Below is a transcript of my recent interview with physicist and noted UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman conducted during the 2009 UFO Festival in McMinnville, Oregon. This interview is part-and-parcel to a freelance article of which I am writing.
Regardless of one's belief's on the subject, you cannot ignore Friedman's skill for debate nor the passion of his beliefs. He's also simply a highly entertaining speaker.
UFO Festival 2009
McMinnville, Oregon
May 16, 2009
Interview: Stanton Friedman
Q: Was there an inciting incident that drew you into the field?
A: Yeah. I read Edward J. Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects and I thought it was intriguing. Then I read about 15 more books, some of which were crap, and then at the University of California-Berkley Library I found a privately published version of the Blue Book Special Report #14 and it was a shocker to me because a) it had not been mentioned to me in any other books and I don’t know why—well, I guess I do know why, and b) there was a guy who put it together (this was before the Freedom of Information Act and somehow we got a copy) you know, government documents are not copyrightable so they could get away with it… It included the press release that went out with it on October 23rd, 1955. And here is the Secretary of the Air Force talking about this huge study—he didn’t give the title— he didn’t say who did the work, nobody asked him, he got all kinds of publicity around the country and he flat-out lied. He said in the press release—and this is Donald Quarles [the fourth secretary of the Air Force] “On the basis of this report we believe that no object, such as those properly described as flying saucers, has over-flown the United States. Even the unknown 3 percent could have been identified as conventional phenomena or delusions if more complete observational data had been made available.” Well, that sounds like it takes care of the problem. The only trouble is that I have the report in front of me, and there are 240 tables, charts, graphs and maps—I’m in data heaven—the unknowns were 21.5 percent, what’s he talking about? They were completely separate from the 9.3 percent of the 3201 sightings—not a small group. 9.3 percent were listed as insufficient information, so by definition he was lying.
That shook me up. I mean, I was working under security and I knew that sometimes you had to sort of tiptoe around the truth—you can’t give it up but you don’t want to lie either… He didn’t seem to mind lying at all.
Q: And none of that information you came across in that document was redacted or…
A: No! It was an unclassified report. I’ve distributed many copies of it since, again, because you can’t copyright it so anybody can reprint it. But it’s not fair to talk to people—well, there’s no way you can get the documents to check and I tried to show the tables compiled from the data in the report. There were rather careful not to show it as explicitly as I did.
So that was an important moment for me. And the second one… Frank Edwards was a newsman in Indianapolis radio and stuff. He wrote a book Flying Saucers: Serious Business which was a best-seller, and I had been living in Indianapolis for three years working for General Motors and I had moved to Pennsylvania and gotten to know Frank because he was active in NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Arial Phenomenon) and he sent me a copy of the book. I called Frank and said, “Frank, I want to go public. You know everybody here in Pittsburgh,” because he did know everybody. So he gave me several names and one of them was the producer of a talk show called Contact on KDKA Pittsburgh—the first major radio station. And I called the producer and it was, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you…” Even in though in Pittsburgh being a nuclear physicist for Westinghouse is a gold-plated credential. I mean, you want a loan, how much do you want?
It was less than a month later they called me at 6:30 a.m.—Could I please be on their show at 7, they had someone cancel. And I lived near the station so I said, “Yeah, well, I guess that I could do that…” I did the show. I didn’t know then quite how to handle a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about—the host…how do you be polite and still say, “Hey that’s an idiotic thing to say…”
Somebody at work—a technician at work—at Westinghouse had heard the show. Her book review club was reading Frank’s book and would I give a talk to their club in her living room. That was my first lecture—my first taste.
Q: How old were you when you first became interested?
A: When I first read Rumsfeld’s book I was 22, so it was it was three and half to four years later…
Q: And were you still working on your undergraduate degree at that time?
A: No, I got out of school early. When I first read Rumsfeld’s book I was a young nuclear physicist working for General Electric aircraft nuclear propulsion department—big program spending 100 million a year, which was a lot of money in 1958 as you can imagine. We had 3,500 people working fulltime, 1,100 of them engineers and scientists.
Q: A Nuclear Airplane?
A: Yeah. It would have a rather major advantage: it could fly for thousands of hours without refueling. That means it has an awful lot of range.
Q: What happened with that project?
A: It got cancelled like everything else I had ever worked on.
Q: What is your take on those members of the UFO Community who say the study is in its death throes?
A: I think they’re full of crap. Some of us are getting old, there’s no denying that—I cannot say that I’m getting any younger. I wish I could, I wouldn’t be talking about flying saucers if I could say that.
I think they’re short-sighed and I say that because I’ve been out there. I’ve given over 700 lectures in all 50 states, nine provinces and 16 other countries. I do loads of radio and television programs. I come to a place like this and everybody is swarming all over me because they’ve seen me in all of these television shows and they’re exited and they’re so glad that I do it. I, once, a few years back offered on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast (when he was doing the show) to send people free information if listeners would send in a self-addressed stamped envelope to my post office box in Maine. I got over 1,000 requests, all but five with the SASE. Over 200 post-it notes saying, “ Thanks for doing what you are doing…” “I’ve been following your career for 20 years—Keep it up!” These are people I don’t know and they don’t know me, but there’s a constituency. So I know that the public is interested. Both of my most recent books, Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience and Flying Saucers and Science, are doing well. Flying Saucers and Science is in its fourth printing already and it just came out last year. And I’ve just signed a contract for another book.
Q: What is your response to critics who say you’re simply backing over old ground?
A: I don’t know what that means. Look, when I check my audiences, I find that fewer than 2 percent have read any of the five large-scale scientific studies I talk about. So, yeah, to the guys who have read those it’s old ground, but how about the rest of the people—the other 98 percent. So what’s the point of worrying about it if people are ignorant? One of the most common reactions I get is, “Gee, I didn’t know that…” “I hadn’t heard about that…” “I’m so glad you brought that up…” And it’s just like the Betty and Barney Hill case; most people have heard about the case, but judging from the response we received from the lecture yesterday, there were an awful lot of people who said, “I’ve never heard that…” —this, that, and the other piece of data.
They’ve heard of Roswell, they’ve heard of the Barney and Betty Hill case, but they don’t know the details, so I don’t know why people make silly statements like that.
The trouble is, when you listen to these statements, what’s the basis for it? In other words, I get people that say, “Everybody knows that MJ-12 is phony.” Well, how is it that everybody knows that? I’ve written a book about it and everybody who reads it doesn’t say, “Oh, that’s a bunch of crap,” they say, “I didn’t know all of that stuff.” So why should I be put off by the prophets of doom and gloom who are too lazy to get off their butts. I get so sick of Armchair Theorists. I’ve been to 20 archives—but I hear, “Oh, that document’s phony because the dates are wrong.” Well, go to the damn archives and you’ll find ten different date formats.
Or, “You called him an Admiral when he was only a Rear Admiral.” Talk to military people for God’s sake. I’ve got mem-cons [memoranda of conversations] with a whole bunch of military guys all using admiral or general and none of them were Four Stars. So I don’t have much time for the prophets of doom and gloom.
Maybe what they are saying is that they are too lazy, they can’t see a way to get out there and they’re mad at Friedman—too damn bad.
Q: What is your take on this kind of event?
A: I’ve been here before and was very impressed with their attitude and the attitude of the people who came to the event. I talk to lots of people when I’m sitting and signing books—though I’m not doing that here—but it’s where you get a chance to talk one-on-one with them…and I find that I provide inspiration for other people to spend perspiration. That is, they don’t want to stand up and be public, but they are very grateful that I am. I’m not a masochist—I mean I’ve had nine hecklers in over 700 lectures… Eleven hecklers—two of them were drunks so I don’t really count them. But you get that many with sports, religion, and politics I’m told.
People say, “They must give you a really hard time…” I don’t get a hard time. I once sat down and figured that I had answered over 50,000 questions. I’m not a masochist. I don’t do this for people who give me a hard time. Sure, I’ve had those nine drunk hecklers—one of them, it turns out, was a professor of physics. He starts off during one of my question and answer periods, “I’d never heard so much nonsense in my life.” Fortunately my response was, “Can you be a little more specific than that please?” He went through about eight “You said that...”s. One was, “You said that Betty and Barney Hill went to Zeta Reticuli and back in two hours...” I say, “Sorry, no, what I said was they were on board the saucer for two hours, they didn’t go anywhere.” The next one was, again, totally wrong. I didn’t know who the guy was and then somebody from the other side of the room said, “Hey, how about taking some sensible questions.” So the guy gets up and leaves and I said, “I’ll take a question—who was that?” It was doctor so-and-so a professor of physics—he hadn’t heard what I said, he was in Never-Never Land about what he thought I must have said because he knew there couldn’t be anything to this… I’m going on because people respond so well and because I feel those of us who can make a difference should. You can’t sit back and say, “Let somebody else do it…” If I can take advantage of my professional background, my speaking skills, my research efforts, to intrigue, excite, stimulate, and educate people, then I have a responsibility to do that. And sure, I’m not saying that everybody should do what I do. I’m very fortunate, I found out early on that I could keep my wits about me and that my memory was totally trustworthy. So I go on the stage—It isn’t enough to say, “Well that’s a good question, I’ll give you an answer tomorrow,” you have to have an answer now. I found out that I was good at that. I’m good at the stage. I play to my strengths. Not everybody can, and I’m not saying that everybody should. There are some very smart people who cannot do that particular thing. I can’t play a violin, but I’ll listen to the guys that do.
I bring to bear single-mindedness, a dedication, a very low tolerance for idiocy, and the recognition that I can hold my own with anybody. Because I’ve always found that the Noisy Negativists almost invariably do not know what they’re talking about.
Q: Is there a difference between a skeptic and a debunker?
A: Yes. I’m a skeptic. I say, “I don’t know, let’s hear the rest of the story of the story and then I’ll decide.” Is this document genuine? Well, I may visit a couple of archives and check on a lot of things—I’m a skeptic. I don’t assume it’s legitimate because it says what I want to have it say. And I’ve done more to show, for example, that MJ-12 documents are phony more than anybody else. I found the originals that were emulated. I don’t sit in my armchair and say, “Well, those don’t look genuine to me…” I say, “Here’s the document that this one is based on if you’ll notice that the wording is essentially all the same—a few little changes…” Basically, when you get a signature: “I approve, HS Truman, July 9th, 1947,” and they fit right on top of each other, three separate hand-written things on a page—yeah—one’s a phony, when you know where the other one came from and you know that it isn’t a phony. So I go at it, but I start off with the premise that “I don’t know.” That’s being a skeptic, “Let’s see what kind of information we can get out it.”
Now, the debunker says, “I do know, I know that this is all crap and there’s nothing to this.” As a matter of fact, my latest paper will be given in Denver in August for MUFON, the 40th annual international symposium, is “The Pseudoscience of Anti-UFOlogy” …and I beat the hell out of the Nasty, Noisy Negativists and the stupid things they say, like some of the stupid things they said about the Hill case last night. How can anyone in his right mind say Barney only saw a light in the sky, when you have all of that stuff without the hypnosis? Two rows of windows, etcetera, etcetera—that’s not a light in the sky. So, I don’t have tolerance for these guys. When the head of what used to be the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) now it’s the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Dr. Joseph Nickell is their chief investigator. He’s got three degrees in English and he’s worked as a magician—intentional deception is the world of the magician, you understand. He said with Roswell, and inexperienced PR person sent out a totally unauthorized press release. I’ve been to the guy’s house, he didn’t even know the guy’s name, Walter Haut the press guy. Unauthorized? Colonel Blanchard told him to put it out. Inexperienced? He’d flown more than 20 combat missions over Japan as a navigator and bombardier. He was such a good one that he was chosen to drop the instrument package over one of the two nuclear weapons tests conducted in 1946, Operation Crossroads in the Pacific. You picked your best people because without the instrument panel in the right place you’ve wasted your explosion. And very well thought of in the community, I checked. I don’t accept people at face value. But that’s typical of the attacks. It’s pseudo-science, you make it sound legitimate but it isn’t.
Q: You made a comment last night, when the inevitable question comes up as to why flying saucers haven’t landed on the White House lawn, and you made a comment human beings being too mean.
A: Look, we are a primitive society whose major activity is tribal warfare. Look at our history: fifty million people killed in one lousy war tells you something, and seventeen hundred cities destroyed and this year we will spend, collectively, approximately a trillion dollars on things military where more than 30,000 kids die every single day of preventable disease and starvation—it tells you where our priorities are…
But the White House lawn? First of all, since when does the President of the United States speak for 6 billion earthlings? He has trouble speaking for 300 million Americans. Secondly, what would be the point, it’s a no-fly zone. They tried in 1952, we set up all kinds of jets, they splashed around for awhile, they went down and came back—that’s what that book Shoot Them Down was all about. Do you realize that orders were given to military pilots, “Shoot them down if they don’t land when instructed to do so?” How do you tell an alien space craft, “Down, down!” They’d just go “Screw you, buddy!”
But those orders were given. We have newspaper articles to prove it.
Q: One of the entr'acte musical themes being played before you took the stage was the original score to The Day the Earth Stood Still. There was this sort of Ventures-esque surfer music and then I heard the Theremin. To me, that film is sort of synonymous with the cold war anxiety toward xenophobia but also this relatively progressive notion of, “We’re just not ready.” That was the impression I’d gotten from the subtext of one of your last comments.
A: Certainly on our planet, people in power don’t want to give up power. No government wants its people to owe their primary allegiance to the planet instead of individual government—nationalism is the only game in town. I mean, just look around—look at the world. I see it in Canada where I live. It’s a constant battle. No, we’re not ready. The key thing for man is power, to preserve power. If you’ve got it, keep it. We saw that every day, from the smallest dictatorship to the biggest country. So, that’s why I say we’re not ready. If we’re going to send a spacecraft to another planet, it had better be an earthling spacecraft. United Nations don’t let cities join—you’ve got to be a country. Why would a local galactic federation membership committee consider the membership of only one country? It’s got to be a planet—so who speaks for planet Earth, guys? Nobody. I mean, you can say the United Nations but how much power do they have? How much impact?
I mentioned in a previous interview that America has tested 331 nuclear weapons. Think about that. And the first H-Bomb—I mean, I worked on fusion propulsion systems back in the 1960s—the first H-Bomb was exploded—it was a bulky old thing—in 1952 in the end of October, early November. Ten million tons of TNT was the equivalent energy release. The fireball was three miles wide. And that wasn’t the biggest one: a few years later the Russians tested 57 millions tons of TNT and look at the progress we’ve made, during World War II the big weapons were ten-ton blockbusters, and now we’re talking ten million tons. Now what would the aliens think when they see that? Hundreds of ships that steam in there for the test because it’s a complicated business. These guys are idiots, what else can they say? And it’s a beautiful planet, but you’d never know the way they act toward each other.
Q: What do you think now informs the study for the future?
A: Well, there is a chance that the money Bob Bigelow is planning on spending via MUFON to actually fund serious investigations—pay the people, may set off a major effort by other people wanting to get involved, makes it legitimate instead of amateurs. You can’t keep out the kooks and quacks they’re always there it doesn’t matter what field you’re talking about. But if you could fund some good work and publish that…if you get some journalists that behave like journalists instead of like Noisy Negativists, because some of them are. What’s important here is—I call it the David Suskind Syndrome. I got a call in the early 70s. I was living in the L.A. area and came to New York because they wanted to do a show about flying saucers. And they wanted all kinds of stuff from me and they wanted a good skeptic, and I said there aren’t any. But here’s how to reach Phil Klass and they wanted an abductee and I got them Betty Hill, and so forth. We’re there taping and between segments he says, “I read the New York Times and there’s nothing in there that says these things are real.” So, the Suskind Syndrome is first the strong belief that “I keep track of what’s important in the world. It’s [“If it’s...”?] important then I know about it, that I read the New York Times and the Post” or whatever. And secondly, “if this were important, we’d be there and I would know about it and the fact that I don’t means there is no data there,” so it’s a vicious circle. I’m not going to waste my time looking for something for which there is not evidence at all. I mean, how do you fight that? I see it with the SETI cultists and I’ve tried to assess (Seth) Shawstack for this I talked about five large-scale scientific studies in a lecture he heard me give on QE2 (the Queen Elizabeth II) and we were each giving three lectures, got a free trip. After each one I asked, “How many people have read this?” These were well-attended lectures on the Queen as there wasn’t much to do on the North Atlantic after you see all the pretty sights. He didn’t raise his hand to any of them. We did a debate on Coast to Coast Radio. I won. He still hadn’t read it. I got 57 percent and he got 33 percent and 10 percent said, “I don’t know.”
Now, he wasn’t as bad as Michael Schermer, Head of the Skeptics Society. You know, I couldn’t have written a better script for him… He started off by saying, “Look, there’s nothing to this, like with all other paranormal phenomena there’s a ‘residue effect.’ 5 percent cannot be explained—you just don’t have enough data and that’s the way it is. If anybody expects to explain them all is mistaken.” Boy did I jump on that one with both feet. “As what you just said is totally untrue and Project: Bluebook Special Report 14, the largest study ever done, 21½ percent of the cases could not be identified—completely separate,” and I rattled off the statistics just to impress the audience. Of course he wasn’t paying any attention…The UFO evidence: 18.6 percent of 4,500 cases couldn’t be explained. In a University of Colorado study, according to a special UFO subcommittee of the world’s largest group of space scientists, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) 30 percent of 117 cases cited in detail could not be identified. I got 80 percent of the vote after that one.
But I read two of his books for God’s sake, and quoted back stupid things that he said! So I’m a skeptic about everything. I give a harder time to some of the pro-UFO people than a lot of other people do.
Q: I really appreciated a comment you made in response to a woman’s question last night. She was asking about some reality-television program (which I do not follow) about UFO Hunters (on the History Channel). You gave her a cautionary comment about media perception. To this day it shocks me that so many television viewers take what they see as “gospel” and lose touch with the fact that they are dealing with an entertainment medium. But when shows like The X-Files were at their peak--that informed a lot of public interest. What is your response to that sort of thing?
A: Well, that was labeled fiction. It wasn’t “This is a documentary and everything you’re about to see here is true.” I don’t object to programs that stimulate the public to think about anything strange. Why not? I do object to people who try to pass off half-assed fiction as reality. I know that the UFO Hunters did a show about the Maury Island case, not far from Seattle, and left out and important amount of information which would have informed the viewer that most of that story was nonsense. And so that I object to—when you play fast and loose with the truth, that’s not good as far as I’m concerned. Stimulating people—people ask me about Star Trek—I think anything that gets people to take a larger look at our place in the universe… Gene Roddenberry was a very sharp guy. Part of my concern, one reason for sticking with it for so long, is that we need to learn that we are not the big shots in the neighborhood. We cannot justify what we do on the basis of “We’re the smart guys around here so what we’re doing must be the most important investment and most accurate—whatever.” Part of my role or goal (maybe both) is to get people to see themselves as others see us. How do we look to aliens? It’s not a pretty picture. I mean I can find plenty of things I like about this planet. I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve seen a lot of places, but from a society-viewpoint, I think a professor in another solar system had plenty of thesis material for his grad students and most of them are not very pretty. Why don’t they speak the same language, all of them? Why is there so much prejudice? Why do so few people have a lot and so many people have only a little? I’m not a communist, but I’m saying that if you live in a society, can’t you be concerned about all of these starving kids? I mean the Bernie Madoffs in this world make me sick. It seems to me the Bush people stood for greed. I mean, like it or not. I’m not for these aerospace contractors who charge $600 for a toilet seat or whatever…I’m also very much opposed to putting everything out in public view. There’s a need for security, “Don’t you think the president should tell us everything?” No, I don’t. You can’t tell your friends without telling your enemies. They listen to the radio and read the newspapers too. And there is a need for legitimate security. I mean, suppose we figure out a better way of monitoring the flight of something in the atmosphere than just radar. If there’s another signal we can get. Should we put that out in the open where Osama can get it? That makes no sense. And there are times when...well, the United States and Russia. The Russians knew we were flying U2s over the Soviet Union during the Eisenhower era. Why didn’t they say anything? They quietly protested to the United States, but not publicly. They didn’t want the Russian people to know that they couldn’t do anything. Once they could, when they shot down Gary Powers’ plane, they went public in a very big way and I give Ike credit (after the first few lies) for saying, “No, it was ours and we need to know what they’re doing because they are a closed society. We’ve had Pearl Harbor, etcetera, etcetera.” But there is a need for security and I’m surprised by most of the people who say, “You should release everything,” are people who have never had clearances. We live in a dangerous world and handing your enemies—I mean, its like atomic bombs…If you have a new slave labor you can get the uranium out of the ground a lot faster than [unintelligible] so finding out about it gives you a leg up. We should not give our enemies a leg up. I’m not paranoid, everybody’s got an “other:” India and Pakistan, China and Russia aren’t always friendly about things—the Middle East…it’s a mess out there, so I am not for putting everything out in the open. I think there’s a very big difference between saying, “Look we know that the planet is being visited, we know that they haven’t destroyed us yet, we are convening international conferences that will simply deal with the political, the scientific, the religious aspects of this phenomena. It’s a planetary phenomenon and we need to treat it as …planetarians. I just made up a new word. But you see my point. I do not think—and people get mad at me, the Steve Greers of the world who say, “We’ve figured out free energy and they’re keeping it from us.” Give me some evidence, Steve, you’ve been talking about this for years and you’re still trying to raise $1,000,000 for a company that’s going to develop all of this stuff and please send money. Would you believe he offered to give all of his secrets to people who’d pay $600 bucks to spend a weekend with him on his farm? But, you’d have to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Think about that.
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