The original Friedman link here.

That he's a nuclear scientist is nice, but not relevant. I can find dozens of professional scientists who think human-caused global warming doesn't stand up, and I bet a dollar you wouldn't pay attention to any of them.

There is a deep need to believe that someone Out There will come and save us from ourselves. Those waiting for the Space Brothers have exactly the same psychology as those who are waiting for Jesus to come back.

One problem with the discussions in articles like this is they focus on the details, and nobody ever actually applies sheer common sense to the overall assumptions.

Here's what Friedman now believes (in my college days, he was a bit more careful):

1. The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. Most are not.

2. The subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate, meaning that some few people in major governments have known since July, 1947, when two crashed saucers and several alien bodies were recovered in New Mexico, that indeed SOME UFOs are ET. As noted in 1950, it's the most classified U.S. topic.

3. None of the arguments made against conclusions One and Two by a small group of debunkers such as Carl Sagan, my University of Chicago classmate for three years, can stand up to careful scrutiny.

4. The Flying Saucer story is the biggest story of the millennium: visits to Planet Earth by aliens and the U.S. government's cover-up of the best data (the bodies and wreckage) for over fifty years.

One common-sense example: I look at 1 and 2 and form the conclusions:

A: Extraterrestrial space craft from a highly-advanced civilization regularly visit the Earth.

B: When one of these crashed decades ago, we hauled it off, stole it, and dissected the pilots.

Nervous yet?

Doesn't make sense, any more than a fifty-year conspiracy involving thousands of people. Some UFO fans take it far beyond this, insisting that all of our advanced tech was "reverse engineered" from flying saucers. The psychology behind this is even more interesting.

Oddly, our saucer-possessing military stubbornly persists, after half a century, in flying jet planes.