Brad Sparks Replies to Stanton Friedman's Response

The original article "Roswell: The 5-Pound Alien Spacecraft"
and Stan Friedman's Response

Notice Stan doesn't QUOTE any FIRST-HAND Roswell witnesses by NAME who saw any alien bodies or spacecraft, and he admits there aren't any. He has to drag in Barnett or Barnett-related stories from across New Mexico and it all crumbles into a disjointed mess of hearsay and questionable or retracted testimony. There isn't a shred of credible evidence tying in Barnett or the later Barnett-related or inspired Plains of San Agustin (PSA) stories to Roswell or even pinpointing a June-July 1947 date. Without at least a June-July 1947 date to provide even a tenuous link to Roswell the stories float in a nebulous twilight zone of ambiguity and doubt -- the very thing Roswell was supposed to change. Roswell was supposed to be the one single intensively investigated UFO case that would prove the fact of ET visitation based on accurately DATED and LOCATED details from credible testimony by FIRST-HAND EYEWITNESSES. Remember?

Stan is hard-pressed to deny his own words "abandoning" the Barnett story back in 1982/5 except by blaming Moore for those MUFON papers. But Stan's Bibliographies in his books and papers list himself as coauthor with Bill Moore of the 1982 and 1985 articles and he even lists himself FIRST as "Friedman & Moore" instead of "Moore & Friedman" in some of the listings.

And I made these same points to Stan about his abandonment of Barnett, etc., by E-mail and in postings on both the Close-Encounters and Project 1947 Lists back in Nov 1998 so he is familiar with my arguments about his and Moore's mistaken linkage of Barnett to Roswell. Stan never tried to deny his coauthorship of these Moore-Friedman or Friedman-Moore papers in the Nov 1998 correspondence.

More of my COMMENTS below

       STF: Stan Friedman          BS: Brad Sparks

STF: I will intersperse my comments with Brad's. We saw each other quite a lot between 1975 and 1980 when we both lived in the San Francisco Bay area.. Stan Friedman (STF)

COMMENTS: We also worked together on the Roswell investigation from 1979 into the early 80's, when I vigorously objected to the linkage of Barnett to Roswell.

BS: Thank you for asking my opinion on the Roswell mess. Basically, I tend to believe the first-hand testimonies of eyewitnesses to the Roswell debris, the earlier accounts the better -- and only after critical evaluation accounting for witness perceptual error and memory defects, especially the processes of folklore generation after passage of many years and the contaminating effects of publicity. BS

STF: I certainly prefer first hand testimony as early as possible in an investigation and before the media get involved. I am fortunate in that, unlike Brad, I was the first to talk to many of the key witnesses long before Roswell went public. Most of them aren't mentioned in his comments. STF

COMMENTS: What Stan is insinuating here is that I should NOT believe HIS interviews with first-hand Roswell witnesses but should do my own interviewing and ignore everything turned up in his interviewing. And if I should discard Stan's interviews, according to Stan, shouldn't everyone discard Stan's interviews too? But I DO believe what the Roswell witnesses said in the interviews with Stan, allowing of course for investigator bias, leading, memory, etc., and NONE of them say they PERSONALLY saw dead alien bodies, a crashed alien spaceship, propulsion system, computers, lasers, life support systems, etc.

ALL of the Roswell witnesses Stan talked to before Roswell "went public" ARE mentioned in my commentary -- there is ONLY ONE and that was Major Jesse Marcel Sr. and I did indeed mention Marcel, in fact it was a quote from Moore and Friedman. Roswell "went public" no later than Len Stringfield's presentation of the case from Marcel's testimony at the MUFON Symposium in July 1978, possibly as early as Steve Tom's interviews and broadcasts from Chicago in May 1978.

Stan has never published a full transcript or detailed verbatim quotes from his first interview with Marcel on Feb 21, 1978, where we could see what Marcel had to say before the Roswell publicity onslaught could influence his testimony -- of course Marcel had still been exposed to "Hangar 18," UFO flap publicity and sci fi for decades before that.

BS: The first-hand Roswell witnesses say that what was found was foil-like foil, balsa-like balsa sticks, rubber-like rubber sheets, paper-like paper parchment, plastic tape-like tape, with symbols on some of the material, plus some filaments or threads -- all of which added up to a total of about 5 pounds of material (according to Mac Brazel who was the discoverer).

STF: The above statement reflects what was printed in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9, 1947, after Mack Brazel had been detained and reprogrammed by the US Government. It does not reflect first hand testimony as obtained from Jesse Marcel, Jesse Marcel Jr., Bill Brazel, Loretta Proctor, Judd Roberts, and many others as described, for example in my 1992 book "Crash at Corona" and Bill Moore's 49 page 1985 Paper "Crashed Saucers: Evidence in Search of Proof "(Contrary to Brad's assertion below I was not a co author).

COMMENTS: Stan lists himself as coauthor with Moore of the 1985 paper, if you check Stan's Bibliographies in his books and papers, "Moore & Friedman."

Notice again Stan doesn't QUOTE any of these Roswell witnesses as saying they saw bodies or a crashed spaceship. His own witness interviews report first-hand seeing only FOIL, RUBBER, PAPER, BALSA and TAPE. He presents no proof for his wild assertion that Brazel had been "reprogrammed by the US Government," but it is very convenient for him to say that in order to explain away the contemporaneous Brazel crash details published in July 1947, which because they are so early they are thus not contaminated or dulled by 30-50 years of intervening time to the present controversy.

STF: Witnesses did say some wreckage had the WEIGHT of balsa wood but could not be burned, broken or cut. They said other material was LIKE foil but couldn't be torn and could be folded over and over and would unfold on its own. They did not describe any tape.

COMMENTS: As for TAPE reported by a Roswell eyewitness, I quote from the Moore-Friedman ROSWELL INCIDENT book of 1980 (p. 86), in the July 1979 interview with Bessie Brazel, Mac Brazel's daughter, where she reported she saw FIRST-HAND:

"Some of the metal-foil pieces had a sort of TAPE stuck to them, and when these were held to the light they showed what looked like pastel flowers or designs."

There are NO FIRST-HAND reports of anyone PERSONALLY taking a sledgehammer to the Roswell material or even PERSONALLY SEEING SOMEONE ELSE taking a sledgehammer to the material -- it's totally undocumented anonymous HEARSAY first told 30+ years after the fact. All the other reports of alleged unusual properties of the foil and balsa come after 30+ years of UFO publicity, science fiction and folklore influence with notions of alien materials being indestructible and strange, and many of these reports are hearsay too. NONE of the reports of unusual strength etc. come from contemporary 1947 accounts, not even the 16-pound sledgehammer tale.

STF: Dr. Marcel described strange symbols on I-beam like pieces. We all tend to describe the new in terms of the old. LIKE does not mean "the same as" especially when clear cut differences are enunciated.

COMMENTS: It still doesn't sound like remains of an alien spacecraft. No one from Roswell saw alien-LIKE dead aliens, spaceship-LIKE crashed spaceship, engine-LIKE spacecraft engines, hull-LIKE spacecraft hull, etc.

BS: This does not sound like an alien spacecraft. There is no mention of dead alien bodies, laser devices, silicon microchip wafers, Kevlar-like fabric, computers, etc., by any of the first-hand Roswell witnesses.

STF: Certainly nobody says the first hand wreckage witnesses relating to the Corona crash said anything about alien bodies, laser devices silicon microchip wafer... this latter is all Corso nonsense

COMMENTS: Exactly my point.

BS: As Moore and Friedman have stated, "Marcel, Haut, and the seven Brazel family members say that as far as they are aware, there were NO BODIES FOUND."

STF: This is certainly true and is clearly reflected in "Crash at Corona" and in all my papers.

COMMENTS: Exactly my point. Here in my Guest Commentary (above) by the way, I mention the names of first-hand Roswell witnesses, contrary to Stan who claimed earlier that I had never mentioned anyone.

STF: Bodies were mentioned with regard to the Plains of San Agustin in testimony

COMMENTS: HEARSAY!!!! This is weasel-wording in the passive voice to dodge the fact that the "mentions" were HEARSAY from Barnett long dead (with one non-credible exception to be noted below). That isn't real "testimony"!

STF: from Vern and Jean Maltais, Alice Knight, Harold Baca, Gerald Anderson etc.

COMMENTS: Gerald Anderson is dismissed in the intro to Stan's revised paperback edition of Crash at Corona, where Stan and Don Berliner say they "NO LONGER HAVE CONFIDENCE" in Anderson's story (p. xvi).

Vern & Jean Maltais and niece Alice Knight all agree they first heard Barnett's story of crashed saucer with alien bodies in 1950. The Maltaises specifically had evidence showing that it was in February 1950 when they heard the story from Barnett and that the story itself was UNDATED. This was right smack in the midst of the Scully-inspired crashed saucer-alien bodies stories in the national media from January to March 1950, which included a TIME Magazine story on Jan 9.

STF: The question until the testimony of Glenn Dennis first hand to me in 1989 was "was there any connection between the PSA and Corona and why were no bodies at Corona." The EBD gives a good reason.: bodies were a few miles away.

COMMENTS: Stan trusts the fraudulent EBD MJ-12 document's distance measurements but fails to mention that the EBD places the UFO crash site at the location of the alleged lightning storm given in The Roswell Incident (p. 27), due to an embarrassing misinterpretation by the document hoaxer, instead of at the actual crash site on the Foster ranch about 15 miles away to the southeast. The EBD states that the crash site was 75 miles NW of Roswell Army Air Base but in fact the UFO crash site was 62 miles NW of Roswell AAF a sloppy error of fifteen miles.

The careless MJ-12 hoaxer misread The Roswell Incident book (p. 27) which said the lightning storm that hypothetically caused the UFO to crash was about 75 miles NW of Roswell, so the hoaxer naively assumed that was the crash site.

STF: Standing on the site in rolling hills they couldn't have been seen from where Jesse and Cavitt had been. Bodies were discussed by a Photographer brought in from DC to take pictures. They would certainly have been easily spotted from the air.

COMMENTS: More ANONYMOUS HEARSAY, now 50+ years after the fact (the unnamed "photographer" didn't see any bodies).

BS: It is still an unshakeable fact that until Moore and Friedman came along in 1979 and mistakenly connected the apparently Scully-inspired undated Barney Barnett story in WESTERN New Mexico to the 1947 Roswell story in EASTERN New Mexico, no one had EVER thought of Roswell as involving dead alien bodies or an alien spacecraft with advanced machinery (beyond of course what the term "flying disc" used in the original 1947 news accounts might have implied to the imagination). Barnett himself was never interviewed by investigators as he had died many years earlier, so his story is only known from admittedly "hearsay" retellings literally decades after he told the story (or stories).

STF: Sorry. There was no mistake.

COMMENTS: Sorry, as Stan said in 1985 the connection of Barnett to Roswell was a "HYPOTHESIS" that had "INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE" and may well be "SUBSTANTIALLY IN ERROR" so it forced a "MAJOR RETRENCHMENT" of their "whole scenario" connecting Barnett to Roswell. (See my quotes from Moore-Friedman 1985 below.)

STF: And certainly no connection with Scully's story. Barney's boss did provide (First Hand) dates and location.

COMMENTS: This is pathetic calling what someone (Barnett's boss) HEARD from someone else (Barnett) as "First Hand" when it is patently just HEARSAY. And by the way, the boss, Fleck Danley, heard from Barnett in the summer 1947 ONLY a report of a Daylight Disc (DD) sighting, NOT a crashed saucer with dead alien corpses hanging half out of the ship or anything of the sort. Again, it's only Friedman who connects this DD sighting to a crashed saucer. This underscores the dangers of relying on hearsay when such distinctions as between a DD sighting and a Crashed Saucer/Dead Aliens are so easily suppressed or ignored in order to force a nonexistent connection between unrelated stories, in this instance Barnett's 1947 DD sighting and his UNDATED Saucer Bodies story first told in 1950, which I think was concocted then to fit in with the Scully hoaxes circulating nationwide.

STF: There was supportive testimony from the above named witnesses, from Ruth Barnett's diary about the location and Barney's activities.

COMMENTS: Ruth Barnett's diary PROVES that Barnett never went to the West Plains of San Agustin (PSA), near Horse Springs, the alleged UFO crash site in July 1947. He only made it HALF WAY, to Datil, on July 2, 1947, and was back home at 6 PM whereas a trip to Horse Springs was so remote it required an overnight stay. (Besides that date is too early for the standard Roswell scenarios.) And the diary makes NO MENTION of BODIES or a CRASHED SAUCER.

STF: One makes do with the witnesses available. Read the book Brad.

COMMENTS: I have read the book, Stan, but you need to re-read it since you overlooked your own statement about "NO LONGER HAV[ING] CONFIDENCE" in Gerald Anderson's story (p. xvi), which no-confidence vote you forgot all about at the beginning of this E-mail response where you cite Gerald Anderson as a credible witness once again.

STF: I have indeed suggested since the bodies at the PSA would never have been shipped to Roswell and since there is witness testimony about a gash like 2 parentheses face to face in the almost intact PSA saucer, and since the Corona bodies smelled badly (apparently after being out in the sun for days) that there might well have been a mid air collision with one saucer coming down intact and another exploding into many pieces.. possibly caused by the tracking radar known to be on or by a huge lightning strike.

COMMENTS: More HEARSAY packaged as "witness testimony," again UNQUOTED and UNNAMED. Normally Stan packages information to nicely answer every point, but not here.

What "tracking radar KNOWN to be on"? At night at White Sands? More nonsense from fraudulent MJ-12 documents?

BS: No one can find a published account of Roswell prior to 1979 that mentions bodies or a sophisticated craft

STF: There were essentially no published accounts of Roswell prior to 1979.

COMMENTS: Not true, there were published accounts or Marcel's story by Stringfield in the MUFON Symposium Proceedings of July 1978, and in the MUFON UFO Journal later in 1978, and there was a Steve Tom/NBC-Chicago recording -- all before 1979 and with NO mention of Saucer Bodies at Roswell. Stan is trying to insinuate the lack of a Saucer Bodies story from Roswell is simply due to the lack of "essentially" ANY accounts being published at all. In reality it is due to the fact that he and Moore are the ones who invented the connection of Roswell to Saucer Bodies by bringing in the Barnett story -- but they didn't think of that until 1979, and that is my point

STF: The Roswell Incident was published in 1980. It, too, said nothing about bodies at Corona, but did note bodies in the PSA. Let us not forget that the Unsolved Mysteries TV program which I instigated in 1989 brought forth more witnesses.

COMMENTS: The Unsolved Mysteries program brought forth Gerald Anderson whom you later gave a vote of NO-CONFIDENCE in Crash at Corona (1994, p. xvi).

BS: Moore and Friedman felt compelled to "abandon" the Barnett story in 1982 as "hearsay" and "circumstantial" but it was too late, the damage had been done. Roswell was forever stamped as a crashed alien ship-with-bodies in their book The Roswell Incident (1980) despite the fact it was a mistake of investigator "hypothesis."

STF: I again suggest that Brad read my co authored 1992 book "Crash at Corona". This hardly abandons bodies in the PSA and introduces new witnesses such as retired Colonel Bill Leed, Harold Baca, Johnny Foard, and others.

COMMENTS: Notice that Stan doesn't deny that he had abandoned the Barnett story in 1982/5. And he doesn't say he now believes Barnett either, he just shifts the subject to other HEARSAY informants.

BS: As Moore-Friedman candidly confessed in 1985, "We freely ADMIT that earlier attempts to tie it [the Barnett story] to the Roswell incident were somewhat overzealous and DEFINITELY PREMATURE."

STF: In case anybody hasn't noticed, it is now 2000 not l985.

COMMENTS: Just over a year ago (on Nov 24, 1998), I made this same point by E-mail and in postings on the C-E and 1947 Lists, and Stan was unable to refute the quotation from 1985.

BS: They "freely admitted" a "MAJOR RETRENCHMENT" of their "whole scenario" connecting the Barnett "claim" to Roswell, which was based "ONLY" on the "HYPOTHESIS" of giving the Barnett story a 1947 date which had "INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE" and may well be "SUBSTANTIALLY IN ERROR." (Of course there was more to it than just force-fitting the date. They also had to force a connection of Barnett with Roswell geographically, somehow bridging the 150 miles or so stretching clear across the State of New Mexico, and then the details of the two completely inconsistent or different stories had to be forced together.)

STF: Brad you can certainly do better than this. Read my book or my 1991 18pg. paper "Update on Crashed Saucers in New Mexico" or my 1992 21 page paper "Crashed Saucers, Majestic 12, and the Debunkers". Check your geography from the Foster Ranch to the PSA is only half way across the state of NM. Nobody has forced the stories together. Wreckage and bodies were recovered at 2 sites within a few days of each other. One craft gave signs of a mid air collision .The unusual body descriptions match.

COMMENTS: All HEARSAY. In his 1991 review of the Randle-Schmitt book, Stan stresses the "VERY LONG" distance between the PSA area and the Corona area crash site, "160 miles." Matching HEARSAY details contaminated by publicity and folklore is to be expected.

BS: But this clarification or retraction was all but ignored by UFOlogy. History was indeed rewritten, as you said Peter. In short, the Roswell debris seems to consist of balloon-and-radar-reflector-like balloon-and-radar-reflector debris. When one looks at the points of information conflicting with this conclusion they are all hearsay data, or subject to serious question due to memory problems or folklore influences. For example, I haven't been able to find any first-hand statement from anyone who PERSONALLY supposedly tried to use a sledgehammer on the recovered.

STF: Read Moore's 1985 paper again with detailed descriptions of strange material (--p.157 in the MUFON Conf. Proc.) Jesse Marcel is on tape stating that one of his people tried to hit a piece of thin strong lightweight material with a sledgehammer and failed to make a dent. Nobody has claimed to me that he personally tried doing that.. Marcel reported what his man told him.

COMMENTS: That's HEARSAY -- what Marcel's "man TOLD him" is just HEARSAY and we don't even get to know the NAME of the "man" who purportedly did this. How come Marcel wasn't there to SEE this alleged attempt to damage or destroy what could have been the most important material recovered in all history? Wasn't he the ranking officer in charge of keeping the material secure?

BS: Roswell material -- a ridiculous tall-tale story that in reality would have been a court-martial offense had any military man actually tried to damage or destroy remains of a recovered alien spaceship or US Government property in such a manner. But it's a classic of folklore embellishment to add in superlative made-up details of the biggest, strongest, tallest, most powerful, most sensational, strangest, scariest, etc.

STF: This is plain hyped BS. Nobody was calling it a spaceship.

COMMENTS: That's my point -- no one from Roswell saw any spaceship wreckage and that's why they didn't call it that -- no hulls, no engines, no power plants, no life support systems, no sophisticated equipment of any kind.

Stan cannot refute the fact that folklore processes result in people embellishing stories to make them more exciting, strange, interesting. Since we all know such folklore processes do occur in real life all the time, pray tell where did it occur in the Roswell case since it MUST have occurred sometime in the 30-50 years it took to surface the Roswell stories? These embellishments are a classic sci fi theme of the Indestructible Alien Material and this motif has filtered into the Roswell stories contaminating the memories.

It is well known from memory research that Post Event Information (PEI) infects the memory so that it is "remembered" as if it "happened" to the person even if it's just a story or variation on a story that has only been heard and never experienced (see Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony, 1996 rev., pp. 66ff.; Loftus is one of the world's leading memory researchers and frequently testifies in court cases about the accuracy of eyewitness perception and memory).

Stan ignores my point that it is a fact that all the alleged attempts to burn or sledgehammer the recovered material amounted to COURT-MARTIAL offenses for VIOLATING ORDERS -- for the simple reason their ORDERS were to RECOVER the material, secure it, and NOT to "TEST" or DESTROY it for crying out loud!!! Can you imagine what a general or commanding officer would have said if he found out some private had taken a sledgehammer to some possible foreign technology that he had ordered to be recovered?

STF: There were lots of pieces of wreckage. Perfectly normal thing to do with stuff that seemed so "strange" No harm done. Certainly a non destructive test.

COMMENTS: Attempting to smash something with a 16-pound sledgehammer is "HARMLESS" and a "NON DESTRUCTIVE test"????? Give me a break. If there HAD been an ET microchip wafer there in the wreck these geniuses would have smashed it to smithereens -- if we believe these tall stories.

BS: The alien transistor story -- that the 1947-8 invention of the transistor at Bell Labs was really due to analysis of Roswell UFO crash material -- is absolute nonsense. No one in 1947 had the equipment to discover that a MICROSCOPIC size component on an alien microchip was a transistor or anything else. And because nondestructive testing did not exist in 1947 they would have to destroy the component in order to discover what it was. And if they did figure it out, they would have to make copies to simulate the function of the circuitry in order to avoid destroying more of the alien original -- and if they made microchip copies in 1947 why did it take two decades to make the first microchips?

STF: The first transistors were certainly not microscopic nor had anything to do with microchips. Let's not bring Corso into this. There certainly was plenty of non-destructive testing being done prior to 1947.

COMMENTS: Document any RELEVANT nondestructive MICROscopic assay tests in existence in 1947.

BS: Does anyone seriously think labs would burn up precious alien materiel in destructive testing thus ruining the function of the circuit or the equipment? Is there any evidence that anyone had microscopic electronic equipment and probes in 1947? Show me how anyone on earth had the microassay equipment even capable of figuring out the chemical composition and the microscopic structure of a microtransistor in 1947.

STF: This again is a rant having nothing to do with Roswell. Brad should know better It is a strawman.

COMMENTS: I was asked to write this Roswell commentary after first commenting by E-mail on Corso's Roswell story so my text began with commentary on Corso. It's no "strawman," and in no place have I discounted the Roswell incident as a whole based on the Corso version -- my Corso-related comments were made in separate paragraphs beginning by saying it was an "alien transistor story" thus SEPARATE from the main Roswell Incident story. Because the Corso story has now been merged in with the Barnetted Roswell story in popular culture, it has to be discussed.

BS: Five pounds of foil, balsa wood, rubber, paper, scotch tape and thread sounds like something made in a garage, not in an alien laboratory.

STF: I will once again repeat that this is from the new story as printed in the RDR July 9.

COMMENTS: I will once again repeat that ALL of Stan's FIRST-HAND Roswell witnesses say this -- FOIL, BALSA, RUBBER, PAPER, and TAPE -- in 1978, 1979 and since. Only the exact 5-lb weight estimate comes from Mac Brazel quoted in the RDR of July 9, 1947.

STF: It is easy to forget that if this is all there was it would have easily fit into Brazel's truck and been brought into town and that Marcel and Cavitt would never have taken the tedious trip out to the Foster Ranch behind Brazel .

COMMENTS: Oh, like Brazel was going to thoroughly scour the possibly 600+-foot area for every single scrap of scattered foil and material, leaving not a bit behind. Come on! The radar reflectors were several feet wide and might well have occupied the space in Brazel's truck in linear extent without filling it up in volume.

STF: The lightweight of balsa wood, thin like foil, etc doesn't make this stuff balsa wood or normal foil.

COMMENTS: So it's ALIEN FOIL and ALIEN BALSA WOOD STICKS and that's what aliens construct their space vehicles out of. Let everyone know that "fact," instead of letting them imagine there was a crashed ship with a doorway someone peeked inside of, with controls, instruments, equipment, dead ET bodies, etc.

STF: It seems strange that USAF Colonel Weaver and Captain McAndrew used some of these same baseless arguments depending almost entirely on the 7/9/47 article and ignoring a host of witnesses and testimony as I have described in my 28pg,1994, paper "The Roswell Incident, the USAF, and the New York Times"

COMMENTS: QUOTE these FIRST-HAND Roswell witnesses Stan! Let's see them testify to a crashed saucer in the Roswell-Corona area in July 1947. It's amazing how much verbiage is spent when a simple quote of a Roswell witness' percipient observations of personally seeing crashed remains of sophisticated alien technology -- instead of FOIL, PAPER, RUBBER, BALSA and TAPE -- would suffice to settle it all. Or maybe we need to say ALIEN FOIL, ALIEN PAPER, ALIEN RUBBER, ALIEN BALSA and ALIEN SCOTCH TAPE -- and how about ALIEN TOILET TISSUE too!