collateral detrimental effects for my family. Moreover, in early 2019, it simply was not necessary to get into my past personal association with Ray Stanford and Project Starlight International, in order to make available to a wider audience some of Ray Stanford's past writings, statements in interviews, postings on forums, and other such published sources of documentation. I believe that was the correct judgment at the time, and I make no apology for it.
However, with the passage of time, my circumstances have changed, so that this concern about blow back on innocent parties is no longer a factor.
In addition, a tipping point came in early June of this year, when I learned of last-minute arrangement for some of Stanford's unsubstantiated (and in my view, not credible) UFO-evidence claims to be presented (through a third party) at a virtual conference of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), which is an evidence-based, invitation-only group with which I have been affiliated for a couple of years. I immediately brought to the attention of the members of the SCU Board some of the gross deficiencies in the material submitted by Stanford, as well as information regarding Stanford's overall track record on UFO-related claims; the Board quickly turned thumbs-down on the submission, for lack of adequate vetting. (This episode was already written up by a reporter who covered the conference for The Daily Grail, so I am not revealing anything confidential here. NOTE: I am an affiliated research-contributor for SCU, but everything I say on the matter of Ray Stanford and his UFO-related claims is strictly in my personal capacity and not to be imputed in any way to SCU.)
No commentator on this forum, or on any other public forum of which I am aware, has successfully challenged a single factual assertion made by Justice Fodor. Few have even tried-- perhaps because I provided the documentation (documents and audio files) to support nearly every assertion.
However, on the podcast UFO Classified (hosted by Erica Lukes), on March 8, 2019, Ray Stanford did indirectly (i.e., he didn't mention Justice Fodor by name) dispute a single Justice Fodor assertion: Stanford denied that he had ever tried to raise money to build a time machine, claiming he had merely done "a bit of joking with somebody in [an audience]." That was a brazen lie by Ray Stanford -- I have recordings of two lengthy lectures that Stanford gave (while awake, not in trance) in which Stanford touted the remarkable capacities that "the Accelerator" (described as "similar to a UFO") would confer on a human occupant ("a hyper-person, a super-person if you prefer, might be created"), including the ability to literally, bodily transport into the distant past-- and sought financial support for the project. Stanford characterized the Accelerator project as "one of the most important projects in which we will ever engage." I also have AUM newsletters in which Stanford spoke in similar vein. In addition, I have a published interview, and various published "psychic readings" (trance discourses), in which Stanford played up the importance of the "Accelerator" project. If have already posted some of that material, and would provide more if anybody wanted to pursue the matter.
Stanford intermittently promoted that the Accelerator scheme for about 15 years, from 1960 until April 1976, when he was age 37, at which time he wrote that "it is not practical to pursue it at this time... the fact is that it may take several million dollars and a number of top-grade professionals to really get that project underway, and it doesn't appear likely that we'll have such resources available until the Association's work is far better known than it is now. If the Association is to undertake scientific projects of that magnitude, then it must command the respect of the scientific community."
This time-machine affair, and many other discredited or abandoned claims by Ray Stanford relating directly to UFOs and purported alien contacts (including claims much more recent), are highly relevant to the evaluation of current Ray Stanford evidence claims and stories. Too often, well-intended persons become invested in a particular Stanford photograph and an associated story, and skip independent investigation of both the story and the primary physical evidence material-- sometimes to their later pain, as occurred not long ago with the implosion of Stanford's now-repudiated claim that he had taken and would publish "a wonderful photograph...in which people will be able to see, in broad daylight, a photo of the Socorro object with its landing gear deployed." It turned out to be a dirty negative-- no landing gear, no egg craft, no UFO at all. I believe that many of Stanford's other UFO-photo claims would fare no better, if the original negatives or direct-prints were subjected to truly competent and truly independent scrutiny.
The discerning reader may notice the continuing disinclination of most of Ray Stanford's current crop of stenographers and acolytes to challenge me on specific points of fact regarding Stanford's past and current UFO-related claims. Instead they engage in clumsy attempts at deflection -- to speculate about my purported motivation, to suggest that Stanford's past "beliefs" are irrelevant to evaluating claims, or other such nonsense. They avoid substantive engagement about Ray Stanford's many remarkable past UFO-related claims, or to provide anything remotely approaching independent validation for any of his current crop of UFO evidence claims. In response to public challenges, they listen to more stories from Ray Stanford, and reassure each other, out of the public eye. Some of them seem to have learned nothing from the "dynamite shack photo" fiasco-- failing to reflect that many of Stanford's other UFO-photo claims are the product of comparable processes.
This is key: Writing under a pen name was not a device to avoid ultimate accountability -- I always knew that eventually, it would probably be necessary for me to publicly challenge Ray Stanford's misleading UFO-related claims, and to assert ownership of the Justice Fodor material. I am glad I was able to defer that day until there was no longer substantial danger of the controversy doing collateral damage to innocent parties. On the few occasions when people asked me about Justice Fodor, I gave ambiguous but not untruthful responses (generally along the lines of "he sure knows a lot about Ray Stanford's claims, and everything he posts seems to be documented")
I was as careful in what I wrote under the Justice Fodor pen name as I am in everything else I write for publication. Again, I stand behind every word. If you think something I have written in the past or write in the future is factually wrong, or "taken out of context," state your claim, and cite your sources.
In truth, writing about Stanford's UFO-related claims under a pen name until now has somewhat tied my hands -- it limited my ability to speak to some important aspects of the Ray Stanford saga, because "Justice Fodor" had to limit myself to documents that were already in the public record. I am happy now to be free of that constraint. Now I am free to refer also to things I directly observed and learned during my three and one-half years of close association with Ray Stanford (again, that was from late 1974 until early 1978), to discuss the real back story on Project Starlight International, and to bring in other material not previously available in the public domain.
Here is my bottom line, taken from one of the Justice Fodor posts:
I'll start the ball rolling by suggesting that Ray Stanford's current associates prevail on him to turn over to an truly independent analyst (someone with no axe to grind, but with previously demonstrated competence in analysis of film images, and access to the requisite equipment) the original 35 mm negative that Stanford took that, he has repeatedly claimed publicly, shows an alien craft and seated inside, an alien pilot that is "three or three-and-one-half feet tall, and has a bald head and pointed ears" --indeed, shows that alien so clearly "you can count the fingers on his hand." Moreover, Stanford has claimed publicly, the very same single 35 mm negative contains evidence that the little alien's craft traveled (while the shutter was open) "either two-thirds or three-quarters of the speed of light in the atmosphere" as it moved to within a mile of Stanford's location. (Check out the uploaded audio clip, from the 2019 Erica Lukes podcast, which may also give you a little bit of insight into some of Ray Stanford's photo-analysis methods.) Yes, let's start with that.
Douglas Dean Johnson
@ddeanjohnson on Twitter
(my gmail is my full name, with periods between the names)
by Douglas Dean Johnson (@ddeanjohnson on Twitter)
(beginning Phase II of the reality check on Ray Stanford's UFO-evidence claims)
Yesterday, in one of the Ray Stanford threads, a brand-new registrant on this website, "Theo," asserted that "Justice Fodor," author of the popular "Ray Stanford Close Up" series that has appeared on this forum beginning in February, 2019, is really me, Douglas Dean Johnson (@ddeanjohnson on Twitter).
"Theo" beat me to the punch! Beginning in mid-June, I have already posted several commentaries about Ray Stanford, on this forum and elsewhere, under my own name, and I already had in the works an intended post claiming ownership of the "Justice Fodor" material. "Theo" moved up my timetable only slightly.
"Justice Fodor" is indeed a pen name that I adopted starting February 8, 2019, in order to challenge, with document-based material, some of the many current and past public claims by Ray Stanford relating to UFOs, aliens, and related matters. I hereby formally and with pride claim authorship of all of the materials published on this website under the pen name Justice Fodor. If anyone wishes to cite any of those posts in the future, they can attribute the material to "Douglas Johnson, writing under the pen name Justice Fodor" -- or just simply attribute it to me directly. I stand by every word that I wrote, and every document that I uploaded, in the eleven "Ray Stanford Close Up" threads.
A bit of backstory: As a young man just out of college, interested in UFOs and certain metaphysical questions since high school, and possessing insufficient discernment, I became personally associated with Ray Stanford for about three and one-half years (late 1974-early 1978). During this period, I became Associate Editor of the Journal of the Association for the Understanding of Man (AUM), which was the (now long defunct) non-profit organization that was formed around the perception that Ray Stanford was a high-caliber psychic oracle (trance oracle). Project Starlight International (PSI) was not a legally separate organization, but rather a project of AUM. I actively participated in virtually all aspects PSI operations for three years, and became Associate Editor of the Project Starlight International Journal of Instrumented UFO Research. Also (to my later embarrassment), I did substantial editing work on the manuscript for Stanford's privately published 1976 book Socorro 'Saucer' in a Pentagon Pantry.
In gathering information for some of the fine points discussed in the Justice Fodor posts, or in running down specific documents, on occasion I have consulted with others, including some other former Ray Stanford associates. I will say nothing about any collaborators, or about those who may have adapted or promoted some of my writings, or spoken on these matters on platforms other than this one. I alone am accountable for the entire contents of the Justice Fodor posts.
If you are new to this subject, click here to reach a list of links and topics for the eleven "Ray Stanford Close Ups." Aside from the main essays, there is a lot of additional good material in the commentaries and updates that appear in each thread. Perhaps during the months ahead I will muster the motivation and time to integrate some of this scattered material into a more unified narrative.
Back in early 2019, not long after the first Justice Fodor post appeared on this forum, one of Stanford's fans (who later converted) asserted that Justice Fodor was engaged in "dig[ging] up rubbish" and "character assassination." Justice Fodor replied (Feb. 13, 2019):
You refer to this process as "dig[ging] up rubbish," and I agree that Stanford has made a great many UFO-related public claims that, when subjected to scrutiny, may be best described as "rubbish." You also refer to this exercise as "character assassination," but if so, it is Stanford's own words that are doing the character-damaging work -- I am just presenting them to a broader audience.
The same commentator asked Justice Fodor who he (Fodor) was to "judge" Ray Stanford. Justice Fodor responded:
I have claimed here no credentials at all, moral or otherwise. For all you know, I might be writing from a prison cell, or from a desk at some mysterious intelligence agency, or perhaps from a spaceship operated by Stanford's extraterrestrial friends, "The Watchers." It really does not matter. I present evidence and point to supporting documentation, including the various documents that I have uploaded along with my posts. So far, the bulk of that documentation has been in the form of transcripts of Stanford's own words, published under his authority, and newsletters that he himself wrote and signed. On some points, I have stated my personal conclusions, based on the evidence that I have presented. Each visitor here is, of course, free to assign those opinions exactly the weight he or she thinks they deserve, based on the evidence presented. I also encourage each visitor here not to rely merely on my summaries and conclusions, but to download and review the underlying documents, to see for themselves whether they think I have fairly represented what they contain. Each visitor is also invited to raise questions about anything they read, either by way of public comment here, or private communication.
In my view, part of what I have been doing, and will continue to do now under my own name, is to put UFO-related claims by Stanford into context -- the context of more than six decades of making public claims related to UFOs and aliens that have been discredited by credible persons or subsequent events, or that Ray Stanford has himself has repudiated, or that he has quietly walked away from, or that are absurd on their face, or that Ray Stanford has utterly failed to substantiate by submitting to basic, truly independent, competent scrutiny of the claimed evidence and independent checking (to the extent possible) of the associated stories. In addition, I believe that in a number of cases, I have useful information or observations to bring to the discussion about some of Stanford's specific UFO-evidence claims.
WHY A PEN NAME?
So, why did I employ a pen name? It was because in early 2019, I feared that entering into a public controversy with Ray Stanford regarding our past association, and regarding his various UFO-related claims made during the period of that association or during the ensuing decades, could blow back on innocent third parties, such as my professional clients, with possible collateral detrimental effects for my family. Moreover, in early 2019, it simply was not necessary to get into my past personal association with Ray Stanford and Project Starlight International, in order to make available to a wider audience some of Ray Stanford's past writings, statements in interviews, postings on forums, and other such published sources of documentation. I believe that was the correct judgment at the time, and I make no apology for it.
However, with the passage of time, my circumstances have changed, so that this concern about blow back on innocent parties is no longer a factor.
In addition, a tipping point came in early June of this year, when I learned of last-minute arrangement for some of Stanford's unsubstantiated (and in my view, not credible) UFO-evidence claims to be presented (through a third party) at a virtual conference of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), which is an evidence-based, invitation-only group with which I have been affiliated for a couple of years. I immediately brought to the attention of the members of the SCU Board some of the gross deficiencies in the material submitted by Stanford, as well as information regarding Stanford's overall track record on UFO-related claims; the Board quickly turned thumbs-down on the submission, for lack of adequate vetting. (This episode was already written up by a reporter who covered the conference for The Daily Grail, so I am not revealing anything confidential here. NOTE: I am an affiliated research-contributor for SCU, but everything I say on the matter of Ray Stanford and his UFO-related claims is strictly in my personal capacity and not to be imputed in any way to SCU.)
No commentator on this forum, or on any other public forum of which I am aware, has successfully challenged a single factual assertion made by Justice Fodor. Few have even tried-- perhaps because I provided the documentation (documents and audio files) to support nearly every assertion.
However, on the podcast UFO Classified (hosted by Erica Lukes), on March 8, 2019, Ray Stanford did indirectly (i.e., he didn't mention Justice Fodor by name) dispute a single Justice Fodor assertion: Stanford denied that he had ever tried to raise money to build a time machine, claiming he had merely done "a bit of joking with somebody in [an audience]." That was a brazen lie by Ray Stanford -- I have recordings of two lengthy lectures that Stanford gave (while awake, not in trance) in which Stanford touted the remarkable capacities that "the Accelerator" (described as "similar to a UFO") would confer on a human occupant ("a hyper-person, a super-person if you prefer, might be created"), including the ability to literally, bodily transport into the distant past-- and sought financial support for the project. Stanford characterized the Accelerator project as "one of the most important projects in which we will ever engage." I also have AUM newsletters in which Stanford spoke in similar vein. In addition, I have a published interview, and various published "psychic readings" (trance discourses), in which Stanford played up the importance of the "Accelerator" project. If have already posted some of that material, and would provide more if anybody wanted to pursue the matter.
Stanford intermittently promoted that the Accelerator scheme for about 15 years, from 1960 until April 1976, when he was age 37, at which time he wrote that "it is not practical to pursue it at this time... the fact is that it may take several million dollars and a number of top-grade professionals to really get that project underway, and it doesn't appear likely that we'll have such resources available until the Association's work is far better known than it is now. If the Association is to undertake scientific projects of that magnitude, then it must command the respect of the scientific community."
This time-machine affair, and many other discredited or abandoned claims by Ray Stanford relating directly to UFOs and purported alien contacts (including claims much more recent), are highly relevant to the evaluation of current Ray Stanford evidence claims and stories. Too often, well-intended persons become invested in a particular Stanford photograph and an associated story, and skip independent investigation of both the story and the primary physical evidence material-- sometimes to their later pain, as occurred not long ago with the implosion of Stanford's now-repudiated claim that he had taken and would publish "a wonderful photograph...in which people will be able to see, in broad daylight, a photo of the Socorro object with its landing gear deployed." It turned out to be a dirty negative-- no landing gear, no egg craft, no UFO at all. I believe that many of Stanford's other UFO-photo claims would fare no better, if the original negatives or direct-prints were subjected to truly competent and truly independent scrutiny.
The discerning reader may notice the continuing disinclination of most of Ray Stanford's current crop of stenographers and acolytes to challenge me on specific points of fact regarding Stanford's past and current UFO-related claims. Instead they engage in clumsy attempts at deflection -- to speculate about my purported motivation, to suggest that Stanford's past "beliefs" are irrelevant to evaluating claims, or other such nonsense. They avoid substantive engagement about Ray Stanford's many remarkable past UFO-related claims, or to provide anything remotely approaching independent validation for any of his current crop of UFO evidence claims. In response to public challenges, they listen to more stories from Ray Stanford, and reassure each other, out of the public eye. Some of them seem to have learned nothing from the "dynamite shack photo" fiasco-- failing to reflect that many of Stanford's other UFO-photo claims are the product of comparable processes.
This is key: Writing under a pen name was not a device to avoid ultimate accountability -- I always knew that eventually, it would probably be necessary for me to publicly challenge Ray Stanford's misleading UFO-related claims, and to assert ownership of the Justice Fodor material. I am glad I was able to defer that day until there was no longer substantial danger of the controversy doing collateral damage to innocent parties. On the few occasions when people asked me about Justice Fodor, I gave ambiguous but not untruthful responses (generally along the lines of "he sure knows a lot about Ray Stanford's claims, and everything he posts seems to be documented")
I was as careful in what I wrote under the Justice Fodor pen name as I am in everything else I write for publication. Again, I stand behind every word. If you think something I have written in the past or write in the future is factually wrong, or "taken out of context," state your claim, and cite your sources.
In truth, writing about Stanford's UFO-related claims under a pen name until now has somewhat tied my hands -- it limited my ability to speak to some important aspects of the Ray Stanford saga, because "Justice Fodor" had to limit myself to documents that were already in the public record. I am happy now to be free of that constraint. Now I am free to refer also to things I directly observed and learned during my three and one-half years of close association with Ray Stanford (again, that was from late 1974 until early 1978), to discuss the real back story on Project Starlight International, and to bring in other material not previously available in the public domain.
Here is my bottom line, taken from one of the Justice Fodor posts:
I have not argued that we should rule out the possibility that, in the long blizzard of dubious, unsubstantiated, and absurd public UFO-related claims by Ray Stanford, there may be "something worth investigating." ... But, I do assert that very little evidentiary weight should be placed on any UFO evidence claim associated with Ray Stanford that relies substantially on Stanford's objectivity (for he seems to me highly subjective, prone to fantasy and confabulation), or on his candor (of which I believe he has too often displayed a deficiency). I have repeatedly said for any specific UFO evidence claim, Stanford ought to place the original evidence (film and camera, electronic recordings, whatever) in the hands of independent persons who are capable of conducting a competent analysis. Whatever conclusions may be drawn based on competent independent analysis of unaltered images or other tangible data -- analysis not reliant on any favorable presumptions regarding Stanford's objectivity or candor -- should be made public for commentary. If it should happen that a specific piece of evidence -- after having been subjected to such independent, competent, skeptical but honest analysis -- is fairly judged to be evidential, then Stanford should get appropriate credit for whatever constructive role he played in obtaining that evidence.
I'll start the ball rolling by suggesting that Ray Stanford's current associates prevail on him to turn over to an truly independent analyst (someone with no axe to grind, but with previously demonstrated competence in analysis of film images, and access to the requisite equipment) the original 35 mm negative that Stanford took that, he has repeatedly claimed publicly, shows an alien craft and seated inside, an alien pilot that is "three or three-and-one-half feet tall, and has a bald head and pointed ears" --indeed, shows that alien so clearly "you can count the fingers on his hand." Moreover, Stanford has claimed publicly, the very same single 35 mm negative contains evidence that the little alien's craft traveled (while the shutter was open) "either two-thirds or three-quarters of the speed of light in the atmosphere" as it moved to within a mile of Stanford's location. (Check out the uploaded audio clip, from the 2019 Erica Lukes podcast, which may also give you a little bit of insight into some of Ray Stanford's photo-analysis methods.) Yes, let's start with that.
Douglas Dean Johnson
@ddeanjohnson on Twitter
(my gmail is my full name, with periods between the names)
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