Friedman was the first civilian to document the site of the
Roswell UFO incident, and supported the hypothesis that it was a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. In 1968 Friedman told a committee of the
United States House of Representatives that the evidence suggests that Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles. Friedman also stated he believed that
UFO sightings were consistent with
magnetohydrodynamic propulsion. In 1996, after researching and
fact checking the
Majestic 12 documents, Friedman said that there was no substantive grounds for dismissing their authenticity. In 2004, on
George Noory's
Coast to Coast radio show, Friedman debated
Seth Shostak, the
SETI Institute's Senior Astronomer. Like Friedman, Shostak also believes in the existence of intelligent life other than humans; however, unlike Friedman, he does not believe such life is now on Earth or is related to UFO sightings. Friedman hypothesized that UFOs may originate from relatively nearby sunlike stars. with Friedman and others defending the statistical validity of the match.
SETI Friedman stated strong views against
search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research. Friedman contested the implicit premise of SETI that there has been no extraterrestrial visitation of the planet, because it was his claim that SETI was seeking only signals, not extraterrestrial intelligence or beings. He maintained that the prominence and widespread public claims of those involved with SETI have tended to prevent serious research of UFOs, including research by journalists.(p. 129) Friedman was a classmate of
Carl Sagan at the University of Chicago. Friedman criticized Sagan, a proponent of SETI, for ignoring empirical evidence, such as "600-plus
unknowns" of
Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. Friedman argued that these empirical data directly contradict Sagan's claim in
Other Worlds that the "reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable". Specifically, Friedman referred to a table in
Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 that he said "shows that the better the quality of the sighting, the more likely it was to be an 'unknown', and the less likely it was to be listed as containing 'insufficient information'"(p. 42).
Public and scientific opinion Friedman said of the response to his talks, "I know that most people are unfamiliar with the several large-scale scientific studies ... because I ask, after I show a slide and ask about each one, 'How many here have read this?' Typically, it is only one or two percent". He said that a talk he gave to Canadian journalists in
Saint John, New Brunswick, caused the attitudes of the journalists to change, because "... attendees had had no idea there was so much solid information, as opposed to the tabloid nonsense they thought was the primary source of UFO data". (p. 202) Friedman argued that the majority of people believe UFOs exist and at least some groups of scientists do as well. Friedman (2008) referred to the following data in support of his position: •
Gallup Polls between 1966 and 1987 asked respondents the question: "Are UFOs something real, or just people's imagination?" Of those who took a position one way or the other, 61%, 64%, 68%, and 60% took the position they are real in 1966, 1977, 1978, and 1987, respectively. • With respect to scientists, a poll was taken by Industrial Research and Development in 1971 and 1979. Of the respondents who took a position, 64% and 69% stated they believed UFOs either probably or definitely exist. Of this subgroup, 32% and 44% considered their origin to be Outer Space in 1971 and 1979, respectively. Of the rest of this subgroup, approximately half believed them to be natural phenomena and half were "undecided". •
Peter Sturrock also polled the membership of the American Astronomical Society and found that "the greater the amount of time one spent on reading UFO-related material, the more likely one is to accept their reality" (p. 210). ==Criticisms and controversies==