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 2 of 3)

I return home with a copy of Stanford’s book Fatima Prophecy, several UFO paperbacks, a PSI publication with plans for building a simple UFO detector, the PSI journal and newsletter, and spend the evening boning up.

Fatima Prophecy is, for the most part, a verbatim transcription of information given to Stanford acting as medium. The transcripts include interpretations of the alleged apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima and other places. There are some interesting UFO correlations—the “sun” standing still at Fatima has all the characteristics of a UFO sighting, and the BVM herself, as revealed in a series of photographs of her apparitions at Zeitoun, Egypt, resembles a sort of one-dimensional electronic holy card, as though Somebody Up or Out There is fabricating icons. (When I ask him, Stanford is enthusiastic about the possibility that extraterrestrials might be behind traditional miracles. “I’m not totally convinced the disc at Fatima was a UFO, but it sounds a heck of a lot like one. Why shouldn’t UFOs be involved in religious activities?”

Fifty-one per cent of the American people, says Mr. Gallup, believe in UFOs. Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller have confided to The National Tattler that they are also among the faithful. There is no question, of course, that UFO sightings can be accounted for by dozens of atmospheric conditions, by satellites, weather balloons, and planets, or that the majority of reports and sightings are obvious misapprehensions and publicity stunts. And yet, and yet . . .(I’ve always wanted to write that sentence.) There are Famous Unsolved Cases: Betty and Barney Hill, whose encounter with a flying saucer was the subject of a recent TV movie; Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, the Mississippi abductees; the Socorro, New Mexico, landing of a craft that left obscure indentations in the ground from which the existence of a sophisticated craft could be extrapolated. These cases may be true or they may not be. Ray Stanford believes they are, and most of the American public seems to prefer them to be, including me, sort of. Actually, I’m content so long as nobody proves that they don’t exist. If the Loch Ness monster turns out to be an oil slick, if the abominable snowman is really an optical illusion caused by an allergic reaction to yak fur, I don’t want to hear about it, and I bet Gerald Ford doesn’t either.

According to Jung, UFOs are an extension of the mandala symbol, “the symptom of a universally present psychic disposition” to discover the existence of a higher power that binds humankind to itself. UFOs are, then, emissaries from the great radiant myth of our god. It’s a rich and warming thought, but it’s not half as much fun as believing that Antonio Villas-Boas got raped by a spacewoman.

I call Alan Shepard to find out if he really did see a glassy sphere on the moon. He won’t talk to me. “Tell him if he doesn’t call back I’ll print the story as true,” I tell his secretary. He doesn’t call back. I can see him snickering at his desk, upon which the sphere is sitting as a paperweight. NASA can’t or won’t help me out either. They suggest that the sphere was actually one of Alan Shepard’s golf balls seen by an astronaut on a later flight.

The next morning I find Stanford looking at slides in the AUM offices. These are slides not of UFOs but of inspirational sunsets and fields of flowers and majestic peaks. Stanford and his staff are choosing the cover for AUM’s new compilation of his readings, a book called Speak, Shining Stranger.

“I’d like to get away from this sun-beam-type thing,” Stanford says. “It looks like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.”

He settles instead on a picture of a water lily.

“Yes, we’ll use that. The water lily is very symbolic; it floats on the waters of the mind, its roots go down to the water for nourishment. That’s what we want.”

The rest of the staff isn’t much impressed with Stanford’s choice, especially with the way he wants to wrap the picture around the spine of the book, destroying its fearful symmetry. But Stanford is quietly emphatic: the objections recede like a tide.

Jerry Johnson, PSI’s equipment engineer, a pale, red-headed person who looks like one of the neighborhood kids who used to come over to learn how to stick a straw through a potato on Mr. Wizard, calls on Stanford to show him the two intercom units he has put together for the site. Stanford indicates his approval and orders another. Johnson is paid for his electronic work; most of the five or six people milling around the offices are on the payroll as well, but AUM and PSI are the kind of organizations that seem to have no trouble attracting volunteers.

“When we need them,” Stanford points out, “we can easily have twelve to fifteen people out there working at the site. A lot of people come up and want to go out to the site now that we have all our fancy equipment. That’s one reason we keep our location a secret. People call up all the time and say, ‘Hey, I saw a UFO!,’ as if I’m going to go out there and look at it. It’s probably just Venus anyway.”

There is little chance that Venus will be mistaken for a UFO tonight. Its light is refracted in all the acceptable ways, its surface flushed with color that is just barely perceivable. It is not one of those nights when you can look up at Venus and, in response to it, palpitate with serenity yourself. No, tonight I watch it closely, a little warily, half expecting it to pop out of its moorings and jump out indiscriminately across the sky.

Yes, it is true—I am just a bit afraid. This morning I saw, in the back pages of Stanford’s UFO album, a riveting photograph of a little creature with elaborately muscled legs and a sunken non-human, non-simian chest, with a face Stanford swears looks like Lee Harvey Oswald’s. In the picture the creature is being led away by two men in trench coats while a woman, her face expressing a full spectrum of horror and humor and revulsion, looks down upon it. Stanford tells me he’s met a man who has seen this being. It is no longer alive and is presently lying in state in a tub of formaldehyde at an Air Force base in an undisclosed country.

It is a night for contemplating the dark underside of UFO research. The secret location of Project Starlight has been well-chosen: we can see the aura the lights of Austin cast upon the hills to the east, but except for an occasional airplane there is nothing to disturb the isolation of the site, which was given to PSI by an anonymous donor.

The demonstrations begin. Ray Stanford walks away from the building, far enough away for the last luminescent traces of his uniform to disappear, but not before he has thrown a switch on the magnetometer, a machine that looks, as just about everything in this gadgetorium does, like a stereo amplifier. Out there, near one of the four sensors buried about the site, Stanford throws a Frisbee with a small metal rod taped to its underside. Immediately the magnetometer responds with the kind of eerie beep you might expect a humanoid to produce if you pinched one. The instrument beeps as long as the object is in motion. The sound even resonates to the degree of wobble. (The evidence is not especially flattering to Stanford’s prowess with a Frisbee.)

What is the point? There is a good deal of evidence that UFOs operate with some sort of magnetic propulsion, or at least create strong magnetic effects in the areas they pass over. When an object with a strong magnetic charge and an anomalistic flying pattern (this excludes airplanes) comes near enough, the magnetometer squeals. The sound is simultaneously recording on a cassette tape and cross-referenced with a Universal Time Data readout.

There’s more. Stanford leads me downslope into the center of the light circle, which consists of 91 150-watt spotlights forming a ring 100 feet in diameter. Until recently, all of the lights were activated by a sequencer Stanford and his wife made out of an old record turntable, an instrument that has been superseded by a solid-state sequencer put together by Al Mouton, a solid-state engineer from Motorola and a PSI fan.

The lights flash on and off in a sophisticated sequence that is not immediately discernible. It’s a hypnotic effect: the sudden flare-ups of light all around us accompanied by the soft click of the sequencer give the impression that the circumference of the circle is impenetrable.

The light circle is here because UFOs have reportedly been attracted by such things in the past. As they are now, the lights can be manipulated in a number of different ways, including a dot-dot-dot pattern which is a crude form of pi, a concept dear to the humanoid heart. But on that day not too far off, when there is cash to install a central computer, PSI will be able to use the light circle to flash mathematical patterns and binary data to any spacecraft in the area, even read and duplicate its light-pulsations.

Back at the building Stanford is upset. “Uh oh! Now I want this understood: this machine was left on pause, which can ruin a machine! This is what happens when people who don’t know what they’re doing mess with this equipment. These are not toys to play around with. We’re scientists!”

The machine in question is one of three video recorders, each of which has a different function. One is hooked up to the video camera mounted on the laser and is used to record the video appearance of the “event.” Another one records the output from the photomultiplier. Stanford has explained it to me twice, but I still don’t know what it is the photomultiplier does. And the third video recorder plays, through the laser, a transmission tape to the UFO. This tape contains video data which, when assimilated and interpreted by the aliens, will produce a still picture of the PSI site as it appears in daytime. Onto this picture has been superimposed a hypothetical flying saucer, with two-way arrows connecting it to the most visible instrument of the site, the lasertelescope complex. The implication for the extraterrestrials is that we down here on the ground are interested in having a little tête-à-tête, assuming they have têtes.

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