I never met the late Stanton Friedman. Nor did we exchange correspondence, nor did I ever hear him speak. To the memory of this man, I have no personal contribution to make. I can only repeat the obvious: that with his passing on May 13, UFOlogy lost a major figure.
I’m moved to write about him, though, after reading two reminiscences of him that appeared in the May-June issue of Rob McConnell’s The ‘X’ Chronicles Newspaper. Although (according to the masthead) Rob has been publishing this Newspaper since 1990, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. I must say I’m rather impressed.
This in spite of the fact that my earlier encounter with Rob was considerably less than pleasant. I blogged about it last December; in an interview we did for his “‘X’ Zone Radio Show,” Rob came across as a bigoted and pugnacious debunker of all things UFOlogical, not least the UFOlogists themselves (“charlatans, liars, and people out to make a quick buck”). As I would have expected, the contents of his Newspaper are weighted toward the skeptical side of UFOlogical and paranormal controversies. There is, however, a measure of balance, and some of the more than thirty items included are genuinely interesting.
In the two leading articles, Friedman is “recalled” by Kevin Randle, a UFOlogist of Friedman’s stature who crossed swords with him more than once; and by Kal K. Korff, a believer-turned-debunker who started out as Friedman’s protege. Randle’s piece, which first appeared the day after Friedman’s death on his “A Different Perspective” blog, makes the more pleasant reading. But Korff’s gives more food for thought–which, however, doesn’t always seem to be the kind of thought that Korff set out to feed.
“Speak only good of the dead,” was the advice of the ancients; and Randle’s reminiscence pleases with its grace, its generosity, its fairness to a man with whom Randle often (in his words) had to agree to disagree. “We had one of those adversarial relations that was more cordial than many thought.” At a dinner in Roswell in 2012, “I had taken a seat at one end of the long table and Stan was about to sit at the far end. Someone mentioned that, believing, I guess, that we were mortal enemies. Before Stan sat down, I moved and took the chair opposite of him. Those around us waited for fireworks, but there were none. We had a nice chat during that dinner.”
The corresponding piece by Kal Korff, several times longer than Randle’s, begins in deference to the antique maxim. Korff calls Friedman his “mentor … To say he was a great influence on me is an understatement. … I will always be grateful for having known him, for having been placed until his tutelage as I was trying to sort the subject out and separate fact from fiction.” Almost from the start, however, bitterness bursts through the forms of politeness, as if Korff is struggling to get in the last word in a long-standing and not very friendly argument.
Of course he succeeds, his opponent being forever silenced. But the polemic distracts Korff from what he might really have been able to contribute: an empathetic understanding of Friedman, and of what led so talented a man to go so drastically–as Korff and I would agree–wrong.
Their friendship, as it originally was, dates back to 1975. Friedman was 41, Korff a precocious 13. He’d already been involved with UFOs for two years, eager to be accepted by the lights of UFOlogy as a grownup colleague and not just some kid. It was what I badly wanted at the same age, a decade earlier; but unlike me Korff was mostly successful. He met Friedman, swore him to secrecy about how old he was. “The secret of your age,” Friedman assured him, perhaps with some amusement, “is safe with me.”
By 1979, the two were lecturing together. The article includes two wonderful photos of them from this time, looking like the father and son they might have been, one of the pics part of a newspaper article headlined: A ‘cosmic Watergate’ – At 17, flying saucers are just his dish.
How did the partnership fall apart? No very clear picture emerges from Korff’s account, because he’s already off scoring points against Friedman. He rehashes first his case against Roswell, then against Betty Hill’s “star map.” In the dust and smoke of battle, Friedman is hardly visible as a human being. “The first major rift” between them is said to have happened when Korff confronted Friedman with the photos, taken the afternoon of July 8, 1947, of the supposed Roswell debris, which anyone could see was nothing but aluminum foil.
“Friedman looked at me, his eyes got big (I could clearly see them behind his glasses) and he casually told me ‘There MUST have been a debris switch.'”
Which for Korff was a shabby dodge. Korff is wholly convinced that “Project Mogul is what ’caused’ Roswell,” and while I think his certainty is misplaced I readily accept his negative conclusion, that there was no UFO crash. The detective work that led Korff to this conclusion, published in his 1997 book The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know, is often very impressive. But there is a place for everything; and when 20-year-old arguments are trotted out in the service of bashing a dead man, something is going on beyond dispassionate search for truth.
The fever level, in this supposed reminiscence, is very high. “Those Roswell ‘researchers’ who promoted and championed these liars should be ashamed, including Friedman” (forgetting for the moment, it would seem, that Friedman is now beyond shame). Korff accuses Friedman, without visible evidence, of having deliberately lied about the validity of the Hill “star map,” and he bombards the deceased with sarcastic queries about his competence in astronomy.
What really gets his goat, though, is that Friedman used “debunker” as a dirty word.
“Another unfortunate legacy of Stanton Friedman, is that he has tried to twist and outright distort the very meaning of the word ‘Debunker.’ As any mainstream dictionary will tell you, the word ‘Debunker’ simply means to remove the ‘bunk’ from facts, to separate truth from fiction. This definition proves that ‘debunking’ is a good thing, not a bad thing. One would think that people like Friedman who always claimed they were after ‘the truth’ would welcome debunking, because its very definition is the separation of fact vs. falsehoods. Yet in Friedman’s own peculiar dictionary, which today too many UFO ‘researchers’ still blindly ape without thinking critically, they repeat the gross misuse of the term, just like Friedman corrupted it. Shame on him, shame on them.”
Reading this diatribe–would “rant” be too harsh a word for it?–I think of why I myself so dislike the word “debunker,” why I’m so eager to describe myself as a skeptic, yes, but a “debunker,” no. It’s that the word conveys a false dichotomy of “facts” vs. “bunk,” as if anything that isn’t a literal fact is therefore “bunk” or (as Korff concludes his article) “claptrap.”
No, UFOs are not a “fact.” They don’t exist physically, the way jet planes exist. But they’re not “bunk”; they’re about the farthest thing from “bunk” that can be imagined. They’re myth; which I conceive, a la Carl Jung, as a collective dream of humanity, emerging within us to convey the profoundest truths of all.
I tried, without much success, to convey this perspective to Rob McConnell in our radio interview last year. In illustration of it (to quote my blog post), “I spoke about Perseus and Medusa. Of course they’re real; not that either of them ever existed on this terrestrial globe, or that a woman can exist whose hair is snakes and the sight of whom turns people to stone. But at the heart of the myth is the profound truth that an unendurable reality can be faced if you do so through a mirror that you yourself control.
“I know this is true because I lived it. My ‘unendurable reality’ was my mother’s dying; the ‘mirror’ I used so I could face it was UFOlogy.”
Trash UFOs as “bunk” or “claptrap”? I recoil at the thought.
“It will be interesting,” Korff winds up his article, “to see what happens in the global popular culture” now that his once-mentor, now-nemesis, is dead. “With the greatest advocate (Friedman) of some of these now entrenched modern myths no longer able to promote them, and with them being exposed in ways that cannot be refuted regardless of what one thinks of the UFO subject, years from now people may treat these topics very differently and instead of continuing to get suckered by hucksters and frauds in UFOlogy, the public will dismiss this stuff for what it has always been, but took many years to prove–assorted claptrap.”
As if in response, the cover of the current (June 14) issue of The Week magazine shows a jet being buzzed by two friendly aliens in a flying disk while, mysteriously but I think significantly, the Baby Trump balloon hovers in the lower right corner. The caption: Taking UFOs seriously: Why the Pentagon is urging pilots to report their close encounters.
Yes. “Taking UFOs seriously,” as they need to be taken, because they’re myth, and myth is a vital and enduring part of our human reality. That’s why Roswell will not go away; why, “star map” or no “star map,” what Betty and Barney Hill injected into American culture remains embedded. Stanton Friedman may not have understood these things as I do, but he lived them. That’s why, for all our disagreements, I honor his memory.
by David Halperin
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