The Strange Legacy of Ray Stanford
UFOs and Dinosaurs...
Ray Stanford is one of the most unusual figures at the intersection of science and the unexplained. A self-taught paleontologist and longtime UFO investigator, Stanford has spent over five decades chasing two seemingly unrelated mysteries: ancient life on Earth and unidentified aerial phenomena in the skies above.
In the world of UFO research, Stanford is perhaps best known for his detailed investigation into the 1964 Socorro, New Mexico sighting—one of the most famous close encounters on record. His book Socorro “Saucer” in a Pentagon Pantry remains a cornerstone in the literature on the case. Unlike many of his peers, Stanford aimed to bring instrumentation into the field, using magnetometers, gravimeters, and high-speed cameras to document potential electromagnetic anomalies during UFO events. His approach was both innovative and controversial—earning him praise from some researchers and skepticism from others who questioned the more fantastical elements of his claims.
In the early 1970s, he started Project Starlight International, a scientific company which aimed to locate and film UFOs in the field, using Stanfords advanced cameras.
Yet what makes Stanford truly unique is that he has also made legitimate, widely recognized contributions to paleontology. Despite having no formal academic training, Stanford discovered several important fossil sites, including a remarkable slab of over 70 dinosaur tracks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He also identified a new species of armored dinosaur, Propanoploaurus marylandicus, with the fossil now housed at the Smithsonian. His work has been cited by professional paleontologists, and he has collaborated with respected scientists in the field.
Earlier in his life, Stanford was also involved in psychic and spiritual work, serving as a trance-channel in the 1960s through his organization, the Association for the Understanding of Man. This aspect of his biography has added to both his intrigue and controversy, and further complicates his reputation in both scientific and UFO communities.
Today on The Cosmic Clock, we're releasing a short, never-before-heard interview from 1987, recently recovered from a reel-to-reel found in the archives of Jean-Yves Casgha at CARE (original audio version in French on the CARE website: here)
Context: In the late 1970s, France became the first country in the world to establish an official government group dedicated to the study of UFOs: the GEPAN. Connected in part to this organization, a brilliant young astrophysicist named Jean-Pierre Petit began gaining international attention with his groundbreaking theories that could help explain (at least in part) how UFOs might be propelled - through magnetohydrodynamics, or MHD. It was during this period that Ray Stanford reached out to Jean-Pierre Petit. What follows is the account Petit shared in 1987 with journalist Jean-Yves Casgha.
ENGLISH OVERDUB OF ORIGINAL FRENCH RECORDING
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Jean-Pierre Petit: Yes, I think I’d like to share a rather amusing anecdote from quite a few years ago. One day, my son told me that I had received a call from Texas, which isn’t something that happens everyday. The caller said they would call back in an hour. So, an hour later, I’m next to my phone and I get a call from a man named Ray Stanford, who runs a foundation called Starlight International in Austin, TX. And this guy keeps me on the phone for a good hour. Now, an hour-long phone call to Texas is quite expensive. He explains to me that they filmed a UFO from an airplane and that it’s extremely important and that I need to see it, etc.
So I tell this gentleman, listen, if it’s that important, pay for my trip. Invite me to the United States to see it myself. “I'll talk to my board of directors about it, but I think we'll actually bring you here” Stanford said. Stanford paid for my trip there, and so I came to see him. At the time, I was still in contact with a number of people who were more or less interested in the phenomenon.
UFOs may have been a bit of a dream. And there too, the imagination was running wild. Some people said it was the American's who used this method to contact you. In fact, it didn't happen at all. I arrived in Austin and found Stanford and his wife, and I spent a few days there in that cowboy country.
I was able to see this film that had been taken of an object flying next to an airplane, etc. And Stanford told me, you know, people are looking for UFOs, all sorts of things, but actually, there are certain places. It's like fishing, there are good places. I have eyes like saucers.
That's the right word. And Stanford begins to tell me that he has... A whole team, he had absolutely phenomenal equipment. There was a kind of concrete observation tower with lasers, telescopes, etc. And I really don't know where he came from without money because it was a private foundation.
And there were still five or six full-time employees, already, a kind of thinker, and Stanford shows on the map, Whiteson. The top-secret American desert polygon. And he claims to me that to the northeast of Whiteson, for those who know a little about the UFO file, there is the case of this Socorro which is located exactly there.
So it's very close to this coral. There's a road like this east and west that runs along the northern part of Whiteson. And periodically, Stanford and his team take big landfalls from behind, and they use ultra-sophisticated equipment, and they've had quite a few UFO encounters there, they've made films, they've made extraordinary sound recordings.
I listened to a sound recording in his living room, made on site, and there are some pretty amazing sounds, a kind of rumbling like that. Fantastic. And you hear Stanford's wife saying, oh, my God, oh, my God. And then there's a terrible scraping and scraping. It's Stanford's assistant scraping the microphone on his pant leg, and Stanford is yelling at him.
Stop scratching the microphone on your pants, the guy was so panicked, and Stanford told me it's very difficult to find people who, in these cases, don't completely lose their composure. And so I see all this material accumulating from these observations. Made in this Whiteson range.
And he tells me a story that really reminds me of the third stick figure encounter in the north, precisely in Whiteson. There's a mountain called Knape. And Stanford says that with good skeletal instruments, you can actually observe that, and that he's seen UFOs hovering over the mountain.
And there were lights responding to the ground, a bit like the American military. I came back from taking over the United States feeling like I'd been to the Martians. What? There's no other word for it. And there's even a downright poetic story to end with. I don't know if you've seen Superman as Superman.
There's this kind of meteorite that hits the ground, digging into the ground, all crystallized, and Superman is right there inside. And one day, a meteor like that hit the ground, and it's a shape that showed a piece of this meteor. I don't know if it's true. If it's false, it's something that was fabricated.
A laboratory. There are crystallized, small pieces of shiny copper, etc. And the American Secret Service tried to recover the pieces of the meteor that appeared. It's indeed very strange, and the meteor had fallen into the field of a black man who always refused to hand over the meteor and even to say where it was.
And Stanford tells me that when people asked him why he didn't want to hand over the meteor, the black man replied, you know, if God put that thing in my field, it's because he had his reasons.
Jean Yves Casgha: Yes, but still, a question about the Stanford affair. And when you saw the film of a UFO following a plane, you thought something was authentic and something was fake. You know, you can't usually tell these documents at all. They have poor qualities. You see on a film that's quite, quite bad.
Jean-Pierre Petit: With poor exposure, a cylindrical object that appears to be evolving. I would say that on a document like that, it's absolutely impossible. I even think we can say it as a general rule. It's important to say that you can't say anything about a photographic document. Nothing resembles it.
You've seen the photographs taken in the lab. I mean, if I had wanted to indulge in hoaxing, I could have made a series of photos or films. And it's extremely spectacular, and by golly, it may have been very difficult to tell whether this object had been made in the lab or not, that's for sure.
So, a priori, there's no way to tell the difference between a real, quote-unquote, photo and a fake. The photographic equipment is practically unusable.