動画：Stanton Friedman の 書斎＋資料庫 の様子
前置き
見かけたので記録しておく。地下室を 書斎＋資料庫 にしたようだ（窓が無いから最初の照明なしのシーンでは真っ暗）。
すべて彼ひとりで切り回し、秘書などはいないと。
該当箇所
19:32--20:35
切り出し静止画
FasterWhisper AI(large-v2 model) + DeepL(2024-07 model)
言うまでもなく、私はUFO目撃談や研究プロジェクト、推進システムに関するアイデアについて多くの人から電話をもらう。 面白いことに、私が自分の電話に出ると、みんな驚くんだ。 (0:19:45)
秘書や同好の士が私のために働いていると思われている。 誰がそんな余裕がある？私は一人でやっている。 私が自分で電話に出ることに驚かれると、いつも驚いてしまう。 つまり、他に誰が私の電話に出るというのだ？ でも、できる限り人の役に立ちたいと思っている。 参考情報が必要なら、彼らはあらゆることを知りたがる。 (0:20:10)
この辺りにはたくさんの研究資料がある。 だから私は、正当な目標を持っているように見える人、私の経歴などに合った適切な目標を持っている人を励ますようにしている。 そのいい例が、クリス・スタイルズが初めてシャグ・ハーバーの件で電話をくれたときのことだ。クリスはちょうど『未解決ミステリー』のロズウェル事件のコーナーを見ていたところだった。 (0:20:37)
Needless to say, I get a lot of phone calls from people about UFO sightings, about research projects, about ideas on propulsion systems, and I try to be helpful. And it's funny, people are surprised when I answer my own phone, which I do when I'm home. (0:19:45)
They expect me to have a secretary and a whole coterie of people working for me. Who can afford it? I'm a one-man operation. I'm always surprised when people are surprised that I answer my own phone. I mean, who else is going to answer my phone? But I try to help people whenever I can. If they need reference information, they want to know all kinds of things. (0:20:10)
I've got a lot of research material around here, no question about that. So I try to encourage those people who seem to have a justifiable goal, an appropriate one that fits in with my background and so forth. A good example is Chris Stiles, when he first called me about Shag Harbor. Chris had just been watching the Unsolved Mysteries segment on the Roswell incident. (0:20:37)
Youtube 動画(49:48)
UFOs - The Stanton Friedman Story
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First the question, are there any flying saucers? Now, some people get very angry at me for using the word flying saucers. Why don't you say UFOs, Stan? Flying saucers, that's a tabloid bit of nomenclature. That's not so. I want to make a very clear-cut distinction between flying saucers and UFOs. All flying saucers are unidentified flying objects. Very few unidentified flying objects are flying saucers. (0:01:31)
And besides, UFOs didn't come into use until after 1950, and I'm interested especially in what happened in 1947, when it was flying saucers, flying disks. There's nothing wrong with the term. So don't get mad at me for using the word. I've used it for many years. My lecture is normally, flying saucers are real, and I'm not ashamed of it at all. Next speaker is Stan T. Friedman, known as the flying saucer physicist, nuclear physicist by background, a noted author, and one of our long-time supporters. (0:02:17)
I'm cute. I've spoken at more MUFON conferences than anybody. That's because I'm older than most of the guys up here. Worked in industry on more canceled government-sponsored advanced research and development programs than anybody that I've ever met. Nuclear airplanes, fission and fusion rockets, nuclear power plants for space, little companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, General Motors, TRW System, McDonnell Douglas. I've focused particularly on the Roswell incident. (0:02:46)
Somebody called me the grandfather of Roswell. It used to be the father of Roswell, but I guess I'm getting older. I get around. Noisy, that's what I am. I talk about noisy negativists. I'm a noisy positivist. Mr. Friedman has spoken at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups in the 50 states, 9 Canadian provinces, and 13 countries. He's published over 70 UFO articles, co-authored the book Crash at Corona, the Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident, his 1996 book about the Operation Majestic 12 Top Secret Magic is in its 6th printing. (0:03:27)
The title of Mr. Friedman's program is Flying Saucers and the Cosmic Neighborhood, and he'll be looking at just where these folks might be coming from. Stan? The more lecturing I did, the more I realized that I really enjoyed being on the stage. The bigger the crowd, the happier I was. And secondly, I found that I like people. I stand behind a table with information sheets, with books and stuff. (0:03:54)
People are always wanting to tell me about their experiences. There's no question that some people think, well, maybe that was a flying saucer, and they sent all these shells. I saw it go across the sky. Oh, you did see the thing in the sky? Oh, sure. From Southgate, it was about this level. The thing that hit me is when you came to the part in your film, I mean, in your video, in reference to the smoke round, or whatever it's called. (0:04:23)
The ionized air plasma round. Yeah. Well, it was something like this. Even though they don't provide classified documentation, when the seemingly respectable people, independently, all over the world, tell me the same kinds of stories, I can't dismiss it. (0:04:42)
So you get a hand, your finger on the pulse of what's going on when you do enough lectures in enough places. And because I come on so strong, they know I'm not going to laugh at them. Let's get rid of another myth. There are too darn many apologist ufologists. Because many people on both sides of the aisle, so to speak, have accepted the notion that most people don't believe in flying saucers. (0:05:10)
I have no idea why. I've had 11 hecklers in over 700 lectures. And two of them were drunk. You're going to get that many if you talk about religion, sports, politics. There's no big risk here in sticking your neck out. But people's actions are determined by their perception of what other people are going to say in response to what they say. It's okay. (0:05:34)
Here's several Gallup polls. They show not only that believers outnumber non-believers, the real over the imaginary, but that the greater the education, the more likely to believe in flying saucers. That comes as a real shocker. We in MUFON have our UFO evangelists. Stan Freedman is my favorite UFO evangelist. When Dwight Connolly did his MUFON UFO Journal profile on Stan, his title was, Stanton Freedman Spreads the Word. Stan would make a great Jewish UFO Presbyterian preacher. (0:06:15)
An idea which newspaper people and Alan Hynek would say has a high degree of strangeness. I was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1934 at the height of the Depression. My dad was born in Chicago. His parents came over from Lithuania about 1900, 1901. My mother, her parents came from the Ukraine, near Kiev, around 1902, 1903. I grew up in Linden, New Jersey. First 19 years of my life. (0:06:59)
It was a working man's town. Lots of immigrants to do the dirty jobs at the factories. But back in the 30s, if you got a job, you were lucky. My dad stayed with American Cyanamid for 37 years. I've been asked what it is that drives me to go after the details, the minutia, to try to get things straight. And the best explanation I can come up with is something that happened in the fifth grade, if you would believe. (0:07:26)
I was a straight-A student as a kid, and I was in the fifth grade, and Miss Gutkin, our teacher, Rose Gutkin, one day in class, she was talking about astronomy, and maybe it was under the heading of science, I suppose. She said, the sun stands still, and the Earth and the other planets move around the sun. Well, that hit me the wrong way, because I had just the day before read in our new encyclopedia volume. (0:07:55)
You bought one volume at a time at the supermarket for 29 cents. I said, no, Miss Gutkin, the whole solar system is moving around the center of the galaxy. Well, she dressed me down in front of the other students. No, that's not right, Stan. That's not right at all. (0:08:15)
And she went on for a little bit. Now, I didn't say anything back. I never sassed the teacher. But I was hurting inside. I didn't much appreciate that when I was sure that's what I had read the day before, no less. So, naturally, I went home and got the encyclopedia and brought it in the next day. And she read it. And she very reluctantly admitted, well, maybe that's the way it really was. (0:08:41)
Now, she didn't apologize for dressing me down. But I felt vindicated. But I also felt I learned a lesson. If I didn't want to be dressed down by people, I'd better have my facts in hand before I open my mouth. That may be one of the reasons I went into debating in high school. I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but my high school career, four years at Linden High School in Linden, New Jersey, did prepare me for my activities as a UFO investigator, as a lecturer, as somebody defending truth and liberty and all that stuff. (0:09:17)
I was on the debate team my freshman, sophomore, and junior years. We won a state championship. And one thing about debating, you have to learn to handle both sides of the argument, because you never know which way you're going to go when the tournaments come up. And also, you have to get your facts straight. You can't make up things. It's sort of against the rules. (0:09:37)
But we didn't have a debate team in my senior year. And instead, I got into drama. I was in two plays in my senior year. I played a priest in a play, The Valiant Never Taste of Death But Once. I remember the line. And I got a real kick. And on one application for college, I remember they asked, What did you enjoy most in high school? (0:10:01)
And I'd done a lot. But I put down being in those two plays, and that was far more prophetic than I ever expected. Now, if you'd told me that I'd wind up spending my life lecturing about flying saucers, I'd have laughed my head off. I received my master's degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1956. Two years later, in 1958, I was working as a nuclear physicist for the General Electric Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department near Cincinnati. I was ordering books from a mail-order place in New York and needed one more book so I wouldn't have to pay shipping. (0:10:36)
And there was one, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by United States Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt. And then I stumbled across Project Blue Book, Special Report No. 14, in about 1960 at the University of California, Berkeley Library. And I was astonished because it hadn't been mentioned in any of the 15 books that I had read. And it not only provided me with tons of data, and I'm a data hound, I'll admit it, information on 3,200 sightings, 240 charts, tables, graphs, maps, data heaven. (0:11:09)
But it also had the press release that the Air Force issued when the document was sort of released. (0:11:15)
It wasn't distributed, but they put out a huge press release all over the country. And that shocked me because it proved, once you looked at the data, as I had been, that the Air Force was lying about the results of their study. And what's interesting is that nobody in the press made an effort, apparently, judging by the articles I've seen, to get to the truth of the matter. (0:11:37)
They were buying what the Secretary of the Air Force said, and that's terribly sad. And you know what? They're still buying what lies are being told by the Air Force. And that's really sad. I was working on classified programs. I understand national security and how it works and so forth. But they were outright lying. That got my dander up. I later visited Project Blue Book many times. (0:12:06)
But that really began a 40-year quest now for the truth about flying saucers. I think I've found it. The Secretary of the Air Force, about this study, this is what the public heard all over the country, all over the world. We believe that no object such as those popularly 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. (0:12:41)
The problem is that the two factual statements in the Air Force Secretary's summary are both false. The unknowns were not 3%, and they were not the sightings for which there wasn't enough information. I did a lot of reading, and when I had moved to Indianapolis, I got to know Frank Edwards, who was quite a UFO researcher. And when he came out with his new book, Flying Saucers' Serious Business, which became a bestseller, he sent me a copy in Pittsburgh, where I was now working for Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory on nuclear rockets. (0:13:16)
Read the book, decided I ought to do something, called Frank, he named some people I should talk to. One of them was a radio station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, one of the earliest big radio stations. I called them, they said, don't call us, we'll call you for a talk show. Somebody cancelled out at the last minute they called me, because I lived near the station. (0:13:35)
Somebody at work heard me, and asked me to speak to their book review club, because they were looking at Frank Edwards' book. And I did, that was my first lecture in somebody's living room. The first big college lecture was at Carnegie Mellon University there in Pittsburgh, and only because I knew the wife of the guy who was the dean, and he booked me, and asked me how much I wanted, I figured I'd have to take half a day off work, it was a morning lecture. (0:14:03)
I said $100, thinking he'd cut me down to $50. He said sold, then he told me what he was paying the other people, $1,200, $1,500, and that led me to believe that I could make some money, perhaps enough to support a family giving lectures. (0:14:19)
So when the bottom fell out of the advanced nuclear and space systems business, as it finally did in 1969, 1970, I went full-time lecturing. 3,201 site, that's a pretty good number. Project, a blue book, special report number 14. Now look at all the categories here, miscellaneous covered a whole long list of things. This is really psychological aberrations, a very polite way of saying crackpot cases. (0:14:48)
You'll notice that those were 1.5%. 2% of the papers submitted to the American Physical Society by physicists are crackpot papers, they say. I think that means there are more crackpots associated with physics than with flying saucers. I like to use humor in my lectures, usually to poke fun at the nasty, noisy negativists, to show things in a sort of ridiculous light on occasion as required. (0:15:15)
I don't go out and tell jokes. I'm not any young man. But I try to soften up the audience and for once get them laughing at the nasty, noisy negativists instead of those of us who are convinced that some UFOs are alien spacecraft. Oh, another group that doesn't want flying saucers to be real are the SETI cultists. S-E-T-I, silly effort to investigate. A cult is a group of people who have a strong dogma, charismatic leadership, strong resistance to outside voices, and boy, the SETI guys sure show that in spades. (0:15:52)
They don't want it to be real because who needs a radio telescope? There's real job security. Hello out there! You know, 40 years later, hi there, what can we do for you? You pass the job on to your kids. They have no evidence. We got loads of it. But they say we're being unscientific, and they're being scientific. He backs up what he's saying with, you know, facts. (0:16:19)
Like, he talks about, you know, the skeptics, you know, how they just believe because that's what they believe. They don't go to the facts. If you go to the facts, you know, the evidence is overwhelming, pointing towards, you know, the existence of some UFOs are extraterrestrials. Stan was a great representative, especially to somebody like myself who hasn't really been in the UFO community, you know, maybe from the outside you would think that this field is with a lot of sort of strange people or whatever, but Stan is extremely intelligent and articulate, and I thought it was very interesting what he had to say. (0:16:57)
The arrogance of each generation of ancient academics and fossilized physicists is something to behold. Well, I'm trying to encourage the young people, you should respect your elders, but check and double-check and triple-check the assumptions that they're making to come to the conclusion that there isn't anything new, because there is and there always will be. If you get younger people, that's what you need. (0:17:24)
You know, what's his name, Max Planck said, new ideas come to be accepted not because their opponents come to believe in them, but because their opponents die and a new generation grows up that's accustomed to them. (0:17:36)
It's true. One thing about the life I've been leading for the last 30-some years, in terms of almost full-time lecturing, is that the travel can be rugged. Now, some people say, oh, you travel all these exotic places, it must be great fun. Frankly, it's work. My longest tour was 25 lectures in 15 states in 35 days. And believe me, that was work. I watched spring come in in three different parts of the United States. And the thing is, I don't just lecture, but I do classroom visits, I do seminars, I do interviews. (0:18:20)
I've started some days at 8 in the morning, done five classes in a row, done three interviews, give a lecture that night, talk for an hour and a half, answer questions until the janitor kicks us out of the hall, go back to the motel by myself, get up in the morning and catch a plane at 6.30 or 7. That's work. And usually I don't get a chance to see much of the towns I visit. (0:18:44)
Every once in a while there's an extra day because I'm on the way to someplace else in a day or two, where I do get a chance to look at things, but it can be lonely. It's amazing to me that he's been so persistent, staying with the task, which has been so frustrating. The work he's done in the Roswell case has required a tremendous amount of travel and investigation and going through records in which you get almost no results for a long time, and then you finally get one little clue, and you try to get more information to back it up. (0:19:17)
And the energy it takes and the hope and the sustenance to keep going, that he has this energy to do this, just amazes me. Needless to say, I get a lot of phone calls from people about UFO sightings, about research projects, about ideas on propulsion systems, and I try to be helpful. And it's funny, people are surprised when I answer my own phone, which I do when I'm home. (0:19:45)
They expect me to have a secretary and a whole coterie of people working for me. Who can afford it? I'm a one-man operation. I'm always surprised when people are surprised that I answer my own phone. I mean, who else is going to answer my phone? But I try to help people whenever I can. If they need reference information, they want to know all kinds of things. (0:20:10)
I've got a lot of research material around here, no question about that. So I try to encourage those people who seem to have a justifiable goal, an appropriate one that fits in with my background and so forth. A good example is Chris Stiles, when he first called me about Shag Harbor. Chris had just been watching the Unsolved Mysteries segment on the Roswell incident. (0:20:37)
And Stanton, of course, being the expert on it at the time, was on the program, and Chris thought, well, I'll try. (0:20:47)
And he looked up his phone number, surprised to learn that he lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and transplanted American. And he called there, he got forwarded through to a motel in Dallas, Texas, because that's where Stanton was doing a lecture at the time, I guess. And talked to Stanton, and Stanton sort of gave him some leads about where he should start looking. And I guess we owe Stan the opening part of our investigation on how to get going on this thing, you know, with Chris and so on. (0:21:18)
Yeah, I find Stan to be a very tenacious researcher. He seems to be tireless in his research. He'll follow leads to the very end and try to squeeze every bit of information that he can out of it. UFOs are a thing that's very difficult to be purely scientific about. If your version of scientific is, when you haul me a dead alien in front of me, I'll believe, you know, you may not bother with the UFO field very much. (0:21:47)
And so Stan has had to be satisfied with evidence, but not foolproof, in order to keep going, and he's done that very well. As a scientist himself, he's gone out there and put his professional career on the line years and years and years ago and went out there and said, you know, this is happening. I believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. These things are intelligently controlled and they're not from here. (0:22:12)
And he makes no bones about that. And he's been carrying that around on his shoulders and bearing a great deal of burden, I think, because of that. And you've got to respect a guy that gets out there and does that and yet backs it up with his scientific credibility. I think that he is careful in his scientific analysis. At the same time, he's not slow to offer opinions. (0:22:40)
Some scientists won't give you their opinions. Stan's more than willing to give you his opinions. When somebody tells you the only sightings that couldn't be explained are poor quality sightings by incompetent observer, they are not telling the truth. They should not be allowed to proceed without justifying that statement. And they can't because it isn't true. Stan Friedman was very much a major contributor to some really very, very important... and contributed very, very important work to that kind of what you would think of as scientific ufology. (0:23:18)
Let's look at the phenomenon. What does the data tell us? What can we learn from this about our visitors, if there are visitors, and where they come from? As time went by, as Roswell came to the fore, as the abductions came to the fore, we found ourselves more and more focused on government cover-up and conspiracy and less on what the government was covering up and conspiring about. (0:23:45)
That is, the UFO phenomenon and the data about it. And Stan moved into that... into that realm with a vengeance, with Roswell. And he spent the past, you know, 20 years now really focused on things like MJ-12 and government conspiracy and all of that, and has done very little, sadly, on the kind of things that he was working on in the past. (0:24:15)
We're dealing with the biggest story of the millennium. Visits to planet Earth by alien spacecraft, successful cover-up of the best data, bodies in wreckage, for 54 years. Why don't we know more? It's the failure of the scientific and journalistic communities are the two major things. And, of course, those other forces that don't want us to know about globalization and being an Earthling and alien visitors. (0:24:45)
Lots of those forces. One of the issues that's very prevalent in the UFO community is the conspiracy issue. Granted, government does not release all information, but I also know from my own experience in the military that the government can't keep secrets very well. Ultimately, the stuff leaks out. Maybe not the documents, but ultimately it does leak out. And to this date, there's been no real smoking gun that's come out of the information that has been released or that's been supposedly overheard by people that would dispel my beliefs that it's anything but a misinterpreted event. (0:25:27)
It took me five years to get one of the important CIA UFO documents. I want to show that to you, so you'll see how much we learned from those documents. Yeah, there's five years to get that. Well, it's got a lot of information. It says title, doc reference, info date, string of numbers, USSR, and more numbers, and that's it. They're not holding back anything. (0:25:58)
Now, how could you accuse the government of keeping a secret from us? Stan is famous for flipping the blacked-out pages and said, you know, what's going on here? Well, we now know that the reason they covered that up was not because there was UFO information in it, but because there was critical source information in it. The Soviets may determine, based on some of the stuff released in that report, where the information was gathered, and it could adversely affect the person who helped in the gathering of the information. (0:26:32)
I don't know how much of this is a consequence of frustration after years and years and years of trying to tease out the answers from the data in hand, and how much of it is a genuine belief that if we crack this cover-up, we're going to have all the answers, so let's not waste any more time poking around with the data and doing all that rather boring hard work. (0:27:06)
I just, that I don't know. I suppose, in some ways, it's also more exciting if you're thinking in terms of cover-up. You know, I mean, there's a kind of, you know, James Bond-ish, X-file-ish kind of aspect to it that makes it more fun. I met somebody once who let me in on a little secret. He had worked at the White House. He was a professional person, and he had access to all kinds of stuff which he saw about flying saucers. (0:27:38)
And he told me, you know, they kill people for leaking stuff like that. And I believe him. But I can't live my life worrying about what the government's going to do and looking over my shoulder. (0:27:52)
I have made seven trips in the last three years to Roswell. It's a 200-mile drive from Albuquerque to Roswell, and there's nobody there. Lots of nothing in New Mexico. And I give out my itinerary, I tell my answering service, tell people where I am and where I'll be going and all this kind of stuff. If anybody wanted to take me out, I had ample opportunity. (0:28:14)
If you're thinking in terms of government cover-up and conspiracy and intimidation of witnesses and all of that, that tends to validate your own importance, too. Because they care about what we're doing. If you don't have that kind of attention from them, then who are you but just another bunch of folks that are interested in something that's slightly off the wall? Now, these guys got a sense of humor. (0:28:41)
This page says, Deny in Toto. They couldn't find eight lousy words to declassify. Of course there's a cosmic water gate. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's no case that better illustrates that than the Roswell case. I knew that was important when I began the civilian investigation of it back in the 70s. I had no idea how important. I do now. (0:29:15)
And you've got evidence that the government recovered not only a crash-flying saucer or two, but alien bodies. And they set up an outstanding group of people to deal with that information and have kept it secret all these years. That's definitely a cosmic water gate. Roswell is important because it defines ufology, both when it first happened in 1947, but also the rediscovery. It tells us a great deal about the hidden nature of the UFO phenomenon and why it has been buried for so long. (0:29:51)
Once we understand Roswell, once we understand what happened at Roswell, we understand why ufology developed the direction it developed for the next 50 or 60 years. We understand what is going on. We understand that there was a necessity for hiding a great deal of UFO information. And if Roswell had not happened in 1947, the whole history of ufology would have been different. Stan Friedman has devoted much of his life to attempting to establish a factual basis, an evidential basis, for accepting his view of what happened in 1947. He was the first, really, beginning in 1978, to interview Jesse Marcel in a systematic way. (0:30:42)
He was the premier pioneer in constructing the Roswell myth. And in doing so, he has become very comfortable in a certain vocabulary, in a certain way of talking about things, in a certain assurance about the sources and the like, so that he feels that his worldview, his particular point of view with respect to Roswell, is true. The poster on the wall in Fox Mulder's office that says, I want to believe, is a representation of what happens to be the very real thing in ufology. (0:31:26)
People want very much to believe whatever it is that happens to be their interest. (0:31:32)
Aliens' visitation, abductions, etc. And unfortunately, what happens is that this leads them to ignore facts that are inconvenient, that is, facts which are contrary to the things that they want to believe. Roswell is replete with this. Friedman is something of a romantic who is interested in good stories and in trying to explain what otherwise would remain mysteries. In the process of doing so, he and his colleagues have constructed, really, a marvelous story. (0:32:15)
It's a story of momentous happenings, of mysterious occurrences, of good guys and bad guys, and it has a transcendental message that we are not alone in the universe. It's very interesting to see what has transpired in Roswell itself and what the town has done with the celebrity that has come with Roswell, the flying saucer crane. For a long time, there was a good deal of resistance in town to the idea that they should in any way try to exploit it or take advantage of it. (0:32:55)
But Max Littel and Glenn Dennis and Walter Haught, three founders of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, pressed ahead anyway. And over time, people began to realize that this was an opportunity to have people not only come or pass through Roswell on their way to Carlsbad Caverns and the like, but to stick around for a couple of days. I've been to Fatima and Lourdes and to Jerusalem and to one of the great shrines of the Lord Shiva in Nepal. I prefer what I saw in Roswell. I was in Lourdes during the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin. It was very impressive and hypnotic, really. (0:33:48)
But I didn't have anywhere near as much fun as I did in Roswell. One of the things that constantly happened in Roswell was people would turn to us and a constant theme, a constant question that was being asked again and again was, Do you believe? Are you a believer? People would introduce, I'm high on so-and-so from Duluth. Are you a believer? And many, many people replied, Yes, I'm a believer. (0:34:20)
When we started on this idea of having a UFO museum, Stan Friedman was the first one that helped us out. He still helps us out. He's been so involved in so many different places that his knowledge is so far beyond ours here that we couldn't operate without him. And I hate to pat him on the back too much, but it has been something that has been of an absolute big operation. (0:35:02)
Everything that we've done, he's been in there and told us, Do it this way. Do it this way. And it's worked out just beautifully. I think this kind of dishonest representation of all this material, bogus and otherwise, by Roswell, further brings down the field of serious UFO research. Because, again, it's one of those things that defines what UFOs are all about in people's minds. (0:35:41)
It's making money, it's a sideshow, it's parades and carnivals and fun and silliness. (0:35:50)
Not something serious. And to that extent, the skeptics are right. I mean, UFOlogy, unfortunately, is caught up in this kind of stuff. And this is probably one of the more dramatic examples of it. I was on a television program once, a town meeting, Sunday afternoon. Every Sunday, this was out in Portland, Oregon. Every Sunday they asked people to phone in yes or no to a question. (0:36:16)
This week the question was, Do you think the government's told us all it knows about flying saucers? And I was in the hot seat and they'd gone down to Roswell and so forth. 3,900 people called. 92% said no, they don't think the government's told us all it knows about flying saucers. That's a pretty big lack of confidence. And they couldn't all have been just UFO believers, if you will. (0:36:42)
I hate that term, but I'm stuck with using it. You know what I mean when I say it. So, yes, there is a pop culture side to all of this. One reason, incidentally, is a peculiar one. When I asked the people at the gift shop at the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center... There are a lot of places where you can buy alien-oriented stuff. (0:37:04)
You know, T-shirts and all the rest. Oh, all over the place. Many, many companies. Well, one reason is you don't need to pay royalties to anybody. At least the aliens haven't billed anybody for using their likeness. So there's an interaction here. Pop culture tends to follow reality. Roswell gives it a face, a focus. The real problem I have is that time after time, these people have received so-called anonymous documents, anonymous letters, signed by individuals who asked that their name not be released or not signed at all. (0:37:51)
And they're using this as evidence to substantiate their claim. And that's a foolish way to do things. You know, that wouldn't go anywhere in a courtroom. You know, the court wouldn't even allow that kind of testimony. It's absurd. And yet, you know, I do wonder why people fall victim to these claims. You know, why does a person of high academic standing step over the itch? (0:38:17)
And I've also worked, oh yes, on the MJ-12 documents. There's a display about them back there. Most important classified government documents ever leaked to the public. They tell the story of the establishment by President Truman of a group of 12, an all-star cast of people, whose job it was to deal with the recovery of the crash saucer at Roswell. And there were an all-star cast, the first three directors of Central Intelligence, the first Secretary of Defense, six outstanding scientists. (0:38:53)
Well, after 11 years and visits then to 15 archives, I've been to 19 now, and I'm convinced the documents are real. Once you have committed yourself to a particular theory or a particular set of, in this case, like Roswell, documents backing up the case and so on, it's extremely difficult. (0:39:14)
Once you've not only committed yourself to them, but you've done so publicly that you have established a reputation on, and that you've written about at length, that you've published books about, etc., it's extremely difficult to stand up and say, whoops, I was wrong. I believe that it was perfectly natural to suggest that the United States government set up a super-secret project similar to the Manhattan Project. Many different people, many different places, many different functions. (0:39:45)
Now, that was a thought. Well, in 1984, I was working with William Moore and Jamie Shandoray. They were still in California. I had moved from California to New Brunswick in 1980. I got a call from Bill that they had received a roll of film in the mail. On this roll of film, there were two sets of eight negatives each of a top-secret-slash-magic-eyes-only document. (0:40:17)
One of the peculiar aspects of the document was that it named somebody Dr. Donald Howard Menzel, a Harvard University professor of astronomy, as a member of the group. And my first thought, Bill read me the list on the phone. This is December 1984. And my first thought was, oh, somebody's pulling our leg. Dr. Menzel was the Phil Class of his day, if you will. (0:40:44)
He was the champion debunker of UFOs during the 50s and 60s. He was a Harvard astronomer, very highly respected. Absolutely rabid anti-UFO debunker. Anyway, he's included as a member of MJ-12, which, of course, many people said, well, you know, that doesn't make any sense. Why would this debunker be a member of this? Well, Stan started digging, discovered that Menzel had this history of working for the National Security Agency as a cryptanalyst and so on, and decided, well, this shows that he had this secret life, and that his debunking was simply, it may have been part of the disinformation campaign of MJ-12, or it was a cover for Menzel's real role, etc. (0:41:33)
But when you look at Menzel's history, it's clear that this is, you know, nothing that he did in the intelligence field had anything to do with UFOs. He was a cryptographer, taught courses on cryptography, code-breaking and stuff. Turned out he'd learned Japanese, which helped in the code-breaking. It turned out he did classified work for more than 30 companies. It turned out he had a top-secret ultra-clearance with the U.S. Navy and with the CIA. The particularly interesting angle is this. (0:42:05)
Menzel had a thing for mythical Martians. He doodled them, he made Christmas cards with mythical Martian scenes and funny little Martians running about, he made paintings of Martians. My friend Jim Mosley, the editor of Saucer Smear, has one signed to him by Menzel, of this scene of Buxom Martian maidens cavorting about the canals of Mars, etc. Anyhow, in the MJ-12 documents, we have Dr. Menzel cited as being the one person who strongly argues that the saucers are not from the planet Mars. I think that that was a kind of inside joke. (0:42:46)
And I think the joke turned out to be on Stan Freedman. My opinion on Majestic-12 is the documents were created in the UFO community to propel specific people into the spotlight. (0:42:58)
And I have said repeatedly and I'll say again, Stan Freedman is not a participant in the hoax. He is merely one of those who have been unfortunately caught up in the hoax and become a proponent of it, but he is not a participant in the hoax. The MJ-12 documents, as well as an allegedly supporting memorandum, the Cutler-Twining Memorandum, which was found, in quotes, found at the National Archives by Jamie Chandra and Bill Moore, all of these things have one thing in common, that's Bill Moore. They all surfaced in one way or another through Bill Moore. Do I think there's any chance that Bill faked the documents? No. He didn't know enough of the minutia to get all those things right. (0:43:45)
Yes, it's easy to say, Bill was tricky, he did some strange things on occasion, but that doesn't mean he faked the documents. That which you want to believe, Francis Bacon said this, that which you want to believe, you more readily believe to be true. And so anything that comes along that offers proof or supporting evidence to back that up, you're going to buy into, if it has the least error of credibility about it. (0:44:13)
How much did you say? Twenty-five. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. With all due respect to Stan, I think that he jumped on the MJ-12 documents because they so neatly packaged up and supported what he had already decided was true about Roswell. Philip Klass, who has been attacking the reality of flying saucers for several decades anyway, he noted that in this Cutler-Twining memo, the typeface was the large piketype. (0:44:56)
So he wrote me saying perhaps I hadn't noticed that, but the tradition at the White House and the National Security Council was the small elite type, and he had nine samples to prove it. And he challenged me to find any genuine letters, memos from the right people, right time frame, or a number of conditions, done in the same size and style type. He offered me $100 each for every genuine such item, with a limit, unfortunately, of $10. And I sent him $20 just to tease him. He accepted $2. I think he thought he was home free. (0:45:31)
Once I got back from the Eisenhower Library, I sent him another $14, and an invoice for $1,000. And he paid me. Here's the crazy part, though. He'd never been to the Eisenhower Library. They have 250,000 pages of National Security Council material. To generalize from nine to 250,000 is absurd. It's typical of the intellectual bankruptcy of the pseudoscience of anti-euphology. Find something to grab on to, and who cares whether it's right or not? (0:46:07)
Stanton's been attacked almost unmercifully over the Roswell thing, which he continues to promote. Might be that Stanton will turn out to be right down the road, and everybody else is wrong. But Stanton gets the word out there, and a lot of people in the world know about euphology because of Stanton. Right, wrong, or indifferent. People know that Stanton's out there, and he's looking, and he believes. (0:46:34)
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Have I pleased everybody? I certainly have not. (0:46:42)
That's the price you pay. I had a father-in-law who said, when you're playing bridge, if you don't get set once in a while, you're not bidding high enough. So if you can't stand the heat, as Harry Truman said, get out of the kitchen. I can stand the heat, and I will continue to do it as long as I can. And I hope my kids will appreciate that I've made a real effort to educate lots of people. (0:47:11)
With A, a concern about how do you get at truth. B, a willingness to stand up and be counted when you've done your homework. And C, a recognition of how important it is, if you can do something, that helps society to do it. Don't hold back. Do I think the world is a better place for my contribution to it? Tough question. I'd say yes. (0:47:40)
How do you measure it? I don't know. Who speaks for planet Earth? There is a challenge. I don't know who it should be. But I think we do need to start acting like grown-ups instead of spoiled brats. See, on a bad day, maybe we can qualify for admission to the Cosmic Preschool. Thank you very much for listening. I'll be signing books outside. Thank you. (0:49:22)
(2025-02-03)