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.
“In the matter of physics the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see.”
—Albert Einstein
In all the years I have studied this phenomenon I have never come across anything like the vehicles Ray had filmed. As bizarre as on-edge beam-pulsing vehicles seem even now, did we have the technology to
build them prior to Ray having filmed them in 1985? Could these vehicles have been designed, tested, and manufactured in this country, or any other, in such complete secrecy that no one else had even conceived of or published similar designs?
As information spreads faster and faster, concepts and designs often end up being developed and worked on almost simultaneously by different people and groups around the world. When radical ideas appear there is usually some evolutionary path that can be followed in the science behind it. Often the same idea seems to occur spontaneously to several people at once. Rockets have been around since the Chinese were firing them off with black powder, and though it was many years before liquid fuel rockets appeared, the evolution of that propulsion is clear. Ever since the Wright brothers’ first airplane, virtually all aircraft still have wings of one type or another. The overall designs may have varied widely in moving from piston engines to jet power, but the science behind the changes has been evolutionary. If the Wright brothers’ second aircraft had been an SR-71, would such a radical leap in technology have raised questions about where the knowledge came from? How does the average person know what should and should not be possible? If, to quote Arthur C. Clarke, “Any technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from magic”, then to learn anything from an advanced technology we ourselves must have advanced far enough that we are able to recognize something in the “magic”. If we recognize something that leads to new ideas of what may be possible, and we then go back and validate those ideas in the lab, our knowledge will have forever advanced. Some of the magic might have gone away, but something even greater will have been revealed: the truth.
In the early 1990’s the Internet was still an exciting new world not yet commercialized and co-opted by huge corporations. Those were the days of 2400-baud modems and using Telnet connections to enter commands manually. The public was still virtually unaware of the Internet and it was hard to get access unless you worked for the government or military, or had an account through an educational institution. With an account at the University of North Texas, I taught myself UNIX and the Internet opened like a new frontier that in many ways seemed like magic.
As its popularity grew, one of the biggest benefits of having an Internet account was being able to subscribe to Usenet newsgroups where people with similar interests could exchange ideas. There were newsgroups on almost every topic people shared an interest in, including aviation and advanced aircraft. It is no secret that sightings of highly classified aircraft have sometimes been obscured by passing them off as UFO reports. Likewise, it became clear to many people interested in the UFO phenomenon that as our own technology became more advanced it would become harder to separate the real phenomenon from something of our own making. So, it only made sense to try to keep up with whatever information was available on advanced aircraft and classified projects. That information was often available very quickly on the Internet.
At that time there was one particular newsgroup (a ‘listserv’) where members discussed a variety of aviation topics, from the SR-71 to almost anything new and interesting. I was a subscriber, and each day or so I received an email packed with the latest messages sent to the “Skunkworks Digest”. The message subjects were always listed first making it easy to scan down the headings for anything interesting. On occasion there would be talk of the secret Aurora aircraft or exotic propulsion concepts, but most of the time the subjects were fairly general and I scanned the headings without stopping. Then, one night in 1995, I came across an interesting message about a major breakthrough. A professor and two graduate students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) had announced a “revolutionary approach to aerospacecraft propulsion”.
I had never heard of RPI, but what was being described in that message struck a chord. The professor and his students had apparently conducted an experiment in a hypershock tunnel that demonstrated the potential for using energy beams to reduce drag on aircraft. A hypershock tunnel is similar in some ways to a wind tunnel, but it is designed for testing at very high mach numbers. To produce the effects of hypersonic speeds, extreme pressures are built up and then suddenly released down the tunnel. Experimental models can be mounted inside and tested for aerodynamics and concurrent shock wave effects. The description I read brought such an incredible sense of déjà vu that I quickly went to the RPI web site to read the actual article. There, in the May issue of the RPI “Review”, was a small black and white picture of a disc standing on-edge with a narrow spike extending forward from its center. In that small picture a powerful burst of energy at the tip of the spike could be seen spreading the oncoming shock wave so that rather than hitting the disc full force it would pass around the edge of it. At that instant there was no doubt at all that what I was seeing was, for all intents and purposes, a small model of the object I had seen in Ray Stanford’s film. It was so clear that it was a bit unnerving. I had never heard of this professor but, as I read what he envisioned as possible using this new concept, I realized it was almost identical to what I had seen in Ray’s pictures. It was only a matter of minutes before I was on the telephone calling Ray.
After the usual hellos, I got right to the point and told him I had come across an article about an intriguing experiment that I thought was a spitting image for what he had on film. In the years since then he has often kidded me for suggesting that I thought perhaps someone had broken into his files. On that night however, I had barely started to read the article to him when I reached the name of the professor who had made the breakthrough. It was a very unusual name, and I hesitated for a moment trying to find the correct pronunciation. But I came close enough that Ray suddenly interrupted and said, “Oh that must be Leik Myrabo from RPI. He was here at my house a few years ago and spent three days looking at my films!”
To say I almost fell over would be an understatement.
I had never known about Myrabo’s visit, and Ray certainly had no idea what I was about to read to him. The significance of this incredible turn of events left me almost speechless. I told Ray that he had better sit down, and I heard him call to his wife to get on the phone and listen as I read the entire article. I will never forget his words once I had finished reading…
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you that UFO research doesn’t pay off.”
That small experiment had validated the entire phenomenon. It had substantiated the claim that there are vehicles in our skies demonstrating levels of technology of which our own scientists were not yet capable. It absolutely and unequivocally invalidated the claim by the Air Force that nothing in the study of UFO’s had led to any advances in our scientific knowledge. I knew it, Ray knew it, and obviously some others knew it. In my opinion the game was over, the proof had been provided in a simple and elegant way. Who could deny this kind of evidence once they saw it? Well, it turns out Science and Ufology have at least one thing in common—the truth sometimes takes a back seat to more pressing concerns.
By the time I hung up the telephone I had learned how Dr. Leik Myrabo happened to hear about Ray and how he had finally appeared at Ray’s doorstep. It was a twisted route of serendipitous events, every bit as lucky as my spotting the article on Myrabo’s recent successful tests. In short, a young man who had known Ray for some time had decided to study engineering and, as fate would have it, had ended up at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. While there, he had met Leik Myrabo and in due course had apparently mentioned to Myrabo that if he saw what Ray had on film he would be “years ahead” of where he was then. Even with such a strong recommendation, Myrabo did not immediately make a trip to see Ray’s images. It was some time later when Myrabo happened to be in the Washington D.C. area for something else that he decided to call on Ray. That side trip turned into a visit of several days.
Over the years since that memorable telephone call, Ray has, on numerous occasions, talked about Myrabo’s reaction to seeing the images. I could tell from the way Ray spoke of it that he had been very happy with Myrabo’s respo
nse. From then on I wanted to know everything I could about Myrabo, both who he was and what his interests were. Over the next several months, I spent time searching for information on his background and his prior research, beginning with the information available on the RPI web site. Then, in September of 1995, an article appeared in Popular Mechanics4 about his ideas and his work.
The most startling thing to me was the magazine’s story illustration—a disc-shaped vehicle blazing its way to the boundary of space. Though Myrabo had been working on lightweight spacecraft for some time, accompanying the article in Popular Mechanics was an illustration of a vehicle almost identical to what I had seen in Ray’s images, including the new concept of an “air spike” projecting ahead of it. It was very exciting to realize that, for all intents and purposes, our own technology was advancing based on concepts realized from seeing a film of something the public was being told did not exist!
At the time I had a small web site under the title “UFO’s: A Closer Look…” where I had posted a few articles I had written, notably on the Socorro case and the events surrounding Paul Bennewitz. After I found out about the RPI experiment and Myrabo’s connection to Ray’s film, and then having seen the illustration with the article in Popular Mechanics, I was determined to write an article revealing everything that I knew. In fact, I did write it. I included several illustrations of my own of the vehicle in Ray’s film and I included a link to the above article in Popular Mechanics. But at the last moment, just as I was about to publish it, I had second thoughts. I began to feel that if Myrabo was effectively proving that these vehicles do exist, even if the headlines were not saying it, then maybe it would be wiser to say nothing for the time being and let things progress.
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