Stanton T. Friedman

Expertise: UFO

Stanton Terry Friedman (born July 29, 1934) is a professional Ufologist who resides in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell incident. He studied physics at the University of Chicago and worked as a nuclear physicist on research and development projects for several large companies. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.

Career in nuclear physics

Friedman graduated from Linden High School and the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1955 and a Master of Science degree in nuclear physics in 1956.
Friedman was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as General Electric (1956–1959), Aerojet General Nucleonics (1959–1963), General Motors (1963–1966), Westinghouse (1966–1968), TRW Systems (1969–1970), and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications.[2] Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the radon-detection industry. Friedman’s professional affiliations have included the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and AFTRA.

UFO investigations and advocacy

In 1970, Friedman left full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of UFO’s. Since then, he has given lectures at more than 600 colleges and to more than 100 professional groups in 50 states, nine provinces, and 16 countries outside the USA. Additionally, he has worked as a consultant on the topic. He has published more than 80 UFO-related papers and has appeared on many radio and television programs. He has also provided written testimony to Congressional hearings and appeared twice at the United Nations.
Friedman has consistently favoured use of the term “flying saucer” in his work, saying “Flying saucers are, by definition, unidentified flying objects, but very few unidentified flying objects are flying saucers. I am interested in the latter, not the former.” Friedman used to refer to himself as “The Flying Saucer Physicist”, because of his degrees in nuclear physics and work on nuclear projects.

Friedman’s positions regarding UFO phenomenon

Friedman was the first civilian to document the site of the Roswell UFO incident, and supports the hypothesis that it was a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. In 1968 Friedman told a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that the evidence suggests that Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles. Friedman also stated he believed that UFO sightings were consistent with magnetohydrodynamic propulsion.

In 1996, after researching and fact checking the Majestic 12 documents, Friedman said that there was no substantive grounds for dismissing their authenticity.

In 2004, on George Noory’s Coast to Coast radio show, Friedman debated Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute’s Senior Astronomer. Like Friedman, Shostak also believes in the existence of intelligent life other than humans; however, unlike Friedman, he doesn’t believe such life is now on Earth or is related to UFO sightings.

Friedman has hypothesized that UFO’s may originate from relatively nearby sunlike stars. In a book published in 2008, he said:

…[there] are about 1,000 stars within our local galactic neighborhood, meaning the region within 54 light years of Earth…. According to an excellent study done by Terence Dickinson… 46 of those stars are very similar to our sun…. the star pair Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, in the southern sky constellation Reticulum (the Net) only 39 light years away from us, are sunlike stars about 35 times closer to each other than the sun is to our nearest stellar neighbor. They are also about 1 billion years older than the sun. A civilization that had a billion-year head start on us will certainly know things that we can’t even dream of. Our own limited science has shown that nuclear fusion rockets can provide thrust far in excess of that provided by a chemical rocket, and so interstellar travel may be as easy for other civilizations now as nonstop flight across the ocean is for us today”. (p. 217)

A piece of evidence that he often cites with respect to this hypothesis is the 1964 star map drawn by alleged alien abductee Betty Hill during a hypnosis session, which she said was shown to her during her abduction. Astronomer Marjorie Fish constructed a 3-dimensional map of nearby sunlike stars and claimed a good match from the perspective of Zeta Reticuli, about 39 light years distant. The fit of the Hill/Fish star maps was hotly debated in the December 1974 edition of Astronomy Magazine,with Friedman and others defending the statistical validity of the match.

Source & more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanton_T._Friedman