I met Stanton at a UFO con, he signed my book and opened my eyes. It was the way he talked about the subject.  Stanton Terry Friedman (July 29, 1934 – May 13, 2019) spent the first act of his life in the engine rooms of American innovation and the second dragging the UFO debate into the light of evidence. A nuclear physicist by training, he worked through the golden age of advanced aerospace and atomic R&D—at places like General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, and McDonnell Douglas—on projects that ranged from nuclear‑powered aircraft to fission and fusion rockets and compact power plants for space applications. He was the consummate insider: a member of the American Nuclear Society, American Physical Society, and AIAA, fluent in the language of budgets, mass fractions, and mission risk. Then, around 1970, he did something almost unimaginable for a scientist with his résumé: he left full‑time physics to investigate flying saucers.

Friedman insisted on that phrase—“flying saucers.” It wasn’t a provocation, it was a filter. “Flying saucers are, by definition, unidentified flying objects, but very few unidentified flying objects are flying saucers,” he liked to say. “I am interested in the latter, not the former.” He wanted to separate the boring majority of misidentifications from a stubborn residue of high‑quality cases: multiple witnesses, radar corroboration, trace evidence, or consistent maneuvering that challenged conventional aerodynamics. Where others saw stigma, Friedman saw an empirical problem: if even a fraction of the best cases were what they appeared to be, then humanity was brushing up against a technologically superior presence—and the only responsible response was disciplined inquiry.

That posture made him the single most important civilian catalyst for the modern Roswell revival. Friedman was the first civilian investigator to document the Roswell crash site in a way that re‑opened dormant leads and forced a reluctant public conversation. He tracked witnesses, sifted documents, and wrote relentlessly, helping turn a localized 1947 incident into a litmus test for national transparency and scientific curiosity. By the time he testified before a U.S. House committee in 1968 and later appeared twice at the United Nations, he had already framed the stakes: the evidence suggested Earth was being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles—and institutions were failing to engage that possibility with the rigor it deserved.

Part of Friedman’s staying power was technical credibility. He didn’t just say “advanced propulsion”; he talked about what that might entail. He argued that a subset of reports fit the profile of exotic field propulsion—he often referenced magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) concepts—where ionized gases interact with magnetic fields to generate thrust without moving parts. MHD thrusters have been experimented with in water and air; scale and power remain hard limits. Friedman didn’t claim to have a working alien reactor in his pocket; he argued that the claims worth taking seriously implied engineering regimes beyond ours, not magic. He was equally comfortable demystifying interstellar travel for lay audiences: even at a modest fraction of light speed, ships with long mission durations become plausible for a civilization a notch older than ours. The fuel isn’t necessarily chemical; nuclear pulse, fusion, antimatter, and beamed‑sail concepts move the conversation from “impossible” to “engineering and energy‑economics.”

Friedman also became a lightning rod in the documentary wars. His position on the Majestic 12 papers—after years of checking signatures, typefaces, and provenance—was not that they were certainly authentic, but that there were no substantive grounds to dismiss them outright. For some, that was heresy. For Friedman, it was consistency: you don’t throw away a datum because it’s uncomfortable; you interrogate it until it confesses—to truth or to fraud. The same impulse animated his engagement with the most famous abduction case in American history, the Betty and Barney Hill encounter. Under hypnosis, Betty Hill drew a star map she said she’d been shown; schoolteacher and amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish constructed a 3D model of nearby sunlike stars and found a striking match from the perspective of Zeta Reticuli (~39 light years away). The fit was debated intensely in Astronomy magazine (December 1974). Friedman didn’t claim the map proved anything beyond reasonable doubt; he argued that the non‑trivial statistical fit warranted open scientific attention.

His public debates became cultural touchstones. In 2004, on Coast to Coast AM, he sparred with Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute. Both believed intelligent life likely exists elsewhere; Shostak doubted it was currently visiting Earth. Friedman countered that the best cases—multiple independent observations, radar returns, structured craft—looked like exactly that. The exchange crystallized a durable divide: radio telescopes scanning the sky versus shoe‑leather investigators chasing witnesses, documents, and debris. Friedman straddled both worlds, speaking at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups across 50 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces, and 16 countries. He published 80‑plus papers, consulted for industry, submitted testimony to Congress, and showed up—again and again—where the conversation needed structure more than spin.

He also wrote books that cut across the grain of received wisdom. One of the most emblematic was his co‑authored “Science Was Wrong,” a tour through the graveyard of confident scientific proclamations later overturned by data. The point wasn’t to sneer at science—it was to defend its actual method: hypotheses live or die by evidence, not by prestige or popular mood. In Friedman’s hands, “Science Was Wrong” became an ethical argument for ufology: don’t confuse the conservatism of institutions with the conservatism of method. A real conservative method tests everything, including low‑prior possibilities, when the data refuse to behave. Roswell, the Hill map, even the MJ‑12 saga—he wanted them examined with the same stubborn empiricism that the aerospace projects of his youth demanded.

If you’re looking for the easy caricature of Stanton Friedman, you won’t find it in his own words. He never sold certainty. He sold standards. He drew a bright line between debunking and skepticism—one closes its eyes, the other opens them wider. He spoke the language of chain‑of‑custody and provenance. He emphasized that most UFO reports dissolve under scrutiny; a small remainder do not. He recognized that stigma is a form of methodological bias, and he spent much of his life lowering it—one campus lecture, one televised debate, one meticulously footnoted paper at a time.

Timeline:

Video:

Conclusion:

His legacy is paradoxical and powerful. Many who disagreed with him on Roswell or MJ‑12 still credit him with professionalizing a field that needed adult supervision. He helped give ufology a backbone—technical, archival, and ethical—and he left behind a template that today’s UAP researchers still use: provenance first, physics second, narrative last. In an era when “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is too often recited as a spell to ward off hard work, Friedman asked the better question: what counts as extraordinary evidence, and what are we doing to collect it?

Representative links:

• Roswell incident: Wikipedia
• Betty & Barney Hill case: Wikipedia
• Majestic 12 overview: Wikipedia
• Coast to Coast AM (debates/interviews): Coast to Coast AM
• SETI perspective: Seth Shostak – SETI Institute
• Professional orgs: ANS | APS | AIAA

Tags (comma‑separated)

• Stanton T. Friedman, Roswell, Majestic 12, Betty and Barney Hill, Zeta Reticuli, magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, interstellar travel, nuclear physicist, flying saucer, Coast to Coast AM, UN testimony, congressional testimony, Science Was Wrong

Hashtags

• #StantonFriedman #FlyingSaucerPhysicist #Roswell #Majestic12 #BettyAndBarneyHill #ZetaReticuli #UAPScience #InterstellarTravel #MHDPropulsion #ScienceWasWrong