[This is reprinted from my Psychic Vibrations column in The Skeptical Inquirer, September/October, 2009. It answers Friedman's critiques of "debunkers," and it explains how Betty Hill's "UFO Star Map" has crashed and burned. Friedman knows this (I discussed it with him), but he has gotten too much mileage from that "star map" to ever give it up, no matter how bogus it turns out to be.]
Many readers are surely familiar with the
author and pro-UFO lecturer Stanton T. Friedman, who calls himself the “Flying
Saucer physicist,” because he actually did work in physics about fifty years
ago (although not since). Well, Stanton is upset by the skeptical writings
contained in SI’s special issue on UFOs (January/February, 2009), and
elsewhere. He has written two papers thus far denouncing us, and it is the
subject of his Keynote Address at the MUFON Conference in August (2009).
In
February (2009), Friedman wrote an article, “Debunkers at it Again,” reviewing our UFO
special issue (http://www.theufochronicles.com/2009/02/debunkers-at-it-again.html). “In actuality, the active writers and
“investigators” aren’t skeptics. They are Debunkers doing their best to pull
the wool over the eyes of a curious public. They know the answers, so don’t
really need to investigate. Proclamation is more their style. Deception is the
name of the game.”
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| Stanton Friedman |
Roswell ” by noting that Nickell is a former magician, and “of course the stock in trade of magicians is intentional deception with another sterling example being the Amazing Randi.” So by Friedman-logic, anyone who has ever practiced prestidigitation can never again be trusted in anything. He criticizes Nickell for raising “the baseless Project Mogul explanation” for Roswell, which cannot be correct, says Friedman, because it does not match the claims made in later years by alleged Roswell witnesses (although it does match quite well the account of Mac Brazel, the original witness, given in 1947).
He moves on to my critique of the
Betty and Barney Hill case, where I note the resemblance of their “hypnosis UFO
testimony” to Betty Hill’s post-incident dreams. I said, “Barney had heard her
repeat [them] many times,” which he claims is “nonsense.” According to
Friedman, “Barney read Betty’s dreams once, and the notes were put in a
drawer,” and that settles that. He conveniently forgets the passages in John G.
Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey, the first book about the incident,
describing the long sessions Betty and Barney spent with several UFOlogists,
“beginning at noon and running almost until midnight” (Chapter 3), in which all
aspects of the incident were discussed again and again. He also forgets that
Barney told Dr. Simon, the psychiatrist who interviewed and treated them both,
that his wife had told him “a great many details of the dreams,” and that Dr. Simon
had concluded that the dreams of Mrs. Hill “had assumed the quality of a
fantasized experience” (Chapter 12).
Friedman next attacks Dr. David
Morrison, NASA senior scientist, for the “absurd” suggestion that if
intelligently-controlled UFOs were here, we might pick up radio transmissions
from them, or from their home planets. “Maybe secret NSA listening devices pick
up alien signals, but then the NSA doesn’t release info about what signals it
receives,” said Friedman. He also attacks Dave Thomas, “a scientist in New
Mexico and president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason”, saying “Dave has
certainly demonstrated his lack of knowledge of both the Roswell and Aztec UFO
crash retrieval cases.” Thomas has conducted in-depth interviews with Dr.
Charles Moore, the chief scientist of Project Mogul, whose balloon caused the
Roswell crash scare in 1947. The “Aztec crash” case that Friedman seems so keen
on is taken from a 1950 book by Hollywood writer Frank Scully, Behind the
Flying Saucers, exposed as a hoax more than fifty years ago by newspaperman
J.P. Cahn. Friedman concludes with, “the Skeptical Inquirer provides many
examples of the intellectual bankruptcy of the pseudoscience of anti-ufology.”
Friedman
was still hot under the collar in May, when he followed this up with a second
article titled the “Pseudo-Science of Anti-Ufology” (http://www.theufochronicles.com/2009/05/pseudo-science-of-anti-ufology.html
). He says that skeptics’ arguments “aren’t scientific, but rather represent
research by proclamation rather than investigation.” Given that SI’s special
issue on UFOs contained detailed investigative reports on the 1984 Minsk, USSR
UFO sightings, the Big Sur UFO of 1964, an update on Roswell developments, and
the Stephenville, Texas sightings of 2008, if this is mere “proclamation,” then
I can’t imagine what “investigation” would look like. “Proclamations and
attacks, often given the appearance of being scientific, have been launched at
every aspect of the phenomena. Despite an enormous array of real evidence and
data, we have been treated to false claims, false reasoning, bias and
ignorance.” Of course, if Friedman or anyone else could produce even one piece
of “real evidence and data,” the UFO debate would have been over long ago.
Friedman has long been obsessed
with the little-known and even less-read Project Blue Book Special Report Number
14, a statistical analysis of UFO reports released by the Battelle Memorial
Institute way back in 1955. However, he carefully picks and chooses the quotes
that he uses from that report, implying it to be some hidden pro-UFO gem,
deliberately ignored by skeptics. However, Friedman never reveals this quote
from the Summary of BBSR14: "It is considered to be highly improbable that
reports of unidentified aerial objects examined in this study represent
observations of technological developments outside of the range of present-day
scientific knowledge" (page viii), which means that the Report says
exactly the opposite of what Friedman wants us to think it does. “Why isn’t
BBSR 14 cited in the debunking books?” he pointedly asks. Probably because it
is over fifty years old, and contains little that is interesting or relevant
today, although Alan Hendry (not a “debunker” but a very skeptical UFOlogist)
did spend several pages of his UFO Handbook (Doubleday, 1979) critiquing
its approach. Hendry concluded, “If the Battelle group had had a real
appreciation for how loose the data were, they never would have bothered with a
statistical comparison to begin with” (p. 266). [For more on Blue Book Special Report 14, see my discussion of Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek, and the "Pentacle Memorandum."]
Freidman concludes, “If one makes
an appropriately objective and careful examination of the pro and anti-UFO
arguments, one finds that the evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being
visited by intelligently controlled vehicles of extraterrestrial origin and
that only pseudo-scientific arguments of a vocal but small group of debunkers
stand in the way of reaching that conclusion.”
It’s truly remarkable what we, a small group of skeptics writing for SI
and similar publications, have supposedly been able to accomplish. Even though
the number of people we reach in our publications is far fewer than Friedman
reaches on any one of his many appearances on TV and radio programs such as
Larry King Live, Coast to Coast AM, etc., he claims that the only reason that
Extraterrestrial Visitations have not been accepted by the mainstream of
science and the media is because we noisy negativists keep chattering against
them. The reality is, of course, that if his supposed “UFO evidence” were
nearly as good as he claims it to be, then nothing would be able to stand in
its way.
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| Betty Hill's sketch of a "UFO star map" |
| The Fish interpretation is supposedly correct because it consists of single, non-variable stars that all lie inside this box. But using the newer and more accurate data, two stars are actually much farther away, and nowhere near this box. Two are actually variable, and two more are close binaries. Poof! |
But today the Fish Map is
no longer viable whatsoever. In her research beginning in 1966, Fish made the
wise choice to use the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars, which was then
the most accurate available. But that was over forty years ago, and science
never stands still. Astronomical researcher Brett Holman recently checked out
what the Fish Map would look like if it were built using the most accurate
astronomical data available today. His answer is in his article in the British
publication Fortean Times (#242, November 2008): "Goodbye, Zeta
Reticuli" (the supposed home solar system of the UFOnauts). Holman writes,
“In the early 1990s the Hipparcos satellite measured the positions of nearly
120,000 stars 10 times more accurately than ever before – including all of
those that appear in the Fish interpretation. The results of this work, and
much else besides, is available online now, and can be easily queried using
websites such as SIMBAD at the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory.”
Fish excluded all
variable stars and close binaries to include only supposedly habitable solar
systems – but the new data reveals two of her stars as suspected variables, and
two more as close binaries. So there go four of her 15 stars. And two more are
much further away than earlier believed, removing them completely from the
volume of space in question. Six stars of that supposedly exact-matching
pattern, definitely gone, excluded by the very criteria that once included them
using the forty-year-old data. Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli.
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| Kathleen Marden, Stanton Friedman, and Robert Sheaffer at the MUFON Symposium 2011 |
Since scientists are obligated to
repudiate their hypotheses should subsequent data contradict them, if Friedman
is practicing “scientific UFOlogy” as he claims, he will have to admit that he
was wrong about the Fish map. But that will never happen. Arguing with Friedman
is like arguing with a Creationist, who keeps using discredited arguments to
impress new audiences, and seizing upon minor misstatements of his critics and
attributing to them the very worst of motives, while completely ignoring their
strongest arguments. His arguments rely heavily on the ad hominem attack
– his critics are such terrible persons – a sure sign of somebody trying to
defend emotionally a position that can’t be defended logically. (Whenever you
see the strong reliance on the ad hominem – my critics are such terrible
persons – it’s almost like a red banner proclaiming, “my arguments don’t hold
up.”) Another major UFO case with a strong endorsement from Friedman is the 1996 Yukon UFO, conclusively shown to be the re-entry of the Cosmos 2335 second stage rocket booster. But Friedman refuses to acknowledge that he was wrong about that case, either.
From this moment on, every time that Friedman
speaks of the Fish Map, except to say “I was wrong about it,” his own words
brand him a hypocrite.
