Reply to article by: ahgnis@yahoo.com (Ahgnis)
Date written: 19 Nov 2004 17:30:51 -0800
MsgID:<24b5a18b.0411191730.76ca1eff@posting.google.com>

this is a copy of my response to Stanton Friedman's UFO "challenge". Read and
enjoy...

The UFO Challenge
December 1997
By Stanton Friedman

You call this a challenge? Ha!

As a nuclear physicist...

Hold on a moment here! Stanton *was* a nuclear physicist years and years ago,
but nowadays he is merely an author of New Age-like books. His former career has
absolutely nothing to do with his current career. In my opinion, I believe he
likes to hide behind the title "Nuclear Physicist", even though nuclear physics
has absolutely nothing to do with UFOs, maybe because it adds respectability to
an otherwise silly belief. I mean think about it: if a Rocket Scientist or
Nuclear Physicist says there is a "Cosmic Watergate", then by golly, there
certainly must be a "Cosmic Watergate" because Rocket Scientists or Nuclear
Physicists are so damn intelligent that it is physically impossible that they
could be wrong or could be suckered into a UFO cult!

Sage, you use this same tactic later when you mention that you were a
classmate of the esteemed Carl Sagan in order to add respectability to
your argument.

You are confusing Stanton's tactics with mine. I never mention I was a classmate
of anyone, much less Carl Sagan.

Eyewitness testimony is well accepted in the legal
arena, but I agree that extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence so this point is moot. You might be interested in reading
some material by MUFON Researcher Jerry Black, who states that 92% of
UFO reports are erroneous, but that leaves 8% unexplained.

You might read PROJECT BLUEBOOK which states the unexplainable cases are only
unexplainable because there wasn't sufficient enough evidence to explain it.

He also
states that there is no direct evidence that aliens have every visited
Earth and I agree with that conclusion.

http://www.citybeat.com/2001-05-03/cover.shtml

Like most "researchers", he doesn't do his homework very objectively. The
stories of disc-shaped objects, little men, deep gouges in the ground, and a
trail of scattered debris, never existed in the case of Roswell until Stanton
"dug them up" around 1970. The report of Louise Smith, Mona Stafford, and Elaine
Thomas is not evidence of what they reported, but rather a storytale, as are all
UFO reports. Some of the explanations for UFO reports are just as ridiculous an
unconfirmable and lacking in evidence as the original UFO reports, ie --
tectonic plate stress. How can you study something that doesn't exist? No
testimony is worth following up on if it cannot be backed up with something more
than a story. There has to be some actual evidence or testimony is worthless
from a scientific and logical point of view.

The Sage

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My Home Page      :           http://members.cox.net/the.sage

"The men that American people admire most extravagantly are
most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are
those who try to tell them the truth" -- H. L. Mencken
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