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July 27, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:02
Edition 167 - Stanton Friedman

Marking the 80th birthday of the world's most famous UFO investigator...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world.
On the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, here up north in the old northern hemisphere, we are dealing with a situation that we're not that used to.
Intense heat.
Truth of it is that in recent years when we get it, we really get it.
And here in London, we've had quite a lot of temperature days where it's been like 30-odd degrees in the 90s Fahrenheit, low 80s.
And cumulatively in a building, if you don't have air conditioning, and most of us don't here, certainly, in the kind of level of accommodation that I'm resided in, then it really builds up.
And the nights are hot, and it's hard to sleep, so it kind of catches up with you after a while.
But you know what's going to happen?
People are complaining about this now, but come the winter here, if we get more storms and floods or we go back to a freeze-up, they'll be complaining about that too.
So I guess you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
As they say.
Now, for me, I'm recording this on a day when I was up at 4 a.m. to do my show on BBC Berkshire that I'm doing at the moment on Saturday mornings, very early.
And I'm recording this in the afternoon.
So I've got two important things with me at the moment.
One, a big cup of black coffee, very strong, and the other one, a bottle of water.
And I shall be dipping into those in equal measure during this show.
No shout-outs on this edition for a very good reason.
We have a huge guest on this show, one of the most famous people that any show of this kind will ever speak to.
His name is Stanton T. Friedman.
Stan Friedman.
And I guess if you're listening to this, you probably know who he is.
They call him the father of modern ufology.
He's been doing it for longer than most people, and he's been doing it more intensively.
He was there when the others weren't.
Stan is 80 years old the weekend that I'm recording this, so we're going to wish him a very happy birthday and many, many more years of doing whatever he wants to do.
He's in New Brunswick, Canada, so we'll cross to him very soon.
Like I say, no shout-outs this time, but I do want to say just a couple of things to a couple of people.
One is my newest listener, Matt Bevin, in Sydney, Australia, originally from the English Midlands.
Matt, good to have you there and apparently jogging with this show.
That's good.
I hear lots of stories of people on public transport and go to work, all sorts of stuff, and listening at work to this show.
So jogging's a new one.
Thank you.
Sue, thank you very much for your contacts lately for finding the show that I did on Talksport Radio when this show was on National British Radio about the hybrid, the hybrid we talked about on a recent edition of this show.
Sue has found that show and sent me a cassette copy.
Well, I do have a good cassette player, so what I'm going to do is try and process that and make it sound better, and hopefully if the sound quality is up to it, we'll be using it on a future edition, because that show was lost until Sue found it.
More and more people sending me shows that they have kept on tapes and mini-discs and various other storage media.
And it's really funny because in the days when I was doing that show, I was told that because it was Saturday night, the audience was not huge, which is why they used to try out many different formats there.
But all these years later, I am still hearing from people who say, by the way, I never missed one of your Saturday shows.
I mean, literally, and I'm not making this up.
I hear from people virtually every week or every other week.
And some of those people used to record the shows.
So there was a big audience there.
And I don't think they particularly measured it.
But we're doing far better now here on the internet, and we have total, complete freedom to do whatever we want.
So we're away from the mainstream media, and we're independently reaching you, which is what we are all about.
If you can make a donation to this show, by the way, please go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, devised and designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
You can make a donation there or send me an email about the show.
Give me your guest suggestions, whatever.
Or just simply, you know, say hi from whichever part of the world you're in, because we have listeners just about everywhere now.
And quickly, one other thing to address now is Fergal, who's been emailing me about Mike Dicken, who was a presenter on Talk Sport Radio and LBC Radio in London and Capital Radio and many other places.
Now, Mike Dicken, as far as I'm concerned, was the best talk broadcaster we ever produced.
A fantastic voice, a razor brain, the very best of us.
And Mike Dicken died in a car crash around the time that I was working with him at Talk Sport Radio in the UK, in his native Cornwall.
In fact, he used to do some of his programmes.
I don't know if you know this if you're in the UK.
But quite often he would be doing his Saturday late-night program that followed mine from Cornwall.
I liked Mike a great deal.
He was very good to me when I first arrived in London from Birmingham, years and years ago.
And Vergel just wanted to remark about him and the fact that nobody talks about him now.
Well, Vergel, we do.
And I will certainly never forget the debt that all of us as broadcasters owe to Mike Dicken, who was, as I say, a talk broadcaster you could put on air anywhere.
Check out on YouTube.
There may well be sound files of him.
His name was Mike Dicken.
Anyway, please keep your emails coming.
Thank you very much for your support.
Let's get to New Brunswick, Canada now, and I'm very excited to be catching up again with a man that I met in London many years ago.
And I'm pleased to get him on this show, Stanton T. Friedman.
Stan, thank you very much for coming on.
I'm delighted to be on.
I love radio.
I grew up with radio.
I can sit here in my pajamas and rove.
Isn't that nice?
Well, that's absolutely true.
You know, I sit there and during the week I work on one of the UK's many radio stations.
And I've done this for years.
I do morning drive news and various other things.
And the truth is that if I'm a bit rushed some mornings and I just throw on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, nobody who's listening to me knows that.
That's right.
I think they call it theater.
I had an old boss who used to say it's theater of the mind.
And I think that's probably true.
One of the strangest experiences of my life when we grew up in New Jersey, and my mother took my brother and me into New York, to Rockefeller Center, to listen to a big radio show that we used to listen to all the time.
You know, you got tickets to watch a radio show.
What a disappointment.
There are these people standing there reading scripts and a soundman over there.
That's not how they looked.
I knew how they looked.
Apropos of nothing at all, did you ever hear Garrison Keeler and the story of Cowboy Chuck?
Well, I've heard of Garrison Keiller.
I don't know.
All right, well, Cowboy Chuck is on Lake Wobegon days, and Cowboy Chuck was a cowboy character on the glory days of American radio, sort of 1930s or so.
And somebody who was a little disgruntled at the radio station decided to go in one night and retype all the scripts and make them faintly pornographic.
And this was a live show.
So literally, it's so funny.
I mean, I do recommend it.
It's the funniest thing.
The actors are standing there around the microphones, flipping over the pages and sweating because they don't know what's coming next.
But they were great days of radio.
And I think that radio is still the most communicative medium there is.
And of course, being 80 years of age, you've lived right through the electronic media growth, well, birth, growth, and development, haven't you?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And I still like radio.
And, you know, especially for long-distance contact with people elsewhere without having to go through a lot of trouble.
And I always, when people ask me, you don't mind doing a telephone interview for radio programs, I love it.
That's my style.
I like that.
And, you know, we have the coast to coast radio, the late night show here.
It goes all over.
And it's on, in my time when I do that show, it's typically 3 to 6 in the morning.
But at least I can do it in my pajamas.
I can relax, drink coffee, you know, I can enjoy myself by talking to people all over the world.
Well, that's the truth of it.
And I think that allows people, I think that kind of freedom allows people to open up in a way that if you had the full panoply of television in your home with the lights and the crews, nice though those people may be, you know, let me tell you, and I've only ever done voiceovers for television, it's good, it's fun, but it's just not the same as intimately speaking into a microphone.
And you'll never really get round that.
It's just them, however simple they make the video equipment, I don't think you'll ever get round that.
Now, they call you the father of modern ufology, and we joked, there's no reason why you should remember of that, but we laughed about that epithet, that name, when I met you face-to-face at Capitol Radio in London, a very, very brief meeting that we had, about 1998 or so, but we laughed about that.
How do you feel about that name, that title?
Well, when I started out, I was one of the youngest people in the field.
So it seems a little strange.
Some people call me the grandfather of money.
And I wasn't the first one down the pike, no question.
I am the original civilian investigator of the Roswell incident.
And, you know, I've been first on board with some other things.
But I don't mind it.
I'm not trying to derogate anybody else, but it's nice to be complemented that way.
I must take credit for trying to bring the skills that I picked up in industry into, you know, as a nuclear physicist, into ufology, as a ufologist, whatever that means to anybody.
Well, your collection of qualifications, your curriculum vitae, your resume, I was looking at it.
It's damned impressive.
The companies are all blue-chip companies, General Electric, General Motors Westinghouse, General Nucleonics, McDonnell, Douglas, and that's not all of them.
Well, you know, that's one of the things that I had going for me.
I've given more than 600 college lectures, and I've lectured in all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces and 18 other countries.
And I know that for some people, when they hear my qualifications, the companies I've worked for, some people will say, can't he hold a job?
Well, the programs got canceled.
It wasn't me.
But what I've tried to do is take advantage of the fact that people presume, perhaps not wisely, that companies like that wouldn't hire idiots.
You know what I mean?
Well, they tend not to because that's how they got rich.
Well, that's right.
And so I start off with an advantage that I'm not working for the Podunk grocery store.
On the other hand, those companies are fairly persnickety.
When you write something for them, when you do a report, they check on you.
You can't just publish anything.
It's got to go through a group of people who have to approve it.
Are you going to put the company name on it?
GE cares that their name not be associated with junk.
But the kicker is, I learned something in the fifth grade, believe it or not.
I had a teacher who was telling us that the solar system sits there and the planets go around the sun and that's it.
And I said, no, Ms. Gutkin, I just read in my encyclopedia, we bought them for 49 cents at the grocery store every month, a volume, that the whole solar system is moving around the galaxy 12 miles a second.
That number impressed me very much.
And she said, oh, no, no, no.
And she gave me a hard time.
I wasn't used to getting a hard time.
I was a good student.
And so the next day, I didn't argue with her.
The next day I brought in the encyclopedia.
And she reluctantly admitted, well, maybe that's the way it was, my portrayal, what the encyclopedia said.
Well, the lesson it taught me was have facts in hand before putting mouth in gear.
And I was in high school debating, we won a state championship down in New Jersey, and the same idea.
And so if I took controversial positions in industry, and occasionally there were some disputes about what was the right way to go about something, my view was always based on what are the facts?
Let's have them here.
And people ask me for advice.
If I want to give speeches about flying saucers, what are the rules?
I said, first, tell the truth.
Second, get your facts in hand before putting mouth in gear.
But here is a problem.
I'm a great one for veracity and I'm a great one for, you know, checking your facts.
I'm a journalist, and kind of professionally, we have to because somebody might sue us, and that's why we do.
But the problem is that the truth in ufology, the field you came to be part of, so much a part of, the truth depends on who you're talking to.
Well, that's right.
And so that's why I try to show people rather than tell people.
If I talk about nuclear rocket engines, here's a picture of one.
I worked on this one for Westinghouse.
I don't just talk about, oh, I worked on rockets.
I show you.
We looked at aircraft nuclear propulsion systems, and here's a picture of one.
Those are the jet engines down there, the reactors over there.
When I say that Carl Sagan, my University of Chicago classmate for three years, was totally wrong when he said that there are interesting UFO sightings that aren't reliable, there are reliable sightings that aren't interesting, but there are no interesting and reliable sightings.
I show the table of the data for the biggest study ever done for the United States Air Force.
Not by me, but the Air Force.
And the numbers show the higher the reliability of the sighting, just the opposite of what Carl said, the more likely to be unexplainable.
When I talk about other things like that, I use the data.
I show it.
And that's why I don't get a hard time.
I've had 11 hecklers in over 700 lectures, and I come on very strong.
And two of those hecklers were drunk, incidentally.
And I'm told you'll get more than that if you talk about sports, religion, politics.
I don't talk about those things, but that's what I'm told.
So the quotient of drunks and people not likely to listen to you is lower when you give a talk on this subject, is it?
Well, that's what I'm told.
Well, I kind of believe that, yeah.
Let me give you an example of a protest.
Guy comes up in a question-and-answer period.
I call on people.
They don't need written questions or anything.
And he started off great.
I've never heard so much nonsense in one night in my life.
Great beginning, you know.
And I said, can you be more specific, please, sir?
Well, you said that Betty and Barney Hill were taken to Zeta Reticuli and back in two hours.
I said, no, sir.
What I said was they were taken on board a craft.
They didn't go anywhere.
And he gave me two more of these you said that's, both of which were total nonsense.
Somebody in the audience shouts out, how about taking some sensible questions?
This guy gets up, walks out.
He spoke well.
He was dressed well.
I said, I'll take your question, but who was that?
Obviously, I had bothered him.
He was a professor of physics.
He hadn't heard what I said.
Really?
Boy, if a professor of physics can't check his facts, that's pretty poor lookout for the rest of us, isn't it?
Well, yeah, and the thing is, he started off with a viewpoint.
If there was anything to this subject, he would have known about it.
And so he wasn't listening for facts, for data, for evidence.
And one of the areas that there are several special areas for me that I bring to the table, so to speak, to the stage.
One is that I worked under security for 14 years for those big companies, GEGM, etc.
And I understand security.
I've been to 20 document archives, some of them many times.
You know, the Truman Library, the Eisenhower Library, the Kennedy Library, etc.
And I get people telling me some of the strangest things.
Well, governments can't keep secrets.
Everybody knows that.
I mean, Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI community said that the proof of that is what a lousy job was done by FEMA, Emergency Management Group, when Katrina, the hurricane, showed up.
And look how badly the post office is run.
Well, none of those things have anything to do with governments keeping secrets.
Dr. Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, fine astronomer, head of the Hayden Planetarium.
He's doing the Cosmos series where Carl Sagan had done it before.
He said the proof that governments can't keep secrets is how much we know about President Clinton's genitalia.
That's a very funny remark, but it has nothing to do with the NSA, the CIA, the NRO.
You know, they don't seem to understand that there's data there that is not part of the academic world, if you will.
So I worked under security.
I've got people who told me everything is declassified after 20 years, which is nonsense.
Well, that's not true, is it?
I mean, documents are released, but bits are redacted.
It happens here and it happens there.
Well, yeah, and there are a lot of them that aren't released at all.
But I get people telling me, I talk a lot about Operation Majestic 12, the group set up by President Truman, 1947, to deal with flying saucers after Roswell.
And, well, surely those guys, they list the 12 members, would have told their wives.
I said, you've got to be kidding.
I never told my wife anything classified.
First, it's against the rules.
And second, I can't control what she said.
She might drop a word.
Loose lips sink ships.
That's an old World War II motto, but it's true.
Or as I used to say during World War II in the UK, because my dad told me, loose talk costs lives.
In other words, if you tell somebody else, you put them at risk as well.
Well, yes.
Yes.
And secrets are kept all the time and for long times.
A third area, which is peculiar to my background, I've worked on more canceled government-sponsored advanced research and development programs dealing with advanced propulsion than anybody.
Not by choice.
Anyway, you can't get here from there.
That's the big argument from the ancient academics and fossilized physicists.
And not on a bicycle.
You know, sure, it took Magellan's ship.
He didn't make it, but it took his Ship three years to go around the world.
That's a good amount of time, isn't it?
No.
The space station does it in like 92 minutes.
Progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way.
The people who tell you you can't get here from there don't know what they're talking about.
Do you find it odd, Stan, that a lot of the people who throw obstacles in your way and may say the kind of things that you're trying to explain to people are people who will talk about progress in so many other fields, engineering, electronics, whatever, and laud it and say, of course, by thinking out of the box, that's how we got where we are.
But when it comes to this field, if anybody thinks out of the box, then they've got to be a nut.
Well, yeah, I mean, part of it is arrogance coupled with ignorance.
There's a famous David Susskin was a talk show host in the United States for many years, bright guy.
I got a call from his office.
They wanted me to come to New York to do a show.
I was living in California and send all kinds of goodies and get them a good skeptic.
I said, there aren't any, but here's how to reach Philip Class and to get Betty Hill.
And I got them everything they wanted.
And while we're taping segments between segments, he says to me, I'm sitting next to him, and he says, you know, I read the New York Times.
I've seen nothing in there that says these things are real.
And so the Susskin syndrome is, I keep track of what's important in the world.
That's what I do.
If this were true, it would be important.
I don't doubt that.
But if it were important, I would know about it, and I don't, so it must not be, and I'm not going to waste my time finding out more about it.
There's a built-in attitude.
Don't bother me with the facts.
My mind's made up.
And that's one of the basic rules for debunkers.
Second is what the public doesn't know, I'm not going to tell them.
Third is if you can't attack the data, attack the people.
It's easier.
And fourth, do your research by proclamation.
Investigation is too much trouble, and nobody will know the difference anyway.
So one is aware of these little tricks of the trade, so to speak, it's easy to handle them.
I've done debates, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, and you know, I say SETI stands for silly effort to investigate SETI, not search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
We debated on Coast to Coast Radio, and I won.
I got 57% of the vote.
He got 33%, and 10% said, I don't know.
I won't.
Is that because that particular audio, if you were to do that debate, say, on the mainstream BBC or the CBC in Canada where you are, not on an audience that is skewed towards believing in these things, I wonder if the result would have been the same?
What do you think?
Well, that's a good question.
I debated at the Oxford University Debating Society.
Did you?
And you know, you can't get higher on the tree.
Well, that's what they tell me.
Well, my team got 60% of the vote.
Are flying saucers real?
Yes, said I to my companion.
And so, yeah, I know what you're saying, but the kicker here, well, I started to say Dr. Michael Shermer is head of the Skeptic Society.
I got 80% of the vote with him because he didn't know anything.
He started off with a foolish statement that the only reason that there are sightings you can't explain are that there's a residue effect.
Whatever field you're in in the paranormal, 5% of the cases don't have enough data for you to reach a reasonable explanation.
And I jumped right in and spoke rapidly because I didn't want to be interrupted.
I said, what you've just said is totally untrue.
In the largest study ever done for the United States Air Force, Project Blue Book, Special Report 14, 21.5% of the cases couldn't be explained, completely separate from the 9.3% listed as insufficient information.
In the University of Colorado study, 30% of the 117 cases studied in detail could not be explained according to a special UFO subcommittee established by the world's largest group of space scientists, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
In De Call's UFO evidence, 18% of 4,500 cases couldn't be explained.
So from there it was downhill.
In other words, he started off with a claim that simply wasn't true.
And it was like Carl Seiden's comments that I mentioned earlier.
He didn't give a reference.
He didn't give a source.
And one of the things that's interesting about the SETI literature is they never talk about the sources of information about flying saucers.
You think they're interested in extraterrestrial intelligence?
Only if it's out there and sending signals so they can justify their existence.
And we're listening.
But when you talk about the source of the information, well, the source of the information about UFO sightings is disparate, isn't it?
It's lots of people seeing different things.
It's aircraft pilots.
It's people on naval ships.
It's police officers on duty.
It's different sources.
Little old ladies.
Well, that's why I refer to five large-scale scientific studies.
And I find that fewer than 2% of people in my audience have read any of them.
For example, United States Congress held hearings on my birthday, believe it or not, in 1968.
Testimony from six scientists in person, six more of us in writing only.
I was one of the latter group of six, and I'm proud to say I'm the only one who didn't have a piled higher and deeper Ph.D. degree.
I think I'm the only one who's still alive, as a matter of fact, because I was the youngest guy.
But I refer people to that.
And for example, Dr. James E. McDonald, a professor of physics, University of Arizona.
His testimony, 71 pages long.
Everything's listed on my website, www.stantonfriedman.com, incidentally.
Jim had 41 excellent cases.
He talked to over 500 witnesses.
He had multiple witness radar visual cases, sightings by astronomers, sightings by pilots.
So I try to direct people not to the tabloid newspapers, but to the solid reports.
Like I say, congressional testimony is pretty strong stuff.
And yeah, you're right.
It's a mess out there.
There's all kinds of garbage out there.
That's why you've got to qualify the sources, and that's what I try to do.
And the problem with it is that the further you get in time from an incident, the mistier sometimes it gets.
You were credited reading your biography with being the first person to investigate Roswell.
Well, of course, we've had, what, 70 years or so.
I'm trying to do the math here.
It's been a very long day, 60-odd years since that happened.
And there have been many different accounts or many different interpretations of the facts of that particular incident.
Yes, there have been.
Remember, I wasn't there in 1947 now.
I'm not that old.
True enough.
But you had a chance to talk to the people.
I was talking to you about it in 1978.
Okay, well, and that's when you became the first person to systematically unpick this.
And I presume you spoke to the people directly involved, like Jesse Marcel Jr.
I was the first to talk to Jesse, as a matter of fact.
It was a totally innocent.
People say, why did he call you?
He didn't.
I was doing a television program, actually, supposed to be interviewed three times in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to promote my lecture that night at Louisiana State University.
And this is 1978.
And I talked to the, I'm supposed to do three interviews.
I talked to the first two.
And the third reporter was nowhere to be found.
This is before cell phones, believe it or not.
And so the manager of the station is giving me coffee.
He's looking at his watch.
He knew the people who brought me to the station, and he knew I had other things to do.
And out of the blue, he said, you know, the guy you ought to talk to is Jesse Marcel.
And brilliant investigator that I am.
I said, who's he?
Oh, well, he handled pieces of the wreckage of one of those saucers you're interested in when he was in the military.
I mean, effectively, for those who, I can't believe anybody listening to this now, but just in case there is somebody who's never heard of Jesse Marcel Jr., his father was the person who carried the can.
I talked to the father.
You talked to the father.
You talked to the man himself.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
Well, that's even...
Got it.
No, I don't.
I just automatically assumed that it was Jesse Marcel Jr. because everybody talks about him, and we've even lost him now.
So you talked to the absolute source.
You got it from the horse's mouth.
This is the man who carried the can for what happened at Roswell, didn't he?
Yeah, yeah, that's the way to put it.
And he, I said, what do you know about him?
I mean, that's a kind of shocking statement from a guy.
There's nobody else around.
He's not joking.
He handled wreckage when he was in the military.
What do you know about him?
He lives over in Homo.
That didn't tell me anything, H-O-U-M-A.
I didn't know where Homo was.
I was there later to talk to Jesse.
Well, he's a great guy.
We're old ham radio buddies.
You really ought to talk to him.
Now the reporter showed up.
I was busy the rest of the day.
We had a great crowd that night.
I was at the airport early the next day, so I thought, let's give it a shot.
Called information in HOMA, Louisiana, wherever it was, and got a number for Jesse Marcel, and he talked to me.
I gave him the station manager's name, Bill Allen, and explained that I had had a clearance for 14 years, and I was very interested in this subject.
So he told me a story.
Well, I found out later, Jesse was one of the few who couldn't deny his involvement.
His picture was in newspapers.
His name was all over the place.
I didn't know that at the time, you'll understand.
I didn't know anything about the Roswell incident.
And so he gave me some names of people.
He didn't have a precise date, but I shared that information with the colleague.
And then a few months later, I'm in Bemidji, Minnesota, everybody's favorite town, giving a talk at a college.
And somebody came up to me afterward, ever hear of a crash saucer in New Mexico?
Well, yes, tell me some more.
And they told me the story, the Barney Barnett story out west of Roswell.
And then my colleague, Bill Moore, found a story in your English Flying Saucer Review about a well-known English actor, Yuey Green, who commented in an article that while driving across the United States from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, he heard on the radio about a crashed saucer in New Mexico.
And he could pin down the date.
It wasn't a trip you made very often, and the roads were lousy, to be frank about it, at that time.
And he could pin down the date, first week in July.
Bill went to the city.
I had no idea Huey Green was.
If this is the same Huey Green, he was very, very famous.
He was a sort of Ed Sullivan character in the UK.
He was Canadian, originally Canadian.
Yeah, originally Canadian.
Well, his son was living in Canada at the time, I believe, and that's how we got the date.
Okay.
So going to the newspapers at the University of Minnesota, my colleague found the story early July and headline stories.
It gave us a lot of names.
In the next year and a half, Bill and I tracked down 62 people in conjunction with the case.
The old-fashioned way.
You know, we didn't have the internet to go by.
You spent a lot of money on phone calls.
And sure, every once in a while I got lucky.
I checked with editor and publisher.
Oh, there's a newspaper in Roswell.
What did I know?
The Roswell Daily Record called, asked for the editor from 1947, long gone.
What do you need?
Well, I've got this article about a guy named Walter Hout Haut.
His name is spelled four different ways in the newspapers I had.
Before I can finish this sentence, he says, oh, his wife works here.
What?
Wow.
That's how it happens, though, isn't it?
One connection leads to another, and you can't do that online.
No, no.
And so I talked to the wife, talked to Walter.
He was a great source of information.
He was the public relations officer for the base, but he also had been a bombardier during the war and was a good enough one.
He was chosen to drop the instrument package at the time they set off the fourth atomic bomb.
Well, fifth, I guess it was.
You pick your best people to do that because without the instrument package, this was Operation Crossroads in the Pacific in 1946.
So Walter was more than 20 missions over Japan, outstanding reputation in town.
I checked around and he gave us names and he had a base yearbook which was helpful.
And so we worked very hard.
Also, we had the name of the rancher and I called information in New Mexico and I said, I'm trying to find somebody, last name Brazil, not a common name, B-R-A-Z-E-L.
He was a rancher.
And she says, what city?
I don't know.
Southeastern New Mexico.
Well, let's see.
Oh, I do have one in Carrizozo.
I said, is that in southeastern New Mexico?
I didn't know.
Has he worked?
She said, yes.
Well, it turns out that was the rancher's son.
And he had just gotten his phone two weeks earlier.
That may sound strange to people, but New Mexico has a lot of land and not many people.
And sometimes in life, things are brought to you.
There's a thing called serendipity.
You know, there's happenstance serendipity.
Things just fall into place.
Well, sometimes you work hard, too.
I was trying to check on...
And I thought, you know, many of the World War II United States officers, military officers after World War II, were West Point grads, because everybody else got out, you know.
The United States didn't have a big standing army back in the 30s, to say the least.
And so I called West Point.
I always like to look for people with unusual names.
It makes it a lot easier to find them, frankly.
Easier than Smith or Jones.
Yo, boy.
And so I called West Point.
Yes, I mean, Thomas Jefferson DuBose can't be a lot of them around.
And yes, he's still alive, and he is in Florida.
They wouldn't tell me his exact address, but I located him.
I called him.
He was in his mid-80s.
Explained that I had seen the picture and was very interested, and I'd like to send him some background information.
My parents were retired in Florida.
I knew I'd be going down there to see them.
Could I stop by?
And he said yes.
So I met with him in person.
Great old guy.
He was sharp, to say the least.
And he told me his story.
Everybody else was dead, and nobody's going to come back to him.
He was a retired general when I saw him, had loads of flying time, set up the Air Force search and rescue teams.
So I met with him in person, and standing three feet away from me, he tells me that he took the call from General Ramey's boss, General McMullen, giving him three orders.
I want you to get the press off our back.
I don't care how you do it.
I want you to send some of that wreckage to Washington, which is where McMullen was, today with one of your Colonel couriers.
And I want you never to say anything about that.
That's an order.
Do I need to put it in writing, Colonel?
They knew each other, both West Pointers, incidentally.
So the three elements shut this thing up.
Get us some of this material so we can see what it is.
And then continue the start of the cover.
Du Bose of complaint.
I said, look, when a two-star general tells a colonel what to do, this is right after the war, he does it.
How high do you want me to jump?
He doesn't say, well, I don't think that's a good idea, General.
Come on.
You know, there's a real world out there.
So I found DuBose.
I talked to him.
I met with him twice, as a matter of fact.
And some of that's filmed, and we had to edit it a bit, but he talked about some of the women at the base.
I won't go into that.
Okay.
But there is an entire DVD, again, on my website, www.stantonfriedman.com, which has first-hand testimony from 20-some Roswell witnesses.
And presumably the first question you asked is the one that any layperson with any interest in this would want to ask, and that is, is all of this true?
In other words, the assumption that what happened there was not what we were told it was, is that the case?
Is that true?
Well, yeah, I started right in from that question.
Was that wreckage that you're in the picture with the real wreckage from the crash?
No, it was not.
You know, so what I'm saying is I went after the real people, got information directly from them, and then verified.
It's like with Jesse Marcel Sr., his picture's in the yearbook.
He really was there.
But remember what he was, and the noisy negativists don't mention this.
He just happened to be the intelligence officer for the most elite military group in the entire world.
I don't say that casually.
And it held that distinction because it was the only ones who had atomic bombs.
They dropped the bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, two more in Operation Crossroads.
You know, there wasn't anybody else who could claim that distinction.
They had high-level security, hand-chosen officers.
It was an outstanding group.
Now, the debunkers won't tell you that.
One of the biggest debunkers said when asked on a radio program that we were both on, what happened to Roswell?
Well, there's this PR guy who made up the Story to get attention.
And I said, You don't even know his name?
Well, no.
I said, I've had dinner with him out in restaurants and in his home.
Walter Hout, everybody who's read anything serious about Roswell knows his name, as a matter of fact, because it's in all the books.
Nine years later, the same debunker published an article in which he said an unknown PR guy put out an unauthorized press release.
Okay.
Total baloney.
I talked to Walter Hout about his relationship with Colonel Blanchard, who was the base commander.
And incidentally, I've had people say, oh, Blanchard, just a loose cannon.
He was head of the only atomic bombing group in the world, you understand, but a loose cannon.
Let's get this clear.
He was the man who said that it was okay in the very early stages to put the story that something weird had been found there.
He authorized it.
He instructed Walter Hout to put out the press release.
And it wasn't he who retracted it.
It was his boss.
So the interesting part of all of this is the dynamic of how that worked.
In those raw days after the incident, here's somebody who says the public have to know about this, so it goes out and goes out through the media, and then suddenly the brakes are slammed on and everything is thrown into reverse gear.
That's right.
And Blanchard, did Blanchard get punished for putting that out?
He got four more promotions.
He became a four-star general, which is a very high rank in the United States.
And he was actually Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force when he died of a massive heart attack at the Pentagon.
He did his duty, didn't he?
When he was told to keep his mouth shut, he kept his mouth shut.
So he did his duty.
He wasn't a maverick.
No, and certainly not a loose cannon.
And along the way to that fourth star, he was in charge of operations for the Strategic Air Command, which meant he had thousands of nuclear warheads under his control.
You don't put loose cannon.
All those high-level promotions incidentally have to be approved by Congress once you get past the first general rank.
It doesn't just happen.
In other words, you don't throw darts at a dartboard.
Who am I going to make the head of this, that, or the other thing?
So, of course, the debunkers never tell you that.
Oh, just a loose cannon.
Colonel.
Yeah, he went on to be a four-star general.
But after all of it happened and after the brakes were put on and another story was put out there, let's take the case of Blanchard.
What do you believe, what do you know that he believed after that?
What did he know in his heart after that?
After he left the service in subsequent years, the kind of thing that he would have told his closest He died in office.
Sorry, yeah.
Well, at the very end of his service period, you said he died of a heart attack in office.
So at the very end of that, though, there must have been a man who, unless he had incredible fortitude, intestinal fortitude, who must have been somewhat troubled by those events in any way, do you think?
Well, I talked to his daughter.
I talked to his two sons.
I talked to his first and second wives.
His daughter told me that he at one point thought it might be Russian stuff because he was on a jaunt with other military guys to Russia, and the symbols made him think Russian.
There were strange symbols on some of the wreckage.
But his daughter told me that she knew somebody at Los Alamos, and he had told her that they were having a little problem with where do they charge the work that went into analyzing the wreckage.
You know, how do we cover that up?
Los Alamos is a place where everything got covered up.
And the whole mechanic of how that is possible, how it's possible to keep the lid on something of that scale, is fascinating by itself, isn't it?
Well, yeah, and what people don't realize is that often, well, I don't need to tell anybody in England, you know, that disinformation was very important during World War II to misdirect Hitler's attention to that the landing would take place at Calus instead of at Normandy and all the rest of that.
You know, so misinformation is part of the picture, disinformation.
But another part of the story of keeping things classified is people at a high level recognize the need for it.
Top-level Americans aren't stupid.
They don't think that, well, there can't be any spies here.
Everybody knows it's an open society.
There are spies all over the place.
And it's something we have to take into account.
Sometimes you can use it.
But keeping secrets, look, the lockade program to develop the stealth aircraft cost $10 billion.
It was done in secret over a 10-year period.
Not a word in public.
The first American spy satellite was the Corona spy satellite.
They had 12 failures.
Nobody heard about them.
The 13th one was a success in 1960.
And it got more information about Soviet military installations than all of the U-2 flights that had taken place before that.
The first public announcement about that was 30 years later.
So anybody who says it is impossible in a free society, which we assume we have, many people assume perhaps it isn't quite as free as all that, anybody who says it isn't possible to keep something like that secret is completely wrong because we have proof from other fields like the stealth fighter and, as you said, these other projects.
Well, as a matter of fact, it's kind of interesting.
A single number.
The Washington Post had an article within the past year about the black budget for military intelligence in the United States.
That means a budget that doesn't go through Congress as such.
They said that for this past year it was $52.6 billion.
The three agencies primarily involved were the CIA, The NSA and the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office.
And the NRO builds those big, expensive satellites.
It can cost a billion dollars each.
They can read the license plate, the cars in the Kremlin parking lot, that kind of thing.
And that's a lot of secrecy.
So what about the theory then, Stan, that a lot of the stuff we see in the sky and people report as UFOs is actually stuff that has been developed by them.
Using that budget, we just simply don't know about it yet.
Well, that budget is the military intelligence budget.
The CIA planted a story and repeated it that most of the sightings once they started flying the U-2, the SR-71, these other secret airplanes, most of them were really reports of those, and the government was glad.
Let's call them UFOs.
That's a lie.
The number of sightings did not go up when those things started flying.
And whoever heard of a U-2 that could land in the middle of nowhere and take off from there?
That could make right-angle turns, that could fly silently, that didn't have wings or a tail?
It's a cover story.
Let me give you an example of a lie that is a big lie, but which was gotten away with for decades.
In 1955, Donald Quarles was the Secretary of the United States Air Force, no higher authority in the Air Force.
And a big study had been done, biggest study ever done, the actual name was Blue Book Special Report 14.
It was not mentioned in the press release that was put out in October 1955.
They quote Quarles is saying, on the basis of this study, we believe no objects such as those properly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States.
Even the unknown 3% could have been identified as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been available.
That sounds pretty cut and dried.
It appeared in newspapers all over the world.
There's a little problem with it.
It's a total lie.
They didn't give the title of the study, Blue Book Special Report 14.
Surely some newsman would have said, what do you mean 14?
101 through 13.
We've never heard of them.
They were all classified at the time.
Secondly, they didn't say who did the work.
Pattell Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, a very well-respected research and development firm.
I had some dealings with them.
I know about them.
So why would they produce a report saying that?
Do you think that they were tasked to come to that resolution?
They didn't show the report.
Ah, so when you come to the report, which I managed to get, you find that the percentage of unknowns wasn't 3%.
It was 21.5%.
Which ties in with other data that you've seen.
So the problem is with whoever wrote the synopsis.
Well, what I'm saying is the Secretary of the Air Force lied full force.
Incidentally, the better the quality of the sighting, the more likely to be unexplainable.
And the sightings for which they didn't have enough data, 9.3%.
So it was a lie, a lie, a lie.
And no newsman, as far as I could tell, questioned anything.
So to get back to what you asked, one way you keep secrets is about lying skillfully.
You know, I hate to say that, but skillfully, yes.
Well, there was a politician over here back in the 80s who came up with a great phrase to be economical with the truth.
Which kind of fits a lot of circumstances, doesn't it?
Yes, it does.
And the thing is that there was an announcement made, the NRO that I mentioned, they had had a program with Boeing to try to improve the architecture, as they call it, of those spy satellites.
They spent $13 billion and they canceled the program because they didn't get what they wanted.
That's not small potatoes.
That's a lot of work, a lot of money, a lot of time.
Well, you guys have a perfect example of that in England.
The Enigma business.
Bletchley Park had 12,000 people whose job it was to intercept, decode, translate, and very carefully release German military communications on a strict need-to-know basis.
And I think when the war was over, that was very important to the victory, I would say.
It's nice to know when the Germans are going to be where they're flying their airplanes and all that sort of thing.
There was not a word in public for 25 years after the war.
12,000 people kept their mouths shut.
But of course, there wasn't the technology then.
Well, let's park that for one second.
The biggest imperative there was the fact that we had to keep things secret because we were in the business of defeating Hitler.
And don't forget, it was touch and go.
25 years after the war, there wasn't a word in public about that great, incredible benefit from breaking the codes.
Well, there were people sworn to secrecy working at Pletchley Park, and just like people at Roswell, they did their duty.
That's right.
What I'm trying to say is there are people who do their duty, who do keep their mouths shut.
Anybody who says you can't keep secrets doesn't understand the situation.
What about Jesse Marcel Sr.?
Of all the people in all this stuff that I would have liked to have met and talked to and looked into the eyes of more importantly, because that's how you can tell.
The eyes are the window, the mirror of the soul.
How did he come across to you?
Very well.
He was a friendly guy.
When we made my movie, UFOs are Real.
We went to Holma, Louisiana.
We interviewed him, spent some time with him.
Of course, later I talked to his son and the rest of that.
I was very favorably impressed.
He was very straight.
Look, you don't get to be the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the world by being an idiot.
You know, people forget that.
You're being trusted with Atomic bombs.
I've talked to people that he briefed as intelligence officers.
They would make simulated missions.
They'd fly a bunch of planes over New York, make sure they got there on time, and all the rest of that.
And Jesse was a fine officer.
He was a major at the time.
And what about his sense of duty?
I think that's the thing I would have wanted to ask him about because his sense of duty, his sense of commitment to the service, commitment to the United States.
There's no question about that.
Right.
And that is why he effectively allowed himself to become a fall guy for the whole thing.
Well, yes, he didn't have a choice.
You follow orders.
And, you know, I once asked Jesse Marcel Jr., I said, why didn't you guys keep any pieces of the wreckage that was on the kitchen floor?
He said, look, we're an Air Force family.
You just didn't do that.
You know, it was the wrong thing to do.
It was very straightforward.
And anybody who says, come on, everybody would have kept a peace.
Well, hindsight is 2020.
You know, you do at the time when you're under pressure what you do at the time.
Well, that's right.
And remember, again, this is right after the war.
You know, many Americans in particular, I don't know about Englishmen, but many Americans link war with, say, the Vietnam War, lots of protests, lots of disquiet and negative attitudes and stuff.
World War II wasn't like that.
We all got to pull together to defeat Hitler and Tojo.
And many Americans don't realize how close we came to losing that war.
Well, us too.
You know, we were very, very close if we hadn't had the support of the U.S., and I know it's still a sore point with some Brits, but we needed the support of the U.S. Otherwise, there was a chance that we would have gone the way of Nazism.
And you look at our Channel Islands here, which are just off France.
They were British.
We had to let them go during the war because of their proximity to France.
We couldn't defend them, so the poor people there were under siege for the period of the war.
That could so easily have happened to us.
So it was a very, very, very close thing.
Jesse Martell Sr., though, how did he, did he talk to you about that?
I presume he did.
How did he live with it all?
Assuming, as many people do assume, that he was a fall guy for it and was willing to do his duty, of course, because that's what he was schooled in doing.
And as you say, the guy wasn't stupid.
He was a very intelligent guy, put in that position for a variety of reasons.
His abilities, his toughness, his mental agility, all the rest of it.
But subsequently, how did he live with it?
I don't think he was happy about the situation.
That is, he knew they were covering something of great importance.
But I think if I hadn't contacted him, thanks, and incidentally, that station manager, Bill Allen, I asked him years later, what did Jesse tell you?
He said he didn't tell me anything.
We were ham radio operators.
I asked him, I had seen the original article in the New Orleans newspaper, and I had asked him about it.
And he said, I can't talk about that.
So he didn't tell him anything.
It's just that he knew back at that time, I don't know how it works in England, but when he had stories about military people, they often said where they were based, where they were from, hometowns and all that sort of thing.
So the article had mentioned that he was from HOMA, the article in the Louisiana paper.
And so there was the ID.
But Jesse wasn't spilling his guts anywhere, his beans anywhere.
He got us started.
And then I could check in newspapers and find other articles.
And like I said, we found 62 people in a year and a half.
Which is an amazing piece of research.
But look, as I said when we started talking about him in this segment, you can look into somebody's eyes and you can tell where they're coming from, can't you?
Yes.
Well, I certainly never had a qualm.
That's not true of everybody I talked to, I should say.
But I never had a qualm about Jesse.
I was quite satisfied when with him in person, and there were some phone conversations as well, and a couple of people who interviewed him afterward.
No qualms at all.
This was a straight shooter.
I'm not saying he enjoyed this situation.
He didn't.
He didn't glory in it.
He wasn't looking for glorification.
I'm a hero.
Not at all.
Remember, as I said, he was one of the few people that couldn't deny he was involved.
His picture was in the papers.
His name was there.
But no matter how tough you are and how skilled you are, if somebody tells you that something that you believe is the greatest story that mankind has ever known breaks all around you and then you're told to tell the world it's weather balloons and it's nothing really much to worry about, that's got to have some effect on you at some level.
Well, remember, he didn't do any of the talking after that.
The attention was shifted to General Ramey's office, which was over in Texas, 300 miles away.
They didn't come back to Jesse.
He didn't talk to the press at the time.
His picture was taken in the office of General Raimi.
And he was told not to say anything, and he didn't.
And when he came back, he told his son, whom had handled some of the wreckage, that we don't talk about this.
Now it's classified.
It wasn't classified before.
Who knew what they were going to get into when they got out to the crash site?
So he was out of the limelight entirely until after I made noises and books came out and so forth.
But that was in the early 80s by that time.
He died in 86.
So, you know, he wasn't parading around.
He wasn't getting drunk, anything like that.
He was a soldier doing his duty.
62 people you talked with, that's a lot of research, a lot of shoe leather, as we used to say.
What is the most Compelling thing that somebody said to you in those interviews with 62 people?
Oh boy, there were an awful lot of well.
One of the ones after that was a guy who showed up.
We'd been trying to, we had a base yearbook, so we were looking for people for many years.
Was a guy who wound up coming to Roswell, and his job was to go around and pick up pieces of the wreckage.
I was so impressed as he described how out in the middle of nowhere, this is desert now, you know, this isn't a pretty little forest or anything, hot, miserable desert, who was picking up pieces of the wreckage, and he'd put them in a big, he called it a gunny sack, a big dark brown cloth bag.
And he said, before it got to the bottom, it would open up.
And I just thought that was such a neat way of putting it.
You know, there were other people who were on the plane who carried that original plane load of wreckage to Texas and who was clear that they were on a mission and they were told to shut their mouths and it was very important and all the rest of that.
You couldn't deny their sincerity, their care with which they spoke.
There are a whole bunch of those people.
I liked Glenn Dennis, who was the undertaker in town.
Somebody mentioned that he might know something.
Yeah, this is the story that I always thought was apocryphal of wasn't there an order of some small coffins?
Well, he's the guy who told the story, and I was the first to hear it.
Yeah, I went at him in a different way.
I got his name from Walter Hout as somebody who might know something in town, called him, and he wouldn't really tell me anything, but would you like me to send you some background material so you can see who I am?
Yes.
So I did.
I sent him some of my papers, some of my background as a scientist and stuff.
He had a son who was a son-in-law who was a scientist, and so he was impressed with that.
When I went to Roswell to do, or I was went to Roswell to do a television show, NBC had a show.
And I called Glenn Dennis, and he was out on Billy the Kid Day, one day of the year where there's life where Billy the Kid is.
Billy the Kid Day, okay.
Yeah, and I got a drive out from somebody who knew him, and he's telling me his story with a Mirachi band in the background.
He's running the food service at the hotel there where the big celebration was going on.
And it was funny.
I mean, when you listen to the tape, it was funny, the gal who transcribed it.
And he's the one who told me about his taking the call from the hospital.
It was a good-sized hospital.
There were a couple thousand people based at the place.
And a lot of soldiers and women who gave birth and accidents and other things.
It was a busy place.
And he worked for the ambulance service, and they had the contract to do the ambulance stuff.
I mean, work for the undertaker, the local undertaker.
But they also did the ambulance service.
That's not uncommon in the West.
You know, Hearsts are big vehicles.
And he was the one who got the call asking about the small bodies, small caskets, and also advice on how do you treat bodies that have been out in the desert for a while.
And his advice was dry ice.
It's very hot in Roswell.
Today it's probably 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
It was the other day anyway.
And so I got that conversation straight from him.
And then I met with him again and got a little more information about the details.
One of the things you find, incidentally, you probably know this as a newsman, maybe better than I do, that if you're talking about something that happened a lot of years before, I find the first response is, oh, gee, this is so long ago.
I don't remember anything about that.
Well, I keep talking, mention names of the officers and so forth, and after five minutes or so, the guy will say, oh, you know, did you talk to Joe Smith?
He was there at the time.
I remember him.
And, you know, after 10 minutes, the details come back.
Well, it's all about handing people.
It's almost handing people back.
Little snapshots of stuff they've already told you because they're aids to memory.
And then, as you rightly say, stuff comes tumbling out.
Now, this Undertaker, small coffins, advice on how to preserve bodies that have been out in the desert in the sun because they decompose.
Dry ice is the way to do it.
But was there anything more than that circumstantial evidence that suggested that what was being transported here was not from this planet?
I wouldn't say so.
Not as such.
What about those stories of the...
I'm sure you've heard this one, of bodies being transported by a couple of military guys, perhaps on the first stage of their journey, put under some kind of tarpaulin cover, then being told not to look.
And of course, one has a look, and what does he see underneath?
Well, you know, you can guess.
That was one of the airplane crew member stories.
And also, Glenn also had the story of the nurse that he talked to.
There was a nurse that he was seeing at the time at the base.
And she told him that he, well, it goes back a little more than that.
He went to the base with an airman who was injured, parked the ambulance outside, goes inside, sees there's a big fuss going on, and he sees this nurse that he knows, and she said, you better get out of here.
You're going to be in trouble.
He didn't know what that was all about.
He talked to her later.
He got threatened by the officers.
You know, get your tail out of here.
And don't You ever say anything about what you've seen here?
He hadn't seen anything.
But he met with her for lunch at the officers' club, and she told him that she was working there, there's stuff.
Two doctors came in, brought her with them into a room where they were looking at a body.
And she said it smelled to high heaven, ugly, not from here.
And so he had this story from her.
When she said not from here, do we infer that that means not from this planet or not from this particular location in the U.S.?
Not from the planet.
Definitely different.
I mean, nurses are used to human anatomy, after all.
It was different.
She even drew a picture for him of what the hand looked like.
So when you get a couple of people, an undertaker, a nurse, a couple of people connected with the vase saying things, well, that's one thing.
When you get 62 people talking with you and all of them put a little extra piece into the jigsaw, you must have started to believe, yes, I'm really getting somewhere here.
Yes.
Yeah.
And I was a major contributor to the first book that came out, The Roswell Incident by Bilmer and Charles Berlitz, language man Berlitz.
And that got the ball rolling, and then other people came forward.
This story's been going on ever since then.
I had no idea that that little sentence at the television station was going to start me on a lifetime of Roswellian-ness.
And I was supposed to be in Roswell two weeks ago.
I had a little heart attack just got in the way.
Well, you know, we didn't talk about this, but you had a heart attack.
And, you know, if you have a heart attack at 50, it's one thing.
If you have a heart attack at 79 and now you're 80, it's quite another thing.
How are you, Stan?
I'm doing fine.
I was never sick.
I was bored in the hospital.
They put in two stints, which work wonders.
I read four books because there was nothing else to do down there.
Had an echocardiogram and, you know, come back in four years for the, that valve might need some help.
And, you know, I lucked out.
I was in good health.
I had joined the gym about six months earlier.
Really?
And maybe that's why I had a heart attack.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, look, when these things, when lightning strikes, when these things happen, they just kind of happen.
But the one thing, the voice, we talked about radio at the beginning of this conversation and sound.
Your voice communicates to me, apart from good health right now, total, complete enthusiasm.
You're 80 years of age now.
It sounds to me as if you're going to keep doing this for as long as you can and as long as you want to.
And that's as far into the future as we need to see.
And I should add, both my parents lived to be 90s, so that's my goal.
I'll quit at 90.
I mean, look, let's not be bacabre about this because you sound fine, but all of our lives are finite.
Are you making plans, Stan, to hand over the baton of the work that you've done to somebody else?
Well, I'm trying to get some local people to set up a museum here, and I'll turn over all my paperwork and journals and magazines.
I got an office full of stuff.
But I've got to see research.
And for anybody who wants to inquire into it all, you know, like me perhaps in the future, or whoever comes after me doing this stuff, probably a lot better than I'm doing it.
But you sound and run with it.
I mean, you sound, and this is the thing that communicates itself and always did.
And when I met you in person as well, there's an energy about you that I think is like nuclear power for you.
You've got a little reactor going on there, I think, within you.
Well, I hope so.
My enthusiasm, if I didn't care about what I was doing, I wouldn't be doing it.
You know, you get to a certain age and you can choose.
And people say, when are you going to retire?
I said, why should I retire?
I'm my own boss.
I have no problems with my boss.
Enjoy what I'm doing as long as I'm healthy.
Let's talk again and listen.
Okay.
From all of the listeners to this show who I know will want to say this to you, happy 80th birthday and truly many happy returns.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
We will enjoy it.
And what will you be doing on the, I know we're not speaking on specifically the day itself.
How will you spend the day?
Well, my two daughters are coming, one from the West Coast, one from the East Coast.
And the family will be together and we'll have dinner out.
And we're going to go look at an old historic train station in Macadam, New Brunswick.
I've never been there and I wanted to see the place.
Back from the day when trains were kings.
Sounds like something from back to the future, doesn't it?
Standard Friedman, pleasure to talk with you again.
And Stan, please come back on the Unexplained soon.
Take care.
Will do.
Thanks.
I'm not going to say anything after that because there's nothing I can say apart from happy birthday and many, many happy returns to Stan Friedman, the father of modern ufology, the man who was there and doing it before just about anyone else.
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