He's come to track dinosaurs.
Stanford, a 69-year-old Texan, has been combing Maryland stream beds for evidence of dinosaurs for the past 13 years. The result is an unprecedented collection of footprints that were left behind 112 million years ago - found in an area where none had been reported before.
Stanford is about the furthest thing possible from a conventional scientist, and his lack of formal training - he has a high school diploma - is just the start. His first passion, one he still pursues, is UFOs; "anomalous aerial objects" is the term he prefers. Dinosaur tracking was just something he happened on. As it turned out, he has a knack for it.
Stanford has found hundreds of tracks in the suburbs of Washington and Baltimore. They reveal an extraordinary diversity of animals living in one place during the early Cretaceous period - about twice the variety previously seen from that geological period. And he has found the fossilized remains of what he and a Johns Hopkins University paleontologist believe is a previously unknown species, a discovery he lovingly refers to as "Cretaceous roadkill."
"I just find things. I don't know why," Stanford says.
The discoveries have earned Stanford the respect of the scientific establishment, despite his unusual background. He has collaborated with Ph.D.-holders on papers and is working with the Smithsonian Institution to find a permanent home there for his collection.
Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, is used to getting calls from people who believe they've found dinosaur footprints or eggs. More often than not, they're mistaken. Stanford was different. "He didn't show me anything that I didn't think was a footprint," Carrano says.
Stanford made his first dinosaur discovery in 1994, while looking for Indian artifacts with his then-teenage children. Having read a bit about dinosaurs, he spotted something that looked remarkably like a track. A few weeks later, he saw something similar.
At first he assumed they were just random patterns that looked like tracks. But he kept thinking about them.
"Ray, how hardheaded can you be?" he recalls thinking one day as he sat in his easy chair. "Those are iguanodon tracks!"
David Weishampel, a Johns Hopkins paleontologist who plans to publish a paper with Stanford on the new species of dinosaur he found, says the sheer number of tracks Stanford has found is mind-boggling.
"It's like, why didn't we see it before?" Weishampel says.
Stanford chalks it up to "the birder phenomenon." A person who badly wants to spot a particular rare bird may be unsuccessful for years. But "once they spot it, they will then see it many times thereafter," Stanford says.
"It has to do with an openness in the mind that says, 'Yes, it is here. Yes, I can see it,"' he adds. "There's nothing strange about seeing more UFOs after you've seen one - and likewise dinosaur tracks."
There is one outside factor that has made tracks easier to spot in recent decades: the region's building boom.
Rapid development has led to more runoff into the region's streams. That, in turn, speeds up the erosion that allows underlying rocks where the footprints are embedded to become dislodged.
Picking up the fragments as they're pushed downstream is a "rescue mission," Stanford says. "Once these things get into the Potomac (River), there's nobody's chance of finding them."
Stanford impresses paleontologists not just with his ability to spot tracks, but with his ability to identify and interpret them as well.
As he shows a visitor around his living room, which is crammed with fossils arranged in mounds on the reinforced floor, he launches into vivid stories about each track he picks up. He points out clues indicating what kind of dinosaur made the track and with which foot. He'll note if the animal was running, skidding or crouching, and often he'll venture a guess about the circumstances.
"This guy was running," he says, picking up a fragment bearing two different footprints. "Now, we don't know that this was at the same time, but here is a larger, (flesh-eating) dinosaur. ... You could almost think that he might be running after this guy."
"In many cases he's probably right," Weishampel says of Stanford's narratives, "but he has a good imagination as well, which is one of the other tools dinosaur paleontologists definitely need."
Stanford insists he's a skeptic at heart. Though fascinated by UFOs since age 9, he insists he's no "UFO buff." His goal, he says, is to apply scientific methods to learn about such phenomena.
With backing from some wealthy patrons, he set up Project Starlight International in the 1960s and set about gathering evidence. Over time, the center began using sophisticated equipment like spectrum cameras and magnetometers. Though Stanford broke with the organization in the 1980s, he continues the research.
He expresses disdain for UFO conspiracy theorists who are always "begging the government to tell them the truth about these things."
"That's a scientific cop-out. If you want real data, you go out with real instruments and attempt to get it. And if you do get it, you analyze it and publish it under peer review," he said.
Stanford regrets that his UFO research, which he considers "an order of magnitude more important" than the dinosaur work, hasn't been accepted by the mainstream. But he's undeterred. When Stanford's wife retires from her job at NASA, the couple plans to move back to Texas, where Stanford will again devote himself to UFOs.
As for the dinosaurs, Stanford wants to transfer his track collection to the Smithsonian before he leaves the Washington area. His hope is that the highlights, particularly the "roadkill," will be on exhibit at the natural history museum.
Carrano likes the idea and has proposed an exhibit highlighting "that this was found right here - and this is someone who literally found dinosaur fossils in his backyard," he says.
Stanford hopes that by sharing his discoveries he might encourage youngsters to look up from their computer screens.
"They don't realize," he laments, "that this world is a lot more interesting than any electronic game."
