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April 2, 2017 — Ray Stanford


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
When Ray Stanford is about to tell a story, there's no stopping him. He has a wealth of crazy tales about those old-time flying saucer contactees, such as George Adamski, Daniel Fry, George Van Tassel and Truman Bethurum.

What about those clearly fake UFO pictures they bandied about, claiming they were genuine?

This discussion was so enjoyable that Ray woke up the very next day and said he had more stories to tell. So we invited him back on this week's episode of our premium podcast, After The Paracast.

You can hear it as a subscriber to The Paracast+ plus at:

Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio
 
When a thread about Dan Fry became active here, I sent the link to Ray for his comments. He said he had so much to tell, an interview would work better. Within a day, I had his appearance set up. The After The Paracast session was scheduled after Ray listed a few things he didn't get a chance to say during the regular episode.

But he has lots more to tell and he'll be back.
 
When a thread about Dan Fry became active here, I sent the link to Ray for his comments. He said he had so much to tell, an interview would work better. Within a day, I had his appearance set up. The After The Paracast session was scheduled after Ray listed a few things he didn't get a chance to say during the regular episode.

But he has lots more to tell and he'll be back.
I hope you and Chris let him know that many people greatly enjoyed his interview. Maybe over time he can become a Paracast regular guest.
 
Thank you so much for conducting this interview, Gene and Chris and Mr. Stanford – it was really great to hear about all of those first-hand experiences with these alleged contactees. And I appreciate hearing his responses to my questions about the Daniel Fry case; I never thought I’d have a chance to hear his answers to those questions – I totally owe all of you guys for taking the time to talk about this.

Frankly I’ve always accepted the fact that Daniel Fry’s photographic/film footage was fake. It doesn’t seem that he did much of it though, like Adamski did. And honestly I do wonder if a person who had a genuine experience that they couldn’t prove, might have a lapse of judgment and fake evidence to offer some kind of proof. I’m probably being too generous. I’d like to ask a psychologist about it though.

But in any case that doesn’t help me understand the surprisingly prescient physics described in Daniel Fry’s books. Mr. Stanford causally dismissed these issues without careful scrutiny, which was disappointing, so I’ll provide a couple of examples so everyone can see for themselves why this case still haunts me.

First let me state that I’m not in any sense “a believer” in Daniel Fry’s case, or anyone else’s stories. I entertain several hypotheses to explain the things that we’ll get into below, like; perhaps Daniel Fry just “got lucky” with some ideas, perhaps he repeated insights that he picked up from the other brilliant scientists working at White Sands, perhaps he really did have audio-only contact with an extraterrestrial humanoid one evening at White Sands, perhaps he overheard some amazing classified research findings and invented his story as a cover story to get those ideas out to the public, or perhaps something else is going on that hasn’t occurred to me yet. Whatever the explanation may be, I’ve found a great deal to ponder in Fry’s books about science – if nothing else I find that it helps me look at interesting problems in theoretical physics and cosmology in new ways, and that’s always an asset: grist for the mill, so to speak.

Here’s an example that demonstrates that I’m not “reading into” Daniel Fry’s scientific statements, as Mr. Stanford suggested in this interview, so you can judge for yourself:

In 1956 Daniel Fry described a negative/repulsive gravitational field between galaxies, which is precisely what astronomers discovered 42 years later in 1998 - a gravitational repulsion which they dubbed "dark energy":
We can explain the observed actions of the present universe by postulating that an attraction exists between the individual bodies within a galaxy, because their total mass and distance is such that they are within the positive portion of the gravitation curve with respect to each other. In the vast spaces between the galaxies however, the curve dips below the zero line, with the result that a repulsion exists between the galaxies themselves. This also explains why matter, although rather evenly distributed throughout the known universe, is not distributed uniformly, but is found in quite similar concentrations at comparatively regular distances.
Steps to the Stars, Daniel Fry, 1956, page 35

In 1960 Daniel Fry described the process of new galaxy formation in a region of diffuse intergalactic gas and dust, at the end of his deceptively simple book Atoms, Galaxies, and Understanding. It’s much as one would expect he once again describes the subtle intergalactic gravitational repulsion that sounds just like “dark energy":
We must, therefore, seek a spot which is remote from any of the existing galaxies, and approximately equidistant from the nearer ones. Even in this remote area of space we will find countless numbers of particles of matter, anti units of charge; electrons, protons or simple atoms, which have achieved escape velocity from some star, or which have been formed in space by random approach and capture. In short, we have all of the building blocks of nature, present in an exceedingly tenuous and diffuse state.

Since each of the particles of matter has mass, each has a force of attraction existing between it and ever other particle of matter in the area.

If we accept the concept of the non linearity of natural law as previously outlined in this text, we find that each of these particles is also being repelled slightly by the surrounding galaxies or galactic clusters.

These forces are almost inconceivably small, yet the net result of their action is to create a tendency upon the part of each randomly moving particle to move ever closer to the center of the area of attraction, which is also approximately but not exactly the center or 'null balance' point of the repulsion of the surrounding galaxies.
Atoms, Galaxies and Understanding, Daniel Fry, 1960, page 95

So that strikes me as a valid scientific prediction: Fry described a repulsive gravitational field effect acting at intergalactic distances, and that’s exactly what astronomers found, totally unexpectedly, 42 years later. I can’t think of another example in all of ufology of a scientific prediction like this being validated later. Can any of you?

And note the explicit and intriguing explanatory distinction between Fry’s model of this subtle intergalactic gravitational repulsion, and the prevailing “cosmological constant” model of dark energy that we see in today’s academic literature. Modern astronomers typically assume that this repulsion stems from a ubiquitous and homogeneous field of “dark energy” that’s intrinsic to spacetime, a “vacuum energy,” but that invokes two troubling problems: the cosmological constant problem and the coincidence problem.

Fry’s model attributes the acceleration field to the gravitational interaction of distant material bodies: his model claims that at cosmological scales, gravity exhibits a negative polarity – that the gravitational field drops off slightly faster than the inverse square law, so at a finite distance the attraction reaches zero, and beyond this point, the gravitational field becomes negative/repulsive. That’s a very elegant and intuitive concept.

And to the best of my knowledge, our observations of the dark energy effect aren’t yet precise enough to distinguish between those two explanatory models. But I know that on-going astronomical research like the Dark Energy Survey that’s collecting data until 2018, will probably offer high enough resolution dark energy observations using the late-time integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (aka the Rees-Sciama effect) and other techniques to settle this fascinating question, and map any existing perturbations in the dark energy field phenomenon. The Dark Energy Survey website describes the situation this way:
To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
Overview - The Dark Energy Survey

So it’s quite clear to me that Daniel Fry described the “dark energy” effect which was only discovered by astronomers 42 years later (they won the Nobel Prize for this discovery btw). And not only that, but he provided an explanation for the effect that the international collaboration of astronomers at the Dark Energy Survey are currently investigating as one of two plausible models to explain “dark energy.” That’s pretty exciting, and in this context, pretty darn mysterious.

But that’s only one of many examples that I’ve found in Daniel Fry’s brief yet provocative books (which frequently describe key physics concepts in deceptively simple terms). Here’s another one:

In his 1956 book Step to the Stars, Daniel Fry describes the possibility of polarizing a gravitational field in a manner similar to using an electrical current to polarize the magnetic field of iron to manifest a repulsion as well as an attraction to a permanent magnet. The principles of gravitoelectromagnetism were known to experts in the general theory of relativity at this time, but a valid conceptual model for generating a polarized gravitoelectric field that would perform as he describes below didn’t first appear in the scientific literature until seven years later, in 1963. Here’s Daniel Fry’s deceptively simple description of this exotic concept:
Suppose you were to hand a bar magnet and a similar bar of soft iron to a man who was intelligent, but uneducated, with the request that he examine and test the two objects in order to determine their properties. One of the properties which the researcher would be certain to list would be the 'inherent' property of mutual attraction between the two objects. He would observe that when either end of one bar approached either end of the other bar, a condition of attraction was observed. He would probably conclude that the attraction was an inherent quality of these objects, and that it would continue to persist regard-less of anything which could be done.

We know, of course, that if a length of insulated wire were wound around the soft iron bar, and a flow of electrons were induced in the winding, the two bars could be made to exhibit a repulsion as readily as an attraction. Note that in this case we have not destroyed the field of permanent magnet, we have not shielded the field, nor have we overcome it. We have simply produced a field which is in opposition to it, and the two objects now tend to separate rather than to come together.

The same possibility exists with respect to gravitational fields. While the results will probably not be achieved in the same way, it should not be too difficult to work out means of polarizing a gravitational field, once we discard the old assumption that it is impossible.
Steps to the Stars, Daniel Fry, 1956, page 42

This possibility wasn’t raised in the scientific literature until Robert L. Forward, working for Hughes Research Laboratories in 1963, published the technical paper “Guidelines to Antigravity,” which first introduced the conceptual design of a gravitational dipole generator (the gravitational analogue of a toroidal electromagnetic inductor with a changing electrical current generating an electrical dipole). This startling little device would exhibit exactly the properties that Fry described above: on one side the device would attract matter, and on the other side it would repel matter, exactly like an electromagnet exhibiting an attraction and a repulsion with a permanent magnet as Fry had described. Here’s Robert Forward’s paper that introduced this marvelous idea to the world:
http://u2.lege.net/culture.zapto.or...rward%20-%20Guidelines%20to%20Antigravity.pdf

There are many other examples in Daniel Fry’s books that I could cite here to illustrate my point. In fact I freely provided an entire chapter about Daniel Fry’s strangely prescient descriptions of a gravitational propulsion system for Sean Donovan’s well-researched book about Daniel Fry titled Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth? which he self-published in 2014.

I think Sean may be a little bit protective about “the real meat” in Daniel Fry’s books - we’re both very eager to figure out a viable gravitational field propulsion concept, so Sean only offered the 1954 edition of The White Sands Incident for free on his website Daniel Fry Dot Com That edition contains the silly “magnetic field propulsion” description that Ray Stanford read on the air.

But the 1973 edition contains a different description of the ufo propulsion system as a gravitational field propulsion system. Daniel Fry stated that he had to get permission from the base security people at White Sands to publish his book because he was writing about events that he claimed had transpired there. Perhaps that’s why he provided that harebrained “magnetic propulsion system” description in the first edition, I don’t know – but as you’ve already seen, gravitational field propulsion was a central theme in all of his other books about science and cosmology, so the later description seems much more appropriate in context. Here’s the interesting description from the 1973 edition:
'The accumulator material has available free electrons in quantities beyond anything of which you could conceive. The control mechanism allows these electrons to flow through the various segments of the force rings which you see at the top and bottom of the craft. You are familiar enough with electrodynamics to know that a moving electron creates a magnetic field. The tremendous surge of electrons through the force rings creates a very strong magnetic field. Since the direction and amplitude of the flow can be controlled through either ring, and in several paths through a single ring, we can create a field which oscillates in a pattern of very precisely controlled modes. In this way we can create magnetic resonance between the two rings or between the several segments of a single ring. As you know, any magnetic field which is changing in intensity, will create an electric field which, at any given instant, is equal in amplitude, opposite in sign, and perpendicular to the magnetic field. If the two fields become mutually resonant, a vector force will be generated. Unless the amplitude and the frequency of the resonance is quite high, the vector field will be very small, and may pass unnoticed. However, the amplitude of the vector field increases at a rate greater than the two fields which generate it and, at high resonance levels, becomes very strong. The vector field, whose direction is perpendicular to each of the other two, creates an effect similar to, and in fact identical with a gravitational field. If the center of the field coincides with the craft’s center of mass, the only effect will be to increase the inertia, or mass, of the craft. If the center of mass does not coincide with the center of force, the craft will tend to accelerate toward that center. Since the system which creates the field is a part of the ship, it will, of course, move with the ship, and will continue constantly to generate a field whose center of attraction is just ahead of the ship’s center of mass, so that the ship will continue to accelerate as long as the field is generated.
To Men of Earth: including The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1973

We don’t yet have a unified field theory of electromagnetism and gravitation, so I can’t say whether the method he describes is a valid technique for gravitational field propulsion (it sounds to me like he's describing the Poynting vector, which is a vector field, but intriguingly, a brilliant CalTech physicist named Carver Mead recently introduced an alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity called G4v, which describes gravitation as a four-vector-potential field). So all I can say for now is that the idea of accelerating an interstellar craft by generating a gravitational field that’s centered just ahead of the craft’s center of mass is damn interesting and original. But here’s something that will really blow your mind:

NASA’s Eagleworks team in Houston, led by Dr Harold “Sonny” White, is currently testing a small device that he hopes will generate a gravitational field with future propulsion applications, and the device is a hand-in-glove fit to the description above: a toroidal ring with magnetic and electrical field components (via several linear inductors and parallel-plate capacitors arranged in a alternating manner) oriented perpendicular to one another in a series of segments (there's a tiny photo of the device at the bottom right-hand corner of the photo array on page 30 of Dr. White's paper "Warp Field Mechanics 101" here, and if you enlarge the image you can see the electrical components as I've described them: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf), which operates at high frequency and the highest amplitude they could muster in their small test device. Sure, it’s probably just some crazy coincidence. But you have to admit that it’s weird for a 1950s-era rocket scientist and self-proclaimed alien contactee to describe a toroidal ring composed of segments that generate perpendicular electrical and magnetic fields for the purpose of producing a propulsive gravitational field effect, and then see NASA testing a device precisely matching that description over 35 years later.

I could barrage you with additional examples of this stuff because we've only scratched the surface here, but I’m sure I’ve already exceeded the patience of most. So let’s see if I get flamed for going into all of this, after being fairly harshly dissed by Ray Stanford for having an active interest in this case, haha. But I really enjoyed this episode nevertheless and I’d love to hear more from him – that story about Aura Rhanes and the hand-sign pendant (that was called the “three-finger salute” in The Hunger Games, by the way), that’s now one of my all-time favorite ufology stories.

(Footnote: Mr. Stanford referred to Daniel Fry as a “psychotic liar” a few times, but I think he meant “pathological liar.” I don’t study psychology much but that doesn’t seem to fit this case. Sure, Daniel Fry definitely lied about the ufo images he made, and perhaps his whole story is a fabrication, but I think that pathological liars generally lie all the time about all kinds of things, compulsively, and I’ve never heard anything to indicate that about him (they also don't generally get nervous when they lie, from what I've read). It seems that if he was lying about his entire ufo experience then his lying was confined to that subject, as far as I’ve heard anyway. And he didn’t embellish his story over the years - he only said he encountered an unoccupied alien craft the one time, and that never changed/evolved, which is interesting. Assuming that he was lying about all of it though, still doesn't explain the kind of scientific features within his writings that we've touched on above, and man that still bugs me.)
 
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Yes! Yes! Yes! The paracast is back! This is why I signed up, I nearly forgot.

Not one wacky hippy weirdo or regressive left femininist issue in sight and there you go just a proper good discussion of the topic with a super super quality guest.

Get this man back on for a Ray Stanford month and someone please...PLEASE get this man in touch with jacques.
 
Stanford seems to want us to believe that he was once an impressionable young person who believed his own experiences represented some sort of alien contact, and that he has since grown out of that state of mind, except that he seems to believe he's still psychic to some extent. That's as diplomatic as it can be put. Consequently, one cannot be blamed for thinking that it's possible that whatever evidence Stanford claims to have may be no more authentic than the rest of the hoaxer's he's outed, except perhaps for its relatively high sophistication and production quality, which remains to be seen.

He only wants to release his evidence if he can get a best seller and a high profile endorsement out of it.
Therefore his motivation seems entirely self-serving, and whether it's true or not he's still made his way to the best-seller's list. The bottom line here is that photos, films, and the debunking of other hoaxers doesn't prove that the objects he has pictures of are in fact alien craft, and whatever Chris or Vallée or anyone else has to say about them doesn't change that. Stanford is only positioning himself to come out ahead materially, and I find that really unimpressive.

Apart from the disclaimer above, I did find his debunking stories believable. Personally, I've never bought into any particular contactee claim, and the abduction phenomenon is just as problematic. I believe that in some cases a phenomena has been experienced that leads the experiencer to the conclusion that they have communicated with something alien, or been through an abduction type experience, but I can't say which cases are genuine with any certainty. As @Goggs Mackay put it on one of the round-table episodes, it's the preponderance of evidence in general that makes it seem reasonable to believe it's not all just hoaxes or misidentification.

The Truth Uncensored: Ray Stanford Uncensored

Ray Stanford's Background
 
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I’d like to respond to the various objections that Ray Stanford offered to the Daniel Fry case.

Rather than arguing for the veracity of Daniel Fry’s story, which is still in my “grey basket,” I offer these responses to illustrate that while his story may not be true, the points raised against it are in many cases unconvincing, and sometimes simply untrue. So I still wonder about it, and specifically I wonder about the many surprising scientific claims that still remain unexplained to my satisfaction.

I suppose I was hoping for something more substantive to disprove this case, like someone who was working at White Sands with him at that time coming forward to say that he wasn't there that day, or perhaps a confession to his wife or a friend that he'd made it up. But apparently that didn't happen in the >30 years of telling his story.

“Z-Grade Sci-Fi writing” in The White Sands Incident

Ray: Daniel Fry’s books read like “kid’s stuff.”
Me: To be fair, he was a rocket instrumentation technician with no writing experience beyond technical writing at his job. If I had experienced an audio conversation with an alien being and ridden aboard an empty alien cargo craft to NYC and back, then written about it, I could scarcely expect to do much better, and I doubt that many of us could.

But I don’t necessarily accept his story as true, to me that's only one of many possibilities. But I do have some valid questions about specific scientific aspects of his books, which are generally written in deceptively simple language. Because there are a number of striking scientific claims in his books which only appear –even more- valid today than when he wrote his books. Sure, they’re written about in simple terms, as we’ll see below, but the substance is often keenly sophisticated and has on many occasions been validated by the latest developments in theory, observation, and contemporary experimentation. That’s 180-degrees in opposition to all of the other contactee stories, which are readily disproven by known physics and astronomy, and which grow increasingly laughable with the passage of time

And I’d like to point out that someone’s writing talent isn’t a useful measure for the veracity of their claims. So I’m looking for factual disproofs within his writings. And I’ve found a few questionable items, and identified what he claimed to have inserted into his first book to get the clearance to publish it. But I’ve also found many absolutely striking scientific concepts and predictions that can’t be explained away as confirmation bias or coincidence. So I want to understand how that happened, because it’s anomalous. And his descriptions of dark energy and gravitational field propulsion are eerily prescient, which merits careful scrutiny.

Lighting at the time of The White Sands Incident
Ray: a ~76% waning gibbous Moon just under the horizon at late dusk couldn’t have produced any appreciable light.
Me: Why not? With any light cloud cover in the upper atmosphere, the light of the Moon just below the horizon could easily illuminate atmospheric moisture or particulates to cast a glow well above the horizon, just as the light of the Sun lingers in the sky for quite some time after the Sun sets below the horizon. So it’s only a question of relative magnitude, and at the onset of night the diffuse illumination of moonlight can be reasonably bright.

Daniel Fry’s technical qualifications
Ray: Daniel Fry was a “Z-rate engineer," he was only self-trained.
Me: It’s true that he was self-taught and learned on the job. But as we’ll see below, he designed and built transducers for Aerojet’s military rocket research programs, which made the company millions of dollars. And he was one of the twelve founding members of the Pacific Rocket Society, established in 1944, and he picked up a lot of experience with their early rocket tests. So clearly he was quite capable. And I would also hope that none of the people working at the largest US military base engaged in rocket experimentation were “Z-rate engineers.”

And I find this to be an odd criticism from a self-taught paleontologist who has made significant contributions to the field without any academic training. History is rife with examples of very accomplished autodidacts. I admire such people. Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist, and one of the most brilliant minds in the history of science, who, I should mention, discovered and formulated the principles of gravitoelectromagnetism in 1893 – over twenty years before Einstein’s general theory of relativity codified those principles of gravitation into the academic canon of physics, and he also may have been the first scientist to propose the existence of gravitational waves (which were only detected for the first time last year, over a century later, by the LIGO project):
Oliver Heaviside - Wikipedia

White Sands personnel on the base on the 4th of July
Ray: White Sands is closed down on the Fourth of July with only a skeleton crew of essential personnel on the base.
Me: Do you know this for a fact, or is this supposition? I’d like to see proof; we'd need to see the base records to know for sure. Perhaps John Greenwald could help with an FOIA request for those base personnel records. It seems to me that a rocket testing crew in the middle of a project might stick around over a holiday break to get back to work early the following day.

The description of the “differential accumulator”
Ray: Daniel Fry is trying to impress the dumb reader by using a technical term.
Me: He’s describing an energy storage device that’s not a chemical battery and not a reactor, so what else is he supposed to call it? It seems like a fair term to use. Calling it a “battery” would give the false impression that it’s like a Duracell, and that can’t be accurate because one would imagine that the energy density would be vastly greater than a common chemical battery. And any other applicable term is going to sound even wordier, like “electrical potential storage device.” I suppose it might be as simple as some kind of capacitor, but that seems unlikely given the problems of storing energy that way (which is why we use chemical batteries in our smart phones instead of capacitors). Perhaps it consists of some kind of room-temperature superconducting magnet that stores electromagnetic energy in kinetic form, or even an L-C circuit that oscillates the energy between static and kinetic states. We don’t know, but the term “differential accumulator” seems like a reasonable term to explain what it does, without getting into these kinds of details.

It just seems like there’s an unwarranted level of hostility in this kind of critique, rather than substance. A similar objection is raised with the use of the word “amplitude.” What’s so objectionable about that? “Amplitude” is a common word synonymous with “magnitude” – anyone with half a brain knows exactly what it means. In fact I’m hard-pressed to think of another word that would convey the same idea accurately. The mockery/hostility I’m hearing in these objections seem more emotional than factual. I mean, it would be one thing if Daniel Fry was using these words wrong. But he’s not. So what’s the problem?

The magnetic field propulsion description
Ray: This description of magnetic field propulsion sounds like a seventh-grader writing sci-fi.
Me: This description appears to be a red herring. A far more compelling gravitational field propulsion description was provided in the 1973 edition of the book, which I included in my previous post. For a host of excellent reasons, a gravitational field propulsion system is currently the most credible concept for an interstellar or even advanced terrestrial propulsion system. And since gravitational field propulsion is a central theme in all of his other books, the 1973 description of that operating principle is the one to critique.

EDIT: I completely forgot about this - Daniel Fry always described the propulsion system of the craft, in his talks and interviews, as a gravitational field propulsion system. Here he is explicitly describing the gravitational field propulsion system in relation to the absence of g-forces that he experienced aboard the alien vessel, during his interview on the Long John Nebel show on August 1st, 1958 (this unique characteristic of a gravitational field propulsion system didn't appear in the academic literature until 36 years later, in 1994):
Daniel Fry describes gravitational field propulsion effect on the Long John Nebel show 8/1/58

Daniel Fry’s description of gravitational repulsion at the intergalactic scale anticipated the discovery of the “dark energy” effect 42 years later in 1998
Ray: Fry didn’t say anything to indicate that, and other people were talking about this kind of thing at the time.
Me: Yes he did state it very explicitly. Please see my earlier post; it’s indisputable. And it’s not an effect that a clever person could just figure out on their own: the world’s top astronomers were shocked when they discovered this effect. If you can cite a source where someone else is describing an intergalactic gravitational repulsion at the time of Daniel Fry’s writings I would be very grateful to see it because I’ve never found another reference about it from that era.

Daniel Fry’s 1954 descriptions of the characteristics of gravitational field propulsion accurately anticipate the first theoretical descriptions of the subject published in Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 warp drive paper
Ray: You’re reading into it, he didn’t do any such thing.
Me: I touched on this a little in my previous post, and I wrote a chapter on the subject for Sean Donovan’s comprehensive 2014 biography of Daniel Fry. So I’ll just offer two examples of this and we can get into it in more detail later on if anyone’s interested.

In this brief passage, Daniel Fry describes the absence of g-forces within the gravitational field propulsion system of the craft, even under high accelerations. The absence of acceleration forces within a gravitational field propulsion mechanism weren’t described in the scientific literature until Miguel Alcubierre published his 1994 paper about gravitational field propulsion:

“A moment later, the ground suddenly fell away from the ship with incredible rapidity. I say that the ground `fell away’ because I did not feel the slightest sense of motion myself, and the ship was as steady as a rock. In spite of the fact that we must have been accelerating at the rate of at least ten g’s, I could have sworn that we were standing still.”
The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1954

And that’s now known to be true – Alcubierre clearly describes how a passenger and his craft propelled in this manner would “free fall” along a geodesic, so no accelerations are experienced within the field, even when executing rapid accelerations in speed or direction. This is absolutely unique to a gravitational propulsion system. Within a gravitational field propulsion system a craft can execute hairpin supersonic maneuvers with no stresses on the craft or the passenger, as if they were motionless – the world outside a window in the craft would appear to scroll around erratically like a movie projected on a wall. But it gets even more interesting with this next passage that explains a more exotic technical detail of a gravitational field propulsion system:

“’But in this case,” I thought, ‘why am I not floating around in the air as things are supposed to do within a missile which is in free fall?’”

‘The answer to this also should be fairly obvious,’ was the reply. ‘Before the ship was put into motion, you were resting upon the seat, and there was a force of one gravity acting between your body and the seat. Since the force which accelerates both the ship and your body acts in exact proportion to the mass, and since the earth’s gravity continues to act upon both, the original force between your body and the seat will remain constant, except that it will decrease as the force of gravity of the planet decreases with distance.’”
The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1954

This is exactly correct, and I’ve seen no other references about this effect in the literature of that era. Alcubierre explained in 1994 that the region within the acceleration field remains “flat” with respect to spacetime geometry, so conditions aboard the craft would remain unaltered. But an external gravitational field intersecting the craft would pass right through the field and persist as if the gravitational propulsion field doesn’t exist. So hovering above the Earth, the passenger and objects within the craft would still feel the Earth’s gravity, until they rose far enough from the surface of the Earth that the field became too weak for any observer at that height to experience the gravitational field of the planet. To the best of my knowledge, nobody understood this until Alcubierre published his paper 40 years after Daniel Fry published his book The White Sands Incident in 1954.

The nature of the scientific process

Ray: Science isn’t conducted by looking at later findings and comparing them to earlier claims.
Me: That’s exactly wrong: this is precisely how science is conducted. A claim is advanced in the form of a prediction, and then it’s either confirmed or refuted by subsequent theoretical developments and/or experimental observations. And time and time again I’ve found that many of Daniel Fry’s assertions accurately describe subsequent developments in the scientific literature. That’s what makes his books so unique and scientifically compelling – no other alleged contactee can boast a series of accurate scientific predictions. So how did he do it? I wish I knew; none of the explanations I’ve considered seem to satisfactorily explain all the various aspects of this case.

Daniel Fry’s discomfort when suddenly in free fall
Ray: Astronauts don’t report this when they become weightless.
Me: Astronauts never experience instantaneous free-fall, their rise out of the gravitational field is gradual and the burn-out of a rocket engine isn’t instantaneous. In Fry’s account, he experiences an essentially instantaneous change from 1 earth-gravity to free-fall, which would indeed be an alarming and uncomfortable experience, like having the floor instantly drop out from underneath your chair. Here’s the description in Fry’s book:

“Instantly the compartment light came on. After the total darkness in which I had been, the light was blinding. While I was attempting to adjust my eyes to the light, my stomach suddenly leaped upward into my chest. For a moment I could plainly feel my heart beating against the lower end of my throat, while my lungs and other upper organs seemed determined to extrude through my ears. I had been through steep dives and sharp pull-outs in airplanes, and have ridden in many amusement devices calculated to produce the feeling of weightlessness, but had never felt anything like this before. There was no sensation of falling. It simply felt as though my organs, having been released from a heavy strain, were springing upward like elastic bands, when released from tension. Fortunately this sensation was of short duration. In a few seconds I felt almost normal again.”
The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1954, p. 62

Personally I wouldn’t want to unexpectedly experience a change from 1g to free-fall in an instant. And I think it’s rather a bit of hyperbole for dramatic impact to state “my lungs and other upper organs seemed determined to extrude through my ears,” but I think a little exaggeration helps convey the sense of dismay and discomfort that anyone would experience in that situation. Because even though the change in acceleration (~9.8ms^-2 to zero) is fairly small in this instance, the rate of change of acceleration (what physicists call “jerk”) can produce significant mechanical stresses, upon the body or anything else, and in this case the jerk appears to be very high.

Daniel Fry scientific sophistication
Ray: Fry was a poor technician with no real science training and little scientific understanding.
Me: He was a successful rocket instrumentation technician working with major US defense contractors like Aerojet, on cutting-edge rocket systems under development after WWII. This is all documented in Sean Donovan’s book Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth? I assume that he worked alongside Operation Paperclip rocket scientists, and must have held a security clearance to work at the base on these projects, because they were working on advancing the V2 rocket technology. And his books demonstrate a firm grasp of the key concepts of nuclear physics to thermodynamics to relativity, as well as prescient descriptions of the dark energy effect and gravitational field propulsion physics that weren’t elucidated in the scientific literature until decades later. And the ability to describe physics in layman terms is a sign of real understanding. Louis de Broglie attributed this apropos quote to Albert Einstein: "that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.'”

Regarding Daniel Fry’s professional credentials, they are actually rather impressive – Sean Donovan did an amazing job of researching his background and interviewing family members and digging up the history of his professional career for his biography about him. Sean writes:

“A custom measurement system utilizing what would eventually be called a "transducer" was built. It consisted of a tiny thin-walled tube wrapped in wires, and when the pressure in the tube changed the resistance of the wires changed, which could be measured on an oscillograph, an early type of oscilloscope. Although Daniel didn't create these transducers for the Eaton Canyon Project, this is likely where he learned how they worked. Daniel would eventually design, build and install these and more advanced types of pressure transducers for Aerojet, making Crescent Engineering millions in sales.”
Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth?, Sean Donovan, 2014, p. 40

“As the war drew to a close and the demand for rockets subsided, all on-site production ended in September of 1945. In April six months earlier, Daniel returned to full-time work at Crescent, which now had 35 employees, and worked as a supervisor of plant number two. Crescent was performing contract work for other large rocket companies during the blossoming rocket age, including the manufacture of stainless steel components for Aerojet's liquid-fuel JATOs. The work that kept Daniel busy at plant number two was fixing thousands of solid-fuel Aerojet JATO rockets. A number of planes had plunged into the trees during takeoff because the carbon shields that protected the metal rocket nozzles were not properly fitted, and during take-off they would vibrate, disintegrate and substantially reduce thrust. The JATO revision work kept Daniel and plant number two busy for six months until the end of the war on September 2, 1945.”
Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth?, Sean Donovan, 2014, p. 41

“Early in 1949, with Elma bearing a third child, Daniel left his family in Grants Pass, Oregon and took up a job with Aerojet General, which was now testing and launching some of the largest rocket motors ever built. The rockets were launched to perform atmospheric experiments at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Aerojet knew of Crescent Engineering and Daniel because he had worked for them during the war, fixing their JATO rockets. It was during this time at the White Sands Proving Ground that Daniel had his life-altering experience.

Below is Daniel's story about this event, which is now combined into one complete book[1] for the first time. It begins on July 4, 1949[2]. Daniel Fry, now 41 years old, is setting up test equipment including transducers for upcoming static tests of the Aerobee rocket engines. The "Aero" in Aerobee stood for Aerojet and "bee" for "Bumblebee," a name given to it by the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) which sponsored the research. In early 1946, as the supply of captured German V-2 rockets was used up, a general-purpose research rocket was suggested. There were various types of Aerobees and Daniel helped to test a 12-meter-tall variant called the XASR-SC-1, a helium-pressurized rocket which flew for the first time in late 1949. The Aerobee had two sections, the first was a solid-propellant rocket booster and the second was a single-stage liquid-fuel spin-stabilized rocket. The booster was necessary to bring the rocket up to speed at the top of the launch tower where the fins would take effect, the solid-fuel booster was then jettisoned a couple of seconds later and the liquid-fuel section would take over. The first Aerobees reached altitudes of 120 kilometers with a payload of 68 kilograms, and would ultimately see over a thousand launches in broad applications by the U.S. military research agencies. Daniel's part in the tests was to design, build and attach the transducers to the rockets on the test stands where they measured thrust performance and other parameters.”
Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth?, Sean Donovan, 2014, pp. 41-42

The alleged UFO footage and photographs
Ray: Daniel Fry faked the film and photographs of UFO’s.
Me: Yes he did. And that is the single most compelling reason to discount his entire story.

But there are two issues that weigh on my mind about this. I’ve already mentioned the first issue: this fakery seemed to comprise a fairly brief and shameful era in his story, and it’s possible that he did this to provide some evidence to support his story. Even good people sometimes do bad things. Here’s what Timothy Good had to say about this in his 1998 book Alien Base:

“I have always been dubious about the authenticity of Fry's 16 mm films of UFOs (copies of which are in my possession), particularly an object he said he saw in Oregon in May 1964, which to me looks like a couple of lampshades or similarly shaped devices fixed together and suspended with fine twine. He went into some detail as to the circumstances of the filming, and claimed that some frames show the limb of a cloud coming in front of the saucer. I remain unconvinced; the movement of the craft gives every indication of being a suspended fake. Perhaps I am wrong. But does this prove that Fry was lying about all his previous experiences? I think not. Most probably, he thought that a few fabricated movie films of "saucers" would bolster his unprovable claims.”

I’m frequently tempted to write the whole thing off because of these faked images, and I think that others are wholly justified to do so.

But the other thing that weighs heavily on my mind is the combination of the subsequently confirmed scientific assertions, and the apparent incongruity of this deception with the rest of his life, which Sean Donovan researched exhaustively and wrote about in great detail. We’ve already touched on a few of the scientific topics that, while written about in simple terms, are very striking in many respects.

But after reading (and providing a complete editorial revision) of Sean’s book about Daniel Fry, he sincerely strikes me as a guy who started from nothing and made something of himself through hard work and independent study, and ended up working alongside some of the brightest defense industry minds on the planet, within the early rocket research program. He was nothing at all like the weird, fickle, and often stupid characters who populated the “contactee scene.”

I’ve listened closely to his radio interviews and his audio talks on scientific subjects, and he comes across as a very earnest, knowledgeable, credible scientific technician with a better grasp of a wide variety of scientific subjects than Ray Stanford gives him credit for. His answers in response to a dizzying variety of questions related to ufology are always thoughtful, sensible, and often quite insightful. His story didn’t “evolve” over time – every re-telling of his alleged experience at White Sands remains unchanging, even across the decades of audio I have of his talks and interviews.

And he had a Lot of truly great ideas. For example, in one of his science talks called “The Many Varieties of Energy,” he closes with a speculation perhaps one day we’ll be able to convert matter into antimatter, under extreme pressures and temperatures, and thereby permanently solve the energy problem for human civilization. He argues, rightly, that such a process would not cost energy (other than setting up the proper conditions) because mass-energy would be conserved in the transformation, and that charge is also conserved in such a process. It’s a brilliantly novel and sensible idea that nobody else seems to have ever thought of before, to the best of my knowledge. And although it’s assumed to be impossible, very recently a theoretical physicist at CERN by the name of Dragan Hajdukovic has published a fascinating theory about antimatter and gravity that suggests precisely this same idea: that the universe periodically re-collapses (but not into a singularity) and “bounces” into a new Big Bang – but in the process all of the matter in the universe is converted into antimatter. The universe would then evolve exactly as our own matter universe has, because the laws of physics appear to hold perfectly for antimatter, until it recollapses again and the antimatter is converted into matter again with the next "bounce." And this would solve one of the biggest conundrums in astrophysics today: the baryogenesis problem. In this model, baryon number is conserved over vast timescales as antimatter-dominated universes oscillate with matter-dominated universes.

And decade after decade I’ve seen this kind of thing happen, unique to Daniel Fry’s work: something he said is verified or echoed in new scientific papers. And ultimately, that’s why I can’t just write it off as just another crazy story by some opportunistic hoaxer.
 
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Get this man back on for a Ray Stanford month and someone please...PLEASE get this man in touch with jacques.

Fastastic show! So how do we connect Stanford with Vallee? Gene or Chris do either of you have Vallee's contact info? I bet Alejandro Rojas does from the IUFOC.. Also, someone should get a kickstarter going to pay flight fare to get Vallee to Stanfords house ASAP! I'd chip in $$$ for the cause.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G890A using Tapatalk
 
I have to admit I'm struggling with starting to listen to this episode.

Because I really struggle with a dude that claims to have proof and understanding of what UFOs are, and won't release it.

For decades.

Except he'll tell anyone about it that will listen. Sorry, that's not how science works. You either shut up until you have your ducks in a row, or you tell everyone and release the data so it can be verified. That's what boned cold fusion.

The only reason why he's even in my grey basket zone is because of how highly Chris talks about him.
 
Stanford seems to want us to believe that he was once an impressionable young person who believed his own experiences represented some sort of alien contact, and that he has since grown out of that state of mind, except that he seems to believe he's still psychic to some extent. That's as diplomatic as it can be put. Consequently, one cannot be blamed for thinking that it's possible that whatever evidence Stanford claims to have may be no more authentic than the rest of the hoaxer's he's outed, except perhaps for its relatively high sophistication and production quality, which remains to be seen.

He only wants to release his evidence if he can get a best seller and a high profile endorsement out of it.
Therefore his motivation seems entirely self-serving, and whether it's true or not he's still made his way to the best-seller's list. The bottom line here is that photos, films, and the debunking of other hoaxers doesn't prove that the objects he has pictures of are in fact alien craft, and whatever Chris or Vallée or anyone else has to say about them doesn't change that. Stanford is only positioning himself to come out ahead materially, and I find that really unimpressive.

Apart from the disclaimer above, I did find his debunking stories believable. Personally, I've never bought into any particular contactee claim, and the abduction phenomenon is just as problematic. I believe that in some cases a phenomena has been experienced that leads the experiencer to the conclusion that they have communicated with something alien, or been through an abduction type experience, but I can't say which cases are genuine with any certainty. As @Goggs Mackay put it on one of the round-table episodes, it's the preponderance of evidence in general that makes it seem reasonable to believe it's not all just hoaxes or misidentification.

The Truth Uncensored: Ray Stanford Uncensored

Ray Stanford's Background
My only question is: Does anyone in ufology ever have a "best seller" from the vantage point of mainstream publishing? I realize that in 1987 Whitley Strieber ht paydirt with COMMUNION, but that is because he created a new genre of the fictional non-fiction book. But ufology is still a special niche within the overall publishing world. So even if Ray Stanford had a popular book in this small pond, I doubt this would lead to riches and fame in the larger ocean. I don't see a real problem with seeking financial return on his investment into a book. That's the American way. I just doubt the proceeds would allow him to buy a new Lexus, much less give him a life of ease and security.
 
I have to admit I'm struggling with starting to listen to this episode.

Because I really struggle with a dude that claims to have proof and understanding of what UFOs are, and won't release it.

For decades.

Except he'll tell anyone about it that will listen. Sorry, that's not how science works. You either shut up until you have your ducks in a row, or you tell everyone and release the data so it can be verified. That's what boned cold fusion.

The only reason why he's even in my grey basket zone is because of how highly Chris talks about him.
I guess it depends on what you are looking for. After decades immersed in ufology, I have given up on ever finding out "The Truth". I applaud people who still seek this Holy Grail of UFO/Alien reality. However, I would suggest that there are a lot of people that have become ufology agnostics with the passage of time in the field. Such people (me) tend to listen to people like Ray Stanford for the pure entertainment and enrichment offered. Ray is a great story teller, someone I would love to sit next to on a long flight. He tells a good yarn and gives us a glimpse of a time period in ufology before many of us were out of diapers or even alive. During the Contactee movement, I was still learning as a tiny tot that there are dire consequences of pulling the dog's tail! Bottomline: I do not know if Ray has the truth about UFOs. I am a jaded old guy and think not. Nonetheless, he is fascinating. At least he isn't claiming that he was selected to be the Earth representative of BlueJays from Space, a Secret Space program elite member, the creator of protocols for summoning UFOs, or any of that rot.
 
I have to admit I'm struggling with starting to listen to this episode.

Because I really struggle with a dude that claims to have proof and understanding of what UFOs are, and won't release it.

For decades.

Except he'll tell anyone about it that will listen. Sorry, that's not how science works. You either shut up until you have your ducks in a row, or you tell everyone and release the data so it can be verified. That's what boned cold fusion.

The only reason why he's even in my grey basket zone is because of how highly Chris talks about him.
This episode is mostly about the contactees, not about Ray's UFO evidence.
 
Fastastic show! So how do we connect Stanford with Vallee? Gene or Chris do either of you have Vallee's contact info? I bet Alejandro Rojas does from the IUFOC.. Also, someone should get a kickstarter going to pay flight fare to get Vallee to Stanfords house ASAP! I'd chip in $$$ for the cause.
You're kidding right? Vallée is a venture capitalist. Do you really think he couldn't get there without a Kick Starter campaign ... lol.
 
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Very entertaining show. Ray had some great anecdotes about Adamski and other contactees, and I liked his analysis and lines of thought in the way he took apart the contactees he talked about. It was an interesting statement at the end of the show when Ray said that, after what he said about the contactees during the show, he hoped doubters wouldn't continue to put him on the same shelf as those screwball contactees.

I do have a question, particularly for those who know Ray and have reviewed his data. How many UFOs does Ray say he has seen and recorded? Late in the show Ray said that UFO investigators shouldn’t be studying UFO reports, they should do what Ray does, study the objects. It was difficult to clearly understand his wording (at 1:50:35 in Paracast+) but I believe he said that he has recorded and photographed “thousands and thousands” of UFOs. Is that what he has said? Some time ago I heard someone say that Ray has recorded so many UFOs (apparently with triangulation) that he says he has discovered a pattern in the different sizes of the types of UFO “crafts". Is that correct?
 
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