Stanton Friedman: the physicist who made Roswell a case

Stanton Friedman was a nuclear physicist who worked on fission propulsion programmes for General Electric, Westinghouse and others through the 1950s and 60s. The credential was real and he used it constantly.

From the early 1970s he lectured full time on UFOs, and he is the single most important figure in the modern history of Roswell.

What he found

In 1978, Friedman was put in touch with Jesse Marcel — the intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field who had handled the debris in July 1947 and appeared in the press photographs.

Marcel told him the material he recovered was not what was later displayed, and that he had been instructed to pose with a weather balloon.

That interview restarted the case. Roswell had been essentially dormant for thirty years; the 1947 press release and retraction were a footnote. Friedman found the man at the centre of it and got him on record.

What the government later said

The Air Force published reports in 1994 and 1997 attributing the debris to Project Mogul — a classified programme using high-altitude balloon trains carrying acoustic sensors to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

Mogul was genuinely secret, the materials match aspects of the debris descriptions, and a flight is documented in the right period. The reports also addressed the later accounts of bodies, attributing them to test dummies used in the 1950s — an explanation that sits badly with the 1947 dating and is the weakest part of the official account.

Friedman rejected the Mogul explanation for the rest of his life.

What Marcel actually said, and what he did not

Precision matters here because so much has been built on the interview.

Jesse Marcel said the debris he handled included material he could not identify, that it did not behave like the balloon material later displayed, and that he had been photographed with substituted material.

He did not describe bodies. He did not describe a craft. Those elements entered the case through later witnesses, most of them interviewed decades afterwards, and several have since been discredited.

MJ-12

This is the part that has to be included.

In 1984 documents surfaced purporting to show a secret committee, Majestic 12, briefing President-elect Eisenhower on recovered craft. Friedman investigated them extensively and defended their authenticity for decades.

The assessment against them is strong: anachronistic formatting, a signature that appears to be lifted from another document, date conventions inconsistent with the period, and no provenance beyond film delivered anonymously. The FBI examined the material and concluded it was bogus.

Friedman was not the forger and there is no suggestion he was. He backed them, and it damaged the case he had otherwise built carefully.