February 1976
Planet X! We’re Waiting for You!
When the flying saucers land, Ray Stanford and his space cadets will be there.
by Michael Knight/istockphoto.com
On an isolated hillside on the planet earth, six bipeds in white jumpsuits are looking up at the sky. It is night, a clear night in early November with a rising, waxing moon, Orion in a nose dive on the western horizon, and a stunning field of stars swathed by gauzy traces of the Milky Way.
The uniforms of the bipeds undulate in and out of visibility in the darkness, like pale fish sighted in murky water. It is somehow reassuring to remind myself occasionally of the obvious, that my companions are native-born earthlings and that I am less than twenty miles away from my house in Austin. The nature of our business here makes such thoughts particularly warming, for it is just conceivable that tonight may be the night when the members of Project Starlight International (PSI) succeed in their goal of establishing contact with a UFO.
Yes, it is night when all possibilities are reverberant, waiting in the wings. From my reading, I know what to expect: a bright elliptical object with the luster of a pearl, peopled by “entities” who could answer to any number of descriptions: little bipeds four feet tall with silvery skin, twelve-foot giants in diving suits, beings my size with glowing eyes shaped like wraparound sunglasses, maybe with claws, or cauliflower ears, bald humanoids with emaciated rib cages and booties and jock straps, hairy creatures with broad chests that seem to be supported by cross-beams.
But there will be plenty of room for speculation in this story. Right now there is the empirical presence of Ray Stanford and his associates rolling back the roof of the four-foot-high white brick building which serves as an observation area as well as a kind of toolshed for PSI’s $25,000 worth of equipment designed specifically to catch any neighboring UFOs in a crossfire of unshakable documentation.
After the roof is rolled back and Stanford has mounted a telescope-laser-video camera complex on a remote-control pan-and-tilt head, he begins an explanation of the equipment for my benefit. I follow as best I can, but in the darkness my notes must feel their own way. Stanford shows me a magazine sensor about twice the size of a pencil box which contains 90,000 wires—I write it down—“90,000 wires”—but my eyes and my attention are elsewhere: they drift uncontrollably upward and notice with suspicion a flock of moonlit birds swooping silently overhead, the strobe lights of an airplane, the afterimage of a meteor, signs in the sky that can be read either as false alarms or omens…
“We wear these suits for two reasons,” Stanford says. (It is daylight, a day earlier. My notes are impeccable.) He lifts his arms so I can assess his uniform to the fullest effect: it is a white jumpsuit bought right here in Austin at a uniform supply shop. Above the left pocket the initials of Project Starlight International form an interlocking logo that is stitched into the fabric. The two reasons he and his staff wear the jumpsuits are (1) safety-white will reflect the heat from infrared radiation, a possible component of a possible UFO laser, and (2) general aboveboardness.
“We don’t want to decoy UFOs. This is naive, it’s stupid. It would be stupid to assume that we could, say, make them think that there’s a disabled UFO on the ground.”
“If they’re intelligent, I’m not going to try and play games. We’re not going to wear black and hide in the bushes. This isn’t a game; it’s a dangerous undertaking. That’s one reason we wear name-tags out there—should we be killed, people will at lest be able to identify us.”
“What we’re doing is unique.” Stanford goes on, while I try to suppress an image of him and his crew lying strewn and smoldering in their jumpsuits on a charred hillside surrounded by molten electronic equipment. “No one else in the world is doing this. We want to get quantitative data and test the hypothesis that UFOs can communicate.”
“You see, we can’t rely on verbal reports to give us any more information than we already have. I’m not saying we’re going to solve the UFO mystery, but if we have a sighting we’ll have enough evidence where we’ll turn a few scientific heads.”
Stanford shows me a letter of encouragement from famed UFO skeptic Philip Klass, as well as plaudits from famous UFO believers like J. Allen Hynek, then breaks into an elaborate account of the differences in propulsion between elongated and saucer-shaped UFOs, something about “subatomic particles accelerated to relativistic velocities.”
Stanford is a small, tight, lithe man, the kind of person who doesn’t burn off energy so much as recycle it, so that he gives the impression of being a compact, self-contained organism, a charged maverick particle.
His appearance, especially his gaunt, ascetic’s face, is not out of keeping with his line of work since, besides being a prominent ufologist, Stanford is also a prominent psychic, a medium through whom certain beings called the “Brothers” offer their opinions on such topics as the contents of the Fatima Letter, diet, the identity of Christ, premarital sex, and virtually anything about which the members of the Association for the Understanding of Man (AUM), the organization founded to harness Stanford’s powers, want to know.
AUM boasts a membership of about 850 people, each of whom pays $25 a year in dues, buys and promulgates the organization’s books and tapes, and subscribes to its journal. This money and some generous donations give AUM enough operating capital to sponsor speakers like Uri Geller, lease a semi-posh suite of offices in an Austin building so new no one has put up the little white letters on the directory board, and engage in one of the most serious UFO research projects being conducted in the world.
AUM is pursuing UFOs principally because Stanford is, and Stanford is primarily because he has always seen them. He downplays the role of his psychic energies in this regard. He’s just lucky, and almost fanatically vigilant. “He just takes the garbage out at the right time,” Doug Johnson, an AUM staffer and an editor of the Project Starlight International journal, tells me.
As a high school student in Corpus Christi, while he was watching Truman Bradley solemnly speculate behind his desk on Science Fiction Theater and building the multiple-stage rockets that would win him the Texas Academy of Science’s research award, Stanford observed a flurry of UFO appearances: a disc hovering behind a flock of pelicans over Oso Bay, orange-vermilion objects that stretched themselves out into parabolas. He even built a primitive light circle on Padre Island out of old oil drums.
“Since 1954 I’ve been able to sense that UFOs are around,” he says, still reluctant to connect the sightings and his own psychic abilities, and especially reluctant to have the rigidly scientific Project Starlight International associated with the wide-open subjectivity of AUM’s other activities.
“I believe that UFOs are a technological rather than a psychic phenomenon.”
He shows me an album of UFO photographs, leaning over me while I thumb through it and providing a very specific gloss for each picture: where and when and by whom it was taken, atmospheric conditions, cross-referenced sightings, and, if the picture is inauthentic—as many of them are—the method of fakery.
Each page of the album shows a photograph, generally hastily taken and badly cropped, of a lake, a row of roofs, the ground seen from an airplane, each with a flying saucer somewhere in the frame either surprisingly sharp or blurry enough to suggest nothing more than a smudge. The persistence of these images is a shade unsettling; when the evidence, some allegedly authentic, some decidedly fake, is arranged like this, in sequence, it produces in me an archetypal fear of invasion.
Stanford’s wife Kitty-bo comes into the office to remind her husband that they are supposed to eat Mexican food tonight. At 23, she is fourteen or fifteen years younger than Stanford and so demure and quiet that she seems to be continually skirting the edges of the force field he produces. She wears her hair in a single long braid that bounces off the oversize collar of her jumpsuit.
Most of the rest of our visit is concerned with great events of the PSI past. Unfortunately all of the nine observations that have taken place since 1973 came before PSI had its detection equipment. The sole hard data for any of these sightings is a photograph revealing a light trail in the night sky with two abrupt 90-degree kinks in its path, like an unfolded paper clip. The most spectacular sighting, Stanford says, came on October 12, 1974, when Charles Hickson, one of the two Pascagoula, Mississippi, men who were allegedly taken aboard a UFO two years ago, was visiting the site of Stanford’s invitation. A bright orange object somewhat smaller than the full moon appeared on the horizon, illuminating the hillside opposite and setting off in Hickson, a sort of vindicated calm: “Well, I’ll be . . . ”
Stanford commands an impressive repertoire of other UFO reports. There is the case of the Italian movie audience who, coming out of a theater (it was not a science fiction movie), espied some humanoids foraging outside their craft in a soccer field. The earthlings pelted them with rotten cabbage and they took off. There is the surprisingly strong testimony of Antonio Villas-Boas, a Brazilian farmer, who claimed to have been spirited aboard a flying saucer and forced (well, induced) to have intergalactic intercourse with a womanlike creature who gurgled with pleasure. Then there’s Snippy the Horse, whose mutilated carcass predates recent “unexplainable” atrocities to farm animals by nine years. And is the government really suppressing the fact that there are non-indigenous subterranean bases on Mars? And did or did not Alan Shepard, stepping out onto the moon’s surface for the first time, report back to Houston (over the air!) that he saw a beautiful sphere sixteen inches in diameter which he was subsequently ordered to put into the LEM and take back to earth? Huh?
