#1628: Stanton T. Friedman

A.k.a. The Flying Saucer Physicist (his own moniker)

Stanton T. Friedman lives in Canada, but seems to be of American origin, and that might be sufficient to qualify for inclusion in the Encyclopedia. He certainly qualifies on merit. Friedman is a retired nuclear physicist who once worked on technology development for various large companies, but who since the 1970s has devoted his life full-time to traveling around the world lecturing about UFOs and giving TV and radio appearances. In fact, Friedman is sometimes considered to be one of the greatest experts on the topic, which is not necessarily very impressive, as he has, ostensibly, written some “80 UFO-related papers” (journals not specified) and even “provided written testimony to Congressional hearings,” where he explained that the evidence suggests that Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles; unfortunately, Congress seems to have had a “you need to show us, not just tell us”-attitude toward that evidence, and wasn’t particularly impressed with what he had to show. He has also appeared on George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM radio show, which presumably gave him a more appropriate audience.

According to Wikipedia, Friedman was “the first civilian to document the site of the Roswell UFO incident” and naturally thinks the Roswell incident involved a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and – accordingly – a widespread government conspiracy to cover it up. As he told Congress, Friedman also believes that UFO sightings are consistent with magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, and in 1996, after researching and fact checking (some quotation marks would probably have been apt) the Majestic 12 documents, Friedman concluded that there was no substantive grounds for dismissing their authenticity – which seems to miss a point or two about who has the burden of proof in these cases. But as Friedman says, he has little patience for “nasty, noisy negativists” or – said in different words – the idea of trying to falsify hypotheses (rather than Texas sharpshooting) as a research strategy. Later on even Friedman himself provided evidence that at least some of the Majestic 12 documents were hoaxes, which, since they were “found” together is pretty solid evidence that they all are. In fact, they are all hoaxes, of course, and they are easily demonstrated to be so. At present, the Majestic 12 seems to serve as something of a gateway between fun-loving, open-minded, silly hobby UFO enthusiasm and tinfoil hat gubmint-is-using-mind-control-rays territory.

Does he have any positive evidence at all? Well, he likes to cite a 1964 star map drawn by infamous alleged alien abductee Betty Hill during a hypnosis session, which she said was shown to her during her abduction. The case is a pretty legendary example of (literally) searching for a terrain to fit the map: one astronomer, Marjorie Fish, spent much effort scouring the night sky until finding – if one adjusted things a little (removing some stars, adding others) – something that fit Hill’s map and story (and not particularly well at that). Even the fit-after-adjustments has later been utterly debunked by new astronomical discoveries, but it is unclear that Friedman even cares. After all, he has, together with Kathleen Marden, written a book about the Hills: Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. Apart from the map, their evidence that the Hills were abducted by aliens is pretty much this: Betty Hill spent two years writing a UFO story and sharing it with her husband Barney, and then, when asked about that story under hypnosis, Barney Hill was able to tell it pretty much as Betty wrote it (dum-dum-dum-dum-dum).

Friedman has also repeatedly cited the 1996 Yukon UFO, which has conclusively been shown to be the re-entry of the Cosmos 2335 second stage rocket booster. He hasn’t mentioned that part. In fact, he generally doesn’t seem to take it particularly well when his claims get debunked, and has argued (e.g. in “The Pseudo-Science of Anti-Ufology”), in response to careful, scientific investigations of UFO phenomena, that skeptics’ arguments “aren’t scientific, but rather represent research by proclamation rather than investigation,” because their careful investigations don’t yield the conclusions he would like. Another piece of alleged evidence he seems to be fond of is the Project Blue Book Special Report Number 14, a statistical analysis of UFO reports released by the Battelle Memorial Institute back in 1955. It is discussed here. Needless to say, reasonable people are not impressed.

In fact, Friedman has written numerous books and, more importantly, appeared in virtually every UFO-fan documentary ever made, such as Overlords of the UFO and the hilariously and embarrassingly anticlimactic Best Evidence! Top 10 UFO Sightings which was supposed to give us what UFO fans considered the best cases of UFO they’ve got; this one was #1 (indeed, the Yukon case mentioned above made an appearance as well). When asked why UFO sightings have increased over the last half century, Friedman suggests that it’s obviously aliens checking up on us in case we nuke them rather than, you know, citing “higher population”, “better record-keeping” or “more effective media”; it’s a rather illuminating answer with regard to how Friedman assigns initial likelihoods to hypotheses.

Friedman is also an opponent of SETI, however, since the implicit premise of SETI is, as Friedman sees it, that there has been no extraterrestrial visitation of the planet (and the researchers are by extension not taking him seriously). He has, however, apparently endorsed semi-legendary and hilariously quaint distance healer Braco. In 2012 Friedman also received some attention for a spectacularly unsuccessful participation in a marketing ploy for the “found footage” movie Apollo 18.

Diagnosis: Oh, dear. At least he’s something of a legend, but possibly not for the reasons he would have wished (except, perhaps, among hardened lunatics). Entertaining fellow.

#1627: Neal Frey

Remember the Texas Board of Education antics a couple of years back? One of the central, uh, grassroots players on the side of abysmally fundamentalist crazy was the organization Educational Research Analysts (ERA), founded a long time ago by Mel and Norma Gabler to campaign against public school textbooks that the Gablers regarded as “anti-family” or “anti-Christian”, which would be pretty much everything this side of Tertullian, including those that contain “statements about religions other than Christianity, statements emphasizing contributions by minorities, and statements critical of slave owners.” Those “religions other than Christianity” would include humanism, which the Gablers claimed were a “religion” that taught ideas such as evolution, sex education, internationalism and an optimistic view of human nature. Given the time and age of their campaigns, ERA managed – despite having no education – to achieve an impressive level of clout with the State Board of Education (who adopted many of their suggestions), and were, by the 2000s, major players.

When they died, ERA was taken over by their long time coworker Neal Frey, who continued their work (“[r]eplacing stan­dard algorithms with haphazard searches for personal meaning unconstitutionally establishes New Age relig­ious behavior in public school Math instruction” is a 2007 example) and, in particular, tried to use it to affect the outcomes of the Texas textbook wars.

As of 2014 he was still trying to combat the teaching of evolution in Texas schools, and did for instance file a formal complaint with the Texas Education Agency alleging that Pearson Education’s high school biology textbook was wrong in explaining the close similarities between chimpanzee and human DNA and saying that scientific evidence shows that chimps are the closest living genetic relatives of humans. Pearson responded by pointing out that Frey doesn’t have the faintest clue what he is talking about, but the State Board of Education Chairwoman Barbara Cargill backed the complaint, ostensibly because she doesn’t have the faintest clue either. Frey also wanted history textbooks to portray white people in the former Confederate states as victims of oppression after the Civil War, but it is unclear whether he found any support for that one.

Diagnosis: Oh, they won’t give up, even though the movement has been intellectually more or less dead since the Middle Ages. Frey still continues to fight bitterly against sanity, truth and reason, but his influence seems to have waned a bit the last couple of years but the Texas Taliban anti-science campaign is certainly not dead. He’s still dangerous.

#1626: Terry Fox

Michael R. Fox, climate change denialist (climate change is a conspiracy among researchers to obtain research money) and, apparently, HIV denialist has passed away, giving his spot in this Encyclopedia to yet another fundamentalist whacko, Terry Fox.

Terry Fox, as pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church in Wichita (a position he later left to focus on his activism), came to attention in 2005, when he became involved, first, in a successful campaign to ban gay marriage and, second, in the now famous fight over the Kansas school board’s science standards. (His discussion with Eugenie Scott, in which he flaunts some impressive levels of ignorance, can be viewed here.) According to Fox, evolution is a “cult” and “the mother of all liberalism”, and the science standards for public education should be changed to also include creationism intelligent design in part because “most people in Kansas don’t think we came from monkeys” (which we hope is true, but not in the way Fox thinks). During his efforts he also cited the “homosexual agenda” and “taking Christ out of Christmas”. Just as well, I suppose – the debate was never about science in any case (also illustrated by board member Connie Morris, who called evolution a “fairytale” and, when she lost her bid, blamed the “lying liberal media” for her defeat). “If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die,” said Fox.

During the debates, Fox seemed to be dimly aware that getting evangelicism and young-earth creationism into public schools would potentially cause some legal problems, and supported the Discovery Institute strategy of introducing creationism in the name of “intellectual freedom”. So, although creationism was his goal (“creationism's going to be our big battle”), he was willing to take things one step at a time: “We’re trying to be a little more subtle,” said Fox. Unfortunately for him and the Discovery Institute, subtlety turned out not to be his strong suit.

Diagnosis: Oh, yes: Another crazy and hateful liar for Jesus. Fortunately for the rest of us, Fox isn’t very good at lying. We don’t know what he’s up to these days (he’s been heavily involved in anti-gay activism, at least) but it is surely nothing good.

Addendum: Actually, we do have some idea what he's up to. He's become a ghost buster! At his new church, Summit Church, the entire ministry team is "trained to help people who are battling the supernatural."

#1625: Wendy Fournier

Wendy Fournier is an anti-vaccine activist and president of the National Autism Association (NAA), a group committed to the ridiculously false idea that “[v]accinations can trigger or exacerbate autism in some, if not many, children, especially those who are genetically predisposed to immune, autoimmune or inflammatory conditions” (it also lists the other usual and falsified (if they were ever worth taking seriously) autism “biomed” causes, such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, proximity to freeways and the like). Katie Wright is a board member. Fournier and the NAA are, of course, more committed to antivaxx lunacy than the “mays” or “cans” of the NAA mission statement might suggest (and which, to emphasize once again, is in blatant denial of the uniform results of actual research). Indeed, the NAA is a sponsor of the quack seminar Age of Autism. But Fournier and the NAA of course don’t market themselves as antivaccine conspiracy theorists. That’s presumably how they could for instance manage to land a partnership with Chili’s, which the company – after actually taking the time to check out what they were sponsoring – subsequently backed out of. Mike Adams took the case to show, once again, that there is a global conspiracy by the “medical mafia” to kill everyone (a framing that probably didn’t help the NAA’s standing with donors, and Fournier claimed that Chili’s cancellation was bullying, orchestrated by people who hate children with autism and that the anti-vaccine claims of the NAA are made by parents who “are entitled to their viewpoints without being attacked.”

Of course, despite denying that she is “antivaccine” (which most anti-vaxxers do as a ploy to look “moderate”, even though it is usually not hard to see through it), Fournier has a penchant for participating at antivaccine conferences, such as the Give Autism A Chance Summit of The Autism Trust, together with “luminaries” like Rob Schneider, Andrew Wakefield, Arthur Krigsman and Kim Stagliano. Though she knows nothing about science or how research works, Fournier has also been caught dismissing scientific studies that find no link between vaccines and autism out of hand. And if you don’t understand the science but don’t like the results of a study, what do you do? You obfuscate, appeal to conspiracy (“conflict of interest”) and move the goalposts, of course.

Diagnosis: Hardcore science denialist and conspiracy theorist. And like most rabid antivaccine activist she has been forced into the conspiracy theorist position position by those pesky, bullying scientists: She knows what she wants the answer to be, but evidence, science and reality tell us that this answer is wrong, so what choice does she have?

#1624: Keith Fournier

Yes, this is familiar territory, but we still need to cover it. Keith Fournier is the editor of Catholic Online, a former attorney with Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, and head of the Common Good Alliance, and he does not like homosexuals. And since he is a loon, Fournier has channeled his dislike of homosexuals into paranoid conspiracy theories, expressed for instance in his columns at Matt Barber’s website Barbwire, where he has claimed that same-sex marriage will lead to as much violence as China’s Cultural Revolution, which left millions dead and which is what zeh gays are aiming for in the US, ostensibly because they are murderous. He also described anti-gay activists as the “true liberators” and “advocates for a society of human flourishing and freedom” who are preventing the “cultural slide into the abyss of relativism,” because he has realized that he can really just make words mean whatever he wants them to mean and that his audience is as crazy as himself. That’s also why allowing gays to marry is anti-Christian discrimination. Meanwhile, those who disagree with him and notice what he’s saying are “spying”, no less.

At least he has the dubious honor of being the author of one of the most embarrassing arguments against gay marriage ever: Yes, his piece contains the common claim that since “homosexual sexual acts” can “never be the equivalent of marriage,” therefore the existence of homosexuals undermine marriage, but the novel move is his point that it doesn’t matter whether there exists any genetic disposition toward homosexuality, since there may be genetic dispositions toward obesity as well; so “[s]hould we as a Nation decide that fat people have a civil right to be fat? Should those who insist that they resist that ‘genetic predisposition’ to overeat be called Fata-phobic?” Yeah, just think about that (Fournier evidently didn’t).

Here is Fournier on the Kim Davis affair – his main claim being that Davis’ oath to uphold the laws only requires her to uphold the laws that were in effect before she was sworn into office (just think for a moment about how ludicrous that idea is) – ending with a call for a “Christian revolution”. (You can find a nice list of deranged wingnut legal misconceptions about the Davis case here.) And here is Fournier being miffed that Ireland overwhelmingly voted to legalize gay marriage, threatening the Irish that Fournier’s bully friend God will come and beat them up if they don’t agree with him.

Honorable mention to his namesake Ray Fournier, a public school teacher and homeschooling activist in North Carolina who has called out public schools for being “concentration camps” that turn kids gay.

Diagnosis: There really isn’t much more to say about this one. A delusional, angry, evil and hateful monster, but we doubt that his nonsense carries much influence beyond the usual suspects.