Nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman told tales of alien abductions, showed slides of flying saucers and complained about blacked out military documents during his presentation, “Flying saucers are Real,” Monday.
The Kiva Lecture Hall was packed for Friedman, who said he is the original civilian investigator of the alleged 1947 Roswell incident.
Friedman said many competent people have reported seeing flying crafts that go 2,000 miles per hour, can make right angle turns on a dime, can hover and fly — all without making noise or flashing.
Friedman said technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. He said that people once doubted the possibility of airplanes and rockets, and that it’s only natural for people doubt that we might one day be able to travel through space to other planets.
He said aliens who have come to Earth probably came from planets surrounding two stars in our galaxy that are 37 light years away. He said two stars, named Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, are one light year apart and are a billion years older than the sun. This, he said, indicates that the beings on the planets around those stars are probably a billion years more technologically advanced than the beings on Earth.
“You might say we’re cosmically retarded,” he said.
UNM student Chris Kitchen said he believes in extraterrestrial life, partly because he has had experiences similar to those Friedman described in his presentation. Kitchen said in 1997, he was driving at 3 a.m. with a friend at the edge of a university area near cornfields in Pennsylvania when he saw a glowing red orb hovering about 300 feet above a house.
The orb was shaped like a slightly squashed egg, he said, lightly pulsing and had a hazy aura around it. He and his friend followed the orb as it slowly moved away from the house. Kitchen said it made a slow turn in front of the car before floating away.
“It definitely seemed conscious of our presence,” he said.
Kitchen never reported his sighting.
“I didn’t think it would be taken seriously,” he said.
Friedman said many people don’t report their experiences with UFOs because they are afraid of being called “wackos.”
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Friedman said, however, that people with higher educations are more likely to believe in flying saucers. He showed slides of a 1978 survey that indicated 66 percent of adults with college educations believed in UFOs, compared to 36 percent of adults with only a grade school education who believed in them.
“If you’re a believer — and I hate to use that word, but I’m stuck with it — then you’re the cream of the crop not the bottom of the barrel,” Friedman said.
Kitchen said he has already earned a bachelor’s degree and is taking classes in microbiology and molecular genetics.
Friedman said he is convinced that the military is involved with UFO cover-ups that he calls “cosmic Watergate.”
Friedman said he and other UFO specialists went through years of court appeals attempting to get a hold of military and CIA documents dealing with the alleged 1947 Roswell crash and other UFO incidents. He showed slides of some of the documents he eventually received in which 75 percent of the information had been blacked out.
Friedman told audience members to contact him if they had any abduction stories or further information on the Roswell incident. He said scientists are willing to pay $1 million for any pieces of the strange, metal/plastic-like wreckage materials that someone, might want to hand over.
Friedman’s presentation was sponsored by the Associated Student’s of UNM’s Student Special Events.
