Stanton Friedman

Stanton Friedman (1934-2019) was a nuclear physicist and arguably the most prominent scientific advocate for the extraterrestrial hypothesis of his era. He initiated the modern Roswell investigation, championed the Majestic 12 documents, and lectured for five decades as the self-described flying saucer physicist.

Friedman earned physics degrees at the University of Chicago and worked 14 years on classified nuclear aircraft, rocket, and power programs for companies including General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, and McDonnell Douglas before becoming a full-time lecturer in 1970.

In 1978 Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who recovered the Roswell debris, launching the case's modern era and feeding the 1980 book The Roswell Incident. He co-wrote Crash at Corona, developed the two-crash-site analysis, and co-authored (with Kathleen Marden) a leading insider account of the Betty and Barney Hill case. He was the leading proponent of the Majestic 12 documents' authenticity, defending them in book-length detail against document experts who called them forgeries. He debated skeptics relentlessly and coined the phrase "the Cosmic Watergate."

Friedman argued the evidence for extraterrestrial visitation was overwhelming to anyone who examined it, and that governments practiced a decades-long cover-up. His contribution is investigative: without his Marcel interview there is no modern Roswell, and his witness-development methods built much of the crash retrieval literature.

Skeptics, and some fellow researchers, faulted his MJ-12 advocacy after documented anachronisms surfaced, and his Roswell witness roster included people later shown unreliable. Friedman answered every critic at length and never conceded the core. His civility in doing so was widely noted on both sides.

Friedman died in 2019. His papers went to the University of New Brunswick, near his longtime Canadian home, and his lecture catchphrase still frames the debate he helped create.