Stan Friedman Retires

For those of you behind the power curve, or sometimes don’t follow all the news in the world of the UFO, Stan Friedman has announced his retirement from the field.

Stan has been around, it seems, forever, lecturing all of us on the reality of alien visitation. I have known Stan for decades, having met him back around 1990, I think. We shared information about the Roswell UFO crash, and Don Schmitt and I supplied him with transcripts and tapes of the interviews that we had conducted with many of those witnesses.

Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

Stan and I have clashed over the reality of MJ-12. Stan, of course, is a proponent and I am quite skeptical. We both believe that the vast majority of the MJ-12 documents are faked. Our disagreement surrounds the first few that appeared back in the mid-1980s.

Truth be told, I think that we agree on more than we disagree on, but too often, those in the community focus on the disagreements. Our working relation has been mostly cordial, though some of the infighting did become a little nasty, something that I had tried to avoid, for the most part.

Stan believes that we have been visited on many occasions and given the number of planets in our galaxy (I really can’t comprehend alien visitation from other galaxies, because those distances seem just too vast to defeat) that isn’t a completely far out proposition.

In recent years, Stan has become the go-to voice when producing a program on UFOs. His knowledge is vast and he has been quick in his responses to the skeptics. It has always seemed to me that Stan was ready to respond to anyone’s questions about UFOs and often share the information that he has gathered. He is

Stan Friedman, surrounded by many other UFO researchers. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

also quick to condemn those who don’t agree with him. His arguments, mostly backed up by facts, do make for some interesting debates and he was always ready to debate anyone about UFOs.

In a field that seems to be descending into chaos, his voice was often a steady one that seemed to draw others back from the fringes. I fear we are now going to be at the mercy of those charlatans who talk of their fights on the surface of Mars, their trips to other worlds, and their real lack of anything concrete to prove their claims because the government is hiding their records and that proof. Stan, at least, was there to challenge them, something that many of us don’t care to do.