"Stanton Friedman has Traveled the World with a Simple Message: UFOs are Real"

Friday, September 16, 2011

"Stanton Friedman has Traveled the World with a Simple Message: UFOs are Real"

Stan with Roswell Article from The Los Angeles Herald-Express

By Lydialyle Gibson
The University of Chicago Magazine
Sept–Oct/2011

The kid knew his teacher was wrong. And looking back, there was never really a chance that he would let it go. It was the middle of the school year, 1943, and Mrs. Rose Gutkin was giving her fifth graders in Linden, New Jersey, an astronomy lesson: the sun, she explained, remains motionless, and all the planets orbit around it. But Stanton Friedman had just read in his encyclopedia that the whole solar system, including the sun, orbits the center of the galaxy. "At 12 miles a second," he says. "That impressed the heck out of me. I mean, that's fast."

So Friedman raised his hand, corrected his teacher, and got a dressing-down. The next day he brought the encyclopedia to school. "And she reluctantly agreed that, well, maybe that's the way it was."

Almost seven decades later, Friedman still tells this story—in vivid, exuberant detail—to give people a sense of who he is: a methodical researcher, a steadfast debater, an investigator, a scholar. A scientist.

He's gotten used to proving his qualifications, convincing people that he's serious and, occasionally, that he's sane. Since 1970 Friedman, who half a lifetime ago worked as a nuclear physicist with a government security clearance, has been a full-time ufologist—that is, someone who studies unidentified flying objects. In national archives and presidential libraries, Friedman pores over declassified documents and scientific reports on UFO sightings and unexplained aerial events. . . .

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