Somewhere in the Skies - Stanton Friedman: The End of an Era

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

On episode 50 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan speaks with esteemed nuclear physicist and UFO researcher, Stanton T. Friedman. With the recent announcement of his retirement from the field, Stanton brings listeners on a journey of over forty years of memories, experiences, and theories. He sets the record straight on what he's learned and where the phenomenon and studies are heading as a new generation of ufologists step up the plate. Guest Bio: Nuclear Physicist-Lecturer Stanton T. Friedman received his BSc. and MSc. Degrees in physics from the University of Chicago in 1955 and 1956. He was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist by such companies as GE, GM, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas working in such highly advanced, classified, eventually cancelled programs as nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and various compact nuclear powerplants for space and terrestrial applications. He became interested in UFOs in 1958, and since 1967 has lectured about them at more than 600 colleges and 100 professional groups in 50 U.S. states, 10 Canadian provinces and 18 other countries in addition to various nuclear consulting efforts. He has published more than 90 UFO papers and has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV programs including on Larry King in 2007 and twice in 2008, and many documentaries. He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell Incident and co-authored Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident. TOP SECRET/MAJIC, his controversial book about the Majestic 12 group, established in 1947 to deal with alien technology, was published in 1996 and went through 6 printings. An expanded new edition was published in 2005. Stan was presented with a Lifetime UFO Achievement Award in Leeds, England, in 2002, by UFO Magazine of the UK. He is co-author with Kathleen Marden (Betty Hill’s niece) of a book in 2007: Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. The City of Fredericton, New Brunswick, declared August 27, 2007, Stanton Friedman Day. His book Flying Saucers and Science was published in June 2008 and is in its 3rd printing. He has provided written testimony to Congressional Hearings, appeared twice at the UN, and been a pioneer in many aspects of ufology including Roswell, Majestic 12, The Betty Hill-Marjorie Fish star map work, analysis of the Delphos, Kansas, physical trace case, crashed saucers, flying saucer technology, and challenges to the S.E.T.I. (Silly Effort To Investigate) cultists. He has spoken at more MUFON Symposia than anyone else. Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Official Store: CLICK HERE Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Closing song, "Home", provided by Cary Judd SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Also here in Washington is Stanton Friedman, a physicist who's been involved in nuclear space and research for such companies as General Electric, Westinghouse, and General Motors. Mr. Friedman, there are books, there are magazine articles, there are television interview programs which have very little time, such as this one. Give it your best shot. If you are seeking to convince the skeptical, what do you point to? I'm seeking to convince the healthy agnostics. The skeptics don't want to listen to the data in my findings. I point to the 2,400-plus landing trace cases, physical changes in the environment collected from 65 countries. I point to the 3,200 cases in Project Blue Book Special Report 14, 20% of which couldn't be explained and at all the characteristics we attribute to flying saucers. I point to the 3,500 pilot sightings collected by a NASA scientist on the West Coast. I point to Bud Hopkins 140 abductees with a waiting list of 200 and an enormous amount of data in the form of documents

Some of them obtained from the government directly, some not so directly, clearly indicating that our planet is being visited, that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, and that we are indeed dealing with a cosmic watergate. This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan's bread. He worked for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for companies such as General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, and MacDonald Douglas.

He was a member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He held top secret clearance and worked on some of the most influential, classified projects in the United States. But in 1970, he left the professional world of nuclear physics to pursue something completely different. UFOs. Convinced of a legitimate phenomenon and cover-up by the United States government, he spent the next 40-plus years scientifically investigating the UFO phenomenon. In that time, he lectured at over 600 colleges, all 50 U.S. states, 10 Canadian provinces,

in over 20 different countries. Respected by scientists, academics, historians, military branches, and researchers alike, he has been deemed the Dean of Uphology. And, in March of this year, at the age of the age of the age of the age of the age of the age of the age of, he has been deemed, he has been deemed, of 84 he announced his retirement from the UFO research field and public speaking arena. Today, my guest is Stanton T. Friedman. To help celebrate my 50th episode, I sit down with Staten to talk all about how he got involved with the UFOs to begin with, his most memorable experiences throughout the years, and just exactly where we are heading in the unknown future.

So, without further ado, here is a retrospective conversation with the one and only Stanton T. Friedman. Stan, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies. Well, I enjoy doing interviews, and I certainly enjoy talking about what's going on in the skies. Yes, I would say so, and we will definitely get into that. I mean, Stan, so the first book I ever read on the UFO topic was Crash at Corona, written by both you and Don Burland. her. And I was terrified. Terrified as a 13-year-old to think that, you know, UFOs are flying around in space, but now they're also crashing on our planet.

And that fear turned to obsession. I've been researching ever since. So I would love to hear, you know, for our audience that may not know this story, your origin story, as it were, of how you got involved in all this to begin with. Well, it was one of a number of topics I was interested in. I was a kid, I read science fiction. You know, when I was 10 years old and the pulp magazines, I'm old enough to remember the popes and all that sort of stuff.

And then I got into more serious science and I got a couple of degrees. And I had a habit of buying books and new stuff. And I needed one more book. It's strictly unintentional. Life just moves on. I did one more book so I wouldn't have to pay shipping on an order for Marble. Borough Books in the York. There's a report on

unidentified flying objects. This is 1958, mind you, like Air Force Captain Edward J. Rupelt. Now, I was working on an Air Force-sponsored program, the Aircraft Nuclear Prohibition Department at General Electric. So I had a great deal of respect to the

Air Force then, anyway. And I got the book, figured it was $2.99 or something marked down to a dollar and because it saved me the shipping costs on that big order of books. It really wasn't costing me anything.

So what the heck? We could afford it if it found sense. Okay. So I read the book and it intrigued me. It didn't convince me. But I read 10 more books. And then in the early 1960s, at the University of California, Berkeley Library,

I lived at that time. I had moved from General Electric to Arrowjet, General Nucleonics, which is east of San Francisco. So I'd go over to Berkeley and read ten more books. And then I made the, had the great epiphany, if you will. I found a copy of something, Project Blue Books, Special Report No. 14. And a surprising thing was it hadn't been mentioned in any of the ten books that I had read. So that seems strange.

Where the heck did this come from? You know, it was an official government report. And the work I found out later was done by Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. And as it turns out, I have a dealings with Battel. I did a study, how do you like this title for a study, analysis and evaluation of fast and intermediate reactors for space vehicle application? One important word was left out, Soviet. I was looking at the literature that I could get on Russian publications in the scientific areas that would be concerned. with developing nuclear power systems for space.

And I would go back to the people who had the best collection of Russian literature were Patel Memorial Institute. And turns out they were the people who did Blue Book Special Report 14, even though their name isn't on it. Interesting, their connection was classified as it happened. So I was intrigued with Patel. I would go back there once a month or so to talk to the people of Patel, and then also Air Force people that write Patterson Air Force Base.

So I would go back there. I was very impressed with Fetel, but I also would be looking at their UFO stuff while I was going to it. Right. And that got me really tooling along because Blue Book Special Report 14, the biggest study ever done for the United States Air Force, mind you, they looked at 3,201 sightings. The report has hundreds of charts.

tables, graphs, maps. I was in data heaven. I'm a data fiend. And what I found was I also discovered, how should I put this, official lying, that's a nice way to say that. The press release, which the guy who put this privately published version together included dated 1955, in the press release, it says, on the basis of this study, we believe that no object, such as I was properly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States. This is the Secretary of the Air Force might be the last name was Coros. We believe no objects such as properly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States. Even the unknown 3% could have been identified as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been

available. Well, if you only saw the press release, that sounds pretty damn good. But I had to report, and I'm a data hound, where'd they get this unknown three percent. The unknowns were 21 and a half percent. And 21 and a half is not three rounded off. They also further saying that they were full of baloney was they did a cross-comparison between the unknowns, the only ones were interested in, and the knowns. Remember, the question isn't our all UFOs alien spacecraft? The question is, are any?

Are all isotopes fish all? Of course not. But fortunately for us nuclear guys, there's something up. They also did a quality evaluation, the better the quality of the sightings, the more likely to be unexplainable. And a cross-comparison between unknowns and knowns showed that the probability that the unknowns were just misnones was less than 1%. The groups did not have the same characteristics at all. So I was shocked by this. And the duration of observation was longer for the unknowns than the knowns and all kinds of other data that says these darn things are real. And so I don't like being lied to.

I worked under security at that time, and I, you know, I sometimes have to, how should I say, tiptoe around the information. But flat out lying, that's another story. So I got determined. I want to find out why we're being lied to. I don't like being lied to. And as a scientist, especially. And so I started digging into the literature and digging out. up more information.

And the quest hasn't ended, to tell you the truth. But I joined, the first thing that was joined APRO and NYCAP, the two big organizations, which are both defunct now. I joined them to get their monthly newsletters or bi-monthly, whatever it was like that, and trying to keep up. There was an active group in Pittsburgh. When I finally moved there, I was one of these, you know, life doesn't take the path you expect it to.

My dad worked for the same company for 37 years. So, okay, my first job out of college, General Electric. Well, they're a big company. I could work for them. I looked that up. I could retire because I started down when I was 57. That's great. And they got several nuclear divisions.

No question at all. It's a lifetime career. Wow. Later, the program was going down the tubes. I saw the handwriting on the wall and got out, joined another company for three years, and then realized they were going down, I've got another job.

Three years. Totally unexpected, you understand. Because I was having to move my family. It's not just walking down the street. Okay, I'll drive two miles this way instead of five miles that way. Moving across the country, get to see the country, I guess. And so I spent 14 years in industry.

And on the UFO scene, you know, I was reading the books and stuff. And we set up a group in Pittsburgh. A NICAP subcommittee is what they had at that time. Then we set up on our own because we didn't like them telling us what we should be doing from the NICAP was headquartered in Washington. That was Major Kehoe. And we had a bunch of us of professional people, mostly from Westinghouse where I were. So we set up the group. And I called Frank Edwards.

I'd gotten to know him when he was in the, he wrote a book, Flying Saucer Serious Business. a journalist from Indianapolis. And on one of my stints, I worked for General Motors Allison Division, which is working on military compact reactors. Nobody thinks of GM and nuclear reactors what they were.

And got to know, Frank. And when I moved to Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, I told Frank, I want to go public. You know, everybody. Give me some names of the media people. Because our group was, good things were happening. I felt very good about

the group. So he gave me a bunch of names. He was a wide-ranging journalist. Let's put it that way. And one of them was the producer of a radio show with a great name, Contact. Perfect. For KDKA, Pittsburgh, which is the big station in town, the big media outlet. And so I called this producer and thought, heck, I'm a Westinghouse nuclear physicist. Pittsburgh's kind of a Westinghouse town, or it was, Westinghouse's kind of gone down the tubes, but at some extent. And so, I thought you might want me to have me as a guest on your show, contact. Don't call us, we'll call you.

Okay, what the heck? Well, less than a month later, at 6.30 in the evening, I get a call from this producer. We had a cancellation. Any chance you could do the show tonight at 7 o'clock? well i was close to live close enough the station have to go down there now they didn't do it by radio by telephone at that time so i said yeah yeah i can do that so i went down to the show now admittedly i wasn't as sharp at dealing with nasty noisy negativist as i am now i've heard all the entire argument right you acquire that as time goes on right yes and but anyway i did the show and as it happened

A woman at Westinghouse, where I worked at the astronaut who lived, called me afterwards. She happened to hear the show and said, Stan, we're reading Frank's book and my, Frank Edwards' book, and my book review club. Any chance you could give us a lecture in my living room? Sure, why not? Wasn't too far away. I lived downtown and so forth. So my first talk was in her living room, a few dozen people. And the word got out, and I did my way.

more and then I did the show again and one day out of only two days and three years did I drive to work from downtown with Joanne who was the supervisor at Westinghouse

astronaut lab and we were talking I was saying gee I'd sure like to speak at Carnegie Mellon University the big university in town and well did you talk to the dean no I talked to so-and-so and he wasn't interested she said stand the dean's my husband

Give him a call. He's heard you on a radio. Oh, okay. And so I called Gene, his name was. And we set a date right away four weeks later. And the last question was, how much do you want? Well, it was during the day, so I'd have to take some time off work. So I figured I ought to at least get recovered of my lost pay. And so how about $100 thinking he'd knocked me down to $50, you understand?

And sure. And then he told me, because I knew his wife, what he was paying any other speakers in the series, 1,500, 17. Wow. So, but the talk went extremely well. We had a big crowd, no nasty questions or anything. And he wrote a nice letter to the agent from whom we had booked all these other people. And they booked me at a breakthrough talk, the engineering society. of Detroit.

$300 and expenses. I'm in the big time here. Big top, yep. Well, what really shocked me, and I must admit, I was surprised, they were sold out two weeks in advance for 1,0008 people for dinner and a tar. And there were no negative questions. Now, that couldn't help but impress me. In the Engineering Society of Detroit, we're not talking about little ladies in tennis shoes, you know,

or cooks with tin hats on. Yeah. And again, there were no negative questions. And then another talk that really impressed me was the local section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astrononics got together with the, I guess it was the Nuclear Society. There were two groups sponsored a joint lecture. We had over 400 people there. And again, some management at Westinghouse was there because it was well publicized. and no negative questions and stuff.

That had an impact because I got a call from somebody at Los Alamos. Stan, I understand you're giving lectures about flying saucers. Typically as flying saucers aren't real. I said, oh, yeah. I said, well, how about speaking to the local section of the American Nuclear Society? I said, oh, I'd be delighted to. No, I mean, on an expense account, Stan. Well, I don't make those decisions.

I'll ask management. Now, I'm a member of the American Nuclear Society. Westinghouse was a corporate member. Of course, Los Alamos was as well. And they said, yes. So they paid for me to go on an expense again, from Pittsburgh to Los Alamos, to give a lecture. And that was pretty neat because they had over 400 people, one of the best crowds they ever had. And how can I not be respectful of that audience?

I had been to Los Alamos on business, nuclear rockets and things like that. These are professional people, you know. Yeah. So when I get a good response from these kinds of people, That affects me. I'm doing something useful in sections of the American Institute of Aronics and Astronautics and Engineering Society. Right. You know. So it was in these circles, and I stress that because people tend to think, well, the only people interested were nutty groups, you know, of the ten-add-crow. Well, it wasn't like that at all.

Absolutely. And I mean, I mean, since that you've done like, gosh, 600 college campuses, every U.S. state, 10 Canadian provinces. Like, I've heard you, you know. 19 other countries. 19 other countries. That's incredible. These aren't just, I think, like people think, these small little groups of like 10, 12 people who are all hardcore believers. These are people that have genuine questions and they want answers. And, you know, the fact that, you know, the people you're speaking to, you know, at Los Alamos and all of these prestigious places, how was their response?

You said, you know, it was. Great. Well, I judged by the question and answer period. Right, right. Am I coming out of me? And I remember at one lecture, first guy up in the question and answer period, I've never heard so much nonsense in one night in my life. That's a great way to start, you know. And how do I pick him? And I said, can you please be more specific, sir?

I'm glad I said that. I don't know. If you would have asked me, I don't know what I. would have said I would say, but that's what I did say. Well, you said that Betty and Barney Hill were taken to Zeta reticuli and back. I said, no, sir. What I said was they were taken on board craft. They didn't go anywhere. And then were a couple more equally uninformed questions. And then finally, after the third one, somebody in the, which I had answered, and somebody in the audience says, how about taking some sensible questions? Shout to it out. This guy got

up and left, and I said, I'll take your question, but who was that? Obviously, I irked him. But it turns out he was a professor of physics. Okay. He hadn't heard what I said at all. So it alerted me to the fact that you can come on pretty strong, and you won't get a hard, respectable hard time from people. You know what I mean? Yeah. There's nothing wrong with asking questions.

And one guy in a question and answer period, I had given some data on a gallop poll showing that the greater the education, the more likely to believe in flying sanctions, which comes to a surprise to a lot of people. He said, how about polling this audience? I said, well,

this is University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, about 600 people. They were sitting in the aisles. I said, well, I normally, I'm the one who sticks his neck out. I'm not asking the audience.

So he said, I don't think anybody in mind and people clapped. They'd heard my lecture ready, you understand. And so I said, okay, I'll ask two questions.

How many people? believe no UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft, and how many believe some UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft? I asked those two questions. I told them I was going to ask. More than 90%

said they told somewhere. It's reassuring to me, in other words, having gone through all this with all these places and stuff, that even though people are always saying to me, oh, you must get a hard time, I don't. I really don't. I'm not a massive

I don't do this, you know, to strain the nasty, noisy, negative, as I do this to present information. And, you know, I'm a little sneaky, usually about five large-scale scientific studies. Describe what's in them, show us why they can go with and so forth. And then I casually asked how many people here have read this. So typically, you know, I might get five. If you're lucky, yeah. Yeah. And so I know that most people haven't looked at the evidence.

and I've been told by people that they were completely unaware of all this data that I present, because I'm a data, an evidence man. I talk about not only Blue Book Special Report 14, I have copies for sale, because it wouldn't be fair for me to say, oh, this wonderful study. Well, I don't know if you get a copy, but that's not crooked, because then maybe you're lying, you know, maybe it doesn't say what you say it says, et cetera. So here, here are copies, autograph. Yeah, yeah, backing it up.

I think that's important. And, you know, next week we have Cheryl Costa on the show who wrote a book about data. And she told a wonderful story about showing you the book, and you told her, finally, someone's doing data. I thought that was hilarious. Well, it's true. That's a rare book because it's got all kinds of information about who see things and stuff. And it's a big, fat report. That's not 20 pages kind of thing.

Right. a couple hundred. And so I hope she sells a ton of them because darn it, conclusions about controversial subjects should be based on evidence, not feelings, not theoretical, not research by proclamation, which is what I run across a lot from the noisy negatists. And so I'd like to have the data in my pocket, so to speak. Why is it that most people don't believe in UFOs? Well, you know, what's a reasonable number? Yeah. 20%? That's a lot.

Especially when the airport says 3%. Right. I've found this great interest all over the world, and people are interested. They ask reasonable questions, and sometimes I have to say, I don't know.

You know, I don't tell them. Why does the government do that? I say, well, in the first place, let's make clear. I do not speak for the government. speak for me. Yeah. So I can only hypothesize. On the other hand, I do have some advantages as a speaker and writer about this subject. One, I worked under security for 14 years.

I know how the system works. I had clearance for 14 years, acute clearance, given me access to nuclear data and stuff like that. Two, I worked on advanced propulsion systems. One of the biggest objections from, quote, scientist, unquote, you can't get here from Stan. Have you forgotten? You know, things can't go fast in the speed of light, and they'd have to come from hundreds of light years away,

which is nonsense. That's one of the things that's changed, our perception of where we fit in the scheme of things. You know, when Frank Drake in about 1960 first talked about searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, he met with radio telescopes, of course, but listening for signals, because the astronomical community can't imagine how anybody could go,

the astronomical distances, but he thought there might be 6,000 places in the galaxy that could be sending signals. Wow, 6,000! Well, because there aren't many planets, you know, there are many people saying, hey, we got the only solar system, man. That has changed with the Kepler satellite, this incredible device, which goes out and back into this for several years, looking for planets. Not easy to find, even with a fancy piece of equipment, but if you're above the atmosphere, you can actually spot the planet going across the face of its star. That's pretty sensitive is what I'm a great admirer of the technology. And so when you do that, holy cow, there are planets all over the place.

Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence. That holds for flying saucers as well. The fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not true. And so the latest numbers suggest that there's 1.6 planets per star on the average. Now, what does that mean to give you a neighborhood survey, so to speak? There are about 10,000 stars within 100 light years of here. It's not that I counted them, the astronomers count them. That means there are about 16,000 planets within 100 light years.

So we go from Frank's 6,000 planets to... At least six billion in the galaxy. So there's several things that our understanding has causes to change in our review about. One is a number of planets. One is, and the number of stars, too, for that matter. Remember, at one time we thought there was only one galaxy. Right. Sorry, billions of them, too, folks.

But beyond that, we also, in 1920s, we thought the sun, our star, was a mass of burning gas. That's how the energy is produced. By 1938, we suddenly realized, ain't no way to get enough energy by, we know the mass of the sun, and we know the energy out. Somebody's very smart physicists figured out that it was nuclear fusion, which nobody knew anything about before that, really. Hydrogen and helium and heavy hydrogen and stuff like that.

And they were talking about an incredible increase in the amount of energy per pound the stuff. And then you can see that if you take a big bomb in World War II, it released the energy of about 10 tons of dynamite and make a big hole in the ground too. It was called a blockbuster.

Well, the first atomic bomb, a fission device in 1945, released the energy of 15,000 tons of dynamite, not 10, but 15,000. The first fusion device, fusion is what powers all the stars. The first fusion device released the energy of 10 million tons of dynamite.

That was in each bomb in 1952. And the Russians sent one off in 61, I guess it was. Tsarbomba. 50 million tons of dynamite, one stinking whip. I mean, and the important, the reason I go through this is that suddenly, you've got not only a way of mass destruction, but propulsion to the stars. Exactly, yeah.

And I worked on a study of fusion propulsion for deep space travel in 1962 at Eurogeneral nucleonics. My boss was John Luce. Dr. Luce was a brilliant guy. He was headed the fusion work at Oak Ridge, and we hired him away. And he had 40 patents. This was a clever man, gentleman, And we did a study and concluded that, well, if you want to put out the dough, you can go.

I put it simply. Right, right. It won't be cheap. And when I was working, when I say it won't be cheap, many people have no idea because they don't work in that crazy world of advanced technology development. I was working on nuclear airplanes in 1958 at GE. Our budget that year was $100 million. We employed 3,400 people of work. 1,100 are engineers and scientists.

We're not talking about six professors and 12 grad students here. They're big programs. The stealth aircraft must have about $10 billion over 10 years in secret for Locke. So that's an important part of this, in other words. If you guys can't, it's not a question of you guys getting together and deciding how, let's see what we can do about this. It takes a major effort. and the taxpayer

we've had a lot of these big programs most of them have gone nowhere some of them have gone everywhere kind of thing the Manhattan Project for example with your weapons the stealth aircraft the first our first spy satellite

the corona spy satellite and I have no idea whether that name came because the Roswell incident actually happened just outside Corona but the Corona spy satellite The first 12 launches, they knew that the U-2 was going to get shot down as it did,

because the Russians were getting smarter. They started in the 50s. The first 12 launches were failures. Those are expensive. In secret, nobody knew about it, so nobody can say, the 13th one was a success and got more data than all the U-2 flights that had preceded about what was going on in Russia. I mean, a satellite is in constant operation and spend a lot of time going right over the Soviet Union. The whole program was done in secret.

And I'd love the way they got their data back. They deorbited the film canisters, which were caught in the air by Air Force planes. He released them over the Pacific. And, of course, he knew where things were going and orbits are predictable and so forth. Kind of a different way of getting data back, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you've got a problem. You've got a solution. You don't have a better solution. We need the information. Let's do it. And when it comes to national defense, cost is not the paramount concern. You know what I mean? How much is it going to cost? Okay. If that's what it costs, that's what we'll spend. Because it was absolutely essential that we know whether the Russians were gearing up to attack us. There were many people who said they were. And so the fact that we could get actual data, evidence that showed that they weren't building up all over, was very important

and probably kept us from having a war, because there were many people who would say, well, if they are, we better get them before they get us. Exactly. Can you imagine what that would have resulted in? You know, I'll drop my bomb, then you drop yours. And, you know, we have a long history of underestimating the Russians. In 1948, General Leslie Groves, who headed our nuclear. weapons, was asked. How long do you think it'll take before the Russians build the nuclear weapon?

Well, he went on for some time that the Russians, you know, they had lost 20 million people during the war. They didn't have the industrial capacity we had. They'd been bombed all the hell. It'd probably take them at least eight years. Well, said this in August of 48. About 13 months later, the Russians set off their first bomb. We had vastly underestimated them. We did not have, in two ways. We didn't have a radar net. What do we got to worry about? And then we thought they didn't have any big airplanes.

They certainly didn't show any during the war. And then all of a sudden at one of these big May Day celebrations, I'll call it, here come all these big airplanes. Son of a gun. They looked just like B-29s. What they had done, we had left the B-29 over there, was bringing Lenleese stuff, and there was something wrong of it,

and they couldn't send it back. And they copied it, Chinese copies, if you know. And they built a whole bunch of these stupid, you know, Eastern Europeans. They don't have Harvard in Yale, after all. Well, that was very much the attitude, and it cost us, because that gave them a chance to catch up much more than they would. Otherwise, if we'd recognize that they had a capability,

yeah, they'd gone through a war, but that didn't mean they were stupid. There had been Nobel Prize is given to Russian scientists, believe it or not, guys. But I'm sensitive about this because my own, for my grandparents were Russians. That's understandable, absolutely. What I'm saying is things move in mysterious ways in this world. Or why things get done or don't get done, who does them, and so forth can be totally wrong. And, you know, I've talked my uncle had come over in the United States from Germany in 1938. And he had tried to get more of the family to come with him because he saw the handwriting on the wall.

Hitler was talking about what he was going to do, and Jews were not in good shape over there. But he couldn't get relatives. This is Germany, the land of Gerdin, Beethoven, you know, they wouldn't do stuff like that. That's crazy. So they wouldn't leave, and they got slaughtered in the concentration camps. Because it's hard to believe that other earthlings will behave that badly toward other earthlings. you know? Yeah, until it happens.

Yeah, after it happens, oh, yeah, I guess we should have realized that. Yeah. What I'm saying is we make judgments often based on insufficient information. It's one of the things that characterizes the attitude of the astronomical community about UFOs. They don't think you can get here from there. They don't think people can keep secrets. They don't think there's any evidence. And so therefore, they're not going to look for any evidence.

And it's a constant problem when I look at astronomical text. Where's the reference of the large-scale scientific studies about UFOs? Although dismiss UFOs are right. And my height in my college classmate, Carl Sagan, for three years, and two different books said there are interesting sightings that aren't reliable. There are reliable settings that aren't interesting, but there are no interesting and reliable sightings. No evidence was provided to substantiate this totally false statement.

It's exactly the opposite. The Blue Book Special Report 14 showed the better the quality of the siting, the reliability. the more likely to be unexplainable. But don't bother me with the facts. My mind's made up. And that same applies, so you can't get here from there. Now, why would anybody expect an astronomer to know anything about advanced propulsion systems?

Think about that. That's not as Balaweck. Well, I worked on nuclear airplanes, nuclear rockets, and I wonder how many people listening are aware that in 1969, three different organizations operated nuclear physics, and rocket reactor propulsion systems on the ground. These weren't little toys. At Westinghouse, we tested the NRX A6, fancy time.

It was less than eight feet in diameter. Liquid hydrogen propellant went in very cold and came out at 4,000 degrees. The power level was 1,000, in our case, 1100 megawatts. Now, Hoover Dam produces 2,000 megawatts. Hoover Dam is enormous. Ours was 1100 megawatts. Eurojet tested one of the thousand megawatts. In Los Alamos,

scientific laboratory, tested the Big Daddy, Phoebus 2B, nuclear rocket reactor propulsion system, also under 8 feet in diameter, and also with an exhaust temperature of 4,000 degrees. Not much works at 4,000 degrees that we know how to make.

I better add. And the power, level was 4,000 megawatts, twice over damn. Now, these were all successful, and we were so delighted because we listened, and we didn't know whether our system would work well. Nobody had done it before. Yeah, right. And what joy.

And they canceled the damn program. You know, that's weird. Why would you do that? Okay, so we have this idea of, like, you know, the physics and the propulsion behind it, And then you have the people who relate this to the UFO topic. And one of the cases you brought up was Betty and Barney Hill and the idea of like, how could they get here, this, that, where did the hills go? I would love to know how you got involved with a Betty and Barney Hill case.

And with working on your books with Kathleen Martin. I read the book, The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller, the Betty and Barney Hill story. And then I had lucky opportunity going back to Westinghouse again. I did media stuff there, and the guys from the same talk show that I had been on that got me moving along, called me and said, we're bringing Betty and Barney Hill to town, we thought you might like to know. And they told me where they were staying, which is very unusual. That's usually not stuff information you get about. So I called, and I had dinner with them.

This is about 65, 1965 or so. and I was listening to see if they'd said anything that expanded upon what was in the book, you know, where they're going to exaggerate. And they weren't. I was very favorably impressed with them. I mean, Betty is a social worker. Barney's his civil rights, I mean, activists and worked for the post office. But I was very impressed.

And then I was the first to do work on, I encouraged Marjorie Fish on the Betty in Barney Hill's, Betty Hill, StarMap, I got a call from Coral Lorenzen at APRO, a very popular research organization. Marjorie had asked her for the names of any scientist that could maybe or she could work with or talk to or so forth. And she called me and, you know, can I give her your name and so forth? And I said, oh, sure, I'd be delighted. And so I was traveling a great deal, and I was near Toledo, Ohio.

I stopped by to see Marjorie. I saw some of her StarMap models. I was the first to publish about her StarMap models, indicating the end. came from Zeta 1 or Zeta 2, Ritulai, in the constellation of Ritculum, 39 light years away as it happens. So I got involved early on, published a paper in Saga magazine about the Star Mop with Bobby Antslai Taranda. I wasn't writing much myself at that time, worked with other people. Then I encouraged Terry Dickinson, who was editor of Astronomy magazine. I'd gotten to know him.

He came to one of my lectures in Milwaukee, and he's still around. He's not editing. He's retired like I'm supposed to be at the end of the year. Oh, yeah. We'll get into that a little later, for sure. Don't think I was going to bring that up. Well, the kicker is that the response to the article in Astronomy magazine, which he did at my suggestion and talked to a lot of people,

I didn't force his hand at all. Got more reaction than anything. they'd ever published before. So they published a number of letters over the next year, and then they put out a 32-page full-color booklet the Zeta Rituclei incident. They immediately sold

10,000 copies, which is unheard of for this kind of thing. And then the publisher was put under a lot of pressure, and they decided to sell the rest of them. They printed 30,000 copies, I think, and

they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I wound up with 16,000 copies in my garage. Sold them all. Wow. I'd sell them. I'd sell them again. Beautiful color, 32-page full-color. There's a day to reticulence. But meanwhile, I had seen Betty.

I was working on a movie UFOs are real and visited her with a camera crew. We had done the tomorrow show together, Betty and I, with Tom Snyder. And I have to give him credit for something. Some media people are really worth. while. He was one of them. Murph Griffin was another, but with Tom he brought Betty out first. Then he

brought me out. I was in the green room. And there was no audience, and we were taping segments. And I said, you know, I told him, I said, the public can't know that Betty's a social worker. Is there a very respectable

individuals? She's not the woman who's not scrubbing the floor. And so the first question we came back on as he asked Betty about her background. So I give him credit for that. Not everybody would do that. Right. And then something else.

At the end of the show, he stood up. He had been sitting down all the time. Son of a gun, he's about six foot seven. Betty is five feet, and I'm five, nine and a half on a good day. What I'm saying is he could be a very intimidating presence if he chose to use that.

but he didn't and I give him a lot of credit for listening to my suggestion in the first place and for not intimidating yes it was a good discussion a good program I really enjoyed doing it

and with Merv he was a pleasure he asked such sensible questions and I did a show twice actually but after the first show we had a live audience I asked him I said gee that was fun

I really enjoyed that because he was sharp. And he said to me, they're just the two of us standing there, he said, I try to keep the show at a level of after-dinner conversation. You're having friends over for dinner.

And what kind of questions would they ask? And he did a great job of that. Mervis and the scientist, but boy, he was a very bright guy. You know, I really appreciated the fact that he had done some work. He asked sensible questions. He was cordial.

He represented the audience in a very clever kind of way. So some of these guys really serve a useful purpose. Not everybody. So I've been to Betty's house. It had been several times. And that's how Kathy got to know me.

And she once told me that, they'd said, if ever need any help, there's one guy you can trust, and that's Stan Freedman. So we did three books. And they were all listed at my website, incidentally,

triplew. Stanton Friedman.com. And the ones by the three of us are autographed by both of us, we use book plates. So everything I send out gets is autographed. Look, I put myself in the people's place. They're buying a book. We have discount prices, but still,

don't they deserve an autograph? Just so they know, it's coming from me, and not from some bookstore. I got nothing against bookstores. They sell my book. No, that's a good point, though. It's that extra personal touch. Yeah, and I can say I'm on the internet.

www. Stanton Friedman.com. I just spell Friedman right, though, F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N. Well, Stad, one of the other ones cases I wanted to get in with you, which you know more than anyone else on this one, what I always found fascinating is how you basically helped break this story of Roswell.

When you met with Jesse Marcel, I would love if you could tell us that story before we move on here to some listening. I was doing a television interview in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Louisiana, Louisiana State University. There's at the local television station. I was supposed to do three interviews.

And the guy was very helpful and nice. And he said, you know, the guy you really ought to talk to was Jesse Marcel. I said, oh, who's he? I'd never heard of his next sentence changed my life. He handled wreckage of one of those saucers who were interested in when he was in the military. What?

And he wasn't joking. There was nobody around. He wasn't trying to impress anybody. He was telling me the fact. Wasn't what do you know about him? He lives in H-O-U-M-A. I didn't know where H-O-M-A. I didn't know where H-O-Mah was in Louisiana, but he's a great guy ought to talk to him. So the next day

I was at the airport early, and I called information. Some listeners may not be aware. That's what you used to do when you wanted a phone number, and you didn't go to computer because you didn't have one to go to. Call the operator in Homa, and there was a listing for a Jesse A. Marcel, and I called him. Told him I was a nuclear physicist. I had a clearance for 14 years and so forth. Try to impress him that, you know, I'd been around a bit. And so he told me a story. People

that, why did they talk to you? Well, I wasn't threatening to him. I impressed him with being nuclear. Remember, he was the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the entire world, which was based at Roswell. The noisy negative is forget to tell you that, usually. Yeah, a bunch of dinged GIs. But, yeah, they happen to be the guys who dropped the bonds on Alamogordo, they set off the bomb, and then the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two more in Operation Crossroads and so forth. I was the only group in the world like that at that time.

And so I was very impressed with Jesse. This is a phone conversation. I got other names of people I can talk to. In the next, I shared that with Bill Moore, and in the next year or so, we talked to 60 people connected with the event. And, yeah, I got lucky when I called the, I had a look in editor and publisher.

Is there a newspaper in Roswell? What do I know about about? I'll be there in July, but, yeah, the Roswell Daily Records. So I called the record to find out something about the town. and the fact that it was the 509th that was there, the only atomic mounting group in the world. And I called the newspaper, and I found an article. We found a date. We found some articles in newspapers.

So I called the newspaper, and I said, I've got an article here that says, I've got a guy named Walter Houtter-Hott, was the public information officer for the base, And before I could finish the sentence, oh, his wife works here. What? So I talked to his wife, and then I talked to Walter, and then he was a huge help, because not only was he a public information officer, which he was for the base, but he was a World War II bombardier, more than 20 missions over Japan. This wasn't a dink again. And remember, he actually dropped the instrument package over when I was Adam Bond. test.

Yeah. Yeah. And you used your best guys to do that, because if you don't get it in the right place at the right time, you've wasted a bomb, and at that time, we didn't have bombs to waste. So Walter was more than a public information officer. And he knew many of the people helped me find other people.

And the big thing is he had a base yearbook, which he made a copy of for me. And I'd call him and say, hey, you know where any of these guys are? Well, I remember Joe, and last I heard he was in Oshkosh. You know, it was a big help. One thing I learned, and this is a lesson for investigators, which I didn't know when I started, you talked to somebody. Yeah, I was there at the base at that time.

They'll remember Colonel Blanchard, and many of them remember Jesse Marcell because he was the intelligence officer. You remember anybody else who was there? Oh, come on, now, it was 40 years ago, you know. No, I don't. And then you talk. Keep them in that time frame for another five minutes. And then, say, hey, did you talk? talk to Joe Smith. He was there. I remember him, and then

come up with three or four names. He wasn't lying to me when he said he didn't remember, and he didn't. He had to think about it. How many of us can rattle off? I can tell you who I went to high school with, but not the other people. So it became an immense amount of labor, and I certainly was convinced that we're dealing with a true story. And there have been people who make up all kinds of phony bologna stories. Jesse was very impressive. Look, you don't get to be the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the entire world by being an idiot. And of course, his son, who was deceased also, was a medical doctor

and served in intelligence work, and I still can't believe. Jesse Jr. was called back in at age 68 in the reserve he had been, and there was flying combat missions in Iraq, in the Middle East. Yeah. After each 68, 130 flying hours over there. We were that desperate. Right.

And I think they were trying to get him shot down so they'd shut up. Yeah. Wouldn't be the most crazy way they've tried to have a cover-up for sure. That's right. So, yeah, Roswell has been my,

and I'm a member, I was elected into the Roswell UFO Hall of Fame. You'll see you at the museum. And for people who wonder, just to prove that there's interest, last year, the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Rajahua, Mexico had over 205,000 visitors. And it's in the middle of nowhere, believe me. Oh, yeah, I've been there. And my God, that was one of the lengthiest drives through a desert I've ever experienced.

Yeah, I believe it. Look, it's 200 miles from Albuquerque. It's 200 miles from Emeriloh. It's 200 miles from El Paso. Look, I grew up in New Jersey. There isn't anything in New Jersey that's 200 miles more. That's a good point, yeah. Well, it makes for a perfect place for something to crash or be tested.

That's for damn sure. Well, I'll tell you. People say, well, why? And I had an astronomer in England say to me, why would it then alien go to Roswell to New Mexico? All there is, there is sand. I said, you ever been there? Well, no.

I said, well, I take it you're not aware that two of our three nuclear weapons labs are in New Mexico, and that White Sands Missile ranges were firing all our missiles. And they're both there because there aren't many people there. You don't fire missiles with a lot of people around, for good to say. You make a mistake. The Curtland Air Force Base is there. It's a natural place to put military installations. Alamagordo Army are few.

and stuff like that. So, Roswell was there for that reason. And, you know, crazy politics. The base was shut down by Lyndon Johnson because New Mexico didn't vote for him in the election when he won the presidents. Oh, wow, that's a vendetta. Well, Lyndon was known to have strong feelings like that.

Yeah. That's very true. You know, how fair was it to the town? Many of the people worked at the base was a big base. Yeah. They had a 13,000-foot runway, and typically runways are 8,000 or 9,000 feet. And that was because they had big B-36 bombers carrying nuclear weapons, and they needed six feet of concrete for a runway.

How's that? If you go out there now, you go out to where the base was, which is south of town, and you'll see airplanes being cut up. It's a burial ground, if you will, except they don't bury them. they come up and sell the parts. Okay. And I don't know of any other place where he can do this. Yeah, really?

For all kinds of airports, big ones, small ones, et cetera, et cetera. So it's been a fascinating story for me. And I will be there again than probably the last time on the anniversary. They have a festival. That's the word. That sounds strange. But in July, around the time of the crash anniversary. Right.

And I think last year, I don't know, 9,000 people there for the weekend, something like that. That's incredible. And the people don't realize, like, how much revenue that brings into that small town every year. They earned it, you know. Yeah, well, absolutely. Cancel the base, which the German Air Force used to fly out of there. It's a great place for flying. It's at 3,500 feet, no mountains close by.

You know, why would you close the facility? Because they didn't vote for him, of course. and where did they move it to Texas That sounds appropriate Yeah The other thing that kind of connects here to Roswell Not kind of This is a big part of the Roswell case as well

Is another thing that you You worked with and investigated And I'd really love to hear your thoughts And where you stand on this now It's the MJ12 documents Now we've heard so many people argue this for so many years But you wrote one of the most definitive books on these documents. So I'd love to hear, you know, now in 2018, what is your stance on these

documents? How much is real? How much is baloney? Where do you stand on that? Most of the MJ12 documents are phony. Okay. That's true. Most isotopes aren't fissionable either. You know, like it or not, most people can't run a mile in four minutes. Nobody can. So there are at least three documents that I believe are genuine. The Eisenhower briefing document, the Cutler Twining memo. And there's another one which doesn't come to mind at the moment. And as proof

tells you something about research in the field, Philip Class was Mr. Noisy negativist himself in abeionics editor for aviation weak in space technology. No, flying saucers are alien spacecraft. Nah, it's nonsense. And he challenged me on those documents.

The Cutler Twining memo in particular. Obviously, the memos are fraud because it's done in the large PICA type, but I've got nine documents here done from the National Security Council, which name is at the top, and they're all done in elite type. So I challenge you to find any other genuine documents found in the same size and style type, and I'll give you $100 each up to a maximum of $10. He did this rather publicly, and you have 60 days. Well, okay, I immediately went to my files, and unlike, it turned out, I didn't know this at the time, it turned out until it had never been

the Eisenar Library or the Truman Library and I spent weeks at them and I immediately went to my files and I had the 20 pages done in the same size and style type they didn't meet all this criteria but time frame etc so I was going to the Eisenar Library and might as well check when I went there it's easy to spot the difference because one type is much bigger than the other one time phase and so I made copies of 14 documents no doubt about they're being genuine I found them at the I was in our library and made copies of all of them, sent him the copies and an invoice for $1,000. He would only pay me for $10,000, and he paid me, and then he got maddened hell when I included a copy of his check in my book.

The audience loves it. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's typical of the intellectual bankruptcy of the pseudoscience of anti-euphology. Don't bother me with the facts. My mind's made up. And it's such a splendid example that he had never been to the library. And it turns out they have like 250,000 pages

of NSC documents. And you're telling me they're all typed on the same typewriter. I hope people recall. We used to use typewriters before computers were around. Well, the MJ12 documents, in other words, I'm convinced I did rather extensive work on the 12 members of the group. And I'm especially proud of my discovery,

to my total surprise, I will admit, that one of the members was Dr. Donald Howard Menzel, and he was a debunker. He written three anti-UFOs books. How could he be a member of a group that knew about crash saucers, alien potties, all that sort of stuff? Well, I saw a mention of his name in a document

in the Ben of Bush files. He was the chief science advisor in the United States in this timeframe. outstanding individual. And so I followed up on that and had to get permission with three different people to look at his papers at Harvard.

The Center for UFO's study. No, UFO, whatever the name of the group was at that time, I got a research grant and I went to the Harvard Archives after getting permission for three different people to see his papers, written permission. Pain in the neck, but anyway, I didn't know what I was looking for.

Let's see what we find. And there was a JFK, Oh, that should be interesting. I know his UFO papers were elsewhere, and I've been there too. Kathy and I've gone to the Archives and Philosophical Society Library has his papers

and also have classes, papers, and so forth. Anyway, and one of the first things I opened up in the JFK files, there's a letter from Menzel to Kennedy. Dear Jack, turns out they knew each other quite well, even had breakfast together on occasion, both

living in the Cambridge area. And there's one area, this is after the election of 1960 when Kennedy was elected president, there's one area where I may be of assistance to you. It's with regard to the National Security Agency. I've had a longer continuous association with them, 30 years of anybody. When we are properly cleared to each other, this is telling the president. When we are properly cleared to each other, I can tell you more about this. So he did a lot.

It turns out he was a world-class cryptologist. Nobody knew that. He did all kinds of classified work. And I was the first to take note of that. And so suddenly it made sense that he was part of this group. But it was such a shock. And there were people who said, oh, he couldn't lead a double life. I wrote a paper, the double life of Donald Menzel.

There are loads of people who led double life. Think of Burgess Filby and Maclean, Russian spies, who worked for British intelligence for like 15 years, you know. Yeah. And you've got to be very careful when you're a spy. that you don't reveal, you know, you're having access to information you shouldn't have access. But once I found Menzel and then saw the connection with the other people, I was able to show that it made absolute sense of those three documents

and clasping me $1,000 that didn't hurt any in terms of the overall picture. And so I think I've dealt with all the arguments with the people say the documents are fraudulent. Yes, I showed that a number of documents are fraudulent. So what? I'm not denying that. It'd be natural if some good stuff gets out. You flood the market with crap, and I hope it rubs on. Yeah.

Well, and we all know, like, these sort of campaigns have been used for years in terms of disinformation of putting some truths amongst the lies, and that's the only way they can sort of get it out. It's extremely frustrating to have to wave through that, but there are people who will do that due diligence to do that. people like yourself, many other researchers who aren't out there, you know, speaking or, you know, on television, they're doing the hard work underground and finding the truth to those things. Well, I have to have evidence in hand before putting my mouth in tears, my feeling. As a scientist, I have that requirement on me. Show it.

I'll just tell it. And so, frankly, I've been disappointed that so few people have visited all the archives. I've been to 20 archives, some of them many times. And it's the documents that make the difference. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean, Stan, no, you mentioned this a little bit earlier. You made an announcement about what, maybe a month ago now, of your retirement from the field.

And, I mean, people were, you know, mixed reactions all around, but everyone was like, oh, my God, it's finally happening. Are you kidding me? Like, no. Am I not entitled? Yeah, I know, really. It's funny how that story came out. I had been interviewed by, I know the reporters at the local paper here, the Frederick and Daley Gleaner, and I called one, and I wanted to promote the fact that I was, and he thought it was an interesting story that I was going to undertake the debate of the century with Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society.

We're supposed to have a big on-stage live. debate in Vancouver, British Columbia on April the 8th, and an auditorium seating maybe a thousand people from which they were charging a good frighten, and they were given us good fees for the two of us. And so I talked to this report that I've known. He said out of their articles about me, and he wrote a nice article. And then I got told the debate had been canceled. No good reason. There's something like that. And so I contacted the reporter. And so he said, well, is there anything else any way I can salvage this? I got anything else that's talking about or, you know, any events going on?

What can we do? I said, well, yeah, I'm seriously thinking of retiring it before the end of the year. Oh, well, okay. So we talked about that for a while, and so that became the focus for the article, only because the debate had been canceled. We needed some other shocker in there, I guess, right? Yeah, a hook, if you. will. And look, I'm going to be 84 in July. Now, I'm still young for my age, it says here in

small years. But it's time. Like I say, I read that first book 60 years ago. Yeah. That's a long time. And, you know, it's getting harder to get around. And my mind isn't as sharp as it used to be. Don't tell anybody that. It's true, though. I mean, you sound as sharp as a tech, but I understand. that. I understand that. In terms of entitlement, yeah, I would say so at this point. I mean, you've broke some of the biggest stories in euphology. You've put in the work, and as a younger researcher, I mean, it's paramount to not, to understand that there was an age without the internet, God forbid, where we can just Google something now, and it's right there in front of us. The fact that you went to these archives, you went out and you spoke to individuals. face-to-face, that's a rarity for the younger generation these days. So in terms of earning that, I would say so. I guess my real question would be, Stan, you know, with this news of your retirement, I'd love to know what some of your most favorite or most memorable moments were throughout this entire, God, 50-plus years of research. I mean, was it a lecture you gave? Was it a debate? Was it a witness you spoke to? I know, I know it's probably a very broad question. When it comes to lectures, I'll never forget in Hawaii supposed to speak and took my wife. What the hell? What's called Hawaii?

I got five days and only have to be there for an afternoon lecture and stuff. And I called them when we got there and said, you know, you need me to do any radio or television programs. You know, I'm available. I'm here. No, no, just show up. It was an afternoon talk. Here we are in a hall seating over 900 people and there were 20, like 26 people at my lecture. I mean, I gave a good lecture.

You know, it's not their fault. But that was an embarrassing moment. On the other hand, I had an audience of more than 2000 in Turkey. Great audience. Saudi Arabia was interesting. Oh, yeah. What was that one? Something like a world competitiveness forum or something like that.

And I'd never heard of the people who called me. And I did some checking. around, is this thing real? And then as time went on and people said, man, you're going to Saudi Arabia? Are you crazy? You've forgotten you're Jewish? They won't even let you in. So I called the person that I was in contact with. It was a woman, incidentally, which tells you something. Some people think, well, and don't get a chance to hold any positions, well, they do. And I explained to her, I said, look, people are saying, you're going to get there and to say, you can't come in here. And she said, look, we've had many Jewish speakers at these

things. No problem at all. And so I went, and there wasn't any problem at all. It was like I was at a meeting of my father's cousins club. People forget Jews and Arabs are both Semites. So that was an interesting experience. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the visits to places I never would have gotten. Otherwise, I've spoken in Hong Kong. I've spoken in Derry and China, in South Korea, in Australia, Argentina, places like the that got to Israel, Germany, France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Finland. So, seeing the world, Hungary, my last foreign talk was Bulgaria. Who would ever, how would I ever get to be?

Yeah. I spoke in Poland and Warsaw. The Warsaw UFO Society had a big crowd for me. Geographically, how people respond to your talks or the theories you're bringing forward. Does it vary from region to region at all, you know, due to like cultural influences? Yeah. I mean, sometimes the talks have been translated, like I didn't speak in Polish, you know. But I seem, remember, I'm talking about evidence, not beliefs.

So when I can show, Shollum Blue Book Special Report 14, show them the numbers. And numbers tell a story, after all. Back up what I say, it doesn't seem to matter. because the universal responses, I didn't know about that. I never saw in that report. You know, that's standard. So it's very hard for people to reject what you're saying when they have to admit, I wasn't aware of that.

And when you show it to them. And so I found it's a way to see the world be a uphologist. Who would I ever thought? Not me. Yeah. I tell you, my classmates at the University of Chicago would certainly have, what are you doing, Stan? I'm looking about flying sausage. What would you expect?

So, as a new generation of UFO researchers start to crop up, you know, I'm 33. So I'm no, you know, I'm no young chicken, but I'm also sort of in that midway point in my research here. What advice would you give to people younger, even younger than I am, in terms of the future of both the UFO field? And I guess humanity in general, what advice would you give them the hope, you know, that this is a topic worth pursuing? Well, I think the biggest thing is to make people aware that our understanding of where we fit in the scheme of things has changed drastically. Frank Drake was talking about maybe 6,000 planets that could send signals. A number today might be 6 billion. The fact that there are so many planets is a total surprise to the astronomical community.

And the fact that we have the technology, when the British Astronomer Royal in 1956 was asked about space travel by Time magazine, it's utter bilge. What good would it do? Who would pay for it? Well, we need his better equipment for astronomy. It was a year before Sputnik, and the field that's benefited the most, of course, has been in astronomy. So our attitude about how old the universe is, how big the universe is, how many planets there are. You know, Bishop Usher in 1650 or so was saying that the world was created in 4,04 BC. I don't think he said on a Thursday afternoon, but he went back through the Bible about begatting.

Now we say, well, they left six zeros out of that. It's four billion years ago that the earth was created four and a half billion. Was it a half billion between friends. And so these concepts, in 1920s, the Sun produces its energy, by burning gas. What do we know about fusion? But fusion is what produces the energy throughout the universe, all the stars.

But there's an enormous difference. And so suddenly what seemed impossible is now possible. Space travel. And it was just like a great astronomer in 1902, 1903, October, that if there was one thing he was sure,

man would never fly any distance in a vehicle, maybe with a balloon, but that was two months before the right brother's first flight. We assume what we don't know doesn't exist. There ain't nothing we don't know. We're smart guys, you know. We're the cream of the cream.

And throughout history, that's been shown to be wrong. Jet engines, for example, were left out of town. Space travel was thought to be absurd. And I've seen numbers, you know, how heavy a rocka would have to be to get a man to the moon. A million, million tons would have to be. But if you make enough stupid assumptions, you can prove anything as impossible. Well, assume a single-stage vehicle with a very low exhaust velocity. Pretty soon you've got a huge rocket.

That's not how we do things. Engineers' job is to get it done, not to show you all the ways in which it can't be done. That's not in much use. And so people often aren't aware of their biases and prejudices getting in the way of their evaluation. Thank goodness there are people who say the heck with that. I mean, Billy Mitchell, remember, was court-martial. He said man would be sinking ships from airplanes. That was in the 20s.

In 1941, late November, there was an article in the program for the Army-Navy football game and showed a picture of the USS Arizona's huge battleship. And in the text, it said, nobody's ever sunk a big ship from the sky. That was eight days before Pearl Harbor, and there went the USS Arizona. I'm killing, I forget, 1,100 people, something like that.

Yeah. I don't know how to do it, therefore it can't be done, right? No, wrong. Yeah. There's a word of caution whenever you find the noisy negatists, because it usually means flying socials can't be real, because if they were I would know about it seems to be the attitude. Right.

But when I'm sneaky, I check my audiences. When I talk about this large-scale studies, I ask how many people who read them. And I think it soberes the audience to realize I'm not the only one who hasn't read that stuff. None of these people are just about. Yeah. Maybe I better listen to this guy. And I show them the documents and the reports or whatever so they know I'm not just making it up out of my head. And so we need to be very careful about presuming we know what the future is.

And if you look around, look at radio. There were people who were saying they would never communicate any long distance with radio. What are you kidding? And that goes back to, say, 1900. And look, where we've come from with that. And every direction you look, you find the progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way.

The future is not an extrapolation of the past. You have to change how you do things. And if we forget that, we step into the potholes of it's impossible. Yeah. What we really mean is, I don't know how to do that. But maybe somebody else does, you know, like aliens.

And the kicker is, again, If there's been intelligent life in the neighborhood for a billion years, why would it be surprising that they're doing things that we can't do? And that business of how many places there are, we assume because Earth is 4.3 light years from the next star over after the sun, that everybody is stuck with loads of stars that have other stars less than a light year away. My favorite stars in the whole case, is 8 to 1, Zeta 2, or 2 over time.

They're an eighth of a light year apart, for goodness sake. You know, 39 light years from here. That's just an entirely different perspective. I've got people saying, anybody coming here and have to come from a thousand light years. Absurd. Give me five, ten, and twenty.

Exactly. Wow. Well, Stan, I mean, I'm going to be seeing you in Halifax, Nova Scotia, this upcoming May. I'll be speaking at the esotericon where you're going to be the keynote speaker at that event as well.

So I guess, you know, for any of our listeners who live in that area, I hope they'll come out and see you give this talk. And it's free, too, I'm told. Yes. How rare is that? It's being put on by your nephew, Paul Kimball, who does so much amazing work in Halifax, you know, with local government and was able to obtain all these speakers to put on a conference for free for the public, which I think is an incredible feat. It's my celebratory swan song, how's that? Absolutely.

One that I'm so honored to be a part of, and one I hope. everyone will come to. Well, that being said, Stan, one more time, where can we find all of your work, your books? Give that to us. Okay. They're all listed on my website. www.stantanfredman.com. And you've got to spell Friedman, F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N. And I list my books and other sources like Blue Books Special Report 14. I don't believe it's proper for me to talk about something and say, well, I don't know where you can get that. That's why I've sold a lot of copies as a Special Report 14. And so, if... If you want an education, incidentally, in one of my books, top secret magic about the MJ12 documents,

I list a dozen PhD thesis that were done more than 10 years ago, so there's more now. So there is information out there, and I have loads of references. I just finished looking at an old book, First Contacts the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which was done more than 20 years ago. And there's nothing sensible about flying saucers in it. No references to the big, large... scale scientific studies or any of the technology stuff or whatever. Why don't they put pictures of nuclear rocket engines, for goodness sake?

They're available. So my website has the information. So, you know, I believe in interacting and communicating. I've been doing this for a long time. If I didn't enjoy what I was doing, I wouldn't be doing it. You know, after the first 500 lectures, you'd say, the hell of it. Yep. I'm over 700, yeah.

Yeah. Where we go? Well, it's extremely invigorating, you know, as someone who has a couple times been like, I want out of this. It's invigorating to see that it's worth the study. It's worth the research to keep doing it, to keep looking for those answers. No matter what it is, like you said, the future is unpredictable, and I think that's extremely exciting. So I can't wait to see where it goes. And I know this isn't the last we've heard from you, Stan.

It might be, you know, your retirement from research, but it certainly isn't your retirement from the field overall. So I have to thank you so much for coming on somewhere in the skies today. It was an immense pleasure in honor, and I will see you in May. I will see you there, and there won't be any snow. I hope there won't be any snow on the grass. I hope at that point. That is it for this week's episode.

Again, I have to thank Stan for coming on. Whatever comes next for him, I know he'll continue to search for those answers somewhere in the skies that we all seek. and maybe even find some answers along the way. To read many of Stan's incredible essays and to purchase autographed books, head on over to Stantonfriedman.com. Again, if you're in the east coast of Canada, this may,

be sure to see Stan give his last ever presentation at the 2018 Esotericon Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Stan will be the keynote speaker. I'll be speaking as well along with an incredible, list of researchers that include Micah Hanks, Greg Bishop, Walter Bosley, Aaron Gileas, Holly Stevens, Tim Bonall, and the host of the conference, Paul Kimball. The conference is completely free to the public. So please come join us on May 18th, 19th, and 20th. More info will be available soon. To stay up to date, visit winterlightproductions.com. If you haven't

already, please subscribe, rate, review, and share Somewhere in the Skies wherever possible. To help Somewhere in the Skies and to receive bonus episodes, content, and rewards at many different levels, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. To learn more and to contribute, visit patreon.com. Backslash SomewhereSkies. We're on Twitter at SomewhereSkies and Instagram at Somewhere Skies Pod. For exclusive articles, news, past episodes, and To suggest guest and topics, visit our official website, somewhere in the skies.com. Next week, we are speaking to the 2018 International UFO Congress Researcher of the Year, Cheryl Costa. It's going to be an interview you won't soon forget.

I'll see you here next Monday. And remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching. Somewhere in the Skies. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with the Entertainment One. Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcast.com. What's up, Euphinauts? It's your UFO guy, Rob Christofferson. Have you ever been curious about the UFO phenomenon, but unsure of where to start? Have you ever wondered about

just what crashed at Roswell? Have you ever wanted common sense advice about licking UFOs? The answers don't. Then check out the Our Strange Guys podcast, where we dive into America's rich UFO history and uncover what these sightings say about ourselves. You can find us on Apple Google Play, Stitcher, and most podcast apps, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don't forget to look up, because you never know what you'll find in our strange skies. In gray, we trust.