RIP Stanton Friedman

Breaking my “blog fast” for what I consider to be another significant news item.

Stanton Friedman died on May 13^th. I know it’s one month since then, but end of semester grading and seemingly endless amounts distractions at home have kept me from marking this sad passing on the blog. That is to my own shame and disappointment, but I hope to make up for it now.

Who was Stanton Friedman? He was someone who spent his life, in one manner or another, investigating. I once latched on to the conclusions of his investigations with a wholehearted embrace. Then I came to disagree with him. But I never once lost respect or admiration for him.

Friedman was a nuclear physicist who at one point worked on projects like nuclear-powered aircraft and rockets. He left all that behind in the early 1970s to pursue full-time his own research into alleged UFO cases, particularly Roswell. In undertaking what would end up becoming a lifetime endeavor, Friedman approached ufology, it seems to me anyway, in three ways. First, he wanted to lift what he called “the laughter curtain” from the subject, so that UFOs might be openly discussed without fear of ridicule. Second, if the taint of automatic ridicule could be removed, Friedman made the modest proposal that each case could then be fairly evaluated on its own merits or lack thereof. Third, inquiries into these cases should by conducted according to the scientific method (would you expect anything less from a physicist?)

All of this I saw in Friedman when he first came to my notice on a program about UFOs back in my teens. He was not a hippy-dippy New Ager sleeping in a crystal pyramid, and any certainly was not like any of the “Rockstar Ufologists” we have today, bringing us nothing but
"UFOtainment” on the History Channel. No. Friedman was scientist. He was level-headed, thoughtful, articulate, and while he did believe that extraterrestrial beings were visiting Earth, he believed they accounted for only a small percentage of UFO sightings while the remainder were mis-identifications and mundanity. He was, however, something of a conspiracy theorist. Often Friedman would use the phrase “cosmic Watergate” to describe what he believed to be the government’s concealment of alien contact. The first book of his that I read, Top Secret/MAJIC, was a deep dive into and a thoroughly-reasoned examination of this cover-up conducted by the shadowy figures known as “Majestic 12.” You can read my review of it here from wayyyyyyy back when I first started ESE. The book even included the infamous “SOM01-01” manual, an apparent field guide for covert operatives handling UFO crashes.

Since then I’ve read much that strongly suggests these documents leaked to Don Berliner, one of Friedman’s writing and research partners, were fakes. Friedman continued to hold to his argument that true UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin and they are in fact “nuts and bolts” spacecraft. As you dear readers know, I can’t accept that and I’ve only grown more and more skeptical of UFO claims. I am certainly not a believer in the so-called “Deep State” and many other conspiracy theories or that “disclosure” is on the way.

And despite my disagreements, I still held nothing but respect for Friedman. He was no “true believer” and would call out cases he thought were weak and people he thought were questionable (I’m thinking of his take on Bob Lazar.) He possessed a keen insight on the effect UFO phenomena was having on society and media, an effect that remains real and palpable regardless of the nature of the phenomena. More than anything, I think Friedman just wanted the truth. As the field (if you can call it that) of ufology grows more and more overrun by YouTubers, rock stars, and glitzy reality TV personalities, the more difficult it will be to arrive at that truth.

If there does happen to be any scrap of validity in UFO phenomena…and there just might be…it will take people like Stanton Friedman to find it. Sadly, he is gone.

And he will be missed.

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