UFO researchers try to go mainstream

Tell it like it is
For nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, there is no doubt that some UFOs are alien spacecraft. In his view, the subject of flying saucers represents a "Cosmic Watergate" — a colossal government cover-up.

Friedman is a globe-trotting lecturer on UFOs and is the original civilian investigator of the celebrated UFO crash case in Roswell, N.M. That out-of-the-blue happening supposedly occurred 60 years ago, in 1947, involving no less than two crashed saucers, strewn debris and recovered alien bodies, he reported at the MUFON meeting.

"I come on very, very strong. I'm not an apologist UFOlogist ... I tell it like it is," Friedman told Space.com. He senses that a "big sea change" is taking place on several fronts.

"My overall impression is that people are more ready to accept [UFO visitation] because the world has changed ... space travel being an important part of that," Friedman noted. "What I'm saying is that the notion that most people don't believe in UFOs isn't true."

Also, the media is giving UFO sightings a much fairer shake than in the past, Friedman suggested, citing not only Roswell coverage, but the reporting of UFO sightings made at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport late last year, and more revelations concerning the Phoenix lights saga of March 1997.

"I don't look for advocacy ... I want fairness," Friedman added. "I feel the world is ready. I'm outspoken, yes. But I try to make it a rule: Fact in hand before mouth in gear."

Mind-bending finding?
UFOs as visitors from afar would be a simple, easy-to-grasp explanation, suggested George Knapp, an investigative reporter for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. But he wonders if there isn't a mind-bending finding waiting at the bottom of the UFO barrel.

"It seems to stay one or two steps ahead of what we can do ... from airships to the saucers, to giant flying triangles ... almost teasing, taunting, or inspiring," Knapp told Space.com. Given cutting-edge physics, talk of the multiverse and parallel universes, along with threshold biological and computer work, there are fundamental paradigm shifts ahead, he said.

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"Although we can't figure out a way to get there ... doesn't mean they can't figure out a way to get here," Knapp said. Involved in UFO reporting for some two decades, Knapp said he's committed to the journalistic credo that the public has a right to know.

"But you know what? Maybe not! It goes against everything in my professional life that I believe. What if it's not something we should know? That the truth is so unsettling that our social institutions would, in fact, crumble," Knapp confided.

Knapp underscored the prospect that perhaps we Earthlings live in the middle of some other kind of intelligence. Perhaps our planet is nothing more than a cosmic drive-in theater, he added, and UFOs skim in and out of our skies just to watch goofy movies.

"And if it's something else — like they live here among us and everything we do is like being in a glass shower — people are going to go crazy. So maybe there is a reason for keeping this secret ... and a need for government cover-up, which I believe there is," Knapp said.

Knapp's on-air investigative work focuses primarily on government corruption and organized crime. But when he was asked about the angle that his next investigative piece on the UFO phenomenon will take, he quickly responded, "Nothing I'm going to tell you about."

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