"The Flying Saucer Physicist" · 1934–2019
Stanton Terry Friedman was born on 29 July 1934 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in nuclear physics from the University of Chicago and worked for fourteen years as a nuclear physicist for companies including General Electric, Aerojet General Nucleonics, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW, and McDonnell Douglas, working on advanced projects including nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear reactors. He was cleared to work on classified nuclear propulsion programmes.
In 1970, having become convinced that the UFO evidence warranted serious scientific investigation, he left industry and became a full-time UFO researcher, lecturer, and author — a decision he never regretted and sustained until his death on 13 May 2019 in Ottawa, Canada. He gave over 700 lectures at universities, colleges, and professional societies in all 50 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces, and 16 other countries. He called himself the "Flying Saucer Physicist" with cheerful self-awareness, insisting that his scientific credentials equipped him to evaluate the evidence in ways that armchair debunkers could not.
Friedman's most historically significant contributions were his pioneering work on the Roswell incident and the Majestic-12 (MJ-12) documents. He was the first civilian researcher to interview Jesse Marcel Sr., the intelligence officer who handled the Roswell debris in 1947, and his initial investigation in 1978 established the evidentiary and testimonial framework that all subsequent Roswell research has built upon. He spent decades interviewing witnesses, obtaining documents, and constructing the argument that the Roswell event involved the recovery of at least one non-human craft.
The MJ-12 documents — a set of alleged classified government papers describing a secret committee established by President Truman to manage UFO-related matters — were provided to UFO researcher Jaime Shandera in 1984. Friedman spent years authenticating the documents through detailed comparison with known historical records, arguing that while some documents in the larger MJ-12 corpus were demonstrably fraudulent, the original Eisenhower Briefing Document showed no anachronisms or inconsistencies that ruled out authenticity. His analysis, documented in Top Secret/Majic (1996), remains the most thorough positive evaluation of the documents.
Friedman coined the phrase "COSMIC WATERGATE" to describe his central thesis: that the U.S. government has engaged in a deliberate, sustained conspiracy to conceal proof of extraterrestrial visitation — a conspiracy he regarded as more significant, complex, and consequential than any other in American history. He consistently argued from primary sources: declassified documents, congressional records, flight performance data, and witness testimony rather than speculation or inference.
His books — including Crash at Corona (with Don Berliner, 1992), Top Secret/Majic (1996), and Flying Saucers and Science (2008) — remain essential references in the field. He debated prominent sceptics including Philip Klass and Carl Sagan, and his willingness to engage openly with the best counter-arguments made his work unusually rigorous by the standards of popular UFO literature. He was, by any measure, the dominant figure in American UFO research for the last three decades of the twentieth century.
"The evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. Some of the biggest 'don't bother me with facts, my mind is made up' people are the arch-sceptics."