Stanton Friedman

Stanton Terry Friedman was born on 29 July 1934 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He studied physics at the University of Chicago — the same institution that had produced the first nuclear reactor and many of the Manhattan Project scientists — earning his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in physics. He then worked for fourteen years as a nuclear physicist on advanced propulsion projects for some of the largest defence contractors in America: General Electric, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, Aerojet General Nucleonics and McDonnell Douglas. The projects he worked on included nuclear aircraft and fission and fusion rockets — classified work at the cutting edge of post-war propulsion technology.

In 1967 he gave his first public lecture on UAP phenomena. From that point forward he described himself as a "flying saucer physicist" — a phrase that was partly self-deprecating and partly a deliberate provocation, asserting that the question of non-human craft deserved the attention of credentialed physicists rather than being left to enthusiasts and sensationalists. Over the following five decades he gave over 700 lectures at colleges and universities, appeared on hundreds of television and radio programmes, and became the most recognisable scientific face of the UAP disclosure movement.

His most consequential contribution was his investigation of the Roswell incident — the July 1947 crash of an unidentified object near Roswell, New Mexico, which the Army Air Force initially described as a "flying disc" before issuing a correction claiming it was a weather balloon. Friedman was the first civilian investigator to systematically track down and interview witnesses from the original incident, beginning in 1978. His work recovered testimony from dozens of military and civilian witnesses who consistently described the recovery of non-human material and non-human bodies — testimony that the official weather balloon explanation could not account for.

He relocated to Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada in 1980, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He died on 13 May 2019 while travelling to a speaking engagement — still working, at 84, on the project he had pursued for more than fifty years.

The Roswell incident of July 1947 is the most investigated and most contested event in UAP history. Friedman's contribution was not to originate the story — the initial press release from the Army Air Force's 509th Bomb Group was itself the origin — but to systematically recover the eyewitness testimony that had been suppressed or forgotten in the thirty years since the incident.

Beginning in 1978 with his interview of Jesse Marcel — the Air Force intelligence officer who had handled the recovered material and who consistently described it as unlike anything he had encountered in his military career — Friedman built a witness base of over 600 individuals with direct or indirect knowledge of the incident. The consistent elements of their testimony included: an impact site north of Roswell that produced unusual metallic debris with anomalous properties; a second, more sensitive site where intact craft and non-human bodies were recovered; a rapid and forceful military operation to secure both sites and impose secrecy on all involved; and a cover story — initially a weather balloon, later elaborated into claims about Project Mogul high-altitude balloons — that witnesses consistently said did not match what they had seen.

Friedman's approach to Roswell was that of a physicist applying evidential standards: he was interested in the testimony that could be corroborated, the physical descriptions that could be evaluated against known materials science, and the institutional behaviour of the military units involved. He was explicitly not claiming that every detail of every witness account was accurate — he was arguing that the collective weight of testimony, from credible witnesses with specific knowledge, could not be explained by the official account.