The Spectral Voyager Episode 6: The Socorro Saucer (Sample)
We finally did a UFO episode, and it’s our retelling of one of the most confounding and mysterious cases on record: The Socorro Saucer. This case has all the makings of a cognitive conundrum: a credible main witness (Lonnie Zamora), secondary witnesses, physical evidence, the Air Force classifying it as unknown, and a lack of convincing alternate explanations. This UFOlogical tale is told in parallel with the story of the Jacques Cousteau of UFOs (and channeler of ascended masters), the swaggiest researcher of them all, Ray Stanford… who also found dinosaurs in a NASA parking lot. Featuring an interview with journalist skeptic-believer D. Dean Johnson.
To listen to the full episode, and gain access to our other mini-series such as Manclan and Trickle Down, you can subscribe for just five bucks a month at: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
D. Dean Johnson: http://twitter.com/ddeanjohnson
The Spectral Voyager theme composed by Nick Sena.
Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky.
Editing by Corey Klotz.
QAA’s website: http://qanonanonymous.com
The US Air Force's Project Blue Book investigated nearly 13,000 UFO cases between 1952 and 1969.
95% of them were explained away as natural phenomena, conventional aircraft, secret projects, psychopathology, or hoaxes.
But what about that last 5%?
The Blue Book team found them perplexing enough to file them away as unknown.
But there was a deeper, more mysterious class within these unknowns that comprised just 1% of them.
Those involving humanoids, known as Encounters of the Third Kind.
This episode tells the tale of one of those 1%.
This story also perplexingly has to do with dinosaurs in a NASA parking lot.
[music]
Behind the cracking wallpaper of our reality, there exists another world that science has yet to explain.
In here dwell monsters and madness, and potentially the answers to our most important questions.
In this world, gravity intensifies, time slows down, and your heart rate quickens.
I'm Jake Rakitansky.
And I'm Brad Abrahams.
And you're listening to The Spectral Voyager.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The Sequora Saucer.
While the main events of today's story took place in 1964, for me, it all began in December of 2019.
It was a Friday night, and as is my proclivity, I was half-watching the 1980 series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World.
It was the UFO episode, and sandwiched between the story of Kenneth Arnold's infamous saucer sighting and some lights in the New Zealand sky, a segment appeared that jolted me to full attention.
It was about a UFO investigative team just outside Austin, Texas, where I had just moved some months before.
Men in matching jumpsuits, wearing bizarre goggles, operated a menagerie of high-tech looking equipment.
At least high-tech for 1980.
It started like this.
Trying to trap a UFO is now big business.
In the scrubland of Texas, Ray Stanford heads Project Starlight International with a million dollars worth of equipment.
The laser is to signal to spaceships his goggles in case they answer back.
The aim is to use the highest technology to establish beyond doubt that craft from other times or worlds are visiting the Earth.
Alright Jake, so what's your first impression of that?
First impression?
First impression?
The tech is awesome!
He's wearing some kind of primitive form of virtual reality goggles and he's, you know, got like a big remote control and he's...
You know, manipulating this giant laser cannon, you know, around quickly and smoothly.
It's got the right words and clicks.
I mean, they're wearing white jumpsuits.
I mean, this looks like, you know, you know what I thought of?
It reminds me of like an indie, like an indie science fiction movie, like, like Primer or something like that.
There's something like kind of desolate and cold about it.
Very cool.
It went on to show just how serious and ambitious this organization was.
Centerpiece of Project Starlight's armory is a computer to monitor UFO activities in the area.
This is an Operation Argus alert.
Please proceed as you have been instructed.
The computer automatically calls up spotters to scan the sky.
And it really hits the panic button if a landing is indicated.
With techniques like these, Stanford hopes to add to the evidence he's already amassed.
So yeah, they seem to be tracking UFOs with satellite data and then automatically calling affiliates in those areas to watch the skies while Ray Stanford or other staff jump in their pickup trucks and are dispatched.
The clip ended with a message from the org's founder, Ray, wearing a PSI-branded white jumpsuit, wool beanie, and glasses.
We have motion picture films, magnetometer recordings, sound recordings, and a whole variety of data that begin to make us think that UFOs are technological, that they're really not something natural after all, but something not only technological, but highly sophisticated and capable of Speeds and accelerations far beyond anything that we've ever dreamed of.
In fact, we've really been surprised at how fast these things can move that we've tracked.
And frankly, I would say that they simply don't originate on the earth, at least any place on the earth that I know of.
So, yeah, I found this so cool when I first saw it.
Because Rey and Project Starlight were basically the Jacques Cousteau for UFOs.
Down to, like, all the matching uniforms, the custom-built equipment, the swag.
I was just gonna say, these are the two swaggiest UFO researchers that I've ever seen.
And I have to, when, so when did this come out?
That clip is from like 1979.
1979.
He's Ray Stanford, but he really does have the sort of quality and personality of Ray Stantz from the Ghostbusters.
I wonder...
I wonder if Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis were privy to these videos and potentially named their character after him.
Interesting.
Because he's got the passion, he's got the swag, though.
Oh, the matching uniforms, the beanie.
Oh, this is so cool.
I was thinking as I was watching this last clip, I went, I wish I didn't have to be a part of this episode.
I wish I could just sit back and watch it.
I just want to watch this like a movie now.
Yeah, so they had remote-controlled VHS cameras, magnetometers, gravitometers, lasers, things called phototheodolites, and it all totaled around, like, 200k plus today.
And it was thanks to wealthy Texas oil guys who, like, donated all the money and equipment.
And there's some of their, on the next page, the cover from their journal and one of their PhDs with a microphone.
This looks like straight out of Ghostbusters.
Oh, yeah, I mean, this is so Ghostbusters.
It's the branding is good.
You know, they have cool.
Their logo is cool.
The colorways is awesome.
It's like they understand the cinematic sensibility of what they're doing, you know, that they're fans of.
Science fiction whether you know reading it or or watching it in movies and basically said which this is what I would do as well I am totally in this camp it's like if I'm do if I'm doing something that is close to the movie you know the movie or the book that I like I want to look like what they did in the movie or the book like there's no need to dress down for this So, I could have left it at that, but the documentarian in me craved to know more.
Was Ray still alive and still living in Austin?
What was he up to?
Info was scarce, but I found a Texas Monthly article from 1976 which featured a reporter that visited PSI.
He described Ray better than I could.
A small, tight, lithe man.
The kind of person who doesn't burn off energy so much as recycle it, so that he gives the impression of being a compact, self-contained organism.
A charged, maverick particle.
When he asked Ray why the white suits, Ray's answer was, "We wear the white suits for two reasons. One, safety white
will reflect the heat from infrared radiation, a possible component of a possible UFO
laser. And two, general above boredness. If they're intelligent, I'm not going to try and
play games. We're not going to wear black and hide in the bushes. This isn't a game. It's a
dangerous undertaking. That's one reason we wear name tags out there. Should we be killed, people
will at least be able to identify us."
Such a Ray answer. Oh my God.
During their night watches, he was known to look up into the sky and exclaim, Land over here!
We have no weapons!
So, Ray was a character.
Further digging revealed that he was very much alive and in his mid-80s.
He had a life-spanning decades of work with UFO investigations, parapsychology, and even paleontology.
It wasn't much longer before I found his email and asked if he'd be interested in being filmed, perhaps for a short documentary portrait.
It did not go well.
Ray had googled me and my documentary Love and Saucers came up.
This is an excerpt from his first reply.
Thanks for your interest, Brad.
But that utterly disgusting, at least to me, Love and Saucers brings to the watcher or listener the kind of, in my not inexperienced opinion, fantasies, delusions, and or lies useful to the anti-UFO community in trying to make even those in scientifically serious anomalous aerial object studies look laughable.
In short, I do not care to become associated, even if only indirectly, with delusional or hoax discourse alleging intergalactic or even just intragalactic intercourse.
And there was a winky face in there that he... Dude, oh my god!
This guy is so fucking cool.
He owned you, but he did it gently and sternly.
Oh!
Yeah.
Oh, my.
Oh, Maron.
You have been listening to a sample from The Spectral Voyager, a new miniseries from the folks at QAA, where we explore true tales from the edge of reality.
To listen to the full episode and gain access to our other miniseries, such as Man Clan and Trickle Down, you can subscribe for just five bucks a month at patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous.
Until next time, farewell from beyond the veil.
Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there.
