Hi Thomas, ... Well that was a pretty big mouthful to give to a self confessed 'scientific-ignoramus' wasn't it. lol.
Unfortunately that’s the nature of the anomaly here – it’s the scientific content of the two books that he published on physics and which make no mention of his alleged contact experience, that stand out as something demonstrably extraordinary, not his account of an encounter with a supposedly “alien drone cargo craft.” Honestly my interest in the experience he described pales in comparison to my interest in his scientific writings, which are in many ways dazzling and unprecedented. In fact I often wonder if he wrote them, or if they were only published under his name.
Firstly I would like to reiterate that advanced science of any nature be it theoretical or proven is just not my area of much interest at all, never has been or ever will be! I leave that play-area to guys like you my friend. And if you say that 'confirmed-UFO-con-man Fry' couldn't have pieced his assertions together from what he had learned from people such as Jan Oort, Fritz Zwicky from way back in the early 30's and all of the other boffins between then and the mid-50's etc. then I will gladly concede that the guy was in fact a "theoretical physics savant" as you say.
But that’s just it - I’m far from convinced that Fry was a physics savant. He was a capable scientific mind (as one would expect of anyone working on experimental rocket motors at White Sands), but nothing I’ve seen convinces me that he could’ve made these extraordinary scientific predictions on his own. If they were his insights, then why didn’t he write and publish papers about them? He never published a single academic science paper in his life. And if somebody like Zwicky or Oort made these discoveries and simply told Fry about them, then why didn’t they write academic papers about their discoveries - they were published scientists, we would expect any of their discoveries to be in the academic literature. If Zwicky or Oort or anyone else knew about dark energy back in the 50’s, then why would they have kept it quiet? It makes no sense. So it appears that Fry was given information that nobody at his time actually knew about, and then that information was confirmed years later…in some cases more than 40 years later. I can’t explain that. And I’ve been trying to explain it for decades. It may be the greatest unexplained anomaly in the history of modern science…and it’s inexorably linked to a self-professed alien contactee. Totally bewildering. What am I suppose to do with that – ignore it? I can’t do that: when I find a genuine logical anomaly I’m the kind of obsessive freak who won’t let it go until I understand it. And I don’t understand this yet.
But what I can say is this: if I had advanced knowledge of gravitational field propulsion and the broader subject of theoretical physics, and I wanted to help move academic science forward without making waves, this is exactly how I’d do it – I’d find a bright guy like Daniel Fry, and give him some key clues to drop into a scientific book or two, and then let the scientific thinkers who stumbled upon that book put the pieces together for themselves. That way, when their papers about it get published, it looks like their own discoveries, and nobody’s the wiser that I played any part in it.
That appears to be what happened here. And my problem is that nobody I know of could’ve had that knowledge to pass on to Daniel Fry. Zwicky was on the right track, and he may have blurted out his suspicions about an antigravitational acceleration acting between the galaxy clusters over beers one night – but he didn’t have the empirical data to prove it or else he would’ve written a paper about it, and been credited with the discovery of the dark energy effect back in the 1950s….so how could Daniel Fry (who specialized in piezoelectric transducers) have known that his hunch was right? And that still doesn’t explain Fry’s foreknowledge of the gravitoelectric dipole generator, which emerged from Robert Forward’s theoretical analysis of general relativity three years after Fry’s book was published. Are we to believe that Daniel Fry was so plugged in to the cutting edge of science that he got these insights from both Fritz Zwicky and Robert Forward, and incorporated them into his books to lend credence to his contact story? Was Robert L. Forward even working on his seminal “Guidelines to Antigravity” paper three years before he published it? It’s not inconceivable, but it’s one hell of a stretch. As far as I can tell – and Sean Donovan’s biographical research bears this out – Daniel Fry didn’t have any special interest in gravitational field propulsion until the night of his alleged encounter.
And here’s the insoluble paradox that convinces me that the basis of your argument – that Daniel Fry was seeking fame and money by concocting an alien contactee story – is untrue: if Daniel Fry had written an academic paper demonstrating either the dark energy effect that he specified in his book, or a paper about a technological approach to gravitoelectric field polarization which he also indicated in his book, then either achievement would’ve garnered far greater fame, and research grants from the US military.
And yet he didn’t write a paper about either discovery. And I’m inclined to think that was not first-hand information to him – it was given to him, and he didn’t fully understand it. The problem being that it appears that no human on Earth had that information at the time he published his science books.
But that's in your sphere of understanding, and is far removed from my own criteria of belief in a person's credibility. And as I stated previously I am of the opinion that because the man is a 'proven' hoaxer that has made wild and quite frankly unbelievable claims of supernatural events , and then made a decent living by means of relentlessly promoting these spurious claims through hundreds of paid TV and radio appearances alongside of other just as dishonourable snake-oil-salesmen … the book sales and even maximised his earnings by founding a kind of minor cult organisation with it's monthly news letter and meetings that had the claim of being a non profit venture... ["but don't forget me in your wills Ladies and Gents"].
There’s a lot to unpack there, but the truth is that I’ve seen no indication that any of Fry’s books or appearances or his organization Understanding Inc., actually turned any kind of profit, or even that they were intended to. He appeared only to be driven by his interest in this subject – akin to our own interest in it – resulting from the experience that he maintained as real throughout his life. And frankly, it’s a mundane story compared to all the rest – he claimed that an unmanned craft was sent to his location walking alone in the desert, to make contact, and offer him a 30-minute ride and an equally long conversation with the operator who claimed that he was in orbit. That’s a far cry from the luncheons on the Moon and meetings with Venusian women that the other contactees claimed.
… And yes I have read all of the stuff that you cite about your rebuttal of Fry's detractors [ie Ray Sanford] on the Paracast site as well as the Fry.com page, and still conclude that even if the guy had ruminations well beyond his time, there is no way imho that they were sourced from Alien Illumination.
That’s a perfectly reasonable position. So who was his source then? And why can I find no reference to the antigravitational repulsion acting between the galaxy clusters prior to 1998...other than in a book by an alleged alien contactee? Dark energy is probably the most important discovery in physics over the past century - perhaps ever, and yet nobody seems to have anticipated it besides Daniel Fry. That's a
very significant anomaly.
It is just beyond my flexibility to accept that such gigantic cracks in a persons claims and nefarious actions can be smoothed over by merely stating that it was a low point in his career ..or as you put it " a fairly brief and shameful era in his story, and it’s possible that he did this to provide some evidence to support his story" .. not only mock photographs but physically building a pitiful model of an UFO , filming it, and then trying to pass it off as being genuine is a pretty iron clad indication of the man's believability ... charlatanism if you like, and not just a 'shameful era' and somehow justifiably designed to glean 'credibility' for a previous 'incredible' claim! [Telling an obvious lie to bolster credibility on a previous probable lie will never fly for me Thomas, and does not sound like the actions of the kind of genius that you are ascribing to him mate.]
But I’m not ascribing real genius to him – I highly doubt that the insights in Fry’s books came from him, which is kinda my whole point.
And it’s not unreasonable to conclude, as Timothy Good did, that Fry was an honest man who briefly dabbled in making a fake film clip because as a scientist he knew that without any physical evidence nobody had any reason to believe him – and after his encounter with Phil Klass that regrettable impulse is understandable. But unlike Adamaski, it appears that Fry didn’t have the stomach to pursue it – he dropped it quickly and never went back to it. But he maintained his story until his death bed.
And I’m ashamed to admit this folly of my own youth, but I have a regrettable personal reason for seriously considering Fry’s faked film as a lapse in judgment. After my sighting as a seven-year-old boy, I immediately ran home to get the family camera and then ran back outside to take photos of the pair of zig-zagging UFOs that myself and four neighbors had been watching beside me. But the damn camera was out of film, and the UFOs didn’t reappear anyway. Then over the next 2-3 months I got increasingly frustrated that most people didn’t believe my account of that remarkable sighting event. So when one of the negatives came back blank with a spot on it, I showed it to some kids at school in a lamentable effort to convince them that my real and life-changing UFO sighting was real.
So you see – it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss Fry’s story because he faked a UFO film, because as a boy I was prompted by ridicule and disbelief to succumb to the same lapse of judgment that he did.
Of course people can also 'misremember' aspects of any occurrence over the passage of time, but the 1949- to 1950 thing after so many public recounting's of the alleged event also rings pretty loud bells with me.
He offered a seemingly reasonable explanation for that to Timothy Good:
” ‘I had to change it,’ he explained. ‘In the last edition [1966], I told the publisher to change it, but he decided this might not be a good for publicity, and he kept it to 1950 after I’d said to change it, because there was now no need to hide the fact that it was 1949.’
” ‘So there was a reason?’ I asked.
” ‘There was a reason,’ Dan replied, ‘because it turned out to be a year later then he had originally planned – that Alan could be here. He thought it could be done in four years; it actually took five years. Now, had the Pentagon, for example, taken this book seriously, at the time there was a pretty good chance they could have tracked him down. There had to be an escape mechanism. The fact is that on the evening of the Fourth of July 1950, I was not at White Sands – I didn’t arrive there until later in July. And everyone at White Sands Proving Grounds and in Aerojet knows that.'”
Alien Base, Timothy Good, 1998
I agree with you about the reliability of the 'Lie Detector' and makes little difference in my personal discernment process, but another red-flag-be-cautious-type-indicator is when I learn that someone that is claimed to be so scientifically adept actually got his degree by mail order. [just like so many conmen throughout history]
But he doesn’t claim to be exceptionally scientifically adept – he’s actually very modest in his interviews and talks. And the degree he received was freely granted to him from that diploma mill: he didn’t even ask for it.
And finally, … I can't remember your explanation of Fry's assertion that these ET's were actually humans from 'the mythical land of Lemuria that were at war with the equally mythical land of Atlantis' … I suppose that along with the undetectable Martian colony bit was just another justifiable lie in order to grab attention for the 'peace and love message' that Alan was eagerly purveying. …. Sorry, that was a cheap shot mate, but I dont have the time to go back and check,... how do you account for this obvious unsophisticated twaddle mate?
Daniel Fry claimed that aspects of
The White Sands Incident were included in the book so that his account would be dismissed as nonsense by the military personnel who read it – apparently he had to get military clearance to publish his account because it alleges to describe events that transpired at the secure facility of the White Sands Missile Proving Ground:
“In composing my report of the incident at White Sands, I took great care to present it in such a manner that it would immediately be dismissed as nonsense by the `military’ type of mind, and yet would present all the vital information in such a manner that its value could readily be understood by the type of mind capable of making use of it.”
NICAP Policy on Contactees | Daniel Fry Dot Com
So I’ve always assumed that the Atlantis stuff was an example of his efforts to slip his book through the approval process by making it look like a work of fiction.
So to round off, i'll end by stating once again that Daniel Fry might well have been a fantastically forward thinking unacknowledged scientific mind of his time, but until proof comes to light there's not a cat in hell's chance that I would believe that he ever had any contact with any ET beings. … or a free ride in a flying saucer!
That’s fine. But frankly I’ve heard far more exotic accounts, like that of Dan Sherman, which appear to be true. It was a wild fluke that Dan Sherman’s account was granted an unexpected boost of supporting evidence via the Edward Snowden leaks, which confirmed Mr. Sherman’s detailed descriptions of the clever “onion principle” architecture of the national security apparatus.
And to be completely honest, I don’t really give a damn if Daniel Fry rode in an alien cargo craft for 30 minutes to NYC and back to White Sands. What fascinates me are the unique and astonishing forward-reaching scientific predictions, and the tantalizing hints at new physics which point to a superluminal gravitational field propulsion technology. Both of Fry’s scientific books hold stunning new insights into physics and astrophysics that were decades ahead of his time. I don’t really care if he got those insights from a human being or an alien being – but I’m dumbfounded because the more I’ve learned about theoretical physics, the more readily I’ve been able to identify the amazing and often novel theoretical physics insights within his books.
In fact it appears that his two science books,
Atoms, Galaxies and Understanding, and
Steps to the Stars, are a kind of IQ test written by somebody with a clear understanding of the Grand Unified Field Theory that even today remains beyond the reach of terrestrial academic physics. And I suspect that a sufficiently intelligent scientist who studies those two books can be led via the heuristic models therein to discover the theoretical foundation which throws open the doors to manned superluminal interstellar spaceflight.
In any case, that’s how I choose to approach this mystery. And I can say that this approach has been unfathomably fruitful – the discoveries I’ve made so far have been absolutely mind-boggling. I've only shared my results with Nivek and my closest friends at this point. I’ll share them with you here when the time is right.
So Which forces me to be of the opinion that anything that the guy claims is as spurious as any other contactee charlatan that i've heard of. And as you can guess from that statement, you could also deduct that for no particular clever reason or scientific qualification, … I doubt that he was a genuine genius either, … merely an adept collator of the available theories and knowledge that may not have been widely known about at the time.
I'll sign off on this one now Thomas, because I have really said all that I want to say about the subject, and yes I admit that I am not really qualified to judge anyone's scientific prowess, but just like anyone else on these forums, I like to consider myself a decent judge of character [by the available information of course] and I see that we are far apart from any agreement on this character. I think he is just a liar, and you suspect that he was some kind of genius. … And that's fine, we don't always have to agree mate.
Cheers Buddy.
We're good; I appreciate you taking the time to have a look at it. For me the prediction of dark energy alone is a staggering anomaly in the histories of astrophysics and ufology, but I’ve spent my entire life studying physics and astrophysics so I have the background to recognize just how astonishing and unprecedented that prediction from 1956 actually is. Not once in all of my research have I found a scientific prediction of such enormous import and unexpected nature, so far ahead of its time. It would be like finding a note in Isaac Newton's book stating "time moves more slowly on the surface of the Earth than it does in deep space - an effect which I shall heretofore name 'gravitational time dilation.'" And until I understand how a capable but otherwise unremarkable rocketry technician could’ve anticipated such an unexpected phenomenon over 40 years before its discovery - and several others of equal and greater import, I’ll always remain fascinated and mystified by the case of Daniel Fry.