X Descending (8 page)

One illustration that I eventually completed was a painting of the 1964 Socorro, New Mexico sighting (Figure 17). The preliminary work for this painting led to several conversations with the principal witness, Lonnie Zamora, whom I finally met in person several years later. This is a classic case that remains significant because of the reliability and reputation of Lonnie himself as well as the evidence at the landing site that some type of vehicle had definitely been there. Even while the Air Force was assuring the public that the phenomenon was pure bunk, an article written in 1966 for a classified internal CIA publication (see Appendix C for details) said something else entirely. Hector Quintanilla, who was then head of Project Blue Book, detailed the Socorro sighting as an example of an incident in which they had no doubt the witness was honest and reliable in his report of what he saw. Furthermore, Quintanilla stated (for his CIA readers, not the public) that for all their efforts the Air Force investigators were never able to determine what had scared Zamora to the point of panic.

In the process of researching this case I made several trips to Socorro to photograph the area where the incident occurred. Arriving at the location and standing at the site I was immediately struck by how close Lonnie Zamora had actually come to the object. With just a few steps from his car he would have had a full view of it. Without standing where he stood it is impossible to fully appreciate that there is no way anyone could make a mistake about something seen at that close range. This sighting is even more visual and intriguing because of a unique symbol he reported seeing on the side of the vehicle. Zamora was extremely gracious with all my questions, and the photographs I took of the area were a great help in illustrating what he saw. But it was during this time that I also came across an excellent book on the case.

One of the first researchers to arrive on the scene in 1964 was Ray Stanford, who later authored the book titled
Socorro Saucer In A Pentagon Pantry
. I was extremely impressed with the amount of work Ray put into it and I recommend it highly. I was equally impressed with Ray himself because he was very detail-oriented and logical while still keeping the sense of excitement that came from his investigation. Over time, as I learned more about him, he continued to be a curiously unique character.

In 1964, he had organized Project Starlight International, a group created to do instrumented research on the UFO phenomenon—something virtually no one else had done before (or since, for the most part). Project Starlight International had facilities located in the hills outside of Austin, Texas. He had also delved into other diverse areas including parapsychological phenomena through his involvement with an organization called The Association For The Understanding Of Man. From reading his book on the Socorro case it was clear that he was very thoughtful and discerning as well as rational and critical in his approach to this phenomenon. Like me, he was after evidence, not anecdotes.

Needless to say I kept his name firmly in mind in case I ever ran across him.

I have never been one to join groups or organizations simply to keep from going it alone. As a result, I have always shied away from UFO groups because, in my experience, they are too often full of ineffectual and misguided “true believers”. Most of them are good-hearted and well intentioned, but too often there is a sense that they are merely looking for support for their own beliefs. Even so, I have attended a few conferences now and then, and it was at one such convention in San Antonio in 1984 that I rounded a corner and heard a lively conversation going on. In the exhibit hall someone was talking rapidly and enthusiastically, and it did not take me long to recognize him…Ray Stanford.

Standing in front of a set of photographs, he was busy describing something to a woman who was clearly fascinated. It was obvious from listening to him that whatever he was talking about, he knew it completely, and he was very enthusiastic when it came to the UFO phenomenon. Now, many years later, I cannot recall just what he was talking about, but I do remember thinking that his tone and his intensity made it clear he had a logical and critical mind. Even now I remember thinking that he was exactly the kind of man that the study of this phenomenon needed. Ray Stanford is definitely after the vehicles at the core of phenomenon. Looking back now I would never have imagined that simply by introducing myself, so much would change.

“...the “paradox” is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality “ought to be”.

—Richard Feynman

With our mutual interest in the Socorro case, Ray Stanford and I hit it off very well. Our conversation continued over lunch and before we were through he had invited me to visit him in Austin where I could see some of the interesting photographs and films he had taken over the years. I was not sure how soon I would be able to make the trip, but it was an offer I was not going to pass up.

Finally, in early 1986, I found myself sitting in his living room looking through a large photo album of very interesting and puzzling photographs. At the time I was not sure what to make of some, perhaps most, of them. They were not the poised and stylized or blurry and obscure images so often presented as evidence. Having had some experience with photography I find it safer to reserve judgment on most photographs, though, in this case, I had no doubt the ones he was showing me were legitimate. Then he decided to show a few images from a film he had taken only a few months before. He had already created slides from several frames of the film, and soon the slide projector and screen were in place and the room lights dimmed. That was when things took a serious turn.

Each of us has an internal mechanism for distilling truth, or at least what we believe to be truth. Some call it intuition. Others simply call it a gut instinct. Often it is jokingly referred to as a "bullshit meter." Whatever you call it, it is the process of looking and listening and filtering information as your mind sorts through the possibilities, all the while trying to deduce the truth. It happens fast, like a pinball rolling downhill bouncing off bumpers and anything else that will slow its descent. You feel it most acutely when confronted with a paradox…something that shouldn’t be, but is. When the first slide appeared on the screen that pinball began bouncing in my mind.

The screen filled with brilliant blue-sky background color and the typical fine grain of color slide film. There, in the center of the field of blue, was a small circular object frozen in time. The first thing I did was to stand and walk right up to the screen to study the image closely. From my experience with telephoto lenses and astronomical photography I was fairly accustomed to how photos of distant objects should look. I have seen plenty of images of alleged unidentified flying objects and I generally lose interest fairly quickly because most are either obvious hoaxes or do not present enough detail to draw useful conclusions. Staring at the small image on the screen however, my mind was rapidly moving through all the explanations I could think of. Even with a conviction that these things do exist, I was having a hard time facing the conclusion that, even by my own standards, this was the real thing. When I felt the hair on my arms begin to stand I knew the pinball had hit bottom. Stepping back from the screen, I remember the feeling I had as I said to Ray, “When this comes out, it will change everything!”

The image on the screen was a disc-shaped object, but it was unique in very specific ways. Rather than traveling in a horizontal plane (typical Frisbee fashion), the object was traveling on-edge with one full surface facing forward (
Figure 12
). Equally bizarre was a bright beam projecting forward from the center of the disc and extending for some distance ahead. It was clear from this and other images I saw, all still frames from the film, that the beam was pulsing, because its length varied in different frames. A plasma-like glow appeared to build up on the front surface of the disc, then coalesce inside a faint structure at the center, and rapidly pulse forward forming the narrow beam. As the beam projected, the surface of the disc would become slightly more visible, and around the central part of the disc were what appeared to be small reddish areas that gave me the impression of being emissions points firing on the surface. The most amazing aspect however, was the apparent effect of the beam on the air ahead. A subtle pattern appeared to fan out ahead of the oncoming disc.

My immediate impression on seeing the disc turned on-edge was that it was definitely not the most aerodynamic way to travel—unless an entirely different scheme of aerodynamics was involved. I stood staring at the image on the screen and began to wonder out loud what seemed to me to be the only reasonable conclusion. The beam had to be doing something to the air ahead, something that resulted in the air moving out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. My simple speculation at the time was that the length of the beam implied an effect that extended for some distance. If the atmosphere ahead were suddenly moved outward along the length of the beam, the vehicle would be at the trailing edge of a “vacuum corridor” that was constantly being created ahead of it. It was only speculation, and the beam itself did not necessarily imply anything about the actual power source that was driving the vehicle or keeping it from falling out of the sky, but there was information clearly visible in those images. The image I saw was only one of
eight
vehicles seen during the sighting, and, unfortunately, Ray ran out of film after the first four. But clearly, someone, somewhere, had this technology already in production for it to be flying over Corpus Christi, Texas on October 5, 1985.

Driving home from Ray’s house that afternoon I was troubled. I have since realized that it was because, for all my skepticism, I was not fully prepared to face the realization that I had finally seen compelling evidence of something totally inexplicable. From that afternoon on, the need to find a way of proving whether those vehicles—or any other for that matter—were or were not man-made, became a harsh reality. At the time the enormity of that task had not even begun to sink in.

Even with evidence, how do you present something like this to a scientific community that is reluctant to talk about it openly? Is every UFO or flying saucer actually part of a classified program of the government or military? Are black projects a universal explanation for any unknown object in the sky? I began to wonder if anyone, especially someone with an interest in this phenomenon, could ever make the case that a vehicle like the one Ray had on film could not have been engineered here and now in some secret lab. It would take someone with serious expertise at the cutting edge of science and engineering to make that case, presuming they had the courage to speak out. Fortunately, within a few years, things turned out better than I ever expected. When I discovered what had happened and realized that the proof had been demonstrated in such a simple but exciting way, I felt a little like the man who knew too much.