Stan Friedman vs. Philip Klass - What's the Difference?

 When Stan Friedman died, I had thought that it was inappropriate to mention many of the stunts that he had pulled during his UFO career. I thought that I might do something later, but as time passed, it seemed that the motivation had passed. Besides, he was no longer here to attempt to explain his actions, so I just never got around to writing anything about it.

All that changed when I listened to Richard Dolan and Kathleen Marden trash Philip

Philip Klass

Klass with rumors and half-truths. It stuck me that nearly everything they were saying about Klass could be said about Friedman with the exception of the wild claim that Klass had been a Soviet asset… which has become something of the go to position when assassinating someone’s character in the world today. Accuse them of collusion with the Russians.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Philip Klass had pulled some fairly dirty tricks in his Ufological career. I did a long post about this a number of years ago when challenged to provide proof of my claim about that. You can read that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/12/philip-klass-and-fbi.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/09/philip-klass-and-his-letter-writing.html

In the interest of full disclosure, I did know Klass on a personal level. While I was attending a DIA school in Washington, D.C., Klass took me sailing on the Potomac River. I visited him at his home, and over the years we had shared the dinner table several times. I had a long correspondence with him as well. The last time I saw him was in St. Louis in 2000 at the MUFON Symposium. He asked me to help him to his room. At that time, his health had deteriorated to the point it was difficult for him to get around.

This is, however, about Stan Friedman. I had known him for thirty years and if I remember correctly, first met him while in Roswell to tape a segment for Unsolved Mysteries. We had a number of conversations and even shared a meal or two. There

Stan Friedman

was no air of competition then. That would come later.

The animosity probably began when we met, along with Don Schmitt, in Illinois. I had approached Avon Books with a proposal to write a book about the Roswell case. An offer had been extended and it wasn’t much of a secret. Friedman suggested that we all work together. His name would go last on the book, he would receive a quarter of the money, and would provide assistance with witnesses.

We, meaning Don and I, had already had a taste of that assistance. Don had been attempting to find Bill Rickett of the Roswell CIC office. Friedman said not to bother because Rickett had died. Don did locate a telephone number and was talking to Mary Rickett, asking her questions, when she interrupted and asked, “Would you like to talk to Bill. He’s sitting right here.”

There are other examples of this, but they are really about trivia. Instead, let’s move onto other, more important issues. After we decided, that is Don and me, that we wouldn’t accept Friedman’s offer, he chose a different path. He sent to the publisher, Avon Books, and our editor, John Douglas, a letter dated June 11, 1990. There were a number of allegations in the letter. Friedman wrote:

I have been to Roswell twice in the past year and perhaps unfortunately have shared some of my recent research with Randle and Schmitt. As [Bill] Moore would have told you there was talk of a book by him, Myself and Jaime Shandera updating the Roswell story…

As you can tell from the enclosed paper I was not happy with the Roswell Incident because of the inappropriate material that was included, the misquotation of myself, and the absence of the contractually obligated acknowledgement of my major contribution. I am certainly anxious to see the Randle Schmitt book to see if once again my contribution is undervalued and if there are many factual mistakes, flights of fancy, lifting of my research much of which remains unpublished. I think the story needs to be told, but with full credit for my and other investigations… After all, by the end of 1985, Moore and I had located 92 persons connected with the event. It is difficult to believe that S and R didn’t depend strongly on that base for their book…

Anxiously awaiting a copy of the manuscript for review only.

Friedman letter to John Douglas

There are two points that need to be made. First, I spent nearly 24 hours on the telephone with the publisher’s lawyers, explaining how, where and when, we interviewed the witnesses. Finally, one of the lawyers asked if I had tapes and I said, “Both audio and video.” That ended the problem.

But remember how Friedman complained, “I am certainly anxious to see the Randle Schmitt book to see if once again my contribution is undervalued and if there are many factual mistakes, flights of fancy, lifting of my research much of which remains unpublished.”

This is exactly what he did in his book, Crash at Corona. There is a long quote from Bill Brazel, describing what his father, Mack Brazel, told him about finding the crashed object, and then a longer section that described what Bill had seen and found. The descriptions are on pages 84 – 85 of the original hardback edition of that book. This information came from an interview conducted by Don and me, at the Outpost in Carrizozo, New Mexico, on February 19, 1989. There is no reference to of our Brazel interview found in that book. It was lifted without permission or acknowledgement and is blatant plagiarism.

Left to right, Kevin Randle, Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt at the Outpost in Carizozo.

To make it worse, Friedman altered the interview by inserting a word into Brazel’s description of the four military men who came to see him. To make the testimony conform to that given by Gerald Anderson, Friedman put in the bracketed word “black” because Anderson told Friedman about a black sergeant who chased them off the crash site on the Plains of San Agustin.

Then, to explain this insertion, he claimed that Brazel had used a racially charged word to describe the sergeant. Bill Brazel, however, never had identified any of the soldiers as black. In a 1992 interview, when I asked him specially about this, Brazel said that none of them were black. Friedman had changed the testimony to suit his own beliefs and then lied about the reason for that change. You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

Friedman, of course, backpedaled on his claims about our book once he received a letter from my agent’s attorney. In the July 30, 1990, letter, Friedman pointed out, “I did not allege plagiarism or infringement of copyright… I have had a number of friendly discussions with Kevin and Don concerning the book and am quite satisfied that my rights are not violated.” (Please note here that we are now Kevin and Don rather than Randle and Schmitt.)

That is far from the only example of Friedman taking our research without credit or attribution in his book; only the largest and most obvious. He quotes from Marian Strickland, a neighbor of Mack Brazel, about his treatment while a “guest” of the Army. Again, the information came from Don and me without credit nor attribution. We interviewed her in January 1990 and again in September 1990. We also took Don Berliner to meet with her but Friedman fails to mention it.

This all came to a head in 1993 when Dick Hall, of the Fund for UFO Research, got involved. He asked for evidence of my allegations and published his results in the May/June 1993 issue of the International UFO Report. He wrote:

Randle alleged that Friedman and others, apparently acting in concert, had attempted to interfere with the publication of the book UFO Crash at Roswell (then in preparation) by contacting the publisher, Avon Books, making charges of plagiarism and generally impugning Randle’s character and integrity. I asked Randle for documentation, which he provided. I asked Friedman for an explanation, and he never replied…

Other repeated ad hominem attacks shall go unmentioned. The concerted effort to derail the Randle/Schmitt book is indefensible.

Friedman and the Lecture Circuit

There is another aspect to all this as well. I had been invited to make a presentation in Cincinnati in the early 1990s. The hosts told me on the morning of the presentation that Friedman had called them, asking why they had invited me. He said to them, “Didn’t you want a scientist?”

I said that they should have said, “Sure. Do you know one?”

But there was really no way to change things around at that late date, even if Friedman had been successful in his attempt to get them to cancel my presentation. It hints at a larger problem.

Now, it can be said that I can’t prove this little interchange took place and that is true. The main host died a number of years ago. However, I’m not the only one who has had this problem. I have a letter, provided by Robert Hastings, who is well-known on the UFO lecture circuit and as the author of UFOs and Nukes. In a letter dated July 25, 1989, John J. Romero, Jr., Hasting’s attorney, wrote:

This letter shall acknowledge receipt of your [Friedman’s] correspondence dated May 26, 1989. In your letter, you state that you have not accused Mr. Hastings of fraud and that you have not defamed him. You further stated that you have “no intention of defaming him in the future…

In your letter of May 26, you suggest that our concern may be without merit. Please be advised that our position is based on the written statement of Ms. Karyl Kumer, Director of Student Support Services of Central Florida Community College. In her statement, Ms. Kumer unequivocally reports that you had previously informed her that Robert Hastings did not know what he was talking about, that he did not have the “real facts” and that “he was just another fraud.”

Ms. Kumer is prepared to sign an Affidavit, under oath, concerning the substance of that particular conversation.

Letter to Friedman documenting Friedman had lied about Hastings.

And to show that this was an on-going campaign by Friedman to take others off the lecture circuit there is a letter dated August 1^st, 1992 (A.D,) in which Jim Mosely wrote:

Re Friedman – I can only tell you, as I would tell anyone who asks, about my own experience with Uncle Stan: Back in 1966, the “marsh gas” flap in Michigan indirectly propelled me to stardom in the UFO field, and I ended up lecturing to over 100 colleges around the country, on the lucrative college circuit. Then, around 1970, Stan started to appear on the circuit. He was indeed better qualified than I was and I was getting tired of the thing anyhow – so I didn’t mind being squeezed out – BUT I did mind his method: Several colleges told me that after I was already booked, he would call more than once and plead that they cancel me and put him on instead. Dirty pool, I say. When I finally dropped off the college circuit in 1974, Stan once said to me on the phone, “I don’t have to think of you as a rival any more.”

Letter from Moseley documenting that Friedman attempted to get Moseley's bookings cancelled.

The Gerald Anderson Fiasco

Those of you who have visited here, or read any number of my books on the Roswell case, know that Don and I never accepted the Gerald Anderson tale of seeing a crashed saucer on the Plains of San Agustin. We had caught Gerald Anderson, one of Friedman’s primary witnesses, in a number of lies, changes of his testimony, and one of those flights of fancy that Friedman had been so worried about.

I was the first to interview Anderson when he returned my telephone call and because he claimed to be a first-hand witness to both the craft and the bodies, he could be important. That he was five at the time of the crash was problematic, and that he claimed the object crashed on the Plains was another worrisome fact. Almost as soon as I had gotten off the telephone, I sent an email to Friedman about Anderson and his claims. Because of what Anderson had told me, I knew that Friedman would want to know about it. This just proves that cooperation with Stan was always a one-way street. I’d send him information but never got any of it back.

Friedman, in his first telephone conversation with Anderson, told him not work with me, that I was former Air Force intelligence and that I wrote romances. He said to just work with him, cutting me out of the conversations and the investigations. In fact, according to Anderson, we’d only spoken for 26 minutes and the conversation wasn’t all that friendly, so this wasn’t a problem for him. I countered the claim saying that my tape of the interview ran to more than 50 minutes and was, in fact, quite friendly.

John Carpenter, brought in by Friedman to conduct part of the Anderson investigation, suggested that my tape was running slow. To prove the point, Carpenter sent me a copy of Anderson’s telephone bill showing a call lasting only 26 minutes. This was one of the biggest mistakes that Anderson made during his UFO period.

Friedman, of course, attacked me for calling Anderson a liar and suggested that I was nothing more than an anti-abduction propagandist. I’m not sure what my opinions on alien abduction had to do with the case at hand, but I suppose any mud that you can sling is better than no mud at all.

Because my telephone number was on the telephone bill, I took it to Southwestern Bell, and asked if they could validate it. Becky Pim provided a copy of the bill from their records. It did not match the one that Anderson had created. It verified what I had been saying about the length of the call. Anderson had forged the telephone bill. Eventually he admitted this when confronted by Carpenter and the evidence I had provided. This was all laid out in the September 1992, issue of the International UFO Reporter. See also John Carpenter’s article, “Gerald Anderson: Disturbing Revelations,” in the March 1993, MUFON UFO Journal.

Even though Anderson had admitted the truth, Friedman continued to support him, suggesting that Anderson had created the phone bill to make me look bad because of what I had said about him. This was an attempt to blame me for Anderson’s bad act. It was because, frankly, I was telling the truth about him and Anderson didn’t like it.

This led, however, to a much more important point. Anderson had identified the archaeologists that were supposed to have been on the Plains on that day in 1947. Anderson said the leader was Adrian Buskirk. Tom Carey, who holds an advanced degree in Anthropology, set out to find Buskirk. He found a Winfred Buskirk, who held an advanced degree in Anthropology. Using an “identi-kit” sketch of Buskirk provided by Anderson, it was clear that Winfred Buskirk was Adrian Buskirk. The problem was that Buskirk, in 1947, was not on the Plains of San Agustin but in Arizona conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation.

The question was, if Anderson didn’t see Buskirk on the Plains, then how could he identify him as an Anthropologist. Buskirk, it turned out, had taught high school in Albuquerque in 1957, when Anderson was a high school student. Anderson attended that same high school, and, according to Buskirk, had taken his Anthropology course. That was the connection.

Buskirk had been as curious as we were about the connection and called friends in Albuquerque who were able to check Anderson’s high school transcripts. Although Buskirk didn’t remember Anderson, the transcripts proved the connection. Anderson, according to the documentation, had taken the Anthropology course. We’d not only put Anderson in the same high school as Buskirk, we’d put him in the same classroom.

Buskirk provided the names of several officials in case I wanted to verify the information about Anderson taking his, Buskirk’s Anthropology class, which was the only Anthropology course offered. I talked with those officials, who were looking at the transcripts as I spoke with them on the telephone. Anderson had taken the Anthropology class. Anderson, of course, denied this and produced a Xerox of his high school transcript, but it looked as if it had been modified, just as he had done with the telephone bill. It was another example of Anderson forging a document.

While you could say that Friedman was just supporting a witness whose story he believed, it is actually much worse. Friedman knew the truth about Anderson and his faked tale of being on the Plains with Dr. Buskirk. But Friedman wanted to preserve the story because it supported his theory of a collision between two saucers with one crashing near Roswell and the other falling on the Plains.

In a letter dated 19 August 1991, and apparently written at 9:00 a.m. Buskirk provided the last bit of evidence proving this. He wrote:

Mrs. Robert Klicker just called me from Albuquerque. She had received a call from Jim Hulsman, who had checked the school records for us. (Apparently Dr. [sic] Friedman had previously made inquiries of Hulsman).

Anderson had called Hulsman to tell him that he did not want Hulsman or the school to divulge any information about him. The conversation was, apparently, friendly, but Hulsman felt he, and perhaps Mrs. Klicker too, had been threatened with a possible law suit.

So, while Friedman was calling me names and defending Anderson as a credible source, he knew the truth. Anderson had identified his high school Anthropology instructor as the man on the Plains, regardless of the evidence against that claim.

Buskirk letter showing Friedman knew the truth about Anderson.

To make this worse, in a June 20, 1991, letter to George Eberhart, Friedman wrote, “(it) is probably right that Winfred Buskirk is the man in the Indentikit sketch… who would therefore be lying about where he was in July 1947. Coincidence???” Note that Friedman is quick to label Buskirk a liar without a shred of evidence that Buskirk was in New Mexico or lying. All the available documentation places him in Arizona on the critical days in 1947.

Tom Carey (left) and Stan Friedman in Roswell.

Tom Carey took some flak for his role in exposing the truth about Anderson. In a letter dated August 3, 1992, Dick Hall wrote:

I also have to say that your paper titled “Propagandist of the Year” (1/19/92), in which you call Thomas J. Carey a propagandist and make other insinuations, is just the sort of accusatory, unscientific, and unprofessional paper that is doing so much harm. Of course, many of your arguments are cogent, and important to anyone trying to obtain a clear picture, but the tone is insulting and the tactics – propagandistic! The cogency of some of your arguments gets lost in the gratuitous personal put-downs. And there is irony in your accusation that CUFOS engages in ad hominem attacks. You must have a very foggy mirror.

I have now read the CUFOS-FUFOR conference paper, and I have to say that Gerald Anderson’s credibility is severely damaged thereby (not by ad hominem attacks but by documented facts), and also your and Don’s [Berliner] integrity if the CUFOS remarks about your failing to live of up to the terms of the conference are accurate.

For those who wish to delve into this episode a little more deeply and see the manipulation of the data about Anderson, including Anderson’s lie about being a Navy SEAL see:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/anderson.htm

Brigadier General Arthur Exon

There are almost endless examples of Friedman’s attacks, but there is space for one more. Brigadier General Arthur Exon had been the base commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1960s. He had inside knowledge on some of the

BG Arthur Exon

workings of the official UFO investigation, and provided information about it. That information was in conflict with Friedman’s belief in the mythical MJ-12. Since what Exon said tended to discredit MJ-12, that could not be tolerated by Friedman. To fix this, Friedman said that he had called Exon after the publication of UFO Crash at Roswell, read him the sections attributed to him, and then began saying that we had misquoted Exon.

I wrote to Friedman and told him we had the quotes on tape. He might not like the quotes but there were accurate. Friedman responded on October 31, 1991, writing:

I will continue to say you misquoted Exon since that is what he told me. After all the misrepresentations about what Anderson said both in your transcription and in your article, even misquoting you own transcription [another allegation that is unproved], as pointed out by John Carpenter, why should I believe anything you say about what you have on tape?

I sent a copy of the book and a copy of the tape to Exon. On November 24, 1991, he responded. He wrote:

I’m sorry that a portion of my interview has given you trouble. I will acknowledge that the quick quotes does have me saying that my flights later, much later verified the direction of possible flight of the object…

Although I believe you did quote me accurately, I do believe that in your writings you gave more credence and impression of personal and direct knowledge that my recordings would indication [sic] their own!

Exon letter confirming the accuracy of the quotes.

This is much longer than I intended and seems to have focused on the early 1990s. I have other letters, other quotes that are in the same vein. Allegations that he has invented, sometimes out of whole cloth. In the 1995 MUFON Symposium Proceedings, Friedman published “38 False Claims by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt.” Eventually, I inherited them all because Don’s name was later dropped.

As but a single example of this Friedman wrote, “That S. T. Friedman knew all about an RS [Randle/Schmitt] alien tissue sample.”

To this day, I don’t know what that means and I never said anything of the kind. Friedman made this up.

The point here is that nearly everything said by Dolan and Marden in their discussion about Philip Klass can be said about Friedman. Both Klass and Friedman used the same tactics, wrote the same sort of letters, and accused those with whom they disagreed of nefarious ideas and deeds. (Klass, said that we were anti-American for challenging the government and, ironically Friedman accused us, at one point, of being government agents.) Friedman, at his lectures, often pointed out that I was only in it for the money and I as a fiction writer I could create imaginative scenarios.

I suppose that we all should now hold up to close scrutiny Friedman’s claims of MJ-12, a crash on the Plains of San Agustin, and his support of other crash stories. If he would manipulate the data as we’ve seen here, if he would attempt to silence the voices of those who disagreed with him, and if would change testimony of the witnesses to bolster his claims, what else might he have done to promote himself and denigrate others? How valuable is his research given all this?

Stan Friedman has Died

Noted UFO researcher Stan Friedman died last night, May 13, 2019.

Stan will be remembered for this advocacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, believing that some of the alien visitors were from the Zeta I, Zeta II Reticuli star system some 37 lights years from Earth. He had met with Betty Hill, and had partnered with Hill’s niece, Kathleen Marden in recent years. Together they wrote Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience which was an inside look at

Stan Friedman and Kathleen Marden at the MUFON
Conference in Denver. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle.

the Hill abduction.

Stan started his adult life as a nuclear physicist working in the industry on various projects, including some that were classified. In 1970, he quit industry to devote full time to his UFO research. He had lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities and wrote several books about science and UFOs. He appeared on thousands of radio shows, on television and in documentaries.

While in Louisiana in 1978, a television station manager suggested that Stan might want to talk to a fellow named Jesse Marcel, a ham radio operator. Marcel was, of course, the air intelligence officer of the 509^th Bomb Group, the military unit said to have recovered the remains of an alien spacecraft and the bodies of the occupants. That began a decades long search for documents, witnesses, and insight into what became know as the Roswell Incident.

Stan Friedman with the speakers at the Denver MUFON Conference.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

It was during my research into the Roswell crash that I first met Stan more than 30 years ago. We did share information and resources, though we sometimes clashed over details. Stan believed that a few of the early MJ-12 documents were authentic while I believed them all to be created by UFO enthusiasts to provide documents proving that a spacecraft had been recovered. Stan was instrumental, however, in proving that dozens of the documents were faked, showing that he simply didn’t accept everything handed to him as authentic.

Stan had met Vern Maltais who claimed that his friend, Barney Barnett, had seen a crashed saucer on the Plains of San Agustin. Barnett had a niece, Alice Knight, and though both Stan and I had asked her about anything to document this, Knight said that she had nothing. She called me one night and said that she had found a diary that Ruth Barnett had kept for the year 1947. I was scheduled to meet Stan, along with Don Schmitt, in Albuquerque a few weeks later. I said I would swing by Knight’s house, which was more or less on the way. I smile every time I think about the first words Stan said to me when we met in Albuquerque. He asked, “Did you get it?”

I certainly had, but there was nothing in it to corroborate the Barnett tale. That was a great disappointment for all of us.

Stan was tenacious in his research, traveling around the country, visiting presidential libraries, meeting with families of witnesses, gathering important information, and providing encouragement to many interested in UFOs. He

Stan in full speaker mode. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle

debated those in the scientific community and those he thought of as debunkers. He was proud of taking a thousand dollars from Philip Klass, when Klass suggested that none of the typewriters in the White House used pica type. Klass said he would pay one hundred dollars for each example, up to ten. Stan happily complied earning him the grand.

Although we had been at odds, in later years, we both seemed to mellow out. In Roswell in 2012, he mentioned that he thought I was right about Robert Willingham, a man who had claimed to have seen a crashed saucer just south of the Mexico. The evidence stacked against Willingham was overwhelming, but that didn’t dissuade Stan from his belief that the Eisenhower Briefing Document was authentic. It was just one of those things with which we had to agree to disagree.

The last time I saw Stan, I believe, was at the Citizen Hearing in Washington, D.C. in May 2013. We sat together, listening to a couple of the sessions of the hearing, and were both part of the hearing that dealt with Roswell. At one point, as we sat together, a question was directed as us, which we both answered at the same time, the same way. It dealt with a minor point about Roswell.

That was the thing. Stan said, more than once, that he and I agreed on more than we disagreed. We had one of those adversarial relations that was more cordial than many thought. In Roswell, at a big dinner in 2012, I had taken a seat at one end of the long table and Stan was about to sit at the far end. Someone mentioned that, believing, I guess, that we were mortal enemies. Before Stan sat down, I moved and took the chair opposite of him. Those around us waited for fireworks, but there were none. We had a nice chat during that dinner.

Stan could be headstrong but he was also interested in the evidence. He could defend those he thought had solid information, rarely abandoning them when the evidence went against them. He was positive that we have been visited, and debated those who thought otherwise. He was a strong advocate for his position, often complained about the entrenched attitudes of the academic world, and arguing passionately for his beliefs.

He leaves behind a wife, and three children. Stan was 84.

Stan Friedman Retires

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.

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

Stan Friedman, surrounded by many other UFO researchers. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

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.

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.

Chasing More Footnotes

I have complained in the past that I am becoming less than thrilled with the UFO community. The reasons for this are varied but come down to a couple of basic ideas. One of those is that no matter how often a case is proven to be a hoax, a misidentification, a misinterpretation, or an inability to recognize the mundane, there are those who will argue the point forever. A recent post was partially inspired by this. How many times do we have to delve into the Oliver Lerch tale when everything that can be found points to an invention of the tale rather than a real event?

The point here, however, is that part of the problem is that some people who claim to be researchers or investigators just don’t follow the path to its end. This is what lead to the chasing of footnotes because sometimes the footnote is simply inadequate. Sometimes the information is not complete.

Not to pick on Richard Dolan, but just the other day as I was looking for something else, I noticed a couple of problems. These sorts of things are not restricted to Richard because we all have

Richard Dolan. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

fallen into the trap. On page 16 of his UFOs and the National Security State, he reported on a sighting by railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who saw ten shiny disks on June 23. His footnote leads us to a number of sources, which cover a number of sightings in that same paragraph. Unfortunately, the information about the Cedar Rapids sighting is wrong, as I have noted in an earlier posting. The report was not made until after the Arnold sighting, was apparently for the afternoon of June 24 rather than the 23, and the railroad man was not in Iowa, but in Joliet, Illinois. Among those who reported this information as Dolan had, were Dick Hall and Frank Edwards. I believe Hall got it from Edwards, who must have seen something in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about the sighting a couple of days after Arnold. Edwards, or those others, had not followed the story to the source, or they would have found the discrepancies.

As I say, not to pick on Dolan, but later, on page 25, he wrote about Bill Brazel and the finding of the metal debris from the Roswell crash. The footnote takes us to Stan Friedman’s Crash at Corona in which he quotes from an interview with Bill Brazel. The quotes are accurate, for the most part, but there is no footnote to explain how the information was gathered because Friedman supplies no information about that. The trail ends there.

However, I know how that interview was conducted because I had

Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

arranged it, and Don Schmitt and I were there. I recorded it. The more accurate footnote would have taken us not to Friedman’s book, but to UFO Crash at Roswell, where the footnote explained the circumstances of the interview. In other words, the original source was that interview that Don and I conducted and not the information printed in Friedman’s book.

A side problem with this is that Friedman altered one portion of the interview without justification. Those who follow Dolan’s footnote to Friedman will get the inaccurate information… Friedman inserted the word “black” into the interview to describe one the sergeants who came to the Brazel ranch to collect the bits of debris Bill had found. Brazel made no reference to the racial identity of those four men but Friedman inserted the word to bolster the Gerald Anderson fairy tale. You can read the whole story here (if you are so inclined):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

This problem is not confined to UFO research. I was looking for information for a post on the new version of the Treasure Quest show and found a couple of sites that provided what seemed to be accurate information. Reference was made to someone named C. H. Prodgers and in this day of the Internet, I thought I would find out what he had said about the treasure.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t have gathered the information. True, one of the articles referred to Prodgers, but in the world today, I was able to find a copy of Prodgers’s book online. I didn’t have to rely on what others had written about it. I could read it for myself. And, I found that much of the information published, that referenced Prodgers, was incorrect. After all, they were quoting Prodgers as the source, but what Prodgers had written did not match what they were reporting. Could Prodgers have been making up the tale of the treasure? Sure. But that didn’t matter because he was the original source. He was writing from the point of view of having been there, lived the adventure, and there wasn’t much documentation that preceded him. The others were quoting him as their source.

That is, I chased the references to the ultimate source. I corrected the errors made by others who had used the same source, and came away unimpressed with the information. It reads more like fiction than fact and there really is nothing to back up the story. And now that the first season is over, we have seen a large number of problems with this treasure hunting quest.

So, now you’re wondering how all this relates to Ufology. It is about getting to the original source. In the past, the only way to do it was go to the location or find a library that had the proper resources in its collections. You had to read the microfilms and search endlessly for the articles. That is what I had done with the Cedar Rapids story. I could search the microfilm of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and I found the original article about the railroad man and his UFOs. Took about an hour. Had I lived elsewhere, I might not have found it… until I could make an Internet search.

Here’s another example. As I point out in another post, Don Keyhoe, in writing about the 1948 Mantell case, got some bad information and therefore some of his conclusions wrong. He didn’t have access to the documents available to us online today. He assumed that the timing of the events fit into a specific sequence. He assumed that the times given in various reports was when the object was seen over that specific town. What this means that the sighting of the object from Madisonville, Kentucky, wasn’t of an object overhead as Keyhoe believed, but of one to the northwest. The claim that the object was over the Godman Army Airfield tower as Keyhoe believed, is not true. The documents in the Blue Book files proved that the men in the tower saw the UFO somewhere to the southwest at the very limits of human ability to see it. Given those two facts, Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed was way off. That’s not Keyhoe’s fault. He was relying on information that had been reported to him orally rather than seeing what the documents said. He couldn’t have reviewed those documents easily until 1976.

Those who cite Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed have not followed up on the information which was published in the early 1950s. Had they done so, they would have realized that his claim the object was moving at 180 miles an hour was badly flawed. Information available today gives us a much clearer picture. This isn’t to fault Keyhoe because he was relying on the information he had, but to fault those who haven’t bothered to update the information when they began their research.

What all this means is that in the world today, we can look much deeper into the past. We have access to nearly all human knowledge through the Internet. We can study newspaper files in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away (though some services require a subscription). The files of Project Blue Book are on line for all to review… and there are other sources of information about Blue Book that we have today that Keyhoe and others in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t have.

There is then, no real excuse for continuing to report information that is out of date or inaccurate. We can clear up these things by taking our research to the next level, which has always been the real point of chasing footnotes. This isn’t about “gotcha” but about cleaning up the information so that we can come to the proper conclusion. It isn’t about making someone look bad, but about searching for the answers to the mystery, whatever that mystery might be.

While I find chasing footnotes to be fun, I guess there are those who can’t be bothered with following the trail. They already know the truth so there is no need to search any further for it. Why clutter up a good UFO report with a lot of facts that provide us with an identification? Sometimes, however, we do learn something important about a case, which is why I do what I do. I just wish that there wasn’t a constant fight inside Ufology, protecting the sacred cows, when the facts take us somewhere else. 

I can cite examples here. Tales that are told and retold by those who are enthusiastic about their favorite cases. They ignore facts that don’t fit into their view of the world. They know the “truth,” and the facts be damned.

The airship crash in Aurora, Texas, in 1897 proves the point. The evidence and documentation shows that the story was invented by a stringer for a Dallas newspaper. Other documentation, in the form of histories of Aurora or Wise County where Aurora is located, that were published within a couple of years of the alleged crash mention nothing about it. Had such an event taken place, even if it didn’t involve a craft from another world, these histories would have contained some information about it. There is none. But we still have to listen to tales of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash and put up with television documentaries in which they are digging “for the truth.” Of course, when they’re done, they have not advanced our knowledge. They have just added another level of nonsense to the tale.

The Roswell Slides and Stan Friedman

While many seem to be tired of the Roswell Slides nonsense, there has been one additional announcement. Stan Friedman, who now labels himself as the “first civilian investigator of Roswell,” was invited to participant in the Mexico City extravaganza by Jaime Maussan and then Don Schmitt.

Friedman, who had remained somewhat silent as the controversy swirled finally chimed in. In a well-publicized statement he wrote:

My first thought was since I would be asked my views, as the first civilian investigator of the Roswell crashed saucer event, it would be nice to have first hand [sic] information…. So I read as much as I could, positive and negative. I have not held copies of the slides. I could find no convincing information that there is any connection between the slides and Roswell. How would an outsider gain access to the real bodies? ... I have seen no specific data to convince me these are phony. But that doesn’t establish a connection to the Roswell events…. But I don’t want to appear to add legitimacy by my presence in Mexico City in the absence of serious evidence of the slides being what is being claimed they are. Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence…

Overlooking the fact that what is claimed without proof can be denied without proof, Friedman’s statement sums up the situation as most of us understand it. There is no proof that the creature in the slide is alien or from the Roswell crash. There seems to be no solid evidence that the slides were made in 1947, near Roswell or who took the pictures. There are too many loose ends in this and unless they can be cleared up, this will end badly for those involved, something that Friedman seems to understand.

Don Schmitt, once Friedman made his position clear, issued his own statement. He said that Friedman had been offered an opportunity to review all their information including, if I understood it correctly, a chance to see high quality copies of the slides. Friedman didn’t take this opportunity, which seems a little strange. He certainly could have looked at the slides and received his briefing, unless it was tied to an agreement to attend the Mexico City presentation.

At any rate it would seem strange that Friedman, who has endorsed the nonsensical Aztec UFO crash and continues to endorse the long discredited MJ-12 documents, would pass up this opportunity. I think that says something about the slides themselves and the situation around them.

Paul Kimball, a nephew of Friedman’s by marriage (if I have that relation right) talked to his uncle about this because some thought the statement hadn’t been issued by Friedman. Friedman confirmed that he would not be among those in Mexico City. In this case, it seems that Friedman understands the real consequences of involvement in Mexico City and was wise enough to avoid it.

Gerald Anderson, Stan Friedman and Winfred Buskirk - Plains of San Agustin Controversy

In an attempt to clean up some things, I was looking at the Gerald Anderson tale of seeing a crashed flying saucer on the Plains of San Agustin back in 1947. This became quite the controversy in 1991 when Anderson identified the leader of the archaeologists seen there as Adrian Buskirk. Tom Carey, who has an advanced degree in anthropology, took on the task of locating Buskirk. While he didn’t find anyone named Adrian, he did find one man named Winfred Buskirk who had earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1949.

Could this be the same man that Anderson had identified?

Given the “identikit” sketch that Anderson had created to help identify Buskirk and the photographs of Buskirk that Carey located during his search, the answer is “Yes.” To make the connection even stronger, copies of the “identikit” sketch were circulated in New Mexico and more than one person, upon seeing it said, “That’s Win Buskirk.”

Buskirk denied that he had been involved. He said that he had been in Arizona in July 1947, and that he knew nothing about a UFO crash on the Plains, or anywhere else for that matter. That lead to the question, “Then how had Anderson been able to pinpoint Buskirk as the man on the Plains, if Buskirk had not been there?” (Not to mention how the five-year-old Anderson would have remembered Buskirk after some forty-five or so years?)

Don Schmitt

Once we (and by we, I mean Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and me) had located and talked with Buskirk, we learned that he had taught high school anthropology in the late 1950s in Albuquerque. According to Anderson, has family had moved to Albuquerque in June 1947, and not long after, he had been down on the Plains, searching for Moss Agate, which was how they stumbled onto the crashed saucer. We had them, Buskirk and Anderson, in the same state at about the same time which didn’t mean they had seen each other, let alone known each other.

On July 19, 1991, Buskirk wrote to me. We had aroused his curiosity about all this. He wrote, “Your colleague Tom told me Anderson’s family moved to Albuquerque. He would, if five years old in 1947, he would have been in high school around 1957 – 58 - 59. During those years I was teaching at Albuquerque High School, mostly history but also other subjects… I think it not unlikely that Anderson heard of me and saw me there and that later, somehow the name became associated with his childhood memories. There is also the possibility that Anderson faked his whole story. He might have used a high school annual for a picture of me to provide his sketches. Can a 40-year-old memory of a five-year-old be that good? In 1947 I would have been much thinner faced.”

Buskirk was now interested in the puzzle. How had Anderson selected him as the leader of the archaeologists on the Plains? On August 8, 1991, he provided an answer. Buskirk wrote:

Mary… Klicker called me this evening. I had written her asking her to check her year books. There is nothing on Anderson in them, apparently.

Then Robert Hannan, a former history teacher and Jim Hulsman, the basketball coach at Albuquerque High School, called her. They had been contacted by [Stan] Friedman and both had pointed him to her (Mrs. Klicker, used to be the assistant principal). But Friedman has not contacted her. She was interested enough then to ask Hannah and Hulsman to get on the case. All were good friends of mine.

They went to the Public Schools microwave [I’m sure he meant microfilm) records and came up with this information… Gerald Francis Anderson was born [I’ve left the date out for privacy reasons]. In the fall of 1956 he enrolled at Highland High School… but after less than a year moved to Indianapolis.

Then on 2 (or 3^rd) October 1957 he enrolled at Albuquerque High, stayed a little over a year, then checked out on 3 October 1958… His grade point average in Albuquerque was [well, I have it, but leave it out for privacy reasons… I mentioned this only to suggest the depth of the information that Buskirk supplied].

Now – at Albuquerque High he was enrolled for a semester of Anthropology. This was a course I taught in the fall, so must have taken it in 1957… You will probably want to call Mrs. Klicker, Jim Hulsman, and Robert Hannah for a verification and possibly more information…

Quite naturally, I did contact them, and they did verify the information. We had established a contact between Buskirk and Anderson, not in 1947 but in 1957. The records in Albuquerque verified it. What are the odds that they, Buskirk and Anderson, would meet in one of the biggest events in history only to meet again ten years later while Anderson was in high school and Buskirk happened to be

Stan Friedman

teaching in that very high school? Buskirk wrote that he didn’t remember Anderson, but given the circumstances, and since Anderson reportedly remembered Buskirk well enough to produce an accurate sketch decades later, wouldn’t Anderson have mentioned something about it when he recognized his teacher?

Here’s the kicker. Here’s the important point. In a letter dated August 19, 1991, Buskirk wrote, “Dr. [yes, I know he didn’t have a doctorate] Friedman had previously made inquiries of Hulsman.”

This was the first time that we had proved that Anderson had been less than candid with his tale. According to Buskirk, Friedman had been given the information about Anderson having studied anthropology and therefore knew the truth, yet he maintained that Anderson hadn’t known Buskirk and hadn’t seen him at the high school arguing that the high school had three buildings so it was conceivable that Anderson never ran into Buskirk... this despite the fact that the information put them in the same classroom.

When I learned about Anderson’s connection to Buskirk, I called Fred Whiting at the Fund for UFO Research. I wanted him to know that we had not only put Anderson into the same high school as Buskirk, but we’d put him in the class room. I had the information from Buskirk, which I believed to be reliable, but I made the telephone calls myself and talked with those that Buskirk had mentioned who could corroborate it. One of them told me, as I asked questions, that he was looking at the transcript as we spoke.

Whiting, apparently called Friedman and Friedman called Anderson. At that point Anderson called the high school. Anderson later wrote to me:

Be advised, however, I have been in contact with the officials of the Albuquerque High School, one in particular…. [ellipses in the original] Mr. Halsay. Also be advised Sir, that I am more than a little aware of my Constitutional rights under FERPA (Family Education Right to Privacy act [sic]…. Just in case you needed a reminder). Make no mistake about it Mr. Randle, if I find out that you have obtained and altered my high school transcripts (or even if you didn’t alter it) without my permission, you and whoever assisted you are going to find yourselves facing Federal charges and the accompanying suits filed under tort law (my [here he gives his GPA, which confirmed the information that I have been given] notwithstanding).

This didn’t concern me, but I had been talking with people in New Mexico who still worked for the school district. My inquiries could have caused them a great deal of trouble over something that was, in the greater scheme of things, trivial. Why put their jobs in jeopardy? I already had the information but more importantly, Stan Friedman had it as well. He knew that Anderson had identified his high school anthropology teacher as the leader of the archaeologists on the Plains but chose to conceal this information. I knew it too, and obviously, so did Anderson.

This was, to me, the smoking gun. Anderson had been caught in complex lie. He had placed his five-year-old self on the Plains to see the downed disk, had identified the archaeologist of fame and fortune as from the University of Pennsylvania led by Buskirk, and denied that he had seen Buskirk at any time after that day in 1947. We knew that Buskirk had no affiliation with Penn, that he had been in Arizona in July 1947, and that he had taught Anderson anthropology in 1957.

Anderson and Friedman managed to block this information. Anderson with his threats and Friedman with his attacks against me. He had claimed that I was attempting to invalidate (a nice way of saying what he was doing) Anderson with false information. But he knew the truth and actively campaigned to keep it hidden.

Later, Anderson would be exposed forging his telephone bill to, as he put it, make me look bad. Although Friedman and John Carpenter are often credited with the initial discovery, I was the one who proved that the phone bill Anderson had submitted to prove that he and I had only spoke briefly had been altered by Anderson to reflect Anderson’s claim.  I had the documentation from the telephone company with the accurate information on it. Anderson eventually admitted to the forgery when Friedman obtained a copy of the telephone bill from the phone company.

(You can read about this episode in the July/August 1992 issue of the International UFO Reporter and in the January 1993 issue of the MUFON UFO Journal. For those who wish a report about some of these activities from a disinterested third party see:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/anderson.htm.)

Although it might seem that I’m beating a dead horse, I will say again that Friedman had the information about the high school classes even before I got it. He just said nothing about it, and when it was clear that I had it, attempted to get it suppressed. At this point, with the people who supplied the information safe from retribution and even though Anderson has been reduced to a footnote in the Plains controversy, it is important that Friedman’s role be exposed.

For those interested… Yes, I have copies of the letters about Anderson’s high school credentials, if we really need that today. He admitted to forgery on other documents and that should be enough to remove him from this UFO controversy.