Stanton Friedman Slams Author of Roswell Initiative
The following was written by Stanton Friedman on July 21, 1997. It is part of The Stanton Friedman Collection as archived here on The Black Vault.
Kent Jeffrey, using perfect timing just before the Roswell 50th anniversary celebration, dropped a bomb on the very people who trusted and supported him, and his intentions with the Roswell Initiative, which he authored. Incredibly, he wrote a long dissertation on how he now believes the government’s lame versions of what took place in Roswell. It was a shock to the UFO community to say the least. (The Roswell Initiative is contained at the end of this general segment.)
The ridiculous leaps to conclusions and false assumptions are as obviously fatally flawed as what he did on the autopsy film, which is also contained elsewhere on this site.
In the following article Stan Friedman exposes Jeffrey’s paper for what it is… WORTHLESS!
Dave Vetterick
Kent Jeffrey’s anti-Roswell conclusions (MUFON Journal, June 1997) are based on the same kind of false reasoning that led to his pro-Roswell views: don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up; be enthusiastic and ready to put ones money where ones mouth is, but don’t have the facts in hand first; don’t bother finding out how security works; believe what one wants to believe; do one’s research by proclamation rather than investigation. Select from the data available to back up your conclusions and ignore the facts that don’t.
Kent stated on a recent radio show with me that he has never had a security clearance and his article certainly shows over and over again that he doesn’t understand that higher classification info cannot be presented in lower classification documents, that having a particular level clearance is not enough to gain access to classified information, that one must have a need-to-know for that information, that people with high-level security clearances do not pass classified information on to people not having a clearance and need-to-know for the information.
Kent decided the Santilli footage was fraudulent because of the curled phone cord. I asked if he had checked with the phone company. He said he didn’t need to. He knew there were no curled cords in 1947. He was wrong. The patent was granted in 1937 and production began in 1938. I tried to keep him from wasting his money on attorneys because no evidence had been presented that Frank Kaufman had played any role in intelligence in 1947 (he was a civilian clerk on the base) or needed legal counsel. Kent didn’t need any evidence because he and his father had a good visit with Frank. So he wasted thousands of dollars.
I tried to get him to understand that it was ridiculous to jump from talking about events in New Mexico in July 1947, to demanding the President declassify everything learned about ETs since 1947 which might, of course, include technology of great importance from a military standpoint. I didn’t sign the Roswell Initiative because I do not believe technical data (defensive or offensive) should be put on the table for the Saddam Husseins of the world. Remember that one can’t tell one’s friends without telling one’s enemies.
Kent can’t seem to understand the utter foolishness of his comment that information about ETs is “knowledge of profound importance to which we are all entitled.” Important? Certainly. But why does he think we are all entitled? There is an annual black budget of $30 billion. Our elected representatives obviously believe there is a great deal of information to which we are not entitled. Other foolish nonsense includes “The existence of a crashed alien spacecraft would have been much more of a social and scientific issue than a national security issue.” Is there no understanding that the government was confronted with a vehicle having exotic flight capability (clearly potentially useful for weapons delivery, for defense, for reconnaissance) whose origin wasn’t known, whose purpose wasn’t known, and whose technology would be useful, not only to the US, but to our enemies? What weapons did the aliens have? Would aliens work with our enemies? Would they be attacking Earth? These are major security issues.
Kent hardly mentions the security level of the many documents to which he refers and which he proclaims would have certainly told about a crashed saucer. He acts as if he has seen all the relevant documents and as though all members of the advisory board would have had a need-to-know for compartmentalized information. Only one document, as it happens, was TOP SECRET and it dealt with “Analysis of Incidents,” not analysis of wreckage; two very different areas of technological investigation. I have been to seventeen Archives now. At none of them did I have access to Special Compartmented Information rated, for example, TOP SECRET/UMBRA or ULTRA, or MAJIC. W.B. Smith, in a 1950 TOP SECRET memo, said the matter of flying saucers was the most classified subject in the USA, even more than the H-bomb. Arid Kent thinks we are all entitled to know all about them!!!
Kent talked to three former officers of the FTD — none of whom were at Wright in 1947. He insults them by saying that if they had known anything highly classified about crashed saucers, they would have told him (no clearance and no need-to-know) what they knew. The very reason they might have been so kind to him is that they wanted to be sure to dissuade someone so naïve that there WAS anything. Furthermore, I have several times been inside a vault at FTD when I was a project engineer on a contract with them for Aerojet General Nucleonics. It was a very compartmentalized place. The primary focus at FTD was paper work from foreign scientists, from spies, from intelligence analysts. I have trouble believing it was ever FTD’s job to go from analyzing wreckage to developing new technology. U-2, Stealth, the SR-71, and a myriad of other technologies were devised by industry under contract to major CIA or USAF or NAVY or Army groups; NOT at FTD.
Read More – Stanton Friedman Slams Author of Roswell Initiative
Update on Operation Majestic 12 Documents
The following was written by Stanton Friedman in April 2004. It is part of The Stanton Friedman Collection as archived here on The Black Vault.
It should be no surprise that the various highly classified Operation Majestic 12 or Majic-12 or MJ-12 documents have been attacked since their existence was first made public. Equally unsurprising is the fact that a number of phony or hoax or fraudulent MJ-12 documents have been released as well. Clearly if the original documents: The Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) of November 18, 1952; the Truman-Forrestal Memo (TFM) of Sept. 24, 1947 (page 8 of the EBD); and the Cutler-Twining Memo (CTM) of July 14, 1954 (found in July, 1985, in Box 189 of Entry 267 of Record Group 341 at the National Archives by Jaime Shandera and William Moore) are genuine, then the consequences are enormous. Aliens are visiting earth; the government has recovered at least one crashed saucer and several alien bodies; and a very significant group of outstanding American scientists and military leaders has collected, reviewed, evaluated, and kept secret all kinds of information about the visitors. Man is NOT alone and the government has covered up the biggest story of the millennium at least since 1947.
Ten years after the 1984 receipt of a roll of exposed 35mm film by Jaime Shandera at his Burbank, California home and his efforts with William Moore and myself to evaluate them, a new roll of film showed up in the mailbox of aviation and science writer (and longtime ufologist) Don Berliner. This contained many pages of SOM 1-01: Majestic 12 Group SPECIAL OPERATIONS MANUAL: “Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal.” Meanwhile Tim Cooper, a researcher in Big Bear Lake, California, began receiving loads of supposedly related MJ-12 documents. There would appear to be no connection between the original three documents and the SOM 1.01 (Mailed from Wisconsin rather than Albuquerque, NM) or the mass of Tim Cooper documents which were usually in the form of Xerox copies, often only legible with difficulty and received by him by mail or dropped off at his PO Box.
THE DEBUNKERS
There seem to be several distinct groups attacking the documents:
A. There are those who believe (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that no alien spacecraft have ever visited Earth. Therefore, any documents saying that they have must be false. No need to do a detailed investigation, to spend time in Archives, research the people involved, etc. THEY MUST BE FRAUDULENT!!
B. There are those who are convinced that some UFOs are indeed alien spacecraft, but that no saucer crashed near Roswell because they haven’t found any other classified documents indicating any have. Karl Pflock in his book (Ref.1) epitomizes this approach. If no saucer crashed at Roswell, then the documents must be fake.
C. There are several former military people who are convinced that the documents must be false because the style, format, details, etc. do not match what they would have expected them to be based on their military service from the 1960s onward. This ignores the many changes in office procedures (copy machines, word processors, etc.) and the fact that the White House is a civilian organization not a military one.
D. There are a lot of armchair theorists who think they can make judgements without doing any homework at all.
In much of the discussion one finds the use of the four basic rules for debunking of any controversial idea:
1. What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them.
2. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.
3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people; it is easier.
4. Do one’s research by proclamation; investigation is too much trouble.
Another important rule for some of the attackers is that “Absence of Evidence is Evidence for Absence.” Karl Pflock and others cite numerous documents, mostly only classified Secret, that say nothing about Roswell or MAJESTIC 12. This, of course, neglects the fact that there are still numerous documents from the Truman and Eisenhower eras 1945-1961 that are still classified, that we rarely see documents that have classification stamps of TOP SECRET Code Word (TSCW). I was told in November, 2003, by an archivist at the Ike Library that they still have about 300,000 pages of classified documents. We know that the NSA classified 156 UFO documents (found in response to a Judge’s directive) as TOP SECRET UMBRA when they finally released a highly expurgated version (about two lines per page are not covered with Wite-Out), supposedly because that information is about sources and methods. Why would it be listed under UFOs if only 5% is about UFOs?
In addition, as a result of my spending a lot of time at twenty different Document Archives from coast to coast, I can say that almost never does one find TSCW documents about anything. The best documents for comparison with the EBD would be the four National Security Briefings for President-Elect Eisenhower presented by DCI Walter B. Smith in the time period between Ike’s election on November 4, 1952, and January 9, 1953, when Smith informed President Truman of his security briefings for Ike before and after the election. Unfortunately, despite my FOIA request to the CIA and a subsequent appeal to their response (“We have nothing in response to your request” even though I gave the dates and times of two of the briefings), we have no such documents for comparison.
Read More – Update on Operation Majestic 12 Documents
Government UFO Lies
The following was written by Stanton Friedman in May 2005. It is part of The Stanton Friedman Collection as archived here on The Black Vault.
ABSTRACT
For almost sixty years the public has been hearing about flying saucers and then UFOs. Press coverage has ebbed and flowed, but polls have always shown a very high awareness score. Motion pictures, tabloids, and TV programs have picked up the slack with a mélange of fiction and some truth. Unfortunately, much of what we have been told by the “powers that be” has been false. Many different government agencies have shared in the misrepresentation and have provided outright LIES as well. These include the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, United States Air Force, etc. The press and certain other academic and supposedly scientific groups, such as SETI (Silly Effort To Investigate) have often blindly accepted and promulgated nonsense without any effort to get at truth. Hopefully, the LIES presented in this paper will help cause these protectors of the public to do their job: seek and present truth.
BACKGROUND
For many years much of the focus in serious ufology has been on the government’s cover-up of UFO information. I can guarantee a laugh when at my lectures I show the 1980 NSA 21-page legal-sized TOP SECRET UMBRA justification (a legal affidavit) for withholding 156 UFO documents in response to an FOIA suit by CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy). Initially it was 75% blacked out. I turned page after page on which one could read nothing. This also went over well on television since one needn’t read anything. I also quote from the November 18, 1980, response by Federal Judge Gerhart A. Gesell, who wasn’t allowed to see any of the disputed documents. His comment in his ruling was that “The public interest in disclosure is far outweighed by the sensitive nature of the materials and the obvious effect on national security their release may well entail.” The Federal Court of Appeals agreed with him and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. In about 1997 the NSA decided that because of the new Executive Order 12958, making it much tougher to continue to keep documents more than twenty-five years old classified, they released a much more lightly censored affidavit with only 20% blacked out. In addition they “released” all 156 UFO documents.
Unfortunately, they used Wite-Out to cover-up all but one or two lines per page. Whited out pages don’t have quite the same impact on television as solid black areas. A number of people in ufology then gave me a hard time saying that now it was clear that there was no cover-up. They reluctantly admitted that one couldn’t read what was under the Wite-Out. Still they insisted, per the NSA, that everything covered up was just about Sources and Methods, which by law could not be released. They also took note of the fact that the lines one could read often said “Probably a Balloon” after the mention of a UFO. This seems highly unlikely considering that NSA’s job is to monitor foreign military communications. Why was the material filed under UFOs, if there was nothing of substance? I should point out that I have very quietly talked to a number of former NSA people who told me they often intercepted UFO reports from foreign pilots.
Another important aspect of the cover-up is the October 20, 1969, statement by USAF Brigadier General Carroll Bolender, while reviewing Project Blue Book, with which he had no previous connection: “Moreover reports of UFOs which could effect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 and Air Force Manual 55-11 and are not part of the Blue Book System.” Two paragraphs later he noted “However, as already stated, reports of UFOs which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.” I spoke with Bolender and it was clear that he understood the distinction between civilian reports and ones which could effect national security. Clearly the sightings of most interest are the ones that could effect national security. Blue Book wasn’t even on the distribution list for sightings reported under JANAP 146 or AF Manual 55-11. I well remember the frustration expressed by Blue Book Scientific consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek when I told him about the Bolender memo at a West Coast MUFON Symposium in 1979. He felt very used.
But if they weren’t part of Project Blue Book, where were the important cases documented? Why haven’t we been told about them? Why does the USAF always respond to queries about UFOs by referring to Blue Book and the fact that it was announced as being closed in December, 1969? I have heard, for example, of flying saucers being observed going right down the runway of a Strategic Air Command base. Unfortunately, my informants don’t provide classified documents. There is testimony, but no proof. I must admit it is also true that people have found plenty of Project Blue Book sightings that were brushed off by Blue Book that, upon much more careful investigation, turned out to be significant cases. Dr. James McDonald in his congressional testimony (Ref. 1) talked about some of these. Brad Sparks and Jan Aldrich of Project 1947 have also been working on these sorts of cases. USAF Pilot manuals still have instructions for reporting UFOs despite the USAF still claiming they now have no interest in UFOs.
In this paper what I intend to do is provide numerous examples of flat out LIES by various government agencies and individuals about UFOs.
LIES about Roswell
LIES about the recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, in July, 1947, have gone on for fifty-eight years. Evening newspapers across the USA from Chicago west on July 8, 1947, carried front page headlines stating that the government had recovered a flying saucer on a ranch outside Roswell. That the cover-up went into effect quickly is shown by the full-width front page headlines later that same day in the Los Angeles Herald Express “Army Finds Flying Saucer.” In smaller print on the next line the LIE was in place: “General Believes it is Radar Weather Gadget.” Earlier, newspapers east of California only had the “finds saucer” story. Within just a few hours of the press release from Roswell announcing the find, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, then Commander of the Eighth Air Force based at Ft. Worth Air Field in Texas was LYING to the press and the public that it was just a radar reflector balloon combination. Pictures were taken in his office showing phony wreckage not matching at all the description given by Major Jesse Marcel who had retrieved a small part of the wreckage located by rancher Mack Brazel “last week” according to all the July 8 stories. Ramey really had chutzpah since he was holding a folded piece of paper in his hand with printing on it that Dr. David Rudiak has deciphered including such phrases as “victims of the wreck.”
The Army Air Force solidified the weather balloon radar gadget explanatory LIE with the launching of such a device for the press over at Alamogordo Army Air Field on July 9. The full-width July 10 front page headline of the Alamogordo News, with three related pictures, was “Fantasy of ‘Flying Disc’ Explained Here.” There was a 24-column-inch front page article. It was accepted, though it was perfectly obvious that the weather balloons could not explain all the sightings of high speed objects such as those observed by Kenneth Arnold on June 24.
It took until 1994 for the USAF to make a preemptive strike against the GAO, searching for Roswell information for congressman Steven Schiff, by finally admitting that they had LIED about the weather balloon explanation. They LIED again to do it, now falsely, in a two-inch-thick volume The Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (Ref. 2 ) by USAF Colonel Richard Weaver (he provided the fiction). He claimed that the Roswell wreckage had been a super secret Mogul balloon train found on June 14, 1947, by rancher Brazel. In the first place, June 14 is hardly “last week” from July 8. In the second place, the characteristics of the wreckage described by witnesses don’t match Mogul balloons. For the latter the paper-backed foil could easily be torn, the balsa wood sticks were easily broken, cut, and burned. The I-beams described by Jesse Marcel could not be broken, cut or burned. In the third place, it was claimed that the unusual symbols described by people like Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. were from a toy manufacturer’s tape used to hold the radar targets together. Isn’t it amazing that the Air Force has not been able to show a picture of any such tape nor are such symbols visible in the high-resolution photos taken in Ramey’s office?
Read More – Government UFO Lies
UFOs: Challenge to SETI Specialists
The following was written by Stanton Friedman in May 2002. It is part of The Stanton Friedman Collection as archived here on The Black Vault.
Major news media and many members of the scientific community have taken strongly to the radio-telescope-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program as espoused by its charismatic leaders, but not supported by any evidence whatsoever. In turn, perhaps understandably, they feel it necessary to attack the ideas of alien visitors (UFOs) as though they were based on tabloid nonsense instead of on far more evidence than has been provided for SETI. One might hope, vainly I am afraid, that they would be concerned with The Search for Extraterrestrial Visitors (SETV). I would hereby like to challenge the SETI specialists, members of the scientific community, and the media to recognize the overwhelming evidence and significant consequences of alien visits and to expose the serious deficiencies of the SETI-related claims. I have publicly and privately offered to debate any of them. No takers so far.
Here are my challenges for the SETI SPECIALISTS (SS):
1. Why is it that SS make proclamations about how much energy it would take for interstellar travel when they have no professional competence, training, or awareness of the relevant engineering literature in this area? As it happens, the required amount of energy is entirely dependent on the details of the trip and CANNOT be determined from basic physics. If one makes enough totally inappropriate assumptions, as academic astronomers have repeatedly done down through history in their supposedly scientific calculations about flight, one reaches ridiculous conclusions. But it is not necessary, for example, to limit the flight to 1G acceleration, or to provide all the energy needed for the round trip at the launch, or to use an utterly foolish trip profile (as devised by a Nobel Prize winning Harvard physicist) that involves accelerating at 1G for half the outward bound portion and the decelerating at 1G for the second half, etc. Do note that it only takes one year at 1G to reach close to c.
Cosmic freeloading can be very, very helpful in reducing fuel requirements and has been used for all our deep space missions such as Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, Cassini, etc. A splendid example of the wrong assumptions to make was provided by Dr. John William Campbell1, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of Alberta, in 1941, when he attempted to compute the required initial launch weight of a chemical rocket able to get a man to the moon and back. Our successful trips to the moon beginning in 1969, still with chemical rockets, showed that the weight he “scientifically” calculated was too high by a factor of 300 Million!! Dr. Alexander Bickerton2 in 1926 proclaimed that it would be impossible to give anything sufficient energy to place it in orbit around the earth. Professor Simon Newcomb3 “proved” in October, 1903, that it would be impossible for a man to fly except with the help of balloons. This was two months before the first flight by the Wright Brothers (two very sharp bicycle mechanics). These three bright professors made a whole host of totally inappropriate assumptions because of their ignorance of the technical situations with which they were faced. They hadn’t read the ample literature available to any professional seeking truth.
For example, Dr. Campbell assumed a single stage chemical rocket, launched vertically and limited to 1G acceleration. He assumed much too low an exhaust velocity. The rocket had to carry a huge amount of fuel for use in the retrorocket supposedly required to slow down the rocket upon return to Earth. For Apollo we used multi-stage rockets (reducing system weight at each stage) launched to the East from near the equator (to take advantage of the Earth’s rotation), a peak acceleration of many Gs (the faster to orbit, the less the losses to gravitation), the moon’s gravitational field (to provide some free energy going in) and earth’s atmosphere to do the deceleration upon approaching the earth, as highlighted, for example, in the movie Apollo 13. Cleverness was more important than power.
The exhaust velocity was certainly much higher than assumed by Dr. Campbell. Of course Campbell knew nothing about fission or fusion rockets (on both of which I have worked). The latter using D-He3 reactions exhaust charged particles which can be directed electromagnetically and are born with 10 million times as much energy per particle as can be obtained in chemical rockets. Most academics in my experience and in their publications (i.e. Krauss 4) are ignorant of the fact that the most powerful fission rocket reactor propulsion system (Phoebus 2B, made by Los Alamos) operated at a power level of 4,400 Megawatts before 1970. Man has produced many controlled fusion reactions. See Luce5 about fusion rockets. Any study of the history of technological development reveals that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. Pocket calculators are not built with vacuum tubes. Supersonic flight is not achieved with propellers. Lasers are not just better light bulbs. In short, the future is definitely NOT a mere extrapolation of the past.
2. Why do SS assume that radio is the ultimate means of long distance communication, when we have only had this kind of technology for roughly 100 years? Just down the galactic street there are two sun-like stars (Zeta l and Zeta 2 Reticuli) only 37 light years away and a billion years older than the sun. Of great interest is the fact that they are less than 1 light year apart from each other. It is good to see recent recognition of the fact that we can already, with our primitive technology, create laser signals able to be observed by other civilizations in the neighborhood. Optical SETI is coming in to its own. But remember progress comes from doing things differently. What new communication techniques will we master in just 50 or 100 years??
3. Why do SS make proclamations about how aliens would behave, when, as physical science professionals, they have no training, experience, or special insights as to how Earthlings, no less aliens, would behave, or what their motivations are. One might consult psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, lawyers, nurses, etc, but radio astronomers?? This is a field which, by its nature, has little to do with people other than those directly involved. We hear such comments as that aliens, once radio contact is established, would teach us about all the secrets of the universe. Just why would an advanced technological civilization share its secrets with a primitive society whose major activity (judging by how its wealth is spent) would certainly appear to be tribal warfare and for whom every new frontier is a new place to do battle? Earthlings killed about 50 million other Earthlings during WW II and destroyed 1700 cities. Currently almost $1trillion per year is spent on the military while 30,000 children die needlessly every day of preventable diseases and starvation.