On Sep 14, 9:11 am, "H." <hbo...@charter.net> wrote:
"Sir Arthur C.B.E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A."<scie...@zzz.com> wrote in message
Holeflapper, go fuck yourself.
H.
See, I did PREDICT this would happen, when the final collapse of the
debunkers starts to happen, the debunkers would all turn to foul-
mouth, drooling, drunkards and drug addicts, as our pal "H"eroin has
done here. Don't attempt to reason with him, that endeavor would be
futile. Just point the way to him over to the nearest FEMA camp for
his round of flu shots. Debunkers are now compared to as in the final
days of Phil "Bullshit" No-Klass. They have lost their minds. Do not
take pity on debunkers, they are enemies and enemas of the State! Way
to go "H"eroin, those drugs may be losing their effect on you, as I
did predict would happen!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Question: What level of proof is adequate proof, then?
SF: I talk in terms of evidence. The legal profession recognizes
certain standards: in a civil court, "preponderance of the evidence;"
in a criminal court, "beyond a reasonable doubt." I think there is,
right now, quite sufficient evidence. Given the physical trace cases,
the radar sightings, the photographs and the eye-witness testimony
from people all over the world, we have quite sufficient evidence to
conclude that our planet is being visited by manufactured objects
behaving in ways that we Earthlings cannot yet duplicate, and that
therefore were produced someplace else. Now, the reason for that
little kicker about not being able to duplicate: every government in
the world would love to be able to duplicate UFO flying capabilities.
If we could build these things, we would be building them. So, if they
weren't built here, they were built someplace else. There's nothing
exotic about that. It's not charismatic handwaving, it's perfectly
good reasoning. We have an adequate amount of evidence today to
clearly establish that some—I emphasize some—UFOs are alien
spacecraft. And I would take on anybody who says we don't. I would say
it's entirely because they haven't reviewed that evidence, which is
very different from saying there is no evidence.
Question: Give me some examples. What are some of the strongest cases
on record that you know of, and why do you find them so convincing?
SF: I feel the Roswell evidence makes a very strong case. We've talked
to more than 240
(now over 350) people about that case; people at the Roswell Army Air
Force base; people out at the rancher's site, including Mac Brazel's
neighbors, his son, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law. We've
talked to people who handled pieces of the wreckage at the base; we've
talked to the people who were in Texas where it went; people who were
crew members on the planes that carried some of the wreckage. I've
talked to somebody who saw the bodies, people who were threatened by
the government—that's being kind—to shut up about this whole thing. So
that's an excellent case.
But I'm also impressed by cases like the one that occurred over George
Air Force Base in California. Two jets had just finished maneuvering
practice and were coming back to base. Both were flown by experienced
pilots who had fought in Korea. The pilot in the lead plane spotted an
object in the distance. It looked peculiar because it was standing
still, so he radioed the ground. The ground control guy went outside
with binoculars and watched the two planes go after this thing,
meanwhile still talking to them by radio. And, as the lead pilot
reported, the object was standing still, and in three seconds it was
going a thousand miles an hour. It moved a pretty good angle through
the sky, then stopped dead again. The pilot switched direction a
little bit, going after it, and it went back the other way. Again, in
just a couple seconds of acceleration, it's going, he says, a thousand
miles an hour. Stops dead. Zigzagging, in other words, back and forth
across the sky. The lead pilot saw it, the pilot in the second plane
saw it, and the guy on the ground watched this whole thing while
listening to the radio conversations. Finally, the thing zipped away
at very high speed. Now, what do you do with a case like that? These
are military pilots reporting to a military control tower operator in
broad daylight. You can't say they're lying. What for? This was a
classified report. It makes no sense. And there are loads of cases
like that. (Including Gordon Cooper's similar case described in his
new book "Leap of Faith")
I'm also impressed with some of the abduction cases; for example, the
Betty and Barney Hill case. I was technical advisor on a television
movie about this case called "The UFO Incident," and I've spent time
with the Hills. These two people underwent individual medical hypnosis
sessions weekly for three and a half months. Betty was a social worker
and supervisor in the welfare department, State of New Hampshire.
Barney worked for the Post Office and was on the Governor's Civil
Rights Commission. Our whole society would fall apart if we had to say
that people like this who report anything strange must either be nuts
or else have some crazy angle to what they're doing. We have standard
procedures for accepting eyewitness testimony. These people and lots
of other abductees certainly meet those standards for providing
acceptable testimony.
So, I get irked when I hear people say there isn't any evidence. We've
got things like the University of Colorado study, the Condon Report,
in which 30% of 117 cases studied in detail couldn't be identified.
Bluebook Special Report 14 does a cross-comparison between 600-plus
unknowns and the balance of 2000plus cases that could be identified.
They looked at six different characteristics—apparent size, color,
shape, speed, etc. —to see if there was any chance that the unknowns
were just missed knowns. It was less than one percent. They did a
quality evaluation. They found that the better the quality, the more
likely to be an unknown. That's exactly what you'd expect if we're
dealing with something different. Because they had other categories:
not only "unknown," but insufficient information, aircraft,
astronomical, balloon, psychological aberrations. The unknowns were
different. And the differences were in the direction of being able to
move with much greater maneuverability and much greater speed, to have
a different shape, to have different lighting. What do people want?
We're dealing with vehicles in the air, many of them observed in the
early 1950s or late '40s, doing things that we certainly could not do.
So, the evidence, for anybody who wants to take the time,—and it does
take time—is overwhelming that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and that
we're dealing with a kind of "Cosmic Watergate." No question.
Question: We also have a situation of extremely high strangeness
associated with a lot of UFO sightings. Stories where people floated
through walls by aliens, or where beings seem to just appear in a room
and then disappear--things that are absolutely fantastic. And yet,
some of these abduction cases are among the most reputable ones. How
do you account for that?
SF: Arthur C. Clarke once said it very well: "Advanced technology is
by definition magic." If you tried to show your great-great
grandfather a television set, it would have been magic. Utterly
impossible. There must be midgets inside. And yet, when humans landed
on the moon—a remarkable thing in itself—we could watch it in real
time, as it happened. Quite extraordinary. A pocket calculator today
represents an enormously sophisticated kind of device. What about a
hologram? You want crazy stuff! If you've ever seen a big hologram,
you know you can put your hand through the darn thing, but it sure
looks like there's something there. That's magic.
So, what I'm saying is, I don't have the faintest idea how to float
somebody through a wall, but the way of science is to recognize that
the observations are real, though the explanations may be all wet. And
that's a problem for a number of ancient academics, fossilized
physicists. If they don't understand how something happens, it can't
be. The sun has been fusioning up there, the primary source of energy
for all our society, since the beginning. We figured out in 1937-38
how the sun works, that it's fusion, not burning gas. But could
anybody in his right mind suggest that it was fusioning until we knew
about fusion? Of course not. So, you have to have a tolerance for
ambiguity, for mystery, and a recognition that there are things we
don't know. The more questions we ask, the more we don't know, because
there's more we can dig into. The true scientist recognizes that.
He'll say, "Gee, that's intriguing, that's different, how could we do
that?" The false scientist says, "That's impossible, I'm going to
ignore it." I'm reminded of Simon Newcomb, a great American astronomer
of the 19th century, who published in October, 1903, a long detailed
paper considering the possibility of man flying in a vehicle. His
conclusion was that the only way man would ever fly would be in a
lighter than-air vehicle, a balloon. This was two months before the
Wright Brothers' first flight, and when told about that, he said,
"Well, maybe a pilot, but it'll never carry a passenger." He didn't
know anything about flight. It's the basic assumptions that mattered.
A little over 20 years later, another great astronomer "proved" it
would be impossible to give anything sufficient energy to get it into
orbit around the earth. All he proved was that he had made the wrong
assumptions. Finally, the example that kind of teases me the most is
Dr. Campbell, a great Canadian astronomer, who published in 1941 a
long detailed paper proving that the required initial launch weight of
a chemical rocket able to get a man to the moon and back would be a
million-million tons. We accomplished it less than thirty years later,
with a dumb old chemical rocket whose initial launch weight was 3,000
tons. He was off by a factor of 300 million. Why? Because he didn't
know anything about space flight! All his assumptions were wrong.
We're stupid, we're silly, we're ridiculous, we're unprofessional. And
that's the kicker here. Because we don't have explanations, because we
cannot duplicate, doesn't mean that it cannot happen. Friedman's Law,
if you will: technological advancement almost invariably comes from
doing things differently in an unpredictable way. The future is not an
extrapolation of the past. A great scientist, Max Planck, once said,
"New ideas come to be accepted, not because their opponents come to
believe in them, but because their opponents die and a new generation
grows up that's accustomed to them." So, I get upset at professional
people who put their pride before their science. They can't figure out
how something could happen, so it couldn't, and that's the end of
that. And that's not science, that's pseudo-science.
Question: Why are they keeping it a secret?
SF: That's a different question, of course. I'll give you several
reasons why all governments are keeping it secret. You see, it's not
just the United States government, it's a worldwide phenomenon. Some
people might think I'm saying there's a conspiracy. I'm not saying
that at all, although there may be. But I am saying that there are
sometimes common interests. People may be enemies and still think the
same way about things. Here are several good reasons for all
governments to not want to put the UFO data out on the table:
First, they want to figure out how the darn things work. As a top-
secret Canadian document said in 1950, "Modus operandi is as yet
unknown." You've got pieces, you've got wreckage. You set up your
secret project, say, a small group working under Dr. Vannevar Bush,
the top science administrator during and after World War II in the
United States. The first problem is, you want to figure out how they
work. Rule number one is security. You can't tell your friends without
telling your enemies. I mean, they read the newspapers too, listen to
the radio, watch television.
Second, the other side of the same coin: What happens if somebody else
figures out how they work before you do? They'd make wonderful weapons
delivery and defense systems. You don't want them to know you know
they know. Because, you see, if the technology is unusual, there may
be ways of countering that, as long as they don't know you know. It's
like poison gas. If you've got poison gas and I've got the antidote
and you find out I've got the antidote, you're going to change your
poison gas. Then I've got to change my antidote, and so forth. This
whole sequence has been going on for thousands of year: stronger
shields, bigger spears, swords and all the rest.
Third, and very important: the political problem. Suppose there were
to be an announcement tomorrow by highly trusted individuals around
the world, Pres. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin maybe, or the Pope and the
Queen—you know, pick your own odd couple—saying that, indeed, some
UFOs are alien spacecraft. What would happen? Well, you know darn well
the stock market would go down, church attendance and mental hospital
admissions would go up. But the big thing that would happen, I
believe, is that there would be an immediate push on the part of the
younger generation, never alive when there wasn't a space program, for
a whole new view of ourselves. Instead of Americans, Russians,
Chinese, Paraguayans—just Earthlings. Because obviously, from an alien
viewpoint, we are all Earthlings, even though we tend to forget it
most of the time.
Gee, you say, that would be great. We could solve all the world's
problems—the environmental problems, the political problems—if we all
thought of ourselves as Earthlings. But then you realize that there
isn't any government on this planet that wants its citizens to owe
their primary allegiance to the planet. Nationalism is the only game
in town. That's why we spent a trillion dollars last year on things
military, in the name of nationalism, protecting ourselves against the
other guy, or preparing to attack the other guy, depending on where
you sit.
And there's a fourth problem, the religious one. There are a number of
fundamentalists who believe that this is the work of the devil, that
man is the only intelligent life in the universe. And the rug would be
pulled out from under them. And you may recall that on occasion the
government has been influenced strongly by fundamentalists. Reagan
certainly was.
Then there's the fifth problem: economic discumbobulation, if you
will. If the public perception, when an announcement was made, was
that there would be new means of transportation, new means of energy
production, new medical things—a whole new world—there would be a
tremendous loss in the stock value of oil companies, power companies,
car companies, plane companies. I mean, forget psychological panic;
that's a different story. There's still five percent of the people in
the United States who don't believe we've been to the Moon. But the
economic problems that might arise, should an announcement be made—
that's a big difficulty. How do you handle that? It's kind of like
we're seeing right now with regard to Eastern Europe. "Freedom,
freedom, they won their freedom." But that doesn't convert you from a
really second-rate economy into a capitalist economy. Now you've got
freedom, but how do you get from A to B? As we're finding out, it's
not easy.
And so, even though people might easily accept, as I think they would,
the notion of alien spacecraft—most people already do, according to
the polls—that doesn't mean the transition is without its
difficulties. Certainly, the government would have asked psychiatrists
and social scientists what would happen, and they'd say, "Well, it
depends on how you broach the announcement. You could make it 'Fear,
fear, fear!' Or you could make it 'just' difficulty for religion,
economics, politics, medicine, industry. You have a choice." And I
think for many governments, the natural thing to do is to postpone the
decision. Let somebody else worry about it. It's a big problem, and I
can understand the reluctance.
However, I must add that, as a nuclear physicist very much concerned
about the proliferation of nuclear weapons amongst countries that I
wouldn't trust with a bazooka, much less a nuclear weapon, the only
hope I see for a decent future for this planet is an Earthling
orientation. By far the easiest way to get that is to recognize that
there are aliens coming here.
---------------------------------------------------------
The UFO Challenge By Stanton Friedman
As a nuclear physicist who has had a serious interest in flying
saucers since
1958, I have reached four major conclusions:
The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by
intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words,
SOME UFOs
are alien spacecraft. Most are not.
The subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate,
meaning
that some few people in major governments have known since July, 1947,
when two
crashed saucers and several alien bodies were recovered in New Mexico,
that
indeed SOME UFOs are ET. As noted in 1950, it's the most classified
U.S. topic.
None of the arguments made against conclusions One and Two by a small
group of
debunkers such as Carl Sagan, my University of Chicago classmate for
three
years, can stand up to careful scrutiny.
The Flying Saucer story is the biggest story of the millennium: visits
to
Planet Earth by aliens and the U.S. government's cover-up of the best
data (the
bodies and wreckage) for over fifty years.
Since 1967 I have lectured on the subject "Flying Saucers ARE Real" at
more
than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups in all fifty US
states, nine
Canadian Provinces, twelve cities in England and nine in other
countries, with
only eleven hecklers. I have also appeared on hundreds of radio and TV
shows.
Overall, I have probably answered about 35,000 questions about UFOs
and
secrecy.
It's clear that over 97% of the people have NOT read any of the five
major
scientific studies I discuss, and are unaware of the mountains of
evidence that
support my conclusions. They are also unaware of the scientific data,
as
opposed to tabloid nonsense. However, it is also clear from the
Opinion Polls
and from my own experience that indeed most people accept the notion
that SOME
UFOs are alien spacecraft. The greater the education, the MORE likely
an
individual is to accept this proposition. In an October 25, 1995,
Oxford
University Debate on the resolution "Planet Earth is being visited by
intelligent extraterrestrial life", the affirmative side, of which I
was a
part, garnered 60% of Debate Union Member votes on the question.
Ninety-two
percent of 100,000 people calling during a TV Debate in London on June
27,1997,
said Earth has been visited by aliens!
The problem is NOT that there is not enough evidence to justify my
conclusions;
but that most people, especially the noisy negativists, are unaware of
the
real, non-tabloid evidence.
Debunkers seem to employ four major rules:
What the public doesn't know, we certainly won't tell them. The
largest
official USAF UFO study isn't even mentioned in twelve anti-UFO books,
though
every one of those books' authors was aware of it.
Don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.
If one can't attack the data, attack the people. It is easier.
Do one's research by proclamation rather than investigation. It is
much easier,
and nobody will know the difference anyway.
Many major media people will concede that if indeed aliens are
visiting earth,
that would be a major story. But because they take great pride in
their
KNOWLEDGE of major stories, if this were happening they would know
about it.
But they don't. Therefore, anybody who says visits are real must be a
crackpot.
I have noted four major reasons why the big names in science and
journalism
haven't jumped on the pro-UFO bandwagon:
Ignorance of the data. Scratch a debunker and one usually finds
somebody who is
putting down what he is not up on.
Fear of ridicule in sponsoring a thesis (only about ten have been
submitted
relating to UFOs) if a professor, or sponsoring a detailed reportorial
investigation if an editor. I check all my audiences and find that,
while in
agreement with polls, 10% have had a sighting but only 5-10% of these
witnesses
have been willing to report what they saw. Biggest reason? Fear of
ridicule.
Ego. If aliens were visiting Earth, they would call a press conference
or ask
to talk to the National Academy of Sciences. They haven't, so aliens
must not
be visiting. Flying saucers finish the job Copernicus started in
taking man out
of the middle of the universe. Priests fought Copernicus's ideas.
Today guys in
lab coats, rather than priestly robes, fight alien visitations.
Failure to use our knowledge of technology to understand UFO behavior.
They say
"It is impossible," rather than "I don't know how." Despite the absurd
claims
of certain ancient academics and fossilized physicists, it is clear on
the
basis of solid engineering studies that trips to nearby stars are
feasible with
round trip times shorter than the average person's lifetime -- using,
for
example, staged fission and fusion propulsion systems. I have worked
on both.
It's clear that technological progress comes from doing things
differently in
an unpredictable way. The history of science is littered with
challenges,
leveled by people who know nothing about the job at hand, against
traditionally
"impossible" claims.
The cult of S.E.T.I. (Silly Effort To Investigate) with its crazy
notions that
nobody would travel -- but that aliens, stuck at the level of radio,
are trying
to attract our attention -- mocks the notion of flying saucers, not by
dealing
with the evidence, but by proclamations about the ABSENCE of evidence.
This
ignores science.
I prove at every lecture that the NSA and CIA are withholding UFO
data. Having
worked under security for fourteen years, visited seventeen document
archives,
and having become aware of the huge black budgets of the NSA, NRO,
CIA, DIA,
etc., I know how easy it is to keep secrets. My nineteen years of
study about
crashed saucers, and thirteen years on the Majestic-12 documents have
convinced
me these are real. The challenge for us all, as we enter the new
millennium, is
to recognize that while our future is in space, we are not alone. I
truly hope
we qualify for admission to the Cosmic Kindergarten.
Stanton Friedman
---------------------------------------------------------
Academia and UFOs by Stanton T. Friedman
I have had an unusually good opportunity to observe the reaction of
the academic community to UFOs, having lectured on the topic "Flying
Saucers ARE Real" at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional
groups, such as management clubs, in all 50 states and 9 Provinces.
Not only has there always been a question and answer session after
each lecture, but there have been classroom visits and seminars.
Sometimes I was told to be sure to leave time at the end of a
colloquium for commentary.
Clearly, they thought they could show that this UFO stuff was all
nonsense. I made sure that in those sessions, often entitled "Flying
saucers and Physics,” that I touched on a number of technical topics
about which I thought they would be ignorant: "You are all familiar
with the fusion and fission nuclear rockets, or electromagnetic
submarines, or data on maximum acceptable acceleration, etc.? Are any
of you aware of these?" Usually none were.
The point was that the students could see that their profs really
weren't with it. The best one prof could come up with was, "How come
you haven't published in any physics journals or given a paper at a
meeting of the American Physical Society?”
"Didn't you see my letter in Physics Today? Besides, why give a
lecture to 50 people at an APS meeting when I can talk to hundreds or
thousands and get press coverage to tens of thousands with my
lectures?" I was somewhat relieved when that evening there was a
packed house with people even sitting on the stage.
I have generally found that while there have been a number of
courageous academics such as Dr. David Jacobs, Dr. Alvin Lawson, and
Dr. Ed Zeller, who have taught classes on UFOs, the general approach
of the science profs has been negative. It seems to be based on a
number of basic facts:
1. Arrogance: "If these things were real, it would be important. If it
was important, I would know about them. I don't, so they must not be
real. Besides any so-called physicist without a PhD and working, God
Forbid, in industry, isn't worth listening to anyway."
Before Dr. J. Allen Hynek would see me, back in the 1960s, he had an
associate listen to my lecture at a college in Chicago. Only if I
passed muster would we go to Hynek.
One of Allen's first questions was, "Why didn't you get a Ph.D.?" I
told him I was tired of working my way through university as a union
waiter, and wanted to get out in the real world.
2. Ignorance of the data. At the beginning of my lecture the focus is
on five large-scale scientific studies of UFOs. After a brief review
of each, I ask, "How many have read a copy of this study?" Typically
it is less than 2%. If they were going to challenge me, I wanted the
audience to know that they hadn't looked at the data.
One physics prof started the question-answer session with a whole
bunch of "You said...." Every one was a gross distortion of what I had
said-for example, claiming I had said Betty and Barney Hill were taken
to Zeta Reticuli and back in 2 hours!!!
Somebody shouted, "How about taking some sensible questions?" The
skeptic walked out. "Who was that?" A professor of physics. Obviously
he hadn't heard what I said, as opposed to his notions of what a
foolish believer would say.
Rather surprising to many people, I have had fewer than 12 hecklers in
over 700 lectures. Two were drunk.
3. Appeal to authority. Often academics have read maybe one skeptical
book, such as by Donald Menzel of Harvard or heard the late Carl Sagan
on TV or in Cosmos, or have heard or read comments by writers such as
Phil Klass. "These people have shown there is nothing to flying
saucers, so I need only echo their views." Certainly they don't feel
they need to validate the explanations.
4. Irrational notions of what science is all about. Carl Sagan, during
a meeting at his home, stressed reproducibility as the key. I wrote a
long response pointing out that there are at least four kinds of
science:
A. The experiments in which everything is under the control of the
experimenter, and in which the experiment can be repeated by the
scientist and anybody else who reads his papers.
B. Those measurements made in circumstances in which the scientist
cannot control all the variables, but can predict certain crucial
ones, such as the timing and location of eclipses. One cannot create
eclipses on demand, and one cannot guarantee good weather at the
location, but one can be well prepared to make scientific measurements
when they occur.
C. Those situations in which one can neither control nor predict, but
can be prepared when something of interest has happened. Earthquakes
and solar storms are two examples. Seismographs are located in many
places. Particle detectors can signal that a solar storm has occurred.
And finally, D. Those events or activities involving intelligence.
These might include murder, rape, aircraft or automobile accidents, or
observations of flying saucers It is the approach to data gathering
and evaluation which must be scientific. One measures skid marks and
blood alcohol levels, and listens to voice recorders.
I can guarantee that more than 30,000 people will be killed in
automobile accidents in the USA over the next 12 months, but I can't
predict just when or where or who will be involved. In these cases
witness testimony is of great importance. Our entire legal system
depends upon it. Rarely is DNA crucial in determining guilt.
Fear of public ridicule also plays a major role in keeping academics
away from the subject. Hynek would ask an academic to do a test on a
soil sample, and the academic would say, “I will have one of my grad
students look at it, but you can’t use my name!” What good is a test
without the tester’s name? Besides, one out to go to a commercial
testing or forensic laboratory, where secrecy can be maintained and
the tester will stand behind his work—normally involving tests which
he does often and which results must be able to stand up in court.
---------------------------------------------------------
Do government documents disprove Roswell? By Stanton T. Friedman
It has been fashionable for a number of years for Roswell denyers to
claim that various and sundry government documents PROVE that no alien
spacecraft was recovered near Roswell, NM, in early July, 1947, as
claimed in books such as “Crash at Corona-The Definitive Story of the
Roswell Incident” by Don Berliner and myself.
Unfortunately, the claims betray a lack of understanding of how
security works. First of all, it isn't enough to have an appropriate
security clearance to gain access to classified documents. One must
also have an appropriate Need-to-Know for the documents in question.
For example, when I worked on radiation shielding for aircraft nuclear
propulsion systems at GE, I read and wrote technical reports
classified as Secret Restricted Data. In a classified version of
“Nuclear Science Abstracts” I often found listings for reports about
radiation shielding produced for Admiral Rickover's nuclear submarine
program, also classified SRD. However, I could not obtain them because
Rickover wouldn't grant a need-to-know for persons outside his
program.
A basic rule
Secondly it is a basic rule that one cannot present data of higher
classification in a lower classification report. Philip Klass once
tried to say there was no crash because a CIA UFO document released by
the CIA in response to a lawsuit and subsequent Judge's demand for a
file search didn't discuss any such crash. But the CIA document was
only listed as Confidential.
Above Confidential there is SECRET, and then TOP SECRET, and then TOP
SECRET-Code word. The latter might include UMBRA, ULTRA, MAJIC. Having
a TS clearance without access to code word material meant one didn't
get it.
In addition, while the existence of most classified Research &
Development (R & D) programs is known and only the data is classified,
there are also numerous "Black" programs whose very existence is
classified. For example, the Naval Research Lab first admitted
publicly in 1995 that it had launched the first electronic
Intelligence Satellite--in 1960. The first public release of
information about Bletchley Park in England where 12,000 people
labored long and hard decoding and translating intercepted German
military communications wasn't made until 25 years after WW II. It was
a black program, as was the development of the U-2, the Stealth
Fighter, the SR-71 etc. The Director of Central Intelligence admitted
in 1996 that his annual black budget was $26.6 billion.
Is there any reason to conclude that there is TS Code Word material on
UFOs as part of a black program? In a Jan. 31,1949, FBI document is
the following statement: "This matter [flying saucers] is considered
top secret by Intelligence Officers of both the Army and the Air
Force."
In a Nov. 21,1950, formerly TS document from Wilbert B. Smith, head of
the Canadian government's UFO study programs, one finds this comment:
"The matter [Flying Saucers] is the most highly classified subject in
the United States Government." This surely implies TS Code word
material is here. So where is it?
None in declassified Blue Book
There is no formerly TS material in the declassified portion of the
Project Blue Book Files. There is an interesting formerly TS UFO
sighting report involving US Senator Richard Russell. There is AIR-A
joint Air Force and Office of Navel Intelligence Report, not giving a
full history of highly classified UFO activities, but intended to
focus only on the implications of whether UFOs represented Soviet
craft.
It is not uncommon for task forces to be set up to independently look
at different aspects of the same problem. For example, Operation
Solarium involved lots of high level military and civilian personnel
divided into three separate groups in 1953. Each was tasked to look at
a different approach to containment of the Soviet Union. These
efforts, under the overall Direction of Dr. (General) James H.
Doolittle, set US foreign policy for many years. The reports were not
released (lightly censored) until after 1980, and aren't noted in any
earlier histories of the time.
Can the US government lie to protect its secrets? Of course; it has
to. For example, the government had to say something when a number of
people observed the first nuclear explosion in New Mexico on July 16,
1945, from a distance of more than 100 miles. A press release stated
that an ammunition dump had blown up, and fortunately nobody was
injured.
A favorite of the the Roswell Denyers is the SECRET September 23,1947,
memo from MJ-12 member Gen. Nathan F. Twining, then head of the Air
Materiel Command at Wright Field in Ohio. It notes
"h.(2) The lack of Physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered
exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects."
Doesn't this prove there was no crashed saucer? Of course not.
Top Secret-code word required
Everything about a crashed saucer would have been TOP SECRET Code Word
and could NOT have been mentioned in a lowly SECRET Memo. This memo
does give a hint in that Twining listed the following groups among
those that should be on the list for future flying saucer info
distribution: Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB (Joint Research and
Development Board), NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics,
RAND (Technology Think Tank) and NEPA (Nuclear Energy for the
Propulsion of Aircraft). All of these were connected with technology.
All had links to Dr. Vannevar Bush, also named in the Eisenhower
Briefing Document, and logically so, as a member of Operation Majestic
12.
McCoy report
Another favorite of the doubting Thomases is a statement in the SECRET
report on a briefing by Wright Field's Col. McCoy to the large USAF
Scientific Advisory Board which comments about the absence of physical
evidence. Does this prove there was no crash? Of course not. Even if
McCoy knew there had been one, he couldn't say so in a SECRET
BRIEFING.
Another example comes from a study I did while at Aerojet General
Nucleonics for the Foreign Technology DIV of the USAF at Wright
Patterson AF Base. I issued two reports. One was an unclassified
bibliography of Soviet technology that might be useful in building
compact reactors for space applications. It made no mention at all of
the highly classified report in which I evaluated the work, and, as it
happens, successfully predicted the Soviets would be launching
reactors for space applications.
Karl Pflock (Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe)
mentions the two TS reports noted above and lists a bunch of others
which he claims show there was no Roswell crash, even though they were
almost all only SECRET. Not even TOP SECRET and certainly not TOP
SECRET Code word.
Absence of EVIDENCE is NOT evidence for Absence. The real Roswell
Denyer was USAF Col. Richard Weaver, compiler of the huge USAF 's "The
Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert." He
supplied the fiction. He quoted this item from a July 8, 1947, FBI
Memo. "The object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with
a radar reflector {but that telephonic conversation between their
office and Wright field had not borne out this belief}." Even though
the report has about 1,000 pages, the brief memo is not included. Why?
Because he left out the comment in brackets. This only reverses the
meaning of the quote!
None available in the archives
Having spent considerable time at a total of 19 document archives, I
can say that none provided formerly TS Code word documents on any
subject. The Ike Library mentioned it had a drawerful. The JFK Library
had 10 drawers full.
In a real deception, the National Security Agency claims it finally
released in 1996 the 156 TS Code Word "UFO documents" withheld even
from Federal Court Judge Gesell in 1980, because of Sources and
Methods info. They lied. All but 1 or 2 lines on each page were
censored using white-out instead of the black ink used to obscure the
TS Code Word Affidavit given to the judge justifying the withholding-
and which played so well for me on TV.
---------------------------------------------------------
The pseudoscience test by Stanton T. Friemdan
The November 2001, issue of Scientific American (p.36) has a column
by Dr. Michael Shermer entitled "Baloney Detection." Shermer is the
Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, and is much younger than the
old line skepticbunkers to which ufologists have become accustomed,
such as Philip Klass. He provides the following rules for testing to
see whether claims about unusual phenomena are pseudoscience, or
science, and unintentionally provides a means for evaluating debunker
views as well: (in summary)
"1. How reliable is the source of the claim? Pseudoscientists often
appear quite reliable, but when examined closely, the facts and
figures they cite are distorted, taken out of context, or occasionally
even fabricated."
"2. Does this source often make similar claims? Pseudoscientists have
a habit of going well beyond the facts."
"3. Have the claims been verified by another source? Typically,
pseudoscientists make statements that are unverified or verified only
by a source within their own belief circle"
"4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world
operates?
An extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how
it fits."
"5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only
supportive evidence been sought? This is the confirmation bias, or the
tendency to seek confirmatory evidence and to reject or ignore
disconfirmatory evidence."
Here are some claims about UFOs that we can put through Shermer's
tests:
A. "The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are
unreliable. Unfortunately there are no cases that are both reliable
and interesting." Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer, Other Worlds, Bantam,
1975, p. 113.
B. "On the basis of this study we believe that no objects such as
those popularly described as flying saucers have overflown the United
States. I feel certain that even the unknown 3% could have been
explained as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete
observational data had been obtained." Donald A. Quarles, Sec. Of the
USAF, Oct. 25, 1955, DOD Press release 1053-55.
C. "All non-explained sightings are from poor observers." Dr. Donald
Menzel, astronomer, Physics Today, June 1976.
D. "Almost every sighting is either a mistake or a hoax. These reports
are riddled with hoaxes, and the flying saucer enthusiasts have so
many cranks, freaks, and nuts among them that Hynek is constantly
running the risk of innocently damaging his reputation by being
confused with them." Dr. Isaac Asimov, author, Fantasy and Science
Fiction, Feb. 1975 p.132.
E. "The unexplained sightings are simply those for which there is too
little information to provide a solid factual basis for an
explanation" Ben Bova, editor Analog, December 1975, p. 172.
These statements by eminent men all have some things in common: a.)
None provide any data to substantiate them. b.) None reference any
data to substantiate them. c.) All are demonstrably false, as can be
easily determined from Tables I and II, the data being taken from
Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, (Ref. 1), the largest UFO
study ever done for the US Air Force. Quarles was talking about BBSR
14, Menzel had a copy, and Sagan, Bova, and Asimov had been given the
data.
Table I
Category # Percent
Balloon 450 14.0%
Astronomical 817 25.5
Aircraft 642 20.1
Miscellaneous 257 8.0
Psychological ramifications 48 1.5
Insufficient information 298 9.3
UNKNOWNS 689 21.5
Totals 3,201 100%
Table II
Quality evaluation of 3,201 UFO sightings, Blue Book Special Report
#14
Quality # % of total Unknowns
# % of group
Excellent 308 9.6% 108 35.1 %
Good 1,070 33.4 282 26.4
Doubtful 1,298 40.5 203 15.6
Poor 525 16.4 96 18.3
Total 3,201 100% 689 21.5%
Note that the crackpot cases were only 1.5% of the total; the hoaxes
fewer than 8%; that the greater the reliability, the more likely the
case was unexplainable by the professionals at Battelle Memorial
Institute who did the study; that by definition UNKNOWNS were not
cases for which there was insufficient information; that the UNKNOWNS
were 21.5% of the total, not 3%. Obviously no attempt was made to
obtain disconfirmatory evidence.
Backup comes only from claims from their circles. These extraordinary
claims clearly do not fit in the larger world dependent upon data and
evidence. Hence they are all, by Shermer's definitions, PSEUDOSCIENCE,
or, more simply, Baloney.
Ref. 1. Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, 250 pages, 1955, BMI,
240 Charts, tables, graphs, and maps. $25. Including S and H, UFORI,
POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958
---------------------------------------------------------
The “Culture” of UFO Debunkers and the Roswell ET Crash By Stanton T.
Friedman
Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America by Dr.
Robert Alan Goldberg (Yale University Press, 2001, 354 pages, ISBN
0-300-09000-05) at first blush is a very impressive academic
undertaking. There is a 43-page chapter on Roswell with 114 footnotes,
and a list of 148 references for this chapter alone.
Unfortunately, on closer examination, Goldberg frequently gets facts,
dates, and sequences wrong. There are surprisingly many serious errors
of omission and commission which might have been avoided if he had
actually read his references.
I, for one, never use the term conspiracy to describe the Roswell
situation. It is, however, tempting to call the web of anti- Roswell
books and papers a conspiracy (Prometheus Press alone has published
three anti-Roswell Books), and often debunkers repeat each others
false arguments.
It is tempting to say that the Roswell debunkers are in it for the
money and fame, since they are often given media time (History
channel, etc) to express totally unsubstantiated anti-arguments. Many
TV programs seem to require a rent-a-sceptic to give "balance" no
matter how little research effort they have expended.
Goldberg doesn't mention Project Blue Book Special Report Number 14,
the largest UFO study ever done for the USAF, nor the lies about it
from USAF Secretary Donald Quarles. He doesn't mention the July 29,
1968, Congressional Symposium on UFOs with testimony from 12
scientists, nor the outstanding work done by Atmospheric Physicist Dr.
James E. McDonald.
He mentions my having difficulty getting several heavily censored CIA
UFO documents, but doesn't mention the National Security Agency first
withholding 75% of the text of a TOP SECRET justification to a judge
for withholding 156 UFO documents, and then, after 17 years,
supposedly releasing those documents with whiteout instead of blackout
used to cover all but a sentence or two on each page .
He gets the sequence of my efforts to use FOIA wrong. Strangely, he
also gets the sequence of my beginning the civilian investigation of
Roswell under way wrong, though it is spelled out with specific dates
in Crash at Corona, which he references four times. No mention of the
WB Smith memo saying flying saucers were the most classified subject
in the US, even more so that the H Bomb, nor Gen. Carroll Bolender's
memo saying that reports of UFOs which could affect National Security
were not part of the Blue Book System. Not a word about physical trace
cases, radar visual sightings, or of the clear and unambiguous
National Security aspects of flying saucers as noted in my MUFON 2001
paper "Flying Saucers and the Cosmic Neighborhood."
Goldberg, a historian, discusses Operation Majestic 12 briefly, and
casually repeats the false arguments of the debunkers, such as that
the date format is wrong, that the absence of a TOP SECRET
registration number means they are fakes, and that military titles
were improperly noted.
He says, "Anachronistic usages like media and impacted further
betrayed the find." Would it really have been too much trouble for him
to check the Oxford English Dictionary at the U. of Utah Library? Of
course he doesn't mention Phil Klass' check to me for $1000 for
proving him wrong about the type face on the Cutler Twining memo,
though I published a copy of the check and our correspondence.
Goldberg notes p. x, "The crime of conspiracy requires 'an agreement
between two or more persons' that results in 'either an unlawful act
or a lawful act by unlawful means."'
My focus, and I believe that of many serious Roswell and UFO
researchers, is with government lies to the public in the two Air
Force reports on Roswell and to members of Congress (as I documented
in detail in TOP SECRET/MAJIC). Having worked under security for 14
years, I certainly feel there are many things that must be kept
secret, such as technological data gleaned from UFOs. Telling the
world in 1945 that the US had exploded two nuclear weapons did not
mean that design data was openly published.
Goldberg doesn't note the USAF lies about Roswell, such as crash test
dummies not dropped until at least six years after Roswell, or a
redheaded officer coming to the Roswell base hospital-12 years after
the event.
He doesn't seem to understand how National Security works. Or Black
Budgets, which, under law, have the existence of the funded projects
classified. I didn't consider the Manhattan Project or the Stealth
aircraft programs conspiracies. People involved were sworn to secrecy
by the terms of their security clearances and employment, backed up by
such legislation as the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
I don't know what to make of such totally false claims as "The Roswell
Newspaper accounts are the only shreds of physical evidence that exist
to document these happenings." Not a word about the front page
headline stories in such evening papers from Chicago west for July 8,
1947, as the Chicago Daily News, The Los Angeles Herald Express, The
Spokane Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, etc etc. These articles
represented a serious journalistic effort, via calls to Roswell, to
update the story from the original press release. How about sworn
statements from witnesses, or the FBI memo of July 8, 1947?
Goldberg states, "Stanton Friedman, Bill Moore and the other Roswell
researchers made conspiracy essential to their search for evidence of
extraterrestrial contact" (p. 242). No basis is given for this
extraordinary and false claim. I am also not overjoyed by this
comment: “The heart of the community [conspiracy thinking] is a male
preserve inhabited by intelligent and creative individuals like Robert
Welch, Pat Robertson, Oliver Stone, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Moore and
Stanton Friedman.” (p.239).
Talk about strange bedfellows! Reminds me of this comment from another
Academic and equally flawed book about Roswell, UFO Crash at Roswell:
Genesis of a Modern Myth (Saler, Ziegler, and Moore, 1997, Smithsonian
Institution Press, ISBN 1-56098-751-0,198 pages), which has this gem
quoting me: "I am convinced that the evidence is overwhelming that
Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles
whose origin is off the Earth. In other words, some UFOs are
extraterrestrial spacecraft." Ziegler comments, "This last sentence is
the very definition of 'true believer."'
Since when did a true believer require evidence? My trips to 19
archives and conversations with hundreds of people involved with
Roswell and with relatives of the members of the MJ-12 group don't
count, I guess, nor does the fact that my college and professional-
group lectures start with a review of 5 largescale scientific studies
which fewer than 2% of the attendees have read.
Goldberg, unlike Ziegler, did interview me and some other Roswell
investigators, but did very little research of his own with key
witnesses, key primary sources, etc. He started with his conclusion
that really there isn't much more to Roswell than typical conspiracy
beliefs by the academically disadvantaged. A key rule of the debunkers
is, "Don't bother me with the facts; my mind is made up." See also
www.vj-enterprises.com/sfpage.html Stan Friedman
---------------------------------------------------------
Why visit Earth? By Stanton Friedman
The focus in my college lecture "Flying Saucers ARE Real!" has always
been on facts and data... five large scale scientific studies,
Roswell, Gallup Polls, Physical trace cases, MJ-12 documents, real UFO
photos, star travel, etc. However, very often I am asked after my
lectures and during radio and TV appearances a lot of "why?"
questions, such as why hasn't the government told us what it knows?
Why haven't saucers landed on the White House lawn? Why are the SETI
cultists so opposed to the notion of flying saucer reality?
Obviously I have never claimed to speak for the U.S Government, the
aliens, or the SETI cultists. However, after 44 years of study and
investigation and 700+ lectures and answering maybe 35,000 questions,
I have come up with my own speculations. Here, for example are a
number of reasons for aliens to travel to Earth.
Please note that I am assuming that travelers come from within our
local neighborhood, since there are 46 sun-like stars within only 54
light years of the sun that might be expected to have planets and
life. One pair, Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, in the southern sky
constellation of Reticulum, are less than one light year apart, about
37 light years from here, and are about a billion years older than the
sun.
They have had ample time to develop technology much more advanced than
ours. I do not assume that the small craft often observed near the
ground just came here from Zeta Reticuli 1 or 2, but that these were
carried here by a huge mother ship, as seen in a number of excellent
cases.
So visiting aliens might be:
1. Graduate students doing thesis research on the development of a
primitive society, on the huge variety of languages here, the huge
variety of genetic stocks, etc.
2. Broadcasters with a weekly show "idiocy in the boondocks."
3. Mining engineers. Since the Earth is the densest planet in the
solar system, it has more relatively rare, very dense elements with
very special properties-such as uranium, platinum, osmium, rhenium,
gold, tungsten-than any other planet in the solar system.
4. Checking on this planet to which they banned bad guys and girls
ages ago. It was the Devils Island of the neighborhood, and that is
why we are so nasty to each other.
5. Potential observers of expected natural catastrophes, such as
nuclear war, a collision with a large orbiting body, asteroid etc.
6. Running special jaunts to this honeymoon capital of this corner of
the galaxy.
7. Guides for hunting and fishing expeditions seeking the weird
wildlife specimens cavorting about. No license required.
8. Specimen gatherers for ET zoos.
9. Gatherers of genetic material for hybridization, since we have a
huge variety of almost all biological and botanical materials,
including humans. Other older places may have long ago run out of many
varieties.
10. Jailers of miscreants who are being punished by having to spend
two weeks near earth. Punishment to last a lifetime.
11. Advance men for the establishment of amusement parks. The land for
Disneyworld in Florida was bought up secretly in advance.
13. Proprietors of supply centers for travelers needing water, food,
or various hydrogen isotopes for their fusion or other propulsion
systems. Sort of like the English coaling stations on islands in the
oceans in the last century. Or gas, food, lodging next exit, perhaps
on the side of the moon away from the earth.
14. Anthropologists checking on colonies left here millennia ago,
perhaps as part of a competition for who can do the best job.
15. Flyers doing their cross galaxy flying solos.
16.Training missions for space explorers, anthropologists, marines,
navigators.
17. Repairmen for space communication systems, checking out the "new
sources" of electromagnetic waves fouling up their communications.
18.Antique and curio buyers from elsewhere gathering specimens and
souvenirs.
19. Advance men for space missionaries like those who converted the
natives in Africa.
20. Talent recruiters for non-earthling sports teams. We on average
seem to be larger and stronger than our visitors.
21. Relativistic space travelers returning home after a short (pilot
time) journey.
22. Advance men planning an interstellar competition on neutral
ground, such as Iceland was for the Fisher Spaasky chess match.
23. Rescuers of arms caches left behind eons ago for use in warfare.
24. Intragalactic advance men for the next Olympics or for new hotels
and resorts.
I am sure readers can come up with their own top-ten list. My
preferred reason for alien visitations is to quarantine us to make
sure we don’t take our brand of friendship – usually described as
hostility – out there.
This notion in based on one assumption I make about every advanced
civilization, namely that it is concerned with its own survival and
security. This means that it must keep tabs on the primitives in the
neighborhood, but only close tabs on those able to bother that
civilization.
At the end of WW 2, it was perfectly clear to any visiting alien spy
checking out the place that soon this primitive society, whose major
activity is tribal warfare (we Earthlings killed more than 50 million
of our own kind and destroyed 1700 cities during WW 2), would be
moving out and bothering the neighbors. Soon would mean roughly one
hundred years, which is obviously nothing on a cosmic time scale. The
three indicators of rapid development of interstellar flight
capability were nuclear weapons, powerful V-2 Rockets, and powerful
radar and other electronic devices.
As it happens, the only location on the entire planet at which one
could study all 3 in July, 1947, was Southeastern New Mexico. The
first atom bomb was tested at Trinity site on White Sands Missile
Range in July, 1945. White Sands was where the captured German V-2
rockets were being launched, and is also where the best radar was to
track the rockets. The recovery of a crashed saucer near Roswell - and
another in the Plains of San Augustin - should not be surprising at
all.
I would further note that because the time to go from one's first
flight technology to space travel is so short, that during any one
century it is very unlikely that there are other solar systems in the
neighborhood going through this transition at the same time. They are
either way ahead of us or way beyond us. We would be a natural focus
for visitation.
---------------------------------------------------------
Why Secrecy? By Stanton Friedman
One of the most frequently asked questions after my 3 lectures or
during radio and TV interviews is, "Why is the government not telling
us what it knows about flying saucers?” Is it fear of panic like the
reaction to the Orson Wells' 'War of the Worlds' radio program in
1938?" Apparently people have no problem with the evidence I present
that indeed the subject of flying saucers is a kind of Cosmic
Watergate. I show the blacked out CIA and NSA documents, the whited
out NSA documents, and review some of the lies told by Air Force and
other officials. But the kicker seems to be WHY?
I normally start by saying that obviously I am not a spokesman for any
government agency, but here are the five major reasons that I believe
help explain (not justify) the coverup:
** Technology most important consideration
1. From a government's viewpoint, what is most important about flying
saucers is the technology; not the philosophical implications of man
not being alone, so often proclaimed by the SETI (Silly Effort to
Investigate) cultists.
The first country to duplicate the ability of flying saucers to move
at very high speed and very slowly, to make right angle turns at very
high speed, to move up and down vertically, usually with little noise
or exhaust or visible external engines, will rule the planet. Having
wreckage and lots of classified technical data about flight
performance, naturally a secret project was set up to try to learn as
much about the technology as possible and to tell our enemies as
little as possible about what we have learned.
A basic rule of security is that one can't tell one's friends without
telling one's enemies. Fifty-five years is a very very short time to
try to learn the technological secrets of a civilization(s) that might
be thousands or millions of years ahead of us, especially since
technological progress comes from doing things differently in an
unpredictable way.
I, for one, don't want technical data out on the table where Saddam
can have easy access.
**Who gets it first?
2. Governments must be concerned about the possibility of "The other
guy" (and every country has an "other" guy) figuring out how they work
before we do. How do we defend against the new technology? We
certainly don't want them to know we know they know. If they have a
new poison gas, and we figure out an antidote, then they have to
change the gas, we have to change the antidote, etc. Mankind has been
playing these silly, but deadly, games for eons. Bigger clubs,
stronger shields. A primary espionage target is determining what the
other guy knows.
** A political problem
3. The third problem for governments is political. What happens if an
announcement were to be made by people respected around the world (The
Queen and the Pope??) that some UFOs are indeed ET spacecraft? I think
Church attendance would increase, as would mental hospital admissions.
The stock market would go down.
But I think one of the most important reactions, based on more than
600 college lectures, would be a push from the younger generation
(which unlike me was never alive when there wasn't a space program)
for a new view of ourselves as Earthlings (Terrans?) instead of as
Americans, Canadians, Peruvians, Chinese, etc). Some people
immediately think "wouldn't that be great??"
Unfortunately, I know of no government that wants its citizens to owe
their primary allegiance to the planet instead of that government.
Nationalism is the only game in town. There certainly isn't anybody
who truly speaks for the planet. I can't imagine a galactic federation
offering membership to individual countries, any more than the UN
offers membership to cities. Actually I don't think our planet yet
qualifies for membership in the Cosmic Kindergarten.
** A devilish question
4. Certain Christian fundamentalists in the USA (Pat Robertson, Jerry
Falwell) have strongly expressed the view that mankind represents the
only intelligent beings in the universe, and that this flying saucer
stuff is the work of the devil. These guys were very close politically
to Ronald Reagan and Bush senior.
They would be up the creek without a religious paddle should an
announcement be made. It is interesting that the Mormons, Hindus,
Muslims, etc all accept the notion that there is intelligent life out
there.
** It's the economy, stupid!
5. The fifth difficulty is economic. Suppose that an announcement were
made, obviously not quietly, but carefully, saying that indeed Earth
is being visited by intelligently controlled ET spacecraft. I believe
that many people, so long as no direct threat were being presented,
such as was the case in "War of the Worlds," would say that obviously
the aliens are much more advanced technologically than are we, since
they are coming here and we can't go there. Probably this would
suggest that soon there would be new methods of energy production, of
ground and air transport, of computing and communications. In short,
economic chaos.
Who would be the winners? Who the losers? Remember that in the late
l980s the countries of the West were saying that if only the Russians
would take down the Berlin Wall and have elections, freedom,
democracy, and capitalism, everything would be great. They have had
those things and everything is terrible. We Earthlings don't seem to
be very good at large-scale economic transitions.
** Knowledge is power
I am sure that readers can think of other reasons, such as the
government has made a deal with the aliens, perhaps swapping access to
medical examinations of earthlings for advanced technology. Perhaps
they know that something terrible will happen and there is nothing
that can be done about it, etc etc etc.
The point here is that Knowledge is Power. Americans and other
nationalities long ago conceded that information would be kept from
the public in the interests of National Security. After all, the
Director of Central Intelligence in 1996, because of a court action,
was forced to admit that his total black budget that year was only
$26.6 billion dollars.
That represents a lot of effort with little oversight by elected
officials. Those in power want to stay in power. Elected officials
take as their first duty the need to be reelected. Those with access
to very highly classified information take as their first duty the
need to keep it from all but the very few having a need to know.
---------------------------------------------------------
The Pseudo-science of Anti-ufology by Stanton Friedman
In 1981 I wrote an article "The Pseudoscience of Antiufology" which
was eventually published in the First Quarter, 1983, issue of PURSUIT
Magazine (pp.17-20. ) My primary focus was on the massive
misrepresentation by Carl Sagan on the Cosmos TV series of the UFO
experience of Betty and Barney Hill (Interrupted Journey, by John G.
Fuller) and Marjorie Fish's star-map work associated with it ("The
Zeta Reticuli Incident" by Terence Dickinson).
A second focus was on the grossly inaccurate portrayal of the same
case by the Amazing Randi in his aptly named book FLIM FLAM.
Once again the term pseudoscience has reared its ugly head. The
National Science Foundation takes polls every so often to measure what
the public knows about science and what they believe about the so
called paranormal areas like astrology, ufology, telepathy, etc. They
found that a lot of people are ignorant of the simplest notions about
science with, for example, only 54% knowing that it takes the Earth a
year to go around the Sun. They also found that lots of people believe
in the paranormal.
Their press release seems to suggest that it is because people believe
in "pseudoscience" that they don't know much real science. They
somehow can't seem to provide any evidence to back up this claim. Or
at least to present it, if they found it.
Gallup Polls and others have consistently found that the greater the
education the more likely to accept UFO reality. I would, I think
reasonably, expect that the greater the education the more basic
science one would know. So where is the beef?
Well, as might be expected, Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss (Department of
Physics) referred to by his employer, Case Western Reserve University
in Cleveland, Ohio, as the new Carl Sagan, jumped right in with an
article in the April 30 New York Times entitled "Odds Are Stacked When
Science Tries to Debate Pseudoscience."
I had done a debate with Krauss on March 30, 1999, on the Jeff Rense
Radio show from the West Coast. Ten days in advance, Jeff had asked
if I was willing to debate Krauss, who had written a nasty review of
an NBC TV Documentary involving Whitley Strieber. I agreed, obtained
background info from Case Western Reserve, and read Krauss' books The
Physics of Star Trek and Beyond Star Trek.
During the debate it was quite clear that Krauss really hadn't done
any homework on either UFOs or advanced nuclear technology, though he
had written negative items about both and pretended to be an expert on
both. He had also not read Crash at Corona or TOP SECRET/MAJIC or
anything else by, or about, me.
Since I had worked as a nuclear physicist on fission and fusion
rockets and nuclear power plants for space, and have had a very strong
interest in UFOs and advanced technology since 1958, I was able to
directly quote and correct the false claims from the books. As one
caller put it, Krauss sounded like somebody who was unwilling to look
through Galileo's telescope to view the moons of Jupiter.
After that show I wrote Krauss, sending along some background material
and some papers, and challenging him to a debate at a location and
time of his choice. He naturally refused. After all, why should he
take on somebody who knows more than he does about these topics?
In his new NY Times article, he talks about his battles with
creationists and a debate he supposedly had on a Florida radio station
about UFOs. I suspect he was really talking about the Rense show.
He claimed that debates stack the odds against science because
"Science is not fair. All ideas are not treated equally. Only those
that have satisfied the test of experiment or can be tested by
experiment have any currency... Beautiful ideas, elegant ideas and
even sacrosanct notions are not immune from termination by the
chilling edge of experimental data."
This sounds very scientific. But it isn't. Provide me with an
experiment using dark energy, or neutron stars, or quasars or black
holes. We observers have no control whatsoever over these strange
phenomena. We can make measurements and try to interpret them. We
can't make an eclipse happen or a major earthquake (we can make small
ones).
There are scientific approaches that can be taken to find out more
about other uncontrollable events, such as automobile accidents,
murders, rapes, burglary, or UFO observations. But our entire legal
system, often concerned with very significant events such as the
above, is primarily dependent on testimony from witnesses. Ask a
lawyer or a judge. Of course we can measure DNA, and alcohol blood
levels, and lengths of skid marks, and bullet trajectories and
ballistics.
Krauss really goes off the deep end with this gem: "We may not know
how spacecraft of the future will be propelled [certainly true],
whether anti-matter drives will be built or even if time travel is
possible. But we do know absolutely how much on-board fuel will be
needed to speed up a substantial spacecraft to near the speed of light-
an enormous amount, probably enough to power all of human civilization
at the present time for perhaps a decade..." Not a shred of evidence
to justify this outlandish claim. Just as when he wrote his books and
then debated me, Krauss seems to have no understanding of how very
important the selected trip parameters are.
In my May 1 1etter to the New York Times, I noted that Dr. Simon
Newcomb had "scientifically" shown that man would only be able to fly
with a balloon, two months before the Wright Brother's first flight;
that Dr. Bickerton had "proven" in the 1920’s that there was no way to
provide sufficient energy to an object, even using our best
explosives, to get it to orbital velocity.
I also stressed the "scientific" work of Dr. Campbell, who in 1941
"scientifically" showed that the required initial launch weight of a
chemical rocket able to get a man to the moon and back would be a
million million tons. He was only too high by a factor of 300 million!
He made just about all possible wrong (dare I say stupid?)
assumptions, such as assuming a single stage rocket, limited to 1-G
acceleration, launched straight up, and having to be slowed down by a
huge retrorocket when coming back.
Engineers and scientists involved in the space program (as obviously
Krauss and Campbell never were) used a multistage rocket, exposed the
astronauts to several Gs, launched to the east from near the equator,
and used the Moon's gravitational field to pull Apollo in, and the
Earth's atmosphere to slow it down upon return. The feasibility is
entirely in the details.
And all this is not even considering fission and fusion rockets, on
both of which I have worked and about which Krauss was almost totally
ignorant.
Late in 1999, I sent Krauss a copy of my MUFON 99 paper "Star Travel?
YES!! " which reviews many of his naive comments. Judging by his
latest commentary, he hasn't learned anything since. Of course, I have
sent him a copy of my letter to the NY Times and once again challenged
him to a debate.
The April 30 NYT article and my May 1 response are both posted on my
website www.v-j-enterprises.com/ sfpage.html
I would certainly agree that there is a lot of nonsense published
about "paranormal" subjects. But we don't expect amateurs to be very
scientific. We do expect the professional academics to do their
homework and NOT to follow the 4 basic rules for debunkers:
1. Don't bother me with the facts; my mind is made up.
2. What the public and the media don't know, I will not tell them.
3. If you can't attack the data, attack the people; it is easier.
4. Do your research by proclamation, rather than investigation. It is
much easier.
In short, then, what passes for scientific truth from on high is often
pseudoscience.
---------------------------------------------------------
UFO’s and the Fermi Paradox by Stanton Friedman
It has become fashionable for various SETI (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Specialists (SS) to invoke the "Fermi
Paradox" as an indication that there are no aliens visiting earth.
Paradox is defined as "a statement or proposition seemingly self
contradictory or absurd, and yet explicable as expressing a truth."
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was one of the top physicists of the 20th
century. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his work
on the interactions of neutrons with many elements, including uranium.
He moved from Italy to the United States right after his Nobel award
because of Mussolini's anti-Semitism, and directed the construction of
the first nuclear chain reacting pile on the squash court under the
stands at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942.
He then became an associate Director at Los Alamos National Lab and
was present at the first Atomic Bomb explosion at Trinity site in New
Mexico in July, 1945. After the war, he went back to teach physics at
Chicago, and this was one of the reasons I transferred there in 1953.
He had exploratory surgery in late 1954 and died 6 weeks later of
cancer that had been found, but could not be treated.
He was, judging by the reactions of my other physics profs, a
physicist's physicist. He was equally at home with theoretical and
experimental work. The US Government even issued a postage stamp in
2001 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth.
The story goes that Fermi, in many discussions with his associates at
Los Alamos, had noted that it shouldn't take very long, perhaps 10
million years, for any advanced civilization to colonize the whole
galaxy, which is about 1000 times older than the colonization time.
His question was "So where are they?" or "So where is everybody?"
SETI Specialists and others have interpreted his comments as meaning
that since we obviously haven't been colonized, either there is nobody
else out there or they must be out there and we just have to listen
long enough with better and better equipment and we will discover
them.
Both groups assume Fermi was saying nobody is coming here. I don't
think that is true. Fermi was famous for his teaching skills, and
often asked questions to get students to think through difficult
problems.
Obviously there are many possible answers, such as "We are the
remnants of colonies planted here thousands or millions of years ago."
One would think they expected an advanced civilization to land and
make a beeline for the nearest pub or TV station or SETI Institute.
Perhaps Earth is a penal colony at which they dumped bad guys and
girls-sort of the Devil's island of this corner of the galaxy. They
certainly would not have been left a means for escaping. Georgia and
Australia were first settled by prisoners.
One popular answer from some of Fermi's close associates: "They did
colonize earth, and we Hungarians (Teller, Szilard, etc) are they."
Hungarian is a language like no other on Earth. A number of brilliant
scientists were Hungarian.....
Another answer, and the one I prefer, is "governments have collected
all kinds of data in secret, including crashed saucers and alien
bodies, proving that they (aliens) have been coming here, but do not
want to tell us because of the potential technological advantage that
might accrue. .. And the possible reduction in power if the people on
the planet start thinking of themselves as Earthlings."
Certainly Fermi arnd his associates working on the Manhattan Project
knew that secrets could be kept. They were helping to keep them. Los
Alamos was a secret city. It didn't even get mail, but used a PO Box
in Santa Fe. Scientists traveled under phony names. That chain
reaction at the U. of Chicago was an extraordinary scientific
achievement, but there was no publication in scientific journals and
no press coverage.
Dr. Michael Hart, a professor at Trinity College, and a small group of
followers did a lot of modeling about Earth, making all kinds of
assumptions having no basis in fact, and concluded that the conditions
here were so special for the development of life, that those
conditions have never existed anywhere else, and we are the only
civilization in the universe!! He took the Fermi Paradox to mean that
since there are no colonists here, there has never been any other
civilization anyplace else!!
Dr. Frank Drake, president of the SETI Institute, looks at things
differently. In “Is Anyone out There?” (Frank Drake and Dava Sobel,
Delacorte Press, 1992). "There are several solutions to this Fermi
Paradox, for the "fact" that "they" are not here does not prove that
"they" do not exist," Drake states. Not the slightest basis is given
for the "fact" that they are not here. No reference to the enormous
amount of data indicating they are.
He continues, "I don't believe we will receive visits from other
planets of other stars...any more than I believe we have been visited
in the past by ancient astronauts or UFOs that are alien
spacecraft....They are there in great numbers for us to find—via their
radio transmissions. That is why I have pushed continuously over the
years for the construction of larger, ever more sensitive receivers,
the better to hear those signals." Not only does he believe that
nobody is coming here, but that they are out there and are stuck at
the level of radio!! Evidence provided? NONE.
Seth Shostak, a SETI specialist colleague of Drake, claims in a recent
internet piece that "Fermi thought there was obvious proof that we
could be alone in the Galaxy." I can't find any evidence for this
conviction. Shostak says, "We seem to have the Galaxy to ourselves. At
least that is the obvious conclusion from the apparent lack of aliens
in the neighborhood." I suppose the aliens haven't called Seth or
Frank, but so what. Why should they?
Shostak says, "The evidence for alien visitation has failed to sway
most scientists. To convince researchers who are inherently skeptical,
unambiguous and repeated detection of flying objects by satellites or
ground-based radar would be required. Better yet would be some
indisputable physical evidence such as the landing lights. In other
words something better than witness testimony is necessary since such
testimony isn't good enough no matter how credible the witness."
This is a truly incredible and unscientific claim. In the first place
there are a whole host of excellent radar and radar-visual cases, such
as the many investigated by Dr. James E. MacDonald. There are more
than 5000 physical trace cases that Ted Phillips has collected from 70
countries.
In addition, of course, is the simple fact that the best air and
ground radar cases involve measurements by our best military radar and
satellite surveillance systems. Their data is born classified. The
data from the spy satellites operated by the National Reconnaissance
Office is born classified and rarely declassified. . . and certainly
not sent to the SETI specialists.
Our entire legal system involving evaluation of events involved with
intelligent people is based on witness testimony. Murders, rapes,
airplane crashes, UFO landings, aren't reproducible, controllable
experiments. They are out in the real world. Absence of evidence in
the hands of the SS certainly isn't evidence for absence of that data.
The most significant characteristic of the comments made about UFOs by
Drake, Shostak, Jill Tartar, the late Carl Sagan, et al is the total
lack of referral to the large scale scientific UFO studies. At my
lectures "Flying Saucers ARE Real" I discuss 5 large scale scientific
studies and ask, after showing slides of each, how many (many of my
audiences are loaded with professional engineers and scientists) have
read this volume? Typically only 1 or 2% have read any.
In short, SETI Specialists are basically saying, "It is OK to theorize
in a way that justifies the work I am doing, but don't bother me with
the facts; my mind is made up." Obviously this applies to their many
foolish comments about "you can't get here from there."
One would think all civilizations were stuck with chemical rocket
technology along with radio systems like ours. The SETI Specialists
forget that technological progress comes from doing things differently
in an unpredictable way.
The Fermi Paradox doesn't establish that nobody is coming here. It
forces us to recognize that they could have come here ages ago, could
be coming here now, and that most of us wouldn't be aware of past or
present visits.
Shostak further says, "SETI Experiments offer the promise of
relegating the Fermi Paradox to the dustbin of historical curiosities
by proving that other intelligence is out there." One would think he
could get aliens to send and respond on his command! In the real
world, it is studying the enormous volume of UFO data that establishes
that other intelligence is coming here, even though "they" are
apparently not visiting the SETI specialists.
---------------------------------------------------------
Absence of Evidence by Stanton T. Friedman
In their new book, “ Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a
Grave Robbing Ufologist,” (Prometheus Press) James W. Moseley and Karl
T. Pflock express their disdain for what they describe as "a
ufological mantra coined by Roswell crash advocate Stan Friedman:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While this is
literally true, the real message, conveyed with body language and a
knowing nod, is subliminal: Therefore evidence really does exist-
Roswell crashed saucer parts, alien cadavers, 'smoking-gun' documents,
you name it. This bit of Saucer Logic is more subtle than most, making
the spoken words seem to mean much more than they actually mean. In
truth the absence of evidence after a thorough investigation is a
strong clue that what was not found does not exist or Stanton T.
Friedman did not happen, and common sense says go with that until
contrary clues show up."
The above is a great perversion of my approach to ufology. First of
all I maintain a large “Gray Basket” containing those notions for
which I don't have enough evidence to reach a conclusion.
Secondly, with regard to Roswell, there is plenty of evidence, as
reported, for example, in Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the
Roswell Incident by Don Berliner and myself. Certainly eyewitness
testimony is considered evidence by all judges. With regard to smoking
gun documents, I discussed these in detail in my book TOP SECRET/
MAJIC, in my 108 page “Final Report on Operation Majestic 12,” and in
my MUFON 2000 paper "Roswell and the Majestic 12 Documents in the New
Millennium," among others.
That I don't have a piece of a saucer and an alien body does not mean
they don't exist, especially when one considers the obvious national
security implications of them. Perhaps most important is that I have
had great difficulty finding these so called "thorough investigations"
on the part of debunkers. What I keep finding are proclamations, NOT
investigations.
There are many examples.
Philip Klass challenged me about the pica type used in the June 14,
1954, memo about MJ-12 from Robert Cutler, Ike's National Security
advisor, to General Nathan Twining, MJ-12 member, and USAF Chief of
Staff. He proclaimed that the White House-based NSC used the smaller
elite type and provided 9 samples to "prove" it. He offered me $100
for each genuine NSC document using the same size and style pica type
from the right time frame and that met certain criteria.
Unfortunately, he set a limit of only $1000. He had not ever been to
the Ike Library, which has 250,000 pages of NSC material, many of
which were then still classified. I provided him with more than 20
examples (having spent weeks there), and he sent me a check for $1000.
A copy is in my Final Report.
Absence of evidence in his hands was NOT Evidence of absence. Also, it
is hardly rational to claim that one can generalize from a mere 9 of
250,000 documents.
Dr. Joe Nickell, full time Senior Research Fellow for the self
anointed “Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal” and, apparently, heir to Klass' UFO debunker throne,
claimed years ago that the date format “18 November, 1952” (note the
comma) violates the Government Style manual and, therefore, the
Eisenhower Briefing Document is a fraud.
His three degrees are in English, which as a physicist, I had not
thought of as a science. He did not provide a copy of the style manual
for 1952 and seemed to be totally unaware that genuine documents,
especially limited distribution classified ones, have all kinds of
date formats, usually depending on who is doing the typing. One file
folder for the Office of the Secretary of Defense had seven different
date formats.
I found many examples of the day, month, comma, year format, including
some by two of the MJ-12 members, both having been Directors of
Central Intelligence: Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the briefing officer, and
Walter B. Smith, his successor as DCI. I had published three short
items from DCI Allan Dulles (Smith's successor) to General Goodpastor
in Ike's Office, written within two weeks of each other, and each with
a different date format, in my Final Report on Op. MJ-12.
Absence of evidence in Nickell's hands was NOT evidence of absence. He
had made a proclamation NOT an investigation. One can only wonder how
much effort he made, if any, to check date formats.
Many debunkers claimed that the Cutler-Twining memo was clearly
fraudulent because the classification marking, “Top Secret
Restricted,” was supposedly not used by the US government before
President Nixon's time in 1968. I had found examples of Confidential
Restricted and Secret Restricted, but had not found any marked Top
Secret Restricted. That certainly didn't mean there were no such
items.
First, we must recognize that Secret info cannot be included in
Confidential documents, that Top Secret info cannot be included in
Secret documents, and that TOP SECRET Code Word (sometimes referred to
as SCI-Special Compartmented Information) data cannot be included in
Top Secret Documents. We do know that there is TOP SECRET UMBRA (other
code words might include Ultra or Majic) UFO information because the
National Security Agency, in 1996, finally “released” 156 UFO
documents, previously withheld, which had that designation. None of
the 19 archives I have visited have provided any TOP SECRET Code word
documents that had been declassified.
Does this absence in my hands of TSR documents ' mean there weren't
any? NO. The General Accounting Office group searching for Roswell-
related classified documents all over the country noted (on page 80 of
the, GAO packet it sends out in response to FOIA requests about its
Roswell work): “December 7,1994....reviewed records pertaining to the
Air Forces atomic energy projects and certain mission and weapons
requirements. These files were classified up to and including TOP
SECRET. The period covered by these records was from 1948 to 1956.
There was no mention of the Roswell Incident. No information
pertaining to the assignment was obtained. In several instances we
noticed the classification Top Secret Restricted, used on several
documents. This is mentioned because in past references to this
classification (Majestic 12) we were told that it was not used during
this period.”
I spoke with three GAO people. They could not provide me copies of
these TSR documents because they were still classified. Absence of
evidence is NOT evidence of absence.
In 1980, in response to a court-ordered search for their UFO
documents, because the CIA had found 18 NSA UFO documents in its
"thorough" search, the NSA found 156 NSA UFO documents, besides 23 CIA
UFO documents, not found by the CIA. The 21 legal page affidavit to a
federal court judge justifying the withholding of these 156 NSA UFO
documents was itself TOP SECRET (Code word-UMBRA-found out later).
The affidavit was 75% censored when we obtained a copy under FOIA. In
1996 the NSA, in response to a new Presidential Executive Order,
relaxed a little, and the new version of the affidavit was only 20%
blacked out. They also claimed to have released the 156 NSA UFO
Documents. Many people, such as Dr. Kevin Randle, hailed this decision
as indicating there was no cover-up--only classified information about
intelligence sources and methods.
Such a claim is truly amazing in that more than 90% of each page was
censored using “white-out” rather than heavy black ink as in the
originally-released, very heavily censored documents that have played
so well for me on TV. I know of nobody who can read the text under the
white-out. In addition, how could it be possible that more than 90% of
each page mentioning a UFO deals with sources and methods information,
and less than 5% deals with UFOs?
There are still those saying nothing is being covered up. Sorry but
absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.
The CIA added its own misrepresentation. Though they had supposedly
done a thorough court-ordered search for UFO documents, they had found
only 18 of NSA’s 156, and somehow had not managed to find any of the
23 CIA UFO documents which the NSA had later found (but could not
release). It took me two years to get 9 of these, which were Eastern
European newspaper articles which had not been classified, and another
three years to get tiny portions of 4 (of 14) highly classified CIA
ones on appeal. Three pages had 10 or fewer visible words.
But we know from the proclamations of the debunkers that there is
nothing being withheld, and that the blacked out material is all
sources and methods information. Surely this is nonsense.
Pflock, in his book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to
Believe (The third anti-Roswell book published by Prometheus) claimed
there was no Roswell crashed saucer event, because it wasn't noted in
any of a number of USAF UFO documents. Once again, none of these were
classified TOP SECRET Codeword. They couldn't have contained TOP
SECRET UMBRA information. These would not have been noted in any
listing of lower classification.
Pflock certainly knows this from his time at the CIA and as Assistant
Deputy Director of Defense. He is well aware of the need-to-know
principle so important for access to highly classified documents and
projects.
Finally, there are the outrageous claims that there is no evidence of
sightings over big cities, no sightings by more than one witness, no
radar cases, no sightings by meteorologists, or astronomers or pilots.
So there is no evidence! All UFOs have prosaic explanations, and no
people are taller than 7'!
The fact is that one can find many examples in each of the above
sighting categories, in such sources as Dr. James E. MacDonald's 71 -
page testimony to the US Congress on July 29, 1969. This has 41
outstanding cases he personally investigated. It is available from
UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958 for only $10.00, including
postage.
Ted Phillips has collected more than 5000 physical trace cases. Let us
just pretend they don't exist, because they are absent from evidence
in the hands of the UFO debunkers.
To repeat my mantra, "Absence of evidence is definitely not evidence
of absence." I will add another. "Research by proclamation is NOT the
same as research by investigation."
---------------------------------------------------------
Roswell and the History Channel by Stanton T. Friedman
On Dec. 13, 1999, the History Channel ran a program about the Roswell
Incident. My strong Dec. 21 letter to the HC about the massive
misrepresentations in the program is posted at my website:
www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfpage.html . I received a brief unsigned
response months later saying thanks for your interest. We can't please
everyone. Dealing with none of my specific objections to false claims
made by debunkers on the show.
They did it again on June 13, 2002. "Roswell Declassified." This show
by Indigo was even more deceptive and inaccurate than the first one.
Very selective choice of data, many factual mistakes, serious
misrepresentation, character assassination, and creative blending of
items having no connection with each other or Roswell.
Despite the title, there were no newly declassified Roswell
documents!! A big fuss was made about 11 boxes of material at the
National Archives. The material dealt almost exclusively with the
USAF's attempts to debunk Roswell as opposed to the Roswell event
itself.
It was as if the consultants were USAF Col. Richard Weaver, author of
the huge 1995 "Roswell Report: Truth Versus Fiction in the New Mexico
Desert" (He provided the fiction) and Capt. James McAndrew, author of
the 1997 2nd Volume, mercifully only 231 pages long, "The Roswell
Report: Case Closed." (In the TV program for reasons unknown, it was
dated 1998.)
In the first place 11 boxes is not a lot of material. USAF
Headquarters Files for the Post WW II period until about 1956 totaled
9,800 feet of material, or about 1,000 4-drawer filing cabinets. I
have been to 19 Archives, and at none of the archives including the
Nat. Archives in College Park ,MD, where some of the TV program was
shot, was I asked to use gloves as were shown.
There was great drama when a triangular box was slowly opened to
reveal, guess what, a radar reflector used with weather balloons.
Connection with Roswell? NONE. It was pristine, clearly had a light
foil backed with paper that any 3-year-old could tear.
Where was the very strong foil with no backing described by Maj.
Marcel and Mack and Bill Brazel? That material when folded many times
would come back to its original shape. The reflector material was
certainly not memory metal.
The narrator claimed that the Roswell witnesses said the wreckage
included balsa wood. More nonsense. Jesse Marcel told me that the I-
beams weighed almost nothing, just like balsa wood, but couldn't be
cut, broken, or burned-very much unlike balsa wood.
Where were the strange lavender symbols on the I-beam as described by
Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr.? Where was the 2" wide toy factory tape used to
hold the radar reflectors together? Its strange symbols were
supposedly mistaken for what Dr. Marcel described. None has been
found, not even in the picture taken in Gen. Ramey's office showing
him and then Col. (later Retired General) T J DuBose and some phony
wreckage.
A small piece of a video of Gerald Anderson (I shot the footage) was
shown, and it was falsely claimed he was speaking to government
investigators. On that same 105-minute video, "Recollections of
Roswell" (assembled by the Fund for UFO Research), is testimony from
26 other witnesses, including Gen. DuBose. He makes clear that the
material in the photo was substituted for the real wreckage.
Using only the brief Anderson clip and none of the other witness
testimony is a great example of selective choice of data, which we
have come to expect from anti-Roswell propagandists.
Many films are shown of huge teardrop-shaped polyethylene balloons.
None were used for Mogul balloon trains until after Roswell. Instead,
the small neoprene balloons were used. Repeatedly we were told how
highly classified Mogul and other USAF programs were.
Mogul was so classified that several launches were allowed to just
float on down in the middle of nowhere without a chase plane or jeep
recovering it. None of the technology-only the purpose-was classified.
Not a shred of evidence was presented to link the supposed June 14
launch of a Mogul balloon train to Roswell.
The program falsely claimed that Marcel changed his tune and made up a
new story in the late 1 970s, and then researchers swarmed all over
him. He supposedly was sent out to the crash site and then was joined
by a platoon of soldiers!! Neither Marcel nor Brazel via his family or
neighbors ever said any such thing.
Jesse told me in 1978, in his first conversation about the incident in
years, that the rancher had come into town on Sunday, July 6 (The
Program made it sound like Brazel called the base-despite not having a
phone on the 7th.) Marcel and CIC Capt. Sheridan Cavitt followed
Brazel out to the ranch, spent the night in sleeping bags, having had
a can of beans, and then went to the site, loaded two vehicles with
wreckage, leaving almost all of it behind, and went the long way back
to town.
Yet the program showed Brazel picking up a small amount of crunched up
aluminum foil with his daughter or wife, who was not even with him at
the ranch. This follows the obviously false claim of Cavitt in an
interview with Col. Weaver that he suddenly recalled just a small
amount of wreckage from an obvious weather balloon, which covered an
area only 20 feet square and would easily fit in one vehicle.
Of course, if that had been the case, Brazel would have taken it all
with him to the Sheriff's office in Roswell and there would have been
no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to make the long trek, much of it
cross country, to the ranch.
Marcel, in our first conversation in 1978 and as shown on the Rec.of
Roswell tape and in my Video "UFOs ARE Real," said the wreckage
covered an area about 3/4 of a mile long and hundreds of feet wide.
There was nothing conventional such as vacuum tubes, wires, rivets,
etc. He had had a course in radar, and knew about radar reflectors,
which had to be very light weight.
In his volume, Weaver described the genesis of the crash story, making
the following false statement: "In 1978 an article appeared in a
tabloid newspaper, the National Inquirer (sic) which reported the
former intelligence officer, Marcel, claimed that he had recovered UFO
debris near Roswell in 1947. Also in 1978 a UFO researcher, Stanton
Friedman, met with Marcel and began investigating the claims that the
material Marcel handed was from a crashed UFO."
The story has just been tabloidized, since the only way the National
Enquirer could have known about Marcel is if he had gone to them with
his story. The fact is that the Enquirer article appeared in 1980,
well after William Moore and I had talked to 62 witnesses while
working on the first book The Roswell Incident.
I didn't get my lead from the Enquirer. In early 1978, I had been
referred to Jesse by an old ham radio buddy of his who had seen the
original wire story about the crashed saucer, and was twiddling his
thumbs as manager of the TV station where I was being interviewed to
promote my lecture that night at LSU in Baton Rouge, LA.
The reporter, fortunately, was late. Jesse didn't go to the Enquirer
or to me. I gave their excellent reporter, Bob Pratt, Marcel's
address. Marcel did not change any earlier story. He hadn't given one.
That National Enquirer story was probably responsible for Capt. (and
outstanding pilot) "Pappy" Henderson's telling his wife Sappho around
1980 about having seen the wreckage and bodies and flown wreckage to
Wright Patterson. Sappho and her daughter and his good friend, Dr.
John Kromshroeder, told their story on that same video.
Karl Pflock, author of the Roswell debunking book “Roswell:
Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe” dismissed Pappy as a
practical joker who, rather than handing Dr. Kromshroeder a small
piece of saucer wreckage back in 1978, on John's honor as a former
naval officer not to talk about it, had supposedly shown him a piece
of a V-2 rocket that he had. The family knew about the V-2 piece.
Pappy's son and son-in-law also held the strange wreckage. Pappy had
also quietly told his story to his WW II bombardier, the late Vere
McCarthy, who in 1989 wrote me about it in response to my call, and
even had been one of Pappy's pallbearers in 1986. Pflock doesn't say
any of this in his book or in his many negative comments in the
History Channel video.
McAndrew had focused on various crash test dummies used to evaluate
ejection seats and methods of jumping out of very high altitude
balloons. Nice visuals of these experiments were shown in the video.
These had absolutely nothing to do with Roswell, especially since none
were dropped until after 1953. McAndrew used a map of drop locations
three times. Strange there were no dummies dropped near either the
Foster Ranch or Plains of San Augustin crash sites!
The man in charge of the program told me that the dummies were 6 feet
tall and weighed 175 pounds. Could anybody mistake such items for
small alien beings? Time travel was further demonstrated by the claim
that the reported red headed officer seen by Glenn Dennis at the
Roswell Army Air Force base (and also independently claimed to have
been observed in the Plains by Gerald Anderson, in both cases
accompanied by a black sergeant) was actually famed red haired pilot
Joe Kittinger, who had been to the hospital with a friend injured by a
balloon that had come down near Roswell. This was 1959!!
No black sergeant seen. Naturally there was a chase team present very
quickly. It was claimed that because the military wasn't desegregated
until 1948 there could not have been a black sergeant with a white
officer. FALSE. Black sergeants were allowed to work with security
dog patrols, of which there were several at the Sandia National Lab in
Albuquerque from which the Officer had supposedly come.
Other visually interesting items were shown, such as a chimp in a
space capsule and a bear used for a space launch. People out in the
desert seeing these coming down would obviously have thought they were
space aliens! NONSENSE! It wasn't noted that none of these
experiments were conducted until well after Roswell, and that there
were always chase teams to dissuade any tourists in the desert from
interfering.
The "expert" team included Dr. Robert Park, a member of the American
Physical Society (as are Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Dr. Robert M. Wood, and
myself. All active in MUFON.) Park is the APS chief debunker of all
things "paranormal." His 10 pages in "Voodoo Science: The Road from
Foolishness to Fraud" about UFOs in general and Roswell in particular
are a splendid example of the pseudo-science of anti-ufology.
He bought into the McAndrew and Weaver opuses (crash test dummies,
Project Mogul, ad nauseum) hook line and sinker, and couldn't even get
straight simple facts, such as that George Wilcox was sheriff of
Chavez County not Lincoln County, and ignored the fact that newspaper
articles of July 8, 1947, noted that the wreckage had been found by
Rancher Brazel "last week," not the June 14 date deemed appropriate by
the Army Air Force People who reprogrammed the rancher with "new" (dis)
info as noted in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9.
Park casually has the false story of Maj. Marcel loading sticks,
cardboard, and metal foil into the trunk of his car growing over the
years into a major operation. There isn't the slightest indication
that he read any of the books briefly flashed across the screen,
including Don Berliner's and my Crash at Corona, and three books by
Kevin Randle, very briefly shown on the program. The noisy negativists
clearly had done no independent research, and accepted Weaver and
McAndrew.
A silly attempt was made to link the nearby crash in 1956 of a bomber
resulting in 11 crewmen being burned to death with mortician Glenn
Dennis' confusing this with Roswell aliens. Speaking to me at the
Ballard Funeral Home, Glenn recalled that crash very well. Another
ludicrous claim on the program was that the International UFO Museum
and Research Center in Roswell is owned by Glenn Dennis and Walter
Haut, who had issued the famous press release! It is a non-profit
organization, does not charge admission, and is NOT owned by them. It
has had 1.2 Million visitors in less than a decade.
Those who want facts about Roswell didn't find them in this program,
which will, of course, be repeated, as was the 1999 History Channel
production. An excellent source is outstanding researcher David
Rudiak's website http:www.Roswellproof.homestead.com . For those who
want to review a serious effort to compare the wreckage descriptions
with the makeup of Mogul Balloons, I would recommend FUFOR's 69-page
2002 report by engineer Robert A. Galganski, "The Roswell Debris
Field: An Engineer's Perspective."
---------------------------------------------------------
Bova and insufficient data by Stanton Friedman
In 1977, I presented a paper at the 8th Annual MUFON Symposium
(Scottsdale, Arizona) entitled "Science Fiction, Science, and UFOs"
complete with 60 references. I reviewed some of the fictional claims
made by such Sci-Fi stalwarts as Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, Arthur C.
Clarke and such scientists as J. Allen Hynek and Donald Menzel. I also
dealt with fiction about UFOs disguised as "fact" as published by
SCIENCE and Science News. Hynek, Asimov, and Menzel are all deceased.
But Ben Bova, former editor of ANALOG Science Fiction, and of OMNI is
still making some of the same off-the-wall comments.
Bova wrote an article in the October 13, 2002, Naples (Florida) Daily
News. He repeats some of the same old baloney such as that the only
reason some sightings can't be explained is that there isn’t enough
data. (Analog December,1975, p. 172).
I sent him tables from Project Blue Book Special Report #14 showing
that there was a separate category, "Insufficient Information," for
those reports for which there wasn't enough data, as opposed to the
21.5% of the 3,201 Sightings considered which could not be explained
by professional people spending full time working on the cases, and
that the better the quality of the sighting the more likely to be
unexplainable.
He certainly didn't let the facts get in the way of his baseless
beliefs as he made these comments in response to my letter and
enclosures: "I've been into the UFO controversy for many years... The
thing that impresses me the most is not the fact that there are so
many unexplained sightings but that so many people are willing to leap
from such sightings to the conclusion that we are being visited by
extraterrestrials... The lack of explanation of sightings in question
is actually a lack of information. Whenever enough information has
been obtained, the phenomenon has turned out to be terrestrial in
origin. . . it would seem that there would be a few with enough
information about them to show that no terrestrial explanation is
sufficient. I have never seen such a report. I’ll be glad to revise my
opinion."
I truly doubt it.
In other words, if we ignore all the relevant data, such as that in
BBSR 14, in Richard Hall's The UFO Evidence, and in the 1968
Congressional Symposium report which I had referenced (Jim McDonald's
paper had 41 excellent sightings), one can reach whatever
unsubstantiatable conclusions one wishes. And with a straight face.
Bova illustrated 3 of my 4 rules for UFO debunkers: 1. What the
public doesn't know, I am not going to tell them. 2. Don't bother me
with the facts, my mind is made up, 4. Do one's research by
proclamation; investigation is too much trouble.
In his 2002 article, Bova demonstrates rule number 3: If one can't
attack the data, attack the people. He uses the term "UFO faithful"
three times, totally ignoring the fact, true even in 1977, that the
greater the education, the more likely to believe in UFOs.
The notion that those of us who have studied the evidence leap to the
conclusions of ET visitors is also absurd. It is the combination of
appearance indicating "manufactured" and flight behavior indicating
not built here that leads us to the ET conclusion.
In 2002 Bova adds in the usual debunker disdain for Roswell without
any indication of having studied any of the relevant data . He states
that Walter Haut's press release referred to the wreckage as a disk.
"The disk was definitively a flying saucer. Three alien crewmen had
been recovered, two of them dead and the third badly injured." There
is no mention of bodies in any of the July 1947 press coverage!
One can only wonder at the source of this bit of nonsense, followed by
"For nearly half a century Roswell has stood as classic example of the
government hiding 'the truth' about flying Saucers." More malarkey. 22
years would be more correct.
The first book about Roswell, The Roswell Incident by Moore and
Berlitz, wasn't published until 1980, just a few years after I started
the civilian investigation of the Roswell Incident. Bova then admits
there was a coverup (lasting 47 years!), since Roswell really was a
Mogul Balloon, citing Karl Pflock's Roswell book, even though nothing
about Mogul fits the wreckage (or the timing) found near Roswell.
It should be noted that the intro to Karl's book was written by
another science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle.
Bova talks about his "Investigative efforts" regarding UFOs when he
was OMNI editor. He also states, "It is all too easy to fall for
unsupported stories that tell us what we want to believe." This is an
excellent description of the nonsense being spouted by anti-UFO
science fiction writers. They want to believe there is no evidence, so
create scenarios to back up this plot line, even though having no
basis in fact.
One of Bova's stranger recent comments: "Why the government would try
to cover up alien visitors is something I don't understand." Has Bova
never heard of the potential impact of anybody on earth being able to
duplicate the flight technology of flying saucers for military
applications and the necessity of keeping one's enemies from learning
what one has learned? How naïve can one get?
He also says, "How a government that leaks like a sieve could possibly
cover up such a story for nearly half a century is beyond my
comprehension." Obviously Bova knows very little about "need to know,"
compartmentalization, black budgets, etc. I should point out that in
1995 the Naval Research Laboratory first admitted having launched the
first U.S. electronic Intelligence Spy Satellite back in 1960. It
provided more Elint data than all the previous spy flights by the U-2
and other recon systems combined.
Echoing Phil Klass, Bova notes that the feds couldn't cover up
Watergate for very long. There is no comparison. Watergate did not
involve national security, the severe penalties for releasing
classified data, etc.
Bova claims, "I would like to see some scrap of hard palpable
evidence." Since he hasn't, I guess there must not be any. As I keep
saying, absence of evidence is not evidence for absence
On the same day that I read Bova's article, I also noted a story on
Business Wire about a Roper opinion poll about UFOs, sponsored by the
Science Fiction channel. The poll was done because of the forthcoming
December broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel of Steven Spielberg's
miniseries TAKEN about how three multi-generation families handle
their abductions. The poll noted that 72% of Americans believe the
government is not telling the public everything it knows about UFO
activity. That is a very large number of "UFO faithful."
Isaac Asimov in his publications back in the 1970s also attacked the
people, stating, whilst defending Hynek, "These reports are so riddled
with hoaxes, and the flying saucer enthusiasts have so many cranks,
freaks and nuts among them, that Hynek is constantly running the risk
of innocently damaging his reputation by being confused with them."
Again, of course, there is no data provided. Hoaxes and crackpot cases
make up together less than 10% of the cases. The polls have
consistently showed that a majority of those expressing an opinion
(including engineers and scientists) do accept the notion of UFO
reality. The greater the education the more likely to so accept.
Asimov: "Nor is it conceivable that they can be afraid of us." I guess
nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons can't affect aliens! He also
stated, "They should either come down and say hello or they should go
away. If they do neither, they are not intelligently guided
spaceships." What arrogant nonsense! One would think that because
Asimov writes science fiction, he is an expert on alien behavior!!
Talk about proclamation. I don't normally talk to the birds and
squirrels in the forest behind my house.
Asimov had been made aware of my views on UFOs when somebody had sent
him a copy of my 1973 MUFON paper which contained this comment: "Many
people are surprised when I point out that two of the most noted
science fiction and science writers, Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clark,
are both quite vehement in their anti-UFO sentiments."
His response in the February, 1974, Fantasy and Science Fiction was:
"That Friedman meets people who are surprised at this indicates, I
suppose, the level of the circles he moves in. After all, why should
the fact that Arthur and I are s.f. writers lead people to suppose
that we have forfeited our intelligence and must surely believe any
mystic cult that seems to have some elements in common with science
fiction."
I was, of course, referring to the many colleges and professional
groups to which I had spoken, including engineering societies of
Detroit, Cincinnati, Baltimore, many sections of the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Los Alamos section of the
American Nuclear Society, etc, etc. I am sure that Isaac was not
referring to the cults of SETI or of the noisy negativists such as he,
or Bova or Clarke.
What was most disconcerting about Asimov's extensive remarks was the
very bad science he displayed, despite his PhD in chemistry. In trying
to determine the number of civilizations in the galaxy, he starts with
the assumption (no basis given) that there are 640,000,000 Earth-like
planets in the galaxy. He reduces this by a factor of 300,000 because
there has only been life here for 1/ 300,000th of the time Earth has
been around, and by a factor of 50 because we have only had a
civilization for 200 of those 10,000 years (1 /50) arriving at a total
of only 43 Industrial civilizations in our galaxy!!
But there is no connection between the fraction of time there has been
a civilization here and the situation in the rest of the galaxy. When
I wrote my response, I pointed out that just because at that time I
had been married to my wife for 7% of my life, did NOT mean 7% of men
are married. He then claims to assume we are average, so there are
only 21 superior civilizations in the galaxy. He says that by
distributing them randomly that means an average distance between them
of 13,500 light years.
He then follows with a truly unscientific claim: "With the nearest
home planet of flying saucers being 13,500 light years away, the
chance of visiting us would seem small."
Random distribution to any real scientist would mean the nearest, even
using his totally baseless numbers, could be 10 light years away. As a
matter of fact there are 46 sun-like stars within only 54 light years
of us of the 1000 stars in that volume of space. Zeta 1 and Zeta 2
Reticuli are only 39 light years from us, and are only 1/8th of a
light year apart (based on the latest measurements.)
Of course Isaac ignores colonization, migration, and civilizations
that started long before us. Zeta 1 and 2 Reticuli are, after all, at
least a billion years older than the sun.
Just as with Bova more than 25 years later, Isaac proclaims, "If
flying saucers are spaceships, this must be proven by direct evidence.
It can never be proven by wailing 'but what else can it be?' I surely
don't know any scientists who have concluded that some UFOs are ET
spaceships on the basis of "what else can it be?"
Arthur Clarke also contributed a number of gems about UFOs back in the
1970s, such as "The public is no longer worried about them... no
longer news," and the International Geophysical Year killed UFOs
because they never found a single one. This, of course, ignores the
outstanding Trinidade, Brazil, photos taken by a photographer on board
an IGY ship.
He also claimed "the hysterical credulity of the late 40's has been
replaced-except in the minds of the few surviving cultists-by a
realization of the fact that the heavens are full of extraordinary
sights." Not a very good prediction, to say the least. Clarke also
noted that defense radar systems could detect single nuts and bolts,
falsely implying there have been no radar observations of UFOs.
Obviously he was assuming that he had the appropriate security
clearance and need-to-know to be shown such data.
One reason for rehashing this old and new science fiction stuff is
that I expect a major debunking effort from CSICOP and its anti-UFO
cultists because of TAKEN and other forthcoming documentaries. Dr.
Joseph Nickell (their full time "investigator"-with 3 degrees in
English) recently visited Flatwoods, WV, to dispose of the Flatwoods
Monster case of Sept. 12, 1952, claiming it was just a meteor that
landed and a large owl.
The facts that there was no crater, no meteor fragments were found, no
earthquake detected, and that the "monster" was at least 10 feet tall,
can of course be neglected. I visited the site exactly 50 years later
and talked to two of the key witnesses. Nickell did neither. I expect
a big book soon by an outstanding investigator, Joseph Feschino, who
has been researching the case for more than a decade.
---------------------------------------------------------
Stanton Friedman - The Quest For Truth About UFOs
Published: May 10, 2003
After more than 45 years of study and investigations and visits
to 19 document archives, I am convinced that:
a) Earth is being visited by alien spacecraft;
b) The subject of flying saucers represent a kind of Cosmic
Watergate;
c) There are no good arguments against these conclusions;
d) Visits to Planet Earth and 55 years of government cover-up of
crashed saucers and alien bodies are, together, the biggest
story of the past millennium.
I take a clear-cut, unambiguous stand that some UFOs are alien
spacecraft but that some of these flying saucers are our own. I
am absolutely convinced that the United States government has
been withholding data about UFOs since at least 1947. That was
the year when at least two crashed flying saucers - alien
wreckage and bodies - were recovered in New Mexico.
This does NOT mean everybody in the government knows all about
saucers and nobody has talked. Security works on a need-to-know
basis with compartmentalization of very highly classified
matters. Of course, some people have talked, but without having
any confirmatory classified documents to release.
After arduous effort, I have received some of the 6,000 pages of
UFO-related documents that have been released - many of them
with eight words to a page and paragraph after paragraph blacked
out (until they graduated to whiteout several years later.)
However, this amount is but a small percentage of what exists in
the archives and files of various government agencies.
More than a decade ago, a Freedom of Information request
submitted to the CIA by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy elicited
the response that the CIA had no information about UFOs. An
appeal was denied, but a federal court action forced the CIA to
do a document search.
Eventually it released about 900 pages of mildly interesting
items. Clearly this was the tip of the iceberg since none were
classified above "Secret" and since there were internal
references to many other documents that were not released.
The CIA has a history of doling out dribs and drabs in hope that
the requester will give up. Of greater importance was the
release of a list of 57 UFO documents found in the CIA files but
originating with a host of other agencies.
Notable among the identified material were 18 UFO documents
originating with the National Security Agency. But these
documents could not be released by the CIA.
A Freedom of Information request was then made for the NSA
documents, but was denied on the grounds of national security. A
subsequent appeal was denied and federal court action followed.
Finally, a federal judge ruled that the NSA had to search its
files. The search yielded 239 UFO documents with 79 originating
with other agencies, including 23 from the CIA, which supposedly
had already done an exhaustive search. The NSA refused to
release 156 of its UFO documents.
I then filed a Freedom of Information request for the 23 CIA
documents identified by the NSA file search. After 35 months the
CIA released just nine, which were all, believe it or not, press
abstracts of Eastern European newspaper articles about UFOs! It
refused to release its own 14 UFO documents on that list.
I appealed and - two years later - received tiny portions of
three documents with the rest being withheld.
The now-famous extraterrestrial encounters and cover up at
Roswell, N.M., have long been a focus of my work. I was the
original civilian investigator of the case and co-authored
"Crash at Corona," the definitive study of the Roswell
incidents, and instigated the Unsolved Mysteries episode on
television about Roswell.
Some attacks on the legitimacy of the Roswell crash have been
made by people who accept the notion that Earth is indeed being
visited by alien spacecraft but do not believe that Roswell
represents the crash of such a vehicle. Much as I have tried to
find good reasons for rejecting the reality of the Roswell
incident, despite the enormous quantity of verbiage that has
been published, I have been unable to do so.
My interest in and study of UFOs date back nearly half a
century, and since 1967, I've lectured on the topic, "Flying
Saucers ARE Real!" at more than 600 colleges and over 100
professional groups around the world. I also am author of more
than 100 papers and articles. I have appeared on hundreds of
radio and television programs about various UFO-related topics,
including Larry King Live, Nightline, Unsolved Mysteries,
Sightings and Entertainment Tonight.
I have provided testimony to congressional hearings, appeared
twice before the United Nations, and pioneered many aspects of
UFOlogy, including the Betty Hill star map work, crashed saucers
and analysis of the Delphos physical trace case.
My explosive book, "Top Secret/MAJIC," in 1996 sheds light on
the covert activities and findings of the select group
established by President Truman in 1947 to deal with crashed
saucers. The book draws from classified documents never before
published.
There is no question that the U.S. government recovered two
crashed flying saucers and crews in the New Mexico desert in
early July, 56 years ago. The government has been quite
successful at withholding the physical remnants and the real
paper trail.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Cosmic Watergate!
Editor's note: Stanton T. Friedman, who is grand marshal of
today's parade, put his convictions in writing as part of the
UFO Fest. We share them with you - with a wee grain of salt.
Source: The News-Register - McMinnville, Oregon
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
The Quest For Truth About UFOs
Source: The News-Register - McMinnville, Oregon
http://www.newsregister.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=165972
Stanton Friedman - The Quest For Truth About UFOs
Published: May 10, 2003
After more than 45 years of study and investigations and visits to 19
document archives, I am convinced that: a) Earth is being visited by
alien spacecraft; b) The subject of flying saucers represent a kind of
Cosmic Watergate; c) There are no good arguments against these
conclusions; d) Visits to Planet Earth and 55 years of government
cover-up of crashed saucers and alien bodies are, together, the
biggest story of the past millennium.
I take a clear-cut, unambiguous stand that some UFOs are alien
spacecraft but that some of these flying saucers are our own. I am
absolutely convinced that the United States government has been
withholding data about UFOs since at least 1947. That was the year
when at least two crashed flying saucers - alien wreckage and bodies -
were recovered in New Mexico.
This does NOT mean everybody in the government knows all about saucers
and nobody has talked. Security works on a need-to-know basis with
compartmentalization of very highly classified matters. Of course,
some people have talked, but without having any confirmatory
classified documents to release.
After arduous effort, I have received some of the 6,000 pages of UFO-
related documents that have been released - many of them with eight
words to a page and paragraph after paragraph blacked out (until they
graduated to whiteout several years later.) However, this amount is
but a small percentage of what exists in the archives and files of
various government agencies.
More than a decade ago, a Freedom of Information request submitted to
the CIA by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy elicited the response that the
CIA had no information about UFOs. An appeal was denied, but a federal
court action forced the CIA to do a document search. Eventually it
released about 900 pages of mildly interesting items. Clearly this
was the tip of the iceberg since none were classified above “Secret”
and since there were internal references to many other documents that
were not released.
The CIA has a history of doling out dribs and drabs in hope that the
requester will give up. Of greater importance was the release of a
list of 57 UFO documents found in the CIA files but originating with a
host of other agencies.
Notable among the identified material were 18 UFO documents
originating with the National Security Agency. But these documents
could not be released by the CIA.
A Freedom of Information request was then made for the NSA documents,
but was denied on the grounds of national security. A subsequent
appeal was denied and federal court action followed. Finally, a
federal judge ruled that the NSA had to search its files. The search
yielded 239 UFO documents with 79 originating with other agencies,
including 23 from the CIA, which supposedly had already done an
exhaustive search. The NSA refused to release 156 of its UFO
documents. I then filed a Freedom of Information request for the 23
CIA documents identified by the NSA file search. After 35 months the
CIA released just nine, which were all, believe it or not, press
abstracts of Eastern European newspaper articles about UFOs! It
refused to release its own 14 UFO documents on that list.
I appealed and - two years later - received tiny portions of three
documents with the rest being withheld.
The now-famous extraterrestrial encounters and cover up at Roswell,
N.M., have long been a focus of my work. I was the original civilian
investigator of the case and co-authored “Crash at Corona,” the
definitive study of the Roswell incidents, and instigated the Unsolved
Mysteries episode on television about Roswell. Some attacks on the
legitimacy of the Roswell crash have been made by people who accept
the notion that Earth is indeed being visited by alien spacecraft but
do not believe that Roswell represents the crash of such a vehicle.
Much as I have tried to find good reasons for rejecting the reality of
the Roswell incident, despite the enormous quantity of verbiage that
has been published, I have been unable to do so. My interest in and
study of UFOs date back nearly half a century, and since 1967, I’ve
lectured on the topic, “Flying Saucers ARE Real!” at more than 600
colleges and over 100 professional groups around the world.
I also am author of more than 100 papers and articles. I have appeared
on hundreds of radio and television programs about various UFO-related
topics, including Larry King Live, Nightline, Unsolved Mysteries,
Sightings and Entertainment Tonight. I have provided testimony to
congressional hearings, appeared twice before the United Nations, and
pioneered many aspects of UFOlogy, including the Betty Hill star map
work, crashed saucers and analysis of the Delphos physical trace case.
aMy explosive book, “Top Secret/MAJIC,” in 1996 sheds light on the
covert activities and findings of the select group established by
President Truman in 1947 to deal with crashed saucers. The book draws
from classified documents never before published. There is no
question that the U.S. government recovered two crashed flying saucers
and crews in the New Mexico desert in early July, 56 years ago. The
government has been quite successful at withholding the physical
remnants and the real paper trail.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Cosmic Watergate! Editor’s note:
Stanton T. Friedman, who is grand marshal of today’s parade, put his
convictions in writing as part of the UFO Fest. We share them with you
- with a wee grain of salt.
---
Guest writer Stanton Friedman was born in New Jersey in 1934 and
received B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the University of
Chicago, where Carl Sagan was a classmate. He worked 14 years as a
nuclear physicist with major corporations on such advanced, highly
classified, eventually canceled projects as nuclear aircraft, fission
and fusion rockets, and nuclear power plants for space.
---------------------------------------------------------
The laws of physics by Stanton Freidman
I am sick and tired of people complaining that one or another law of
physics would have to be violated by flying saucers, and, therefore,
since I am a nuclear physicist, how can I say some UFOs are alien
spacecraft?
There is a long list of such supposed violations: It would take too
long to get here from other star systems. It would take too much
energy to get here from other star systems. Right angle turns are
impossible. High accelerations would violate the laws of physics.
People can't be taken through walls without damaging the walls or the
people. Etc. ad nauseum.
What we seem to be dealing with are claims by people who don't
understand the laws of physics, who have no comprehension that the
feasibility of accomplishing a particular objective is almost
completely dependent on the engineering assumptions made, and that
much of the blind acceptance we give to today's technology would have
been totally rejected by other noisy negativists 100 or more years
ago.
It is easier and perhaps more erudite to suggest that something is
impossible because it supposedly violates the laws of physics rather
than admitting, "I don't know how to do that." Can we reach the stars?
Can we withstand high accelerations? Can we go into orbit? Can we make
powerful computers that will fit on a desk?
Slide rules and vacuum tubes won't cut it for today's computers.
Neither will transistors nor integrated circuits. . . But micro
integrated circuits will do it. They were only attained with the
expenditure of billions of dollars and thousands of man-years of
effort by physicists and others.
The key thought is that progress comes from doing things differently
in an unpredictable way.
Acceleration
How much acceleration can people stand? This, of course, is a biology
question, but the simple answer to so many such questions is that it
depends on the duration of the acceleration, the direction of the
force acting on the person with regard to her body, the magnitude of
that force, the restraints on the person, etc. As it happens, the
shorter the duration, the more one can stand.
This question is often confused by the units we physicists use. One G
(ask any physics class) is 9.8 meters per second squared-which means
nothing to most people. In normal units that is about 21 miles per
hour per second. NASA data shows that a trained pilot can perform a
tracking task while being accelerated at 14 Gs for two minutes.
Think about that for a moment. 14 Gs is about 300 miles per hour per
second. A Corvette going from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 6 seconds if
uniformly accelerated is pulling 60/6 or 10 mph per second, or only
about 0.5 G’s! It turns out one can withstand 30 Gs for 1 second
without damage, if properly constrained, and the force is in the right
direction with regard to the body.
Notice how the astronauts are launched on their backs because people
can stand much more acceleration back to front than foot to head.
Note, too, that contour couches are used to distribute the load and
that strong seat belt restraints are employed.
There are really no laws of physics being violated here, though one
book foolishly claimed that when one gets to 8 G's, one dies. True, if
one slams a standing unrestrained person into a brick wall....Dr.
Stapp actually lived through deceleration of 43 Gs (From over 600 mph
to zero), for a fraction of a second. The rocket sled can be seen at
the Clyde Tombaugh Space Museum in Alamogordo, NM. No, you wouldn't
catch me on such a sled.
Right angle turns
Some have said that saucers making right angle turns violate the laws
of physics. The laws of physics say nothing about the possibility of
making rapid right angle turns. Our present jet and rocket technology,
which work by carrying along something thrown out the back end, is not
capable of providing right angle turns, because we cannot rapidly
change the direction of the rearward thrust.
A magneto-aerodynamic system which could provide rapid changes of the
direction of electric and magnetic forces probably could provide right
angle turns. More likely there is a technique about which we know
nothing.
Sonic booms
Sometimes it is claimed that one cannot go faster than the speed of
sound in the atmosphere without producing a sonic boom. Therefore, any
claims of supersonic flying saucers without booms being heard would
mean the laws of physics would be violated. The truth is that the
production of a sonic boom is dependent on the shape of the high speed
object and its interaction with the surrounding boundary layer of air.
If the air is electrically ionized (made to be a conducting plasma)
then there may NOT be an accompanying sonic boom.
Energy and time
I have been told that getting here from another solar system in a time
shorter than the average person's life span would take far too much
energy and would violate the laws of physics, or it would take
thousands or millions of years. The fact is that the feasibility of
any space travel is based upon the assumptions made.
As I noted in my "Challenge to SETI Specialists" (see my Web site at
www.vj-enterprises.com/sipage.html), a "scientific" calculation in
1941 oft he required initial launch weight of a chemical rocket able
to get a man to the moon and back concluded it would be a million
million tons.
Dr. Campbell was off by a factor of 300 Million! He made all the wrong
assumptions, such as single stage rockets, a limit of 1G acceleration,
using a retrorocket to slow down when approaching earth on the return,
assuming much too low an exhaust velocity, and assuming that the
rocket would have to provide all the energy.
We use cosmic freeloading such as the earth's rotation of 1000 mph
when launching to the east near the equator, the gravity field of the
moon to pull in the rocket, and the earth's atmosphere to slow us down
on return. It was Dr. Campbell's ignorance that was the problem, not
the laws of physics.
Another misunderstanding of the laws of physics comes from people
pointing out that since one would have to approach the speed of light
(670,000,000 mph) to go to nearby solar systems, the amount of energy
required would be humongus because the mass of the rocket increases as
one approaches the speed of light. However, it only takes one year at
1G acceleration to get close to the speed of light.
If one uses nuclear fusion of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) and helium-3
(light helium one produces charged particles which can be directed by
electric and magnetic fields) then there is ten million times as much
energy per article as they can get in a chemical rocket. The particles
are born that way and are not accelerated to that energy.
In addition, time slows down for things moving that fast to the point
that at something like 99.99 % of light speed, it only takes a little
over six months pilot time (not counting acceleration time) to go the
39 light year distance to Zeta l and Zeta 2 Reticuli.
Also, if one uses gravitational assist (the traveler doesn't provide
the energy) as we do on all our deep space probes, the increase in
mass wouldn't matter anyway. A black hole would be quite convenient.
Moving through walls
"But Stan, how do the laws of physics permit people to be pulled
through walls and windows without breaking them or the person?" I
haven't the faintest idea. I am sure that 150 years ago the idea of
having information enter a closed room and be reproduced to make
pictures and sounds on TV and radio sets using electricity, which also
wasn't known at that time, would have been thought absurd.
Remember that radio waves have been reaching Earth for billions of
years even though we weren't aware of them. Maybe we will learn how,
with strong electric or magnetic or unknowium fields, to go through
the mostly empty space of walls and windows with the mostly empty
space of people.
New nanotechnology techniques are truly as extraordinary as the
breakthroughs in quantum mechanics, relativity, radioactivity, and
solid state physics over the past century or so. Does anybody really
believe that the progress has stopped? I certainly don't.
That we cannot either explain or duplicate what to us seems like
anomalous technology, doesn't mean a more advanced society didn't get
there a long time ago. It is our lack of understanding that provides
the limits, not the laws of physics.
Limited realms
Remember that the closest-to-each-other pair of sun like stars, Zeta 1
and 2 Reticuli, are a billion years older than the sun. An important
aspect of the laws of physic is that they apply in limited realms.
Einstein's relativity involving increase of mass and slowing down of
time is only significant at velocities near that of light, or in
situations where the conditions are very different from "normal"-for
example, near very very dense black holes or neutron stars.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, normally deal with the world of
the very small. In the biological sciences we find that a great
variety of very new micro scopes enable us to see the very small
world. Nanotechnology and quantum dots are part of that very small
world.
The myriad of applications for lasers, from the check-out counters, to
CDs, to very sophisticated analyses of materials, to the surgeon's
special tools frequently accomplishing what was thought to be
impossible shoul dhelp us recognize that violations of the laws of
physic are not really very common.
What new realms will be discovered in the next decade or in the next
century? New variations on old theme of the world of physics?
---------------------------------------------------------
James McDonald by Stanton Freidman
For more than 30 years I have been touting the outstanding UFO
research of the late Dr. James E. McDonald (May 7, 1920—June 12,
1971). Jim was a professor of physics in the Institute of Atmospheric
Physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
He was an outstanding scientist who looked in depth at every
scientific problem that caught his attention, which covered a great
deal of ground indeed.
Between 1960 and his death in 1971, he interviewed more than 5 500 UFO
witnesses, made presentations about UFOs to a host of professional
groups from coast to coast and in Australia, wrote a number of papers,
and provided inspiration to APRO and especially to NICAP.
His dogged persistence in not only tracking down witnesses, but using
the methods of science to destroy the foolish "explanations" put forth
by Dr. Donald Menzel, Philip Klass, and others, should provide a model
for all those seeking the truth about flying saucers.
Finally there has been a book published that thoroughly explores his
UFO activities. Ann Druffel, herself a long time UFO researcher in the
Los Angeles area, has authored a splendid book, Firestorm: Dr. James
E. McDonald's Fight for UFO Science. The text alone covers 587 pages.
With appendices and index, the total will be about 640 pages.
Ann had full access to Jim's very voluminous and detailed files, and
transcribed loads of notes. He was very well organized. Having had
brief access to those files decades ago, with Richard Greenwell, I can
testify to his extraordinary persistence and objectivity.
Having met Jim several times when he met with our NICAP group in
Pittsburgh, I can't find fault at all with Ann's portrayal of Jim
McDonald the person, as well as Jim the scientist. He gave
unstintingly of himself to all who sought assistance.
It was Jim who was primarily responsible for the Hearings held by the
House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics on July
29,1968. The 246-page Proceedings of that Symposium are one of the
five major scientific sources that I stress in my college lectures
"Flying Saucers ARE Real," not because I contributed in writing, but
because there is so much good material, especially Jim's contribution.
I consider his 71 -page paper the best single paper available on
excellent cases which were very well investigated. There are 41
different cases noted, including multiple witness cases, radar/visual
sightings, sightings over big cities, and sightings by astronomers,
meteorologists, and pilots. His paper is available in an easier to
read format from UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958 for $10.00,
including first class postage.
One of the many themes running through Ann's book is the ongoing
battle between Jim and Northwestern University astronomer, (and
Project Blue Book Science Consultant) J. Allen Hynek. Jim had visited
Project Blue Book and was astonished to find how many excellent
sightings had been swept under the rug or misidentified by Blue Book
personnel and Hynek.
He was upset that Allen had not alerted the scientific community to
how much good information there was in the files, and how much poor
investigation, intentional or not, had been done.
Dr. Jacques Vallee, who wrote the foreword to Firestorm, was caught in
the middle between the two. He was more or less Hynek's protege, but
seemed to believe that more vigorous action could have been taken by
Hynek.
Hynek and McDonald had very different personalities and very different
professional backgrounds. Jim was a very dynamic and thorough
individual who went at all scientific problems quantitatively, using
his very extensive knowledge of atmospheric physics to evaluate so
called mirages, temperature inversions, ball lightning, atmospheric
plasmas, etc, to demolish claims about these phenomena supposedly
explaining UFO sightings, as put forth by Klass and Menzel.
Allen rarely resorted to computations about these phenomena, and never
seemed to want to learn a lot about them. I noticed the same problem
when I tried to get him to look into the literature on interstellar
travel. Much of it was by aerospace engineers.
It is true that astronomers have almost always neglected aerospace
engineering when "investigating" the possibility of space travel in
general and interstellar travel in particular; they have almost always
been totally wrong in their computations because of making absurd
assumptions.
Ann discusses in detail Jim's fight against the SuperSonic Transport
program in the 1960s. His focus was on the effect of the engine
exhaust on the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere. The concern was
that reducing the ozone layer would increase the level of ultraviolet
radiation at the surface of the earth. and, therefore, would lead to
an increase in skin cancer.
There were, of course, aerospace companies and political jurisdictions
that were very much for the SST program because of the jobs it would
create. Jim testified in depth at congressional hearings, and was
ridiculed be cause of his stand (falsely described by a congressman on
the committee) about UFOs. He was right about the ozone. For economic
reasons the UK-France consortium has recently announced that the
Concorde SST will soon stop flying as well.
Jim had also applied quantitative computations to evaluating the
impact on residents of Arizona cities if nuclear weapons were dropped
on the missiles to be emplaced to protect them. He pointed out that
with the prevailing winds of the area, the residents would have been
exposed to much higher levels of fallout than would have occurred if
the missiles had been on the other side of the cities. He thought
science and the welfare of the people and the planet should take
precedence over political considerations.
Hynek seemed more concerned with keeping his consultant income for his
Blue Book work than really doing something about UFOs. Part of the
problem was he apparently needed the money to keep his children in
university. Jim had 6 children, three of whom were also in college, in
the late 1960’s, so this excuse for inaction carried little weight
with him.
Allen also seemed to feel that, by not making waves, he could keep his
foot in the door. McDonald clearly felt that this not only
accomplished little, but delayed the participation of many scientists
who would have become involved, if they had known there were so many
good cases needing investigation. Most of the scientific community
apparently thought that with astronomers such as Hynek and Menzel not
claiming there was much going on, there was no point in even dipping
their toes in the ufological waters.
McDonald was understandably distressed when he finally managed to
obtain a copy of the Robertson Panel Report of 1953. He considered it
a travesty, and Hynek's failure to do anything about it while there-or
afterwards-incomprehensible.
The unethical treatment of Jim by people like Phil Klass and Donald
Menzel becomes obvious when reviewing how Klass was responsible for
the Navy backing away from Jim's research contract (with the Office of
Naval Research) on atmospheric physics. Jim had done yeoman work and
published many papers in refereed scientific journals. Klass'
misrepresentations about Jim and his work certainly make one wonder
who Klass worked for.
Ann talked to many of Jim's professional colleagues at the University
of Arizona and elsewhere, as well as to people who had been at NICAP
when Jim had greatly assisted Director Donald Keyhoe and associates,
both in digging into cases and encouraging contributions from members
and others.
It is clear that the halls of academia are hardly a hotbed of
courageous professional people willing to risk status by gathering
solid information. They sure worry about reputations and status, even
if they have tenure. Ann notes that McDonnell-Douglas, a major
government R and D and hardware supplier, also expressed concerns
about possible public discussions, such as at the 1968 Congressional
Hearings or the 1999 American Association for the Advancement of
Science UFO Symposium by Dr. Robert M. Wood.
I consider myself extremely lucky that Westinghouse Astronuclear, when
asked by me for a policy statement about whether I could or could not
lecture about flying saucers, responded so well. I was told that I
could say whatever I pleased on my time, that I could state that I was
a nuclear physicist employed by Westinghouse, and that I should begin
each presentation with a disclaimer that the views they were about to
hear were mine and not those of my employer.
The company was also asked to send me on an expense account to speak
to the American Nuclear Society Chapter at Los Alamos National
Laboratory and to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
chapter in Wilmington, Delaware. They did. Management had heard my
lecture.
Jim McDonald spoke to dozens of such professional groups and prepared
detailed written presentations as well for many of them. They are
extremely well done, loaded with solid information. He even allowed
our group in Pittsburgh to have 1000 copies of his paper "UFOs: Most
Challenging Scientific Problem of Our Time" to be printed and sold for
$1 to help raise funds for our answering service, newsletter, and
investigations.
We assembled it on the large conference table in the offices of one of
Pittsburgh's largest accounting firms. Establishing credibility in the
community was helped by people like Jim, who lent respectability so
that the media came to us when the Condon Report was issued in January
of 1969.
KDKA, Pittsburgh's most powerful radio station, actually told me they
were getting an advance copy, and would give it to me if I would
appear on their big talk show to discuss it. I agreed, not realizing
the book was 963 pages long. The newspapers asked for our views as
well, and treated them with respect. Speaking out carefully, after
having done one's homework can encourage the community to report
sightings, and other scientists to come forth. Jim's technical group
efforts certainly encouraged many to take the subject more seriously.
An important conflict within the book is the question of whether the
government's totally inept Blue Book investigations after Captain
Edward Ruppelt's reign were just a foul-up by people who didn't care
and were not scientific, or whether there was a cover-up.
Ann indicates that, before his death, McDonald had finally come around
to the position that there indeed was a cover-up, though he hadn't
divulged whatever it was he found that led him to this conclusion. Ann
tried, but was unable to determine what the information was.
It should be noted that Jim did not have the benefit of the Freedom of
Information Act to get at long covered up classified documents which,
even though often very heavily censored with black ink or white-out,
establish a cover-up.
I wonder what he would have thought about USAF General Carroll
Bolender's comment (20 October, 1969-obtained by Bob Todd a decade
later) "Reports of UFOs which could affect national security are made
in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11 and are not
part of the Blue Book System."
Ann deals very well with the real story of Jim's tragic death. I had
done a quiet investigation of my own at that time after several people
told me that the government must have killed Jim, and that I would be
next. I spoke with Jim's wife, his daughter, and a colleague at U of A
to get the facts. It was indeed suicide--an incredible loss to his
family, the scientific community, and the world.
He had been planning a book, which would have certainly done a lot to
convince the press, the public, and the scientific community of the
importance of the UFO problem. It was outlined, apparently, but
certainly never written.
The official publication date for Firestorm is given by the publisher,
Wild Flower Press (ISBN 0-926524-58-5) as July 3, 2003.
Stan Friedman fsphys~rogers.com and website www.vj-enterprises.com/stpage.html
---------------------------------------------------------
Young blood needed by Stanton Friedman
While writing last month's column on Dr. James E. McDonald, in my
opinion the most outstanding ufologist ever, I couldn't help but think
of how many leaders in the field are getting older and older, but
without many newcomers to take their place.
Ann Druffel, author of Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald Fight for UFO
Science, the excellent new book about Jim, was born in 1926. Dr.
Jacques Vallee, who wrote the foreword to the book, was born in 1939.
Dr. Richard Haines, who is still active in ufology and has collected
several thousand pilot sightings and published several UFO books, was
born in 1937.
Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who has contributed so much to ufology over the
years with regard to the government cover-up and concerning photo
analysis of cases ranging from Gulf Breeze to McMinnville was born in
1942, as was Timothy Good of the UK.
Dick Hall, author of The UFO Evidence and a much updated version, was
born in 1930. John Schuessler, International Director of MUFON, is
still very active, but was born in 1933. Dr. Robert M. Wood, on the
board of MUFON, FUFOR, and CUFOS, was born in 1925. Three top
abduction researchers, Budd Hopkins, Dr. John Mack, and Dr. David
Jacobs, were born in 1931,1929, and 1942 respectively.
A few exceptions
There are fortunately some exceptions. The most outstanding is John
Greenewald Jr., author of Beyond UFO Secrecy and host of the
outstanding Black Vault website (www.blackvault.com), who turns 22
this year. John gave a fine paper at the MUFON Conference in St. Louis
in 2000 and at the Aztec Annual Conference in March of 2003. His site
reflects an enormous amount of effort to obtain government UFO-related
documents from many different sources .
Another relatively young UFO researcher in the USA is Nick Redlern,
now of Texas, who has written several books and also gave a fine paper
in Aztec. He was born in the UK in 1964.
Clearly, there is a need to attract young people to replace those of
us getting well past our prime. I was born in 1934. I used to chide
Allen Hynek that he was the same age as my father (born in 1910). Now
I am certainly old enough to be John Greenewald's grandfather, as are
many of the leading lights of American ufology. I don't even get too
upset when I am called the grandfather of Roswell, although it used to
be the Father of Roswell. It has been more than 25 years.
What can be done?
Each of us can make an effort to attract younger people by speaking at
high schools, community colleges, in classrooms, as well as to wider
audiences. When I speak at a college campus, I always offer to speak
in classes. Fewer and fewer hosts make the effort to arrange such
visits, even though there is no extra charge. I have been well
received in the Honors Physics class at the local high school when I
have spoken there.
Make a habit of at least leaving free book lists and MUFON
subscription blanks. We could each make up a bibliography of the best
materials, some no longer generally available, and offer to loan them
to interested parties.
Many students have to write essays and/or do term papers and other
projects. I get frequent requests via the internet, but am sure I
could do more to make people at schools aware of my availability. I am
sure many of you could as well.
I try to aim my campus presentations at general audiences, rather than
at ufologists, even at MUFON Conferences.
We could charge lower admission fees for younger people for our group
meetings and try to attract the general public, especially younger
people, without programming lectures or events that are too
specialized for beginners. Some science fiction Star Trek type groups
should be approached as well.
We could point more interested young people towards the UFO
Investigators Handbook and try to get interested young people to do
investigations with us. We can show people how to get more data from
newspapers and magazines by using Readers Guide and the periodical
files at the city and university libraries near us. Some need to be
convinced that not everything is on the internet, yet.
One recommendation I have made that seems to help is to get people to
check local newspapers (usually on microfilm) for the period June 25
to July 15,1947. There were loads of front page headline stories about
flying saucers, flying discs, even flying platters. Many people don't
realize that even newswire stories are played differently in different
papers, often with local relevant sightings added .
The time period involved obviously includes Kenneth Arnold's June 24,
1947, case and the Roswell story. Although most libraries have the New
York Times on microfilm, it didn't mention Roswell, because it was a
morning paper, until July 9-after General Ramey's cover story had been
issued.
However, evening papers from Chicago west on July 8 had the original
story before the cover-up. To date I have found only one July 8
newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald Express, which featured both the
original story and the cover-up on the same front page. I bet there
are others out there, such as on the west coast and in Hawaii.
Digging into press reports
It would be interesting to have young people, with guidance from older
investigators, dig into how the press treated the USAF totally
misleading press release of October 25, 1955, about the completion of
Project Blue Book Special Report 14, which never mentioned the title
oft he report or where the work was done or who did it-and apparently
without the press even asking these questions.
The press treatment of the closing of Project Blue Book on Dec. 19,
1969, is another event to be researched. In all these cases one finds
some editorials as well as the news stories.
The issuance of the Condon Report in January, 1969, brought forth
loads of negativity, often seeming to be from people who hadn't read
it. The issuance of the USAF "Roswell Report: Truth Vs. Fiction in the
New Mexico Desert" (the USAF supplied the fiction) in 1995, and the
equally misleading sequel "The Roswell Report: Case Closed" on June
24, 1997, and the Roswell 50th anniversary celebration a week later,
would be excellent topics for careful investigation by young
utologists.
The front-page, grossly inadequate, article by a Pulitzer Prize
winning journalist for the New York Times, William Broad, on Sunday,
Sept. 18, 1994, typifies the general bias, ignorance, and failure to
do critical analysis of the false proclamations of the noisy
negativists that are typical rather than unusual.
Many high schools have clubs, some of which might be interested in
having a free talk by a MUFON member about local sightings, about the
big picture, about Star Travel, or government cover-up.
There are campus sections of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, the American Physical Society, and the American Nuclear
Society, all of whom need exciting programs.
I, for one, would provide free copies of my videos "Flying Saucers Are
Real" (Vols. 1 and 2), "UFOs ARE Real," and "Recollections of Roswell"
for viewing by local clubs and groups to anybody who will show them
publicly.
Believe it or not, the Audio Visual Department of the Province of New
Brunswick distributed copies of my "UFOs ARE Real" video to high
schools, some of whom used it for their Maritime Studies course. Two
different teachers told me it was the one class in which it was
guaranteed that their students would pay attention! (New Brunswick is
one of 3 Maritime Provinces).
Get acquainted with local broadcasters
One could get to know local broadcasters, especially at stations
catering to young audiences, to offer to do a local talk show, or give
them my number and that of other elder statesmen of Ufology who would
be willing to do telephone interviews.
I think an important way to lure young members would be to take a much
more proactive approach, seeking sightings rather than waiting for
them to come to you. Having a widely publicized toll free number is
one approach which can bring in reports.
Another, once a sighting report has been received, is to send a letter
to the local newspapers and radio stations, seeking reports, promising
not to use names without permission.. I have done this on several
occasions and been given many more reports. Be sure to list phone,
email and snail mail addresses. A toll free number helps.
Displays in shopping malls offering special reduced subscription or
membership rates and distributing a free information list, and good
UFO pictures on display panels with appropriate captions would be
doable.
MUFON will observe National UFO Awareness Week from Aug. l 6, through
Aug.23, 2003, so this would be an especially good time to set up
displays and programs, as Stan Gordon does each year in Pennsylvania.
Donate subscriptions to libraries
MUFON members could donate subscriptions for the MUFON UFO Journal to
local public and campus libraries. Jerome Clark's outstanding two-
volume UFO Encyclopedia could also be donated to provide a factual
data base for those young people with a serious interest .
Many schools have science fairs. Offer to help students by providing
source materials. Anybody who wants to distribute the 10-page
bibliography in my "TOP SECRET/MAJIC" is welcome to do so. It includes
10 PhD theses and a bunch of negative books, as well as the accurate
and comprehensive data sources that are available but little known.
I think an important part of attracting younger people to ufology in
general, and MUFON in particular, would be for many of us to stop
being apologist ufologists or closet ufologists. We need to take on
the debunkers head on. That certainly means doing one's homework. In
36 years of lecturing ("Flying Saucers ARE Real!") I have had only 11
hecklers, of which two were drunk, even though many of my audiences
were professional groups, as opposed to just campus groups.
The polls show a majority accept UFO reality, and the greater the
education, the more likely to say some UFOs are alien spacecraft. I
have yet to have an egg or tomato thrown at me.
There was a two-hour TV debate on the ITV network in the UK in June, l
997, between Tim Good, Nick Pope, and myself vs. the con team of
professors of physics, psychology, and astronomy. "Have aliens visited
Earth?" l 00,000 people called in to say yea or nay.92% said YES! If
we don't stand up for facts and data and truth, who will?
Perhaps we could collectively produce a FAQ about UFOs so that younger
people would recognize that we are with it?
---------------------------------------------------------
Debunking Roswell debunkers by Stanton Friedman
Shortly after finishing my MUFON 2003 paper "Critiquing the Roswell
Critics" for the Conference Proceedings, I was alerted to two more
widely distributed Roswell debunking articles in major publications.
Each had the word ROSWELL on the covers in large print, the better to
sell the magazines. Often I am told that the Roswell International
UFO Museum and Research Center and people like me are only in the
Roswell business to make money. We don't count research costs, of
course, or the fact that admission to the museum is free. But it is OK
for magazines to hype Roswell to sell magazines. The 1997 issue of
Time Magazine with a goofy looking female on the cover (like no alien
anybody had ever reported) and ROSWELL in big type, was their largest
selling issue that year until Princess Di died. They were not giving
away copies.
Popular Mechanics (June 2003) writer Jim Wilson has done other UFO
stories, so I would have expected better from him in his article
"Roswell Declassified." He makes much of eleven boxes of material
(also noted in a very misleading History Channel TV Program) which
supposedly are all the official files about Roswell, and which had
been declassified for the USAF.
This is nonsense. These are the boxes of miscellaneous stuff collected
by the USAF for its first volume of the Big Roswell (debunking) Report
"Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert." The Air Force supplied
the fiction, as I have noted in detail elsewhere (such as "The Roswell
Incident, USAF and N.Y. Times," 1994 ,27P., $4. UFORI, POB 958,
Houlton, ME 04730-0958).
Nothing was declassified for the USAF about Roswell! The volume was
a strong effort to pre-empt the GAO Roswell report which came out
later. The MOGUL balloon explanation was here propounded while
ignoring the evidence clearly indicating that was a phoney story. The
materials don't match, the dates don't match. Almost all of the
relevant testimony about the debris field is ignored.
But Wilson bought it hook, line and sinker, even making a big deal
about the pristine radar reflector and using a picture of it as
included in the article and presented at the Archives. Many people
would wrongly think this was what was seen in Gen. Ramey's office!!
The second Air Force Volume, "Case Closed," came up with the crash
test dummies explanation for the bodies reported in connection with
Roswell, even though none were dropped near either the Plains of San
Agustin or Foster Ranch crash sites and none were dropped prior to
1953 or at least 6 years after Roswell.
Wilson seems to be impressed by the 11 boxes, even though they have
stamped on them "Roswell Reports Source Files." His primary focus,
besides these supposedly relevant files and the pristine radar
reflector (somehow not having the toy-company tape with flower symbols
that the USAF say explains the I-beams described by Dr. Jesse Marcel
Jr. with strange symbols-not flowers) is on two other details:
A. He says the Base Morning Reports for the 1947 July 4th weekend say
nothing about the crash retrieval. So what? Maj. Jesse Marcel and CIC
officer Sheridan W. Cavitt didn't return to the base until late on
Monday, July 7. There is no indication the morning reports were highly
classified or even would have contained highly classified information.
They seem to deal with changes in personnel assignments.
B. Wilson claims that Frank Kaufmann, whose nefarious activities I
discussed in a recent column, "had been tied to the story from the
very beginning." The fact is that his name shows up nowhere until
1991! My first discussion with Jesse Marcel was in 1978, the first
book, "The Roswell Incident," was published in 1980.
Bill Moore and I did six MUFON papers about Roswell by 1986. I
instigated the heavily watched Unsolved Mysteries Roswell Program in
1989. It brought forth a number of new witnesses. But still no
Kaubmann. Kaufmann added nothing but confusion and disinformation to
the story. Karl T. Pflock had debunked him over a decade ago, and
there are negative mentions of him in several places, including in the
2nd edition of Don Berliner's and my Crash at Corona in 1997.
In other words, the fact that Kaufmann's testimony has been shown to
be spurious tells us nothing whatsoever about the legitimacy of the
Roswell story. Wilson makes it sound as though this puts the nail in
the Roswell coffin!
"A Roswell Requiem" in SKEPTIC (Vol. 10, No. 1, 2003) magazine is much
worse than Wilson's article, starting with a cover that is a splendid
example of the practice of debunkery (Dr. David Jacobs' turn of
phrase).
There is a quite large disc-shaped shiny craft tilted at an angle and
stuck in the ground with a flock of sheep in front and a bunch of
military vehicles in the background. There is a sub-title, "How a
modest military adventure in 1947 was turned into a great whopper of a
UFO tale in 1978." A far more accurate sub-title would have been "How
a Major UFO event of 1947 was turned into a whopper of a tale in
2003."
The tale teller is B.D. "Duke" Gildenberg, a military meteorologist
heavily involved in balloon research projects for 30 years. He seems
to have done almost no real homework with regard to Roswell, and
picked up on every false claim. I especially resent his referring to
my documentary movie "UFOs ARE Real" as a tabloid! It includes 4 PhDs,
2 Lt. Colonels, a nuclear physicist, an astronaut, etc.
He totally ignores the original testimony from Maj. Marcel; his son;
the rancher's son and neighbors; Walter Haut, the base PIO who issued
the press release; retired Gen. T.J. DuBose (Chief of Staff for Gen.
Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, TX, and Col.
Blanchard's boss); the sheriff's family; and many others.
He seems not to understand that the debris field covered a huge area
and consisted of small pieces, not a huge intact saucer. The latter
would have been appropriate for the Plains of San Augustin Crash
retrieval event, but there were no sheep out there, and that crash
isn't even mentioned in the article.
Duke seems very angry that his claim and that of Dr. C. B. Moore that
it was just a Mogul balloon, given when Don Berliner and I met the two
of them in NM, wasn't blindly accepted, even though it was clear they
knew nothing about the crash, other than what was printed in the
Roswell Daily Record July 9, totally ignoring the stories in
newspapers from Chicago west of the previous day.
He mentions the first book, The Roswell Incident, but gives a
publication date of 1988 rather than 1980, so he can tabloidize the
story by having the story in the National Enquirer long before that.
He talks about a balloon launched on July 7, 1947, that just might
have been responsible for the story, even though Marcel and Cavitt
went out to the Brazel ranch on July 6.
He fails to mention that The Roswell Incident shows a drawing of that
very balloon package, and includes a comment by Dr. Moore that he knew
of no balloon being investigated at that time that could cover such a
large area.
Duke buys into CIC Officer Sheridan Cavitt's totally false and very
belated claim that he never met rancher Brazel, and that the balloon
only covered an area 20' square and would easily fit in one vehicle.
Even the cover-up story in the July 9 Roswell Daily Record says the
wreckage covered an area 200 yards in diameter. If there had only been
that small item, Brazel would have brought it into town with him and
there would certainly have been no need for Marcel and Cavitt to have
followed the rancher out in a long and tedious drive, some of it cross
country, and to spend overnight. They could not have found the ranch
without following Brazel out, so Cavitt had to have met Brazel.
Neither Duke nor Wilson deals with the peculiar properties of the real
wreckage, such as memory foil that could be bent on itself many times,
could not be torn, and would unfold on its own. The I-beams, which
were as light as balsa wood and could not be cut, broken or burned,
certainly aren't what the radar reflector frames were made out of.
Neither mentions that Marcel stressed that there was nothing
conventional to be found, and that the debris field covered an area
many hundreds of yards long and a few hundred feet wide.
Neither notes that the original articles across the country on July 8
all said the wreckage was found last week rather than the Air Force's
new story for Brazel on July 9 claiming June 14 was the date.
Duke includes all kinds of misinformation and totally irrelevant
information about unrelated events that happened much later. He shows
the crash test dummies without mentioning that, according to Col.
Madsen, who ran the program, they were 6' tall and weighed 175 pounds.
He doesn't explain the morphing down to little guys. Lapses of the
mind and memory supposedly accounted for people confusing the date of
1947 with 1953 and later!!
There is a great deal of misrepresentation. I can't really explain
Duke's purpose in presenting so much nonsense. He didn't talk to
anybody directly connected to the event. He didn't read the relevant
literature; he couldn't get most of his facts straight. He probably is
receiving a government pension, as was Cavitt and several of the
others who have spoken out negatively about Roswell (don't forget that
supposedly only pro-UFO people have a financial stake in Roswell).
Having met Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher and editor-in-chief of
SKEPTIC, and heard some of the silly things he has said on TV about
UFOs, I am certainly not surprised at his publishing this piece of
fantasy. Michael, after all, is the one who said (on the History
Channel, no less) that he will believe in UFOs when someone gives him
an alien body to examine!!
I suspect he accepts the fact that there are lots of nuclear weapons
around, even if nobody can provide him one. If he doesn't think the
government would lie about very highly classified events in New Mexico
in July, 1947, (remember none of the Mogul Balloon technology was
classified, only its purpose), I suggest he read the newspapers after
the first nuclear explosion at Trinity site on White Sands Missile
Range in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
A news story was required because many people saw it even from 100
miles away, and there were many calls to authorities, even though it
was quite early in the morning. The press story said that a large
ammunition dump had blown up, but fortunately nobody was injured. This
was indeed a whopper; just as was the tale that a radar reflector
weather balloon combination was found on the Brazel ranch, perhaps
accompanied by large crash test dummies not dropped until years later
in other locations according to the USAF's map of the drop sites.
A good example of Duke's anti-Roswell zeal is this statement: "After
55 years of commercial exploitation, the mythology has reached
frenzied heights." Later, on the same page, he states, "..for more
than 30 years no one anywhere cared about the incident at Roswell."
Nobody cared, but there was commercial exploitation during those 30
years??? As Shakespeare said: "Methinks he doth protest too much." He
isn't skeptically doing research, he is preaching propaganda.
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------