If you are indeed a new poster here (doubtful) you are being overly antagonistic and condescending towards me and you appeared to attack an important member of the ufological community. Since you have decided to remain anonymous, you are a troll until proven otherwise and I suggest that you contact me privately and introduce yourself. As for the Corpus Christi sighting, here is why I said you do not know what you are talking about. There is no way in hell the following description could be of a Star Wars" project. It's funny how so many purely anecdotal cases get a free pass, but when Ray doesn't make his visual evidence public, people immediately attempt to crucify him. All I can say is if you have a problem w/ Ray's MO, TALK TO RAY! Don't whine at me. I'll even give you his address! Stop w/ the kick-the-messenger routine. It's getting old and I'm getting thin skinned!
Now, I'll let Ray continue to shoot off his mouth—sorry if you have a problem w/ it. It's your personal problem and you'll have to fucking deal with it...
From the unpublished book; ...and my dog sings Chopin: The Ray Stanford Interview part 1
[Ray Stanford:]Both of them [his two kids] simultaneously said “Daddy, Look at that! What’s that object?” They both pointed to the same place in the sky, about 50 degrees above the northeastern horizon at what I subsequently judged to be about the 5,000-foot level. About a mile high there was a strange object coming across.
Understand, I grew up in the Corpus Christi area and I was familiar with the air traffic [patterns]. For instance the Naval Air Station to the south of us. And there was the International Airport off to the northwest and a few small 0airfields in the area. This didn’t have any resemblance to any conventional aircraft. So immediately I started to get out my Super-eight movie camera (with a high-quality Canon ten-power zoom telephoto) to film it. I checked to make sure the lens was still set at maximum telephoto . . .
[Christopher O'Brien]. . . and made sure the lens cap was off [chuckles] . . .
Like a good hunter I was very experienced at aiming this ten-power telephoto lens and it was no problem getting it [quickly centered] on the object. Of course, at ten-power I could see much more than with the naked eye and it was immediately obvious that I was looking at and filming a real UFO.
This thing was odd, something totally strange. Even odd in relation to what we normally think of as a “UFO,” because most of us (probably because of cartoons [chuckles]) think of a UFO as a disc---often with a dome on it. We think of the dome as being on the top with the flange pretty-much horizontal. Maybe somewhat tilted. But in this case this object was flying out of the northeast toward the southwest. Its course took it almost directly straight over us. Instead of the way we might normally think of UFOs flying, this disc was traveling with its plane of radial symmetry, its flange (in other words), with the dome pointing in the opposite direction of its direction of travel.
So the kids caught sight of it as it was approaching . . .
That is correct. I don’t know if the woman, her daughter and the man had already spotted it before my kids shouted about it and pointed it out to me or not, but at this point they were watching it just like we were . . . So I started filming it. The whole thing was glowing and around the dome and flange had a kind of mother-of-pearl look with these pink and turquoisey-blue/whitish, iridescent colors revolving around the dome and across the flange. But right at the edge of the flange there seemed to be six emitters. When you look at the film (because of the telephoto and I was shooting at the highest film speed), around the edge were these six things you could occasionally make out (in the sharpest frames) these dark shovel things sticking out at six positions around the rim. They are emitting blue-green flames . . . What most people would think of as the bottom of the disc (that's pointed in the direction of travel) there is an area of pink that is also six-sided that is glowing a radiant pink. In the middle of this six-sided area is what looks like (and the super-eight millimeter film shows this with remarkable clarity) a tower. It looks like (although it may not be) a girded tower. It's on the axis of radial symmetry.
I've never heard of that description before.
I've made a deliberate attempt to locate such cases and there are several excellent multi-witnessed cases with girded towers. Believe-it-or-not. When I first started filming, suddenly this object appeared to increase its diameter by maybe three times which would probably be about nine times the area. This upset me.
You know how you always think the worst is going to happen, well I thought one of the twenty-two elements of glass [in the lens] had separated and dropped out to give me an artificial magnification! I had checked before I had put the camera up to my eye and it was on maximum telephoto so how could the thing suddenly have become substantially larger? And so I probably let out an explicative that "my dang camera lens had broken" and I put the camera down from my eye and shook it to see if I could hear the lens elements rattling. [chuckles]
My daughter (who is very intuitive even though she was only seven years-old) asked "Daddy, what's wrong?" I told her "my lens had broken and made [the object] artificially magnified" and she said, "we saw it instantly get bigger." This [enlarging effect] was confirmed by the woman, her twenty-one year-old daughter [standing at the end of the pier], and her husband [who was now back at the beginning of the pier]. So I put my camera back up and resumed filming--relieved that my lens was in good shape.
After I had run out of film after the fourth of this procession of seven or eight objects [had flown over] all six of us on the pier discussed [the apparent momentary increase in size]. We all had a good parallax separation [on the pier] and I asked the man if he thought the thing had dropped down toward us and he said, "no it just enlarged." His wife said, "it just enlarged to me," and her daughter [said] "that's the way I saw it too."
And you got this all on film?
Yes. So apparently it hadn't shot toward us, it had optically--or by some other means, enlarged itself. I don't know if it had somehow (by a process unknown to us) increased the effect of the strong and weak forces within the atom. If it were able to control or compress (relative to the outside) its passage of time, time would then effect the action of the strong and weak forces and therefor it could change its size. But it had the complete appearance of changing size, three times its diameter so it would have had to come one-third its former distance straight down toward us. But it hadn't--we had all that separation and we could tell it hadn't dashed down.
I have probably seen, maybe several hundred reports describing this effect. Even then, when you see it yourself your gut reaction is that it zoomed down toward me instead of enlarged. [chuckles]
I've actually seen that effect too. [New Paltz, NY September 1979] We could have sworn the objects were hurtling down toward us.
They might have been. [chuckles] What was fortunate was that we had the separation with our relative positions on the pier and the parallax from being spread out. We were at the beginning, middle and the end. I have a satellite or high-altitude photograph of it in my photo archive (that I've picked up off the Internet). It's quite a long pier. Anyway, I continued filming and while I'm filming this [first object] the kids began to shout again that another one was coming, on the same course, from the northeast. Thank God for kid's observational abilities. In each case [the procession of objects] were coming from the direction of Eagleside, TX. The Bay of Corpus Christi curves around and you have this little town over to the northeast called Eagleside and I knew there was a Coast Guard base over there. You have to cover all your bases so even if you saw a little green man winking out the window, you still want to check [all prosaic explanations] in case you have a film of a balloon. I checked with the Coast Guard Station and they had released absolutely nothing and they had no idea what these things might have been. So then first object changed its course when it was a little bit southeast of overhead, then it started climbing. Not straight up but at a very steep angle of about 85 to 87 degrees--within three to five degrees of vertical. Instead of continuing on toward the southwest, this thing started to climb like it was going into outer space and disappeared.
How long did this take?
I don't know. I would occasionally glance over and watch it but I had turned my camera to film the other one coming out of the northeast because at that point it was closer and you're going to get better resolution on the one that is closer. And indeed, they appeared to be identical-type objects. So anyway the second one came out of the northeast and I started filming it. It didn't pull any shenanigans like artificially magnifying itself. So I got the second one, then I got a third one and part of a fourth one before I ran out of film. What is neat about this footage is that while they are in different positions in the sky I've got them edge on; I've got them to where what we would normally think of as the bottom part of the flange. The tower on it is tilted almost at a 40-degree angle toward the camera so you can see that girder-like structure. And then I've got them where you see fully the dome and the slope of the flange. So I've got an excellent number of perspectives where the plane of radial symmetry is turned to different positions so you get a good total look at these objects.
So they all seemed identical?
The [first seven] seemed identical. So the first object changed its course when it was a little bit southeast of overhead and then it started to climb like it was going into outer space and disappeared. If I recall correctly, after I ran out of film (after filming four of the objects}. It was either the fourth or the fifth object that stopped just a little southeast of overhead. The others had not stopped. They had gone almost vertical at that location and this one stopped and we wondered why. Then the kids began to shout again, "Daddy, there's another one!" Sure enough, another one approached until it got within a few diameters (beside and to the east) [of the stopped object] and then they flew up together. I wish I had filmed the two of them. You wonder why, when they have been going singly, one waits for the other and they go up together.
Go figure . . .
After six or 7 of these identical objects the last came along on exactly the same course and when each one got to that position (almost directly overhead), it would go almost straight up--disappearing into the distance into outer space. But the last one was totally different. From our position it was shaped exactly like if you took an hour-glass and removed the wood portion and leave only the glass three-dimensional figure-eight-shape. Something like that. Now place that to where it is revolving around that thin point of it in a horizontal plane. And as you're looking up at it it's revolving counter-clockwise. This little sound effect I'll make is the duration or the rate it took to turn one revolution. [He makes a trilling, bird-like sound that repeats after a one-second duration] That's the way I think of it [sonically]. It did the same thing as the other objects. When it got to that point overhead it went up just like the others. That was the end of that experience.
The film turned out even better than I anticipated because as you know, if you take a ten-power lens and hand hold the camera you are going to have some smear due to hand-motion. But because of the high shutter speed I was using, (that freezes the hand-motion very nicely) I had sharper images than I could see with the naked eye.
So this film shows structure . . .
It does indeed--it's shows excellent structure. I would mention that (after examining the film) the six emitters along the side seemed to fire around the side faster [at times]. When they fired in sequence it was kind of like a theater marquee. You almost get the feeling it's spinning around. Although I don't think the objects were spinning--judging from the film.
That reminds me of the Salida footage where you have that apparent effect of lights circling around an object, or the object spinning with lights lit on it . . .
. . . which I believe to be sequencing also--having seen the footage. In this case, when the sequencing seemed to be occurring very fast, the object appears to be round, but at times when it's slower you get the impression the edge of the flange (instead of actually being round) that it is six-sided. On the bottom where the so-called tower structure was (I suspect this was a physical structure) you can see certain things that seemed to be attached to that tower. One of them is a triangular structure--seemingly attached on to the tower.
Now I realize the six-side effect could be what I call the "geometric surround." There is an energy field around [some UFOs] that can actually distort the shape of the object. I am reminded of a case where a whole family saw [and photographed] what they described to everyone as a "flying saucer." They said it was round and had a dome on top of it, but when the pictures came out they had apparently froze this effect and you've got images of a square (or diamond-shaped) object with a dome on it.
There's the famous Japanese excellent videotape of a bona fide UFO taken by Kanazawa That shows an object that looks like the round energetic surround of it becomes distorted at times into a diamond shape just like the images from the several photographs taken by the Minnesota schoolteacher and his wife in Hawaii several years ago. You see exactly the same thing. I believe that to be the effect of what I call an energy field that has optical properties that are geometric. This can make it appear that the object has four, six or different angles. Anyway, this is thrillingly well resolved on my film. One would always love better, but still (considering this is a Super-Eight) film the camera lens system did a beautiful job.
We also have evidence within this film of the existence of a dipolar magnetic field around the object [effecting] the atmosphere around and ahead of this object to the extent that I describe this film as being "propulsion diagnostic". At least for that type of UFO. What we have on that film, in my opinion (and in the opinion of aerospace engineers who have likewise examined images from the film) could explain how UFOs could travel at hypersonic speed and not produce a shock wave. I'll leave the details [of this analysis] for the time of the publication of this film and its analysis. All who have seen the Corpus Christi film think it is hands-down the best movie or video ever taken of authentic UFOs. It is in fact propulsion diagnostic.
Were you able to follow-up on this sighting and check to see if anyone from nearby airfields got radar returns from the objects? Were there any other additional witnesses?
I checked all possible sources in the area. I knew, of course, that what we had seen were not balloons, but on the other hand because of people like Phil Klass and other skeptics out there, you want to cover all your bases. So I called the Naval Air Station, I called the Air Force, I called the Coast Guard Station, and I even called up to the Balloon Launch Center in Palestine [TX] where these huge skyhook-type balloons are launched . . .
. . . which coincidentally is where the Space Shuttle Columbia went down.
They all said they had no balloons [in the air at the time] that could account for these observations. [chuckles] Of course I didn't see how any balloons could account for these sightings anyway, but I wanted to cover all the bases. I knew at that point that most UFOs are "stealthy" shaped and I had some sense about "stealth" back then even though at that time "stealth aircraft" were not known about publicly. I realized they probably hadn't been tracked on radar but I did call the FAA to inquire about getting the records [for the time period when the sightings took place]. [END OF EXCERPT]
You are welcome....
I don't know about you all, but I couldn't imagine a more distinguished opening act!
