For
those of you behind the power curve, or sometimes don’t follow all the news in
the world of the UFO, Stan Friedman has announced his retirement from the
field.
Stan
has been around, it seems, forever, lecturing all of us on the reality of alien
visitation. I have known Stan for decades, having met him back around 1990, I
think. We shared information about the Roswell UFO crash, and Don Schmitt and I
supplied him with transcripts and tapes of the interviews that we had conducted
with many of those witnesses.
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| Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle |
Stan
and I have clashed over the reality of MJ-12. Stan, of course, is a proponent
and I am quite skeptical. We both believe that the vast majority of the MJ-12
documents are faked. Our disagreement surrounds the first few that appeared
back in the mid-1980s.
Truth
be told, I think that we agree on more than we disagree on, but too often,
those in the community focus on the disagreements. Our working relation has
been mostly cordial, though some of the infighting did become a little nasty,
something that I had tried to avoid, for the most part.
Stan
believes that we have been visited on many occasions and given the number of
planets in our galaxy (I really can’t comprehend alien visitation from other
galaxies, because those distances seem just too vast to defeat) that isn’t a
completely far out proposition.
In
recent years, Stan has become the go-to voice when producing a program on UFOs.
His knowledge is vast and he has been quick in his responses to the skeptics.
It has always seemed to me that Stan was ready to respond to anyone’s questions
about UFOs and often share the information that he has gathered. He is
also
quick to condemn those who don’t agree with him. His arguments, mostly backed
up by facts, do make for some interesting debates and he was always ready to
debate anyone about UFOs.
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| Stan Friedman, surrounded by many other UFO researchers. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle. |
In
a field that seems to be descending into chaos, his voice was often a steady
one that seemed to draw others back from the fringes. I fear we are now going
to be at the mercy of those charlatans who talk of their fights on the surface
of Mars, their trips to other worlds, and their real lack of anything concrete
to prove their claims because the government is hiding their records and that
proof. Stan, at least, was there to challenge them, something that many of us
don’t care to do.
Stan was great for the UFOlogy, he is a man of integrity and someone who brought class to a field that needed it. He wasn't a sellout and thankfully avoided the train-wreck that was BeWitness, he was smarter than that. The only thing is Majestic 12, I just still cant buy into that one particularly because of the provenance of the documents, which I never heard him speak much about. I mean come on, its almost a joke, Shandera and Moore's backgrounds should have been looked more into by Friedman before buying into such a big thing. They seemed to stay neatly tucked into the background while Friedman was so gung-ho about it, Shandera and Moore have been way too quiet and elusive about the whole thing in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteBut thank you Stanton for all your work, and what you brought to the table.
I guess Stan Friedman has decided to call it a day because he feels he has done all he can on the UFO subject, plus of course the little matter of 'anno domini'. With all his lecture tours dating back to the 70s, or earlier, he must have convinced hordes of people of UFO reality. He came to the UK a few times (don't know how many) to spread 'the gospel' but I always felt he vastly overplayed his conspiracy ideas, namely the thesis that the top guys in the US, and maybe even in some other countries, knew the great truth but were suppressing it from us the public.
ReplyDeleteMJ-12 was, for him, the great reveal and he was determined to pursue it to the bitter end, even though he must have, deep down inside, realised it would turn out a failure.
There is no way you can really argue with someone who is so determinedly set in his ways and beliefs, as Stan was (and is).
His later promotion of the Hills encounter has likewise failed to convince the people who matter, i.e. the astronomical and scientific world.
He also tended to overdo the self-publicity, in that his papers and lectures were generally highlighted by the description of himself as a "nuclear physicist", presumably because this would convey to his audience an air of authority. After all, a nuclear physicist is recognised as someone with advanced scientific knowledge.
And some years ago, he did win a bet of $1000, I think, against his arch rival Philip J. Klass over a matter of typefaces and signatures. The trouble was that it really had no effect whatever on the matter at hand - namely the authenticity (or rather fakery) of those infamous MJ-12 documents.
When it comes to UFOs, he was, and is, not one to admit defeat.
A friend of mine often said that the young authors/researchers today only re-write what has been written before, and no new investigations are being done.
ReplyDeleteIt is sad to lose another one of the "old-timers."
I'll refrain from making any smart remarks about John Ventre being in the photo with the legitimate investigators.
What does a ufologist actually do when retired? Write books, go on the talk radio circuit, make presentations?
ReplyDeleteSo how does being “retired” actually change anything for Stan? Is he never going to speak about UFOs ever again? Hard to believe.....
Dr. Randle (Kevin): Thank you for being so magnanimous as to devote a farewell blog entry to Stanton Friedman. I realize you two have had your disagreements over the years, but I too believe that you and he agree more about the subject of UFOs than you in fact disagree. In any event, you have both produced remarkable legacies of achievement as a result of your persevering research and investigation in the field.
ReplyDeleteThank you both so very much!
While I can't agree with Stan Friedman on the MJ-12 documents either, he was a valued voice in a field that has more cranks and charlatans coming out of the woodwork all the time. Fortunately there are some like Mr. DeLonge that really want to change the direction the field is heading in but its not quite what I had hoped at this point. Some IRST footage from a Navy Hornet is great and all, I'd love to see them get their hands on some of the oddball stuff from the Kiowa scout helicopters. Then again, I don't know how they FOIAed the Navy footage in the first place unless someone from that unit told them exactly what they needed to put in the request.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm preaching to the choir here but the SOM 1-01 is written all wrong. Hell the title, gives it away even. I've never seen a zero in front of a number WRT Army TTPs, FMs, ARs, TCs, or TRs. Even if it was supposedly purple (which I don't believe its supposed to be, isn't supposedly an Army TTP document?) it has a lot of incorrect nomenclature, and other weirdness in formatting that shouldn't be there and certainly would not be there in something that important. There would also be the history, summary, applicability and proponent sheet as the first damned page, and they're all written exactly the same no matter what the classification level or security caveats are. And hell, this would be marked ORCON and SI at the bottom of every page and neither are there. Nor would there be a War Department seal in 1954, it'd be DA's seal or DoD's if it was purple.
It was written by someone who had contact with the Army or Air Force, but didn't remember just exactly how the Army Publishing Directorate and TRADOC do things well enough for it to pass muster from someone intimately familiar with Army documents.
Anyway, sorry about that. Back on topic, I wish Stan well and I hope he doesn't quit completely. Not being as busy with it maybe, but I hope he stays somewhat involved.
Wish you well Stan and know you will always be around for all those who wish to know more on the subject for years to come. Regards, Viktor Golubic
ReplyDelete