Stanton T. Friedman

Stanton Friedman was a nuclear physicist who worked on classified propulsion projects for companies including General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse before leaving industry in 1970 to become, by his own description, the world's first full-time professional ufologist. He is most associated with reviving the Roswell incident: in 1978 he tracked down Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who had handled the recovered debris, and his subsequent investigation — published with Don Berliner as Crash at Corona (1992) — helped transform Roswell from a forgotten 1947 news retraction into the most famous UFO case in the world. Friedman also promoted the disputed Majestic 12 documents, purportedly a 1947 briefing paper on a secret group overseeing recovered alien technology, a position that drew sustained criticism from both skeptics and fellow ufologists who considered the documents likely forgeries. A tireless public debater, Friedman gave thousands of lectures over five decades defending the extraterrestrial hypothesis with a physicist's command of technical detail, and repeatedly challenged prominent skeptics including Philip Klass to public confrontation. He died of a heart attack in 2019 at age 84, shortly after a speaking engagement, having done more than any single individual to build Roswell's cultural dominance in UFO lore.