[citation needed] In 1970, Friedman left full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

[5] Friedman was the first civilian to document the site of the Roswell UFO incident,[6] and supported the hypothesis that it was a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

[7] 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.

217) A piece of evidence that he often cited with respect to this hypothesis is the 1964 star map drawn by alleged alien abductee Betty Hill during a hypnosis session, which she said was shown to her during her abduction.

Astronomer Marjorie Fish constructed a three-dimensional map of nearby sun-like stars and claimed a good match from the perspective of Zeta Reticuli, about 39 light years distant.

The fit of the Hill/Fish star maps was hotly debated in the December 1974 edition of Astronomy magazine,[11][12] with Friedman and others defending the statistical validity of the match.

Friedman criticized Sagan, a proponent of SETI, for ignoring empirical evidence, such as "600-plus unknowns" of Project Blue Book Special Report No.

His positions are regarded as controversial in mainstream science and media, but Friedman claimed to have received little opposition at his many lectures, most of which were at colleges and universities, many to engineering societies and other groups of physicists[4] (p. 24).

For example, he showed that a supposed memo from Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter to President Truman, dated February 17, 1948, was actually the emulation of a letter from Marshall to Roosevelt that was featured in the book The American MAGIC.

[18] On May 13, 2019, Friedman died of a heart attack at the Toronto Pearson Airport while traveling home from a speaking engagement in Columbus, Ohio.