by Len Kasten
After reading about a dozen more books on UFOs from his local library, Friedman happened on a privately published version of Project Blue Book’s “Special Report 14” in the library at the University of California, Berkeley. This was the report that sifted through all the Blue Book data and summed it up. With more than 240 charts, tables, graphs, and maps to review, Friedman’s scientific mind was “in data heaven.” The bottom line was that six hundred sightings out of three thousand could not be identified. It was an epiphany for Friedman when he realized that the Air Force knew that a large number of the UFO sightings were probably alien craft. On the original version of his web-site, he said, “I . . . recognized that the Air Force, in its October 1955 press release about the study, flat-out lied.” The website now includes an entire section devoted to “Government Lies.”
In 1967, while working for Westinghouse, Friedman met Frank Edwards, the author of the now-famous book Flying Saucers—Serious Business. After reading Edwards’s book, Friedman decided he wanted to help spread the word about UFOs and asked Edwards for advice. Edwards hooked him up with a media contact who helped Friedman get on a radio talk show on KDKA in Pittsburgh, which allowed him to promote his public lectures. At first, Friedman’s talks were limited to small groups on what he calls “the chicken-and-peas circuit.” These were organizations and book clubs interested in UFOs, few of which were able to pay him a fee.
A breakthrough came when Friedman addressed a crowd of over four hundred at a joint meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. His lecture that night, titled “Flying Saucers ARE Real,” was a big success and subsequently became a staple in his repertoire. Shortly thereafter, he joined a speaker’s bureau and was immediately booked to speak to the Engineering Society of Detroit. This drew a crowd of over one thousand and was sold out three weeks in advance. For this appearance, he earned the princely sum of three hundred dollars plus travel expenses. He was now officially launched on his speaking career and was subsequently booked all over the country by the bureau. About a year later, funding for the development of nuclear reactor propulsion systems started to dry up, and Friedman found himself out of work. He decided to devote himself full-time to the lecture circuit. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he became well known worldwide as a leading advocate of the UFO reality. As a scientist, he brought a tremendous amount of much-needed respect and believability to ufology.
A PERSONAL MISSION
At the time the MJ-12 document came to Shandera in 1984, Friedman had been lecturing all over the world about UFOs for almost twenty years. Since it was the seminal event of the UFO era, Friedman had devoted years of investigation and research to the crash at Roswell, and he had no doubt that it had happened, but the tracks were well covered, and proof was hard to come by. When this piece of hard evidence dropped into his lap, it had an electrifying effect. It rejuvenated his efforts, and it shifted his career as a UFO investigator and spokesman into high gear. Friedman immediately realized the importance of the briefing document. He says in Top Secret/Majic, “I was very excited about this discovery . . . There was no question that if the . . . document . . . was genuine, it was one of the most important classified government documents ever leaked to the public.” Consequently, he made it his personal mission to determine whether the “Eisenhower Briefing Document” was genuine.
Stanton T. Friedman
For the next ten years, Friedman laboriously tracked down every piece of evidence he could find to validate the authenticity of the briefing document. One of the apparent glaring inconsistencies was the inclusion of Dr. Donald Menzel in the ranks of MJ-12. Menzel, a noted professor of astronomy at Harvard, was a notorious UFO skeptic who frequently publicly ridiculed believers. Friedman’s research turned up the facts that Menzel had a top-secret ultra security clearance with the Navy and a top-secret clearance with the Air Force and did highly classified consulting work for the CIA, the National Security Agency, and more than thirty corporations “on such matters as radio wave propagation, cryptography, and apparently, alien interstellar spacecraft.” Furthermore, he was an old friend of Vannevar Bush and was acquainted with two other members of MJ-12. Friedman concluded that Menzel had led a double life. He had secretly been in the inner circle of government UFO activity while publicly appearing to be a very conservative Harvard scientist.
Friedman also determined that President-elect Eisenhower had definitely been briefed on the date of the document, November 18, 1952. On that date, the records show that the president-elect had a forty-threeminute, high-security meeting with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. The last page of the briefing document contained a copy of a memorandum from Truman to Forrestal dated September 24, 1947, authorizing Forrestal to proceed with Operation Majestic-12 and notifying Forrestal that he (Truman) would remain in charge but would seek advice from Forrestal, Dr. Bush, and the director of the CIA. This memo was included with the briefing document to inform Eisenhower of the authority under which they operated. Documents in the Truman Library attested to the fact that Truman met with Forrestal and Bush on the date of the memo, and it was the only time he met with Bush between May and December of that year. Friedman also tracked down the minutiae of the document such as the date format, Truman’s signature, the typewriter used, and Hillenkoetter’s customary writing style. All these details checked out or proved to be acceptable. Friedman was ultimately convinced that the briefing document was the real thing and that therefore MJ-12 did, in fact, exist.
THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
Friedman has now spent almost fifty years in his personal crusade to reveal the truth of the extraterrestrial presence, against tremendous opposition. He has had to take on not only government and military opponents but also many high-level scientists and other researchers, some of whose connections are highly suspect. He has dealt with every challenge with a measured response backed up with methodical, careful, and exhaustive research and has emerged victorious in every case. He has crisscrossed the world with his message.
On his website, www.stantonfriedman.com, Friedman says, “Since 1967 I have lectured on the subject ‘Flying Saucers ARE Real’ at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups in all fifty US states, nine Canadian Provinces, twelve cities in England and nine in other countries, with only eleven hecklers. I have also appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows. Overall, I have probably answered about 35,000 questions about UFOs and secrecy.” He has flung down the gauntlet to the Air Force, challenging two of the Air Force officers who wrote Roswell reports to a public debate. He has effectively demolished the arguments of everyone and anyone who has questioned the reality of Roswell and the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents, and it was he who coined the rallying cry “cosmic Watergate.” If and when the dam is finally breached and the truth does indeed make us free, we will certainly owe much of that freedom to this Don Quixote of ufology who has now been tilting at government windmills for half a century.
Since the appearance of the briefing document in 1984, many new documents have surfaced, virtually all of which support the existence of MJ-12. For those interested, I highly recommend a visit to the website www.majesticdocuments.com to view the documents, along with some startling photos. The investigative team maintaining this site comprises some of the leading lights of UFO research and reporting: Robert M. Wood, Ryan S. Wood, Nick Redfern, Timothy S. Cooper, Jim Marrs, Jim Clarkson, and, as you would expect, Stanton T. Friedman.
12
Sci-Fi Film
A Path to Self-Discovery
Was it synchronicity that brought me to Los Angeles that Wednesday before Memorial Day in 1977? Searching for a movie to see that evening, my friends and I settled on the premiere that night of a new sci-fi film called Star Wars at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. A long-time sci-fi fan, I didn’t expect much of this movie since no decent science-fiction fare had appeared on the sc
reen since 2001: A Space Odyssey nine years earlier in 1968. But it turned out to be a memorable experience. It was the first (and last) time in my life that I ever witnessed an entire movie audience stand up and cheer as the credits rolled. The rest, as they say, is history.
Little did I realize then that I was a witness to that history. An amateur sociologist by instinct, I have puzzled over that spontaneous eruption of audience appreciation and delight many times over the years. Now, thirty years later, I finally think I understand it. But let’s start at the beginning.
VISUAL TRICKS AND FANTASTIC VOYAGES
It all started with an accident. In Paris in early 1897, a stage magician turned moviemaker named Georges Méliès was filming a street scene in front of the Paris Opera when the camera jammed, as they frequently did in the early days. Naturally, the continuity of the film was briefly interrupted. As recounted by Carlos Clarens in his classic book An Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction Films, “When he reviewed the developed film later on, Méliès was astounded to see a bus changed into a hearse. Film had stopped while time had not. This wonderfully macabre metamorphosis was the genesis of all film trickery. The Fantastic Film had been born.”
Movie poster from 1977 for Star Wars
Méliès quickly realized the possibilities and began to develop techniques that allowed him to give free rein to his imagination. He promised to bring to his audiences “visual tricks, and fantastic voyages.” To accomplish this, he built the first movie studio in the world in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. It had glass walls and ceilings and was equipped with all sorts of stage contrivances to facilitate trick photography. Says Clarens, “To Méliès the camera became a machine to register the world of dreams and the supernatural, the mirror to enter Wonderland.” He became known as the King of Fantasmagoria, the Jules Verne of the Cinema, and the Magician of the Screen.
After breaking new cinematic ground with such imaginative productions as The Battleship Maine, The Man with Four Heads, She, and Cinderella, all under thirty minutes long, Méliès created his grandest production, widely considered to be his masterpiece. In 1902, at the very dawning of the twentieth century, Méliès became the father of science-fiction movies with his film A Trip to the Moon. Based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’s First Men in the Moon and also thirty minutes in length, the movie followed a scientific expedition to the moon and back. Clarens says, “It is, then, the movies’ first venture into science-fiction and interplanetary travel . . . As the rocket is fired from the giant cannon atop the Paris roofs, the film cuts to the spaceship (in miniature) traveling against a painted backdrop of the sky, then cuts to the moon from viewpoint of the cosmonauts, getting larger and larger, and finally there is a cut or fast dissolve to the moon’s face wincing in pain as the bulletlike ship enters the eye.”
From its very inception, the science-fiction genre enthralled audiences. The film was an instant success. Bootleg copies were made from the three prints Méliès sent to his American agents and were shown all over the United States. While the books of Verne and Wells had also been very successful, the film brought a wider audience into the sci-fi fold because it was visual and could appeal to those who were not fond of literature and were not capable of appreciating literary nuance. Like fast food for the imagination, science-fiction film opened the world of the future to the masses. Most importantly, the writings of both men, but especially Verne, portrayed the man of the future as a conqueror of space and the ocean depths, expanding his dominion through science to previously forbidding places. The Time Machine by Wells extended human reach through time into the future. This was a hopeful and inspiring message for humanity and had a powerful spiritual appeal to fin de siècle audiences.
After this hopeful beginning, sci-fi film got lost in the shuffle as the world became embroiled in war and economic depression. By the end of World War II, there was very little to suggest that the human race could ever aspire to the glorious dreams of Verne, Wells, and Méliès. In fact, with the advent of the atomic bomb, it appeared that scientific advancement had simply given us more efficient means of slaughtering each other. Then, as we entered the second half of the century, everything changed. Spacecraft from other stars appeared in our skies and crashed in our deserts, and spacemen had encounters and conversations with humans. By their presence, the aliens proved that space travel was possible and that perhaps science could save us after all. And so the dream was revived, and a new and powerful impetus was given to science-fiction literature and film.
GORT! KLAATU BARADA NIKTO
The resurrection of sci-fi film in the 1950s was startling in terms of both quantity and diversity. Films belonging to this genre, however loosely, numbered in the hundreds over the course of the decade, and most of them were profitable. It started off appropriately and auspiciously. The first important entry out of the gate was Destination Moon, produced in 1950 by George Pal and based on the youth novel Rocketship Galileo by Robert Heinlein, who also wrote the original screenplay.
Taking up where Méliès had left off fifty years previously, this film depicted a moon journey as scientifically realistic as possible. Director Irving Pichel consulted with physicists and astronomers, including German rocket expert Hermann Oberth, and employed famed astronomy painter Chesley Bonestell for set design. It took one hundred men two months to build the realistic moonscape set, which brought it the 1950 Oscar for special effects. This movie turned out to be remarkably predictive of the actual moon landing in 1969.
Destination Moon was followed, in 1951, by a movie that is now widely considered to be the best American sci-fi movie of the fifties, The Day the Earth Stood Still. What made this film so unusual was the fact that it succeeded on several levels. The dramatic story line and love story were intriguing and gripping, but it also got away with committing what is considered the unpardonable sin in Hollywood—exhorting the audience with a message. An alien called Klaatu comes to earth in a flying saucer as an envoy from the “planetary federation” to warn us about the use of nuclear weapons and gives a long speech about our fate if we ignore the warning. On a third level, it is a Christian allegory, since Klaatu is killed by the military but then is resurrected by his robot, Gort, and at the end ascends Christlike to the skies in his spaceship. It was directed by Robert Wise, who later directed The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Movie poster from 1950 for Destination Moon
Some other noteworthy films from 1951 based on interplanetary drama were Flight to Mars, Rocketship X-M, Flying Disc Man from Mars, and The Man from Planet X.
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON
Up to this point, filmmakers traded in likely scientific advancement that would lead to space travel. Although fantastic, it was all believable because faith in science had been restored, and it all seemed possible, even before Sputnik. This was pure science fiction, and the science-fiction writers wrote for and applauded these films. The aliens were all humanlike and civilized. Then, things took a “horrible” turn. Succumbing to the popular appetite for horror films, Hollywood decided to populate the universe with monsters. The turning point was the Howard Hawks production The Thing, released in late 1951, in which the threatening alien feels “no pleasure, no pain . . . no emotion.” It just wants to survive and procreate.
Movie poster from 1951 for The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Thing started the whole monster cycle of sci-fi movies, largely dominated by directors such as Roger Corman. The respected science-fiction writers of the fifties were appalled at this turn of events. They were especially enraged by the way scientists now became “mad scientists,” a throwback to Dr. Frankenstein in the thirties. The Thing was a well-made film and was financially successful. This success further emboldened the “monster sci-fi” moviemakers. Some notable films in this subgenre were The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which was the first project of Ray Harryhausen, who went on to legendary animation fame, Invaders from Mars, Robot Monster, and Cat
Women of the Moon (all in 1953), Them in 1954, This Island Earth in 1955, and the still-famous Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956.
By 1959, a very clear dichotomy between two different types of scifi films had become evident. On the one hand, there were the films that honestly sought to capture the drama and excitement engendered by the possibilities of space exploration, time travel, and interaction with extraterrestrials. These mainstream science-fiction films tried to adhere to likely future scientific developments and the implications thereof. The two men most identified with this pseudodocumentary style were producer George Pal and director Robert Wise. After Destination Moon, Pal went on to make When Worlds Collide in 1952, War of the Worlds and Conquest of Space, both in 1954, and the H. G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, in 1960. All these films had the stamp of a visionary. Hollywood producer Paul Davids, who knew Pal well, says in a biographical essay about the legendary director, still available in his archived column “Flying Saucers Over Hollywood” on the website www.alienzoo.com, “George Pal began to understand that humankind’s ultimate destiny could only be fulfilled by people freeing themselves from planet Earth and venturing into space, to the planets.” On the other hand, the monster movies were patently absurd, simply substituting space monsters for the more earthbound variety. These movies worked very well, and they made money. They attracted the audiences who might otherwise choose some other type of horror movie, and so they really belonged more properly in the horror genre.
