REVIEW: Flying Saucers and Science: A Scientist Investigates the Mysteries of UFOs

Flying Saucers and Science: A Scientist Investigates the Mysteries of UFOs
by Stanton T. Friedman, MSc

New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, NY, 2008, 317 pp. ISBN 978-1-60163-011-7

Reviewed by Chrispy

Stanton Friedman graduated from the same University of Chicago class as Carl Sagan and went on to work in classified nuclear research until one day he stumbled into the world of flying saucers. As he tells in the book, in 1958 he needed an extra book to complete a mail order and selected The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt on a lark. If ever there was kismet, this was it.

Still, nine years later a group of his work mates were doing a book club meeting on Flying Saucers – Serious Business by Frank Edwards and he did a living room talk. Again, he’d found his calling, and thousands of hours and lectures and debates later in every media imaginable, Friedman has brought his wit, common sense, keen mind, and pugnaciousness to his lectures in front of audiences large and small.

His greatest claim to fame was yet another chance of serendipity. A 1978 interview at a Louisiana radio station found Friedman stuck waiting for a late interviewer. In the downtime, a manager blurted out that he should speak to a guy named Jesse Marcel. After some time, Friedman managed to locate Marcel and stumbled over, arguably, the craziest story of the 20th century. Tenacious to a fault, Friedman began to try to tear into the story of a UFO crashing near the most top-secret Army Air Force base in the country. In 1947 there was no place more important or classified than the home base of America’s nuclear arsenal, where testing of the hydrogen bomb took place. Only weeks after Kenneth Arnold saw something dancing about Mount Rainier like a “flying saucer”, a ranch foreman allegedly found a bunch of foil crap choking out the grazing land of his sheep, and after an investigation and a press fiasco by the military, the incident was quickly killed. More than three decades later, Friedman took a can opener to it and Roswell became a household name.

The book, however, is about more than three incidents in Friedman’s long life. He discusses most of the major crusades and controversies of his career. His fights with Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Michael Shermer, Ben Bova, and Arthur C. Clarke are detailed. If nothing else, Friedman has outlived many of his opponents. He savages SETI as useless, that we’ve had on the books for years the capability of near-the-speed-of-light flight, about his close friendship with Betty and Barney Hill, arguably, the first American UFO kidnap victims, his embattled defense of the MJ12 files that declare that both Truman and Eisenhower were plugged into UFO cover-ups.

That is a great part of Friedman’s books, as with all 21st century UFO researchers, that whether or not UFOs exist, the American Security State is convinced that NO NEWS about eyewitness evidence is allowed to be untainted. Almost from the beginning, Friedman’s research to determine what people were really seeing was thwarted by massive misinformation entrenched by (now discovered) CIA and security members in the scientific community. To his credit, Friedman understands and defends national security, but he loathes lies and deception almost as much as narrow-mindedness.

As a true-life scientist, he believes in freedom of speech and the right for the public to have a diversity of opinions. He enjoys a good fight, even when he’s wrong, and takes wins and losses with a good spirit.

Along the way we find statistics over many decades that show the harder the government and the scientific community lambasted UFOs, the greater the belief. Why? People intuitively perceive that while eyewitness evidence can be questioned, it’s mostly reliable. People want to know if all the high strangeness is top secret military hardware, earthly enemy invaders, real interstellar aliens, or simply an unknown psychological effect that we’re all susceptible to. Whatever people are seeing and experiencing, the last thing the American public wants is a cover-up. They can smell a rat, and it smacks of too many heavy-handed lies.

It doesn’t matter if you believe or not, you need to get to know an American original, Stanton Friedman.

The book includes a preface by an American hero, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, an advocate to stop cover-ups, and a renewal to understand the truth about UFOs. Bruce Maccabee adds an additional tribute and preface. A bibliography and index is included.

http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfhome.html

Chris Perridas roams the Ohio Valley letting those dark corners and lonely country roads fuel his imagination. His popular blog on H. P. Lovecraft can be found at http://tiny.cc/g5L4W.