Planet X! We’re Waiting for You!

When the flying saucers land, Ray Stanford and his space cadets will be there.

by Stephen Harrigan

February 1976

(Page 3 of 3)

Other pictures transmitted to the UFO show old friends Betty and Barney Hill and their dachshund Delsey, and Charles Hickson (who Stanford suspects, on the evidence of the October 1974 sighting, is being followed by his former abductors).

“It’s really a simple idea,” Stanford explains.

This video data is transmitted to the UFO by means of the laser, a demonstration of which is forthcoming. The laser can provide a video readout of the UFO for the PSI people as well as transmit information to the spacecraft. The pan-and-tilt head can be moved up and down and sideways simultaneously by means of the remote-control “joystick,” but it still takes the skill of an anti-aircraft gunner to strike the UFO with the laser beam.

“Everybody out of the way of the laser,” Stanford shouts as he pulls off a cardboard “Shield” that says “Danger” and activates a 10-second warning signal. The body of the laser glows pink and, though from our position behind it we cannot see the beam, we can make out a red dot 100 feet or so in the distance.

But it is of course necessary to see the beam, and so Stanford takes me around in front of and a little to one side of the laser.

“Come a little closer,” he tells me.

“Ray, be careful,” Kitty-bo says, explaining to me that the laser could put my eye out.

“I can see it fine from here,” I say.

“Just a little closer,” Stanford coaxes, and the beam gradually becomes more definite, becomes the cartoon space ray I’ve been watching in science fiction movies all my life. Dust particles swim in the pencil-thin beam, like undissolved sugar in a glass of strawberry Kool-Aid.

Let us review the purpose of all this equipment, which is known collectively as UFO/VECTOR (UFO/Video Experiment Console for Transitional Overt Response). Let us postulate a UFO hovering over the hills west of Austin looking for action. As soon as it is sighted, the PSI crew, each in a white suit, each with a penlight in his or her pocket, will scramble. They put on their radiation goggles; the magnetometer bleats; the light circle flashes pi pi pi; from three coordinated camera positions 35mm still telephoto pictures are taken; video signals are recorded; video data is transmitted; through the photomultiplier photos are, uh, multiplied; a soon-to-be-installed gravitometer records any gravitational effects the spacecraft might be producing; a parabolic dish with a microphone attached records the sound.

At the very least, even if the UFO doesn’t send a message back, its passage overhead will be documented to an unprecedented degree, all documentation correlated by Universal Time Data. At the very least, it will be The Most Significant Day in the History of the World.

But until that happens it’s mostly kind of boring out here, and for someone without Stanford’s manic zeal and prescience it must at times seem fruitless. Sometime in the future PSI will have a permanent building on the site staffed 24 hours a day, but for now an average of five or six nights a week is all that can be devoted to the project. But surely even part-time UFO tracking must get tedious. Where is the TV so we can watch Space 1999, where are the Hershey bars, the beer, the card decks? Nothing doing, these people are vegetarians, they eat sesame-seed candy bars from the health-food store, they wear their seatbelts when they drive, and throw the Frisbee only when they want to hear the magnetometer perform. Could it be that the crossbreeding of AUM and PSI has produced a new strain of scientist monks, an electronically equipped apostleship?

Most of the crew is leaning now with one elbow on the low open roof of the building. Bob Dunnam, a tall, lanky real estate salesman, is talking about the Hickson sighting. He has a smooth, soothing voice that as often as not trails off before the end of a sentence.

“I turned around and was absolutely stunned. There was a beautiful orange glow about three-fourths the size of the full moon. Just extraordinary. All of us were unprepared.”

He tells about another sighting that occurred last month. “There was a tendency among some of us to see a weather balloon or something and get excited and then of course Ray would jump on us and tell us to get sharp. Well one night we were looking over, oh gosh, right above those trees over there and saw a brilliant strobe at an extraordinary speed. We said, “Ray, what’s that over there?” and he said, ‘That’s a UFO dammit! Film it!’ But it seemed that just when we keyed into it, just as we had our cameras ready, it responded and disappeared. It went right straight up and turned off like a rheostat.”

“When UFOs are white there is no earthly light that can duplicate it,” Stanford rhapsodizes. “And they act weird, they just don’t conform—colors, manners, everything.

“At the Hickson sighting I was too surprised to have any fear. Only afterward when I thought it might be landing in that valley did I have weird thoughts. You know, if a UFO should land out here and a door opened and we were summoned aboard, I have to admit I don’t know what I’d do. I’ve seen UFOs that have left me shaking like a leaf over an hour afterward. And I’ve seen others that were exhilarating, peaceful.”

A plane passes over, its red and green lights blinking, its engines giving off a soft, hollow drone.

“That’ll be the 9:45 flight from Midland-Odessa,” Stanford says.

“You’ll get some planes that’ll see our light circle and turn back and check it out,” Dunnam adds.

Stanford walks to a phone that is hanging on a post some yards away and, having directed that a folding chair be brought to him, dials the number of a colleague in California.

Kitty-bo (I know I should ask her how she got that name, but there is a certain mood to be observed here) tells me how she and Ray met. She had joined a study group at AUM which he was teaching and “I just had this feeling we were going to get married. So the third time I saw him I said, ‘Ray, are we going to get married?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ I mean there hadn’t been any amorous advances or anything.”

This conversation somehow modulates into a discussion of a famous humanoid photograph. A man who had taken a snapshot of his daughter in an open field discovered, when the film came back, that hovering in the background there was a twelve-foot being dressed in, or consisting of, a larval-looking spacesuit.

“I’m getting goose bumps just talking about it,” she says.

Me too. A meteor wafts a short distance across the sky. Over the phone Stanford is saying, “Four hundred people … at a carnival … they looked up in the sky and there was this object!”

It’s cold, and I’m the only one out here without a white suit to protect me from infrared rays.

Stanford hangs up the phone after a 45-minute discussion, has Kitty-bo get his sweater from the car (he puts it on under his jumpsuit), and turns to Doug Johnson: “Doug, we want to write to the ornithological society to get a recording of a saw whet owl.” It seems that over the phone he has learned certain UFOs have produced sounds remarkably similar to this particular bird’s call.

Johnson makes a note, Stanford goes back to the phone for another hour-long call. By the time we begin putting the equipment back into the building and get ready to leave it is well past midnight.

“We’ll spend a lot of nights out here when nothing very significant happens,” Dunnam says, “but one night like the Hickson sighting or last October’s sighting makes it all worthwhile.”

Ray Stanford is waving a check in the air, a check for $2000 someone who has heard about PSI sent in unsolicited. But this is not the only cause of Stanford’s excitement this morning.

“Remember I told you there was a possibility we might be killed doing this? Well, did you hear the news this morning? It happened Wednesday night!”

Well, not exactly. It seems that seven forest service employees in Arizona saw a UFO land near them. One of them, Travis Walton, who, it was revealed later, is an amateur ufologist, walked toward the craft despite the warnings of his friends and was promptly knocked down by a blue beam. The other six freaked out, left the scene, and returned later to find Walton gone. (As of this writing Walton has reappeared, five of the witnesses have passed lie-detector tests, and the affair, says Stanford, is building up into an interesting case.)

As we drive out to the site Stanford discusses another recent occurrence, one that happened in Texas a week or so ago, involving a farmer near Boerne who claimed that an oval object hovered over one of his cows, floated it up, and engorged it.

The purpose of this trip to the site is to provide Don Sassano, a local ABC cameraman, with some footage to send into the new morning show Good Morning, America, which is planning a spot on PSI. By daylight the site has all the force of a dispelled nightmare: it is rather corny, all that bright blue accessible sky, the recognizable earth creatures scurrying over the rocks, the vistas unimpeded by curtains of darkness. Returning from the site the other night I had nearly jumped out of my seat when the headlights illuminated a deer on the side of the road. That reaction seems silly now, but how much more prodding would my imagination have needed for that deer to become a spaceman?

Sassano has instructions to film a wide shot from across the valley of the PSI staffers milling around. It won’t be much of a shot, just a squat white building surrounded by five people in white suits, all washed out in the bright noon sunlight. It may not be much to photograph, but there is something about it. It is a perfect place for a UFO to land. Perfect. Already it has the ring of history.

Wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t it be only fair, Sassano and I speculate as across the valley Stanford and his crew pretend to check their instruments, wouldn’t it be worth at least a Pulitzer Prize if a flying saucer flew over right now within range of his camera? It would be something for Sassano to be able to tell his new baby, born on the day Travis Walton disappeared in Arizona, that his daddy had been there when Ray Stanford, calm and somber, secure of his place in an expanded history, walked over and shook the hand of a creature from outer space.

[Editor’s note: This story was reprinted from the pages of the February, 1976 issue of Texas Monthly Magazine. Unfortunately, our search to bring the efforts of Project Starlight International (PSI) up to date hasn’t turned up any successful leads. According to the Watchman Expositor Index, a publication of the Watchman Fellowship, a Christian organization devoted to cult awareness, the Association for the Understanding of Man, another group with which PSI ufologist Ray Stanford was associated, is alive and well in Austin. If this is true, we couldn’t find them through conventional methods. Another UFO/extraterrestrial intelligence group, Project Starlight Coalition, has a web presence but was founded in 1993 and is apparently unrelated.]

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