UFOs in the daily Press:

Stanton Friedman - The Quest For Truth About UFOs

After more than 45 years of study and investigations and visits to 19 document archives, I am convinced that:

a) Earth is being visited by alien spacecraft;

b) The subject of flying saucers represent a kind of Cosmic Watergate;

c) There are no good arguments against these conclusions;

d) Visits to Planet Earth and 55 years of government cover-up of crashed saucers and alien bodies are, together, the biggest story of the past millennium.

I take a clear-cut, unambiguous stand that some UFOs are alien spacecraft but that some of these flying saucers are our own. I am absolutely convinced that the United States government has been withholding data about UFOs since at least 1947. That was the year when at least two crashed flying saucers - alien wreckage and bodies - were recovered in New Mexico.

This does NOT mean everybody in the government knows all about saucers and nobody has talked. Security works on a need-to-know basis with compartmentalization of very highly classified matters. Of course, some people have talked, but without having any confirmatory classified documents to release.

After arduous effort, I have received some of the 6,000 pages of UFO-related documents that have been released - many of them with eight words to a page and paragraph after paragraph blacked out (until they graduated to whiteout several years later.) However, this amount is but a small percentage of what exists in the archives and files of various government agencies.

More than a decade ago, a Freedom of Information request submitted to the CIA by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy elicited the response that the CIA had no information about UFOs. An appeal was denied, but a federal court action forced the CIA to do a document search.

Eventually it released about 900 pages of mildly interesting items. Clearly this was the tip of the iceberg since none were classified above "Secret" and since there were internal references to many other documents that were not released.

The CIA has a history of doling out dribs and drabs in hope that the requester will give up. Of greater importance was the release of a list of 57 UFO documents found in the CIA files but originating with a host of other agencies.

Notable among the identified material were 18 UFO documents originating with the National Security Agency. But these documents could not be released by the CIA.

A Freedom of Information request was then made for the NSA documents, but was denied on the grounds of national security. A subsequent appeal was denied and federal court action followed. Finally, a federal judge ruled that the NSA had to search its files. The search yielded 239 UFO documents with 79 originating with other agencies, including 23 from the CIA, which supposedly had already done an exhaustive search. The NSA refused to release 156 of its UFO documents.

I then filed a Freedom of Information request for the 23 CIA documents identified by the NSA file search. After 35 months the CIA released just nine, which were all, believe it or not, press abstracts of Eastern European newspaper articles about UFOs! It refused to release its own 14 UFO documents on that list.

I appealed and - two years later - received tiny portions of three documents with the rest being withheld.

The now-famous extraterrestrial encounters and cover up at Roswell, N.M., have long been a focus of my work. I was the original civilian investigator of the case and co-authored "Crash at Corona," the definitive study of the Roswell incidents, and instigated the Unsolved Mysteries episode on television about Roswell.

Some attacks on the legitimacy of the Roswell crash have been made by people who accept the notion that Earth is indeed being visited by alien spacecraft but do not believe that Roswell represents the crash of such a vehicle. Much as I have tried to find good reasons for rejecting the reality of the Roswell incident, despite the enormous quantity of verbiage that has been published, I have been unable to do so.

My interest in and study of UFOs date back nearly half a century, and since 1967, I've lectured on the topic, "Flying Saucers ARE Real!" at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups around the world. I also am author of more than 100 papers and articles. I have appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs about various UFO-related topics, including Larry King Live, Nightline, Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings and Entertainment Tonight.

I have provided testimony to congressional hearings, appeared twice before the United Nations, and pioneered many aspects of UFOlogy, including the Betty Hill star map work, crashed saucers and analysis of the Delphos physical trace case.

My explosive book, "Top Secret/MAJIC," in 1996 sheds light on the covert activities and findings of the select group established by President Truman in 1947 to deal with crashed saucers. The book draws from classified documents never before published.

There is no question that the U.S. government recovered two crashed flying saucers and crews in the New Mexico desert in early July, 56 years ago. The government has been quite successful at withholding the physical remnants and the real paper trail.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a Cosmic Watergate!

Editor's note: Stanton T. Friedman, who is grand marshal of today's parade, put his convictions in writing as part of the UFO Fest. We share them with you - with a wee grain of salt.

Guest writer Stanton Friedman was born in New Jersey in 1934 and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the University of Chicago, where Carl Sagan was a classmate. He worked 14 years as a nuclear physicist with major corporations on such advanced, highly classified, eventually canceled projects as nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and nuclear power plants for space.