Daniel Fry - Contactee?

[Thomas R Morrison]

I'm looking for evidence against the claims of Daniel Fry, the 50s-era contactee(?). Specifically I'm hoping that some of the members here can cite sources that provide a factual basis to refute Fry's contact story.

Because I've been studying this case for nearly 20 years - the physics described in his books has been the focus of my interest, and in many key aspects Daniel Fry's story and scientific writings stand alone among the contactee stories. In fact, in sharp contrast to the other contactee reports, an alarming number of specific claims have withstood the test of time. Not only withstood it, but in fact many modern theoretical and technological advances appear to be converging on specific items within his published works. And that sets me back on my heels, because it's exactly opposite to the divergences we find in the other contactee reports.

So I seem to be forced to arrive at one of two conclusions: either Daniel Fry was telling the truth about his contact experience at White Sands, or perhaps the contact report was a cover story to leak some major advancements in deep black military research programs.

For example, in two of Daniel Fry's books first published in the 50s, he clearly describes dark energy, which he attributes to an extremely long-range repulsive gravitational force acting at intergalactic scales. Our best model of dark energy is described as a repulsive gravitational effect, consistent with the theory of general relativity, attributed to some massless and all-pervasive vacuum energy field that appears as the cosmological constant in Einstein's field equation. As most of us know, academic astronomy didn't detect dark energy until 1998 - more than forty years after Fry published his books.

There are other fascinating examples, like electromagnetically induced transparency of metals, which is another recent advancement anticipated by Fry's writings.

And unlike all of the other contactee explanations of the field propulsion system employed by ufos, Fry attributes the action of this field to an as-yet undiscovered general relativistic effect. The effect he describes in some detail perfectly coincides with the field propulsion mechanism that first appeared forty years later in the academic theoretical physics community, in 1994, when Miguel Alcubierre first published his paper on warp field propulsion - which remains to this day the only mathematically consistent model of a faster-than-light propulsion mechanism in the mainstream literature. And it doesn't end there; I volunteered a chapter to Daniel Fry's biography on the subject which goes into more detail.

I already know about the fake ufo footage. I assume that Daniel Fry created it, and that's pretty damning stuff. On the other hand, it's possible that he faked that footage because he was taking such a beating for not having any evidence to offer to support his story. As a scientific thinker and a professional technician in the rocket industry, he would've understood that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - which he didn't have. And that may have driven him to a tragic lapse of judgment.

I have to consider that possibility in light of the startling logical and scientific consistency of his books and interviews.

But if anyone has any additional evidence against Daniel Fry, I'd like to hear it, because I'd like to settle this matter in my mind.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

Ask Ray Stanford. He spent a bit of time checking him (and his followers) out back in the 50s in SoCa. I seem to remember he wasn't impressed w/ Fry & his contact "Brother Boco."

 

[Gene Steinberg]

To which you can pretty much add all the other infamous 1950's contactees.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Thank you Chris and Gene – it’s really great to hear from you both.

Chris – thank you for the encouragement to contact Ray Stanford. I was very impressed by your show with him: it’s great to hear so much substantial information flowing when an extremely informative researcher is queried by two experts in the field. I’ve been reluctant to write to him on this matter since he seems to have disdain for Daniel Fry, and I guess I’ve always hoped to strike up a mutually respectful conversation with him. I guess I’ll have to risk getting some egg on my face to learn the basis of his opinion.

I don’t know who “Brother Boco” is Chris; perhaps that’s a reference to a different contactee. Daniel Fry claimed that his contact communicated with him from a remote location in orbit and provided Fry the name “A’lan” when asked. A’lan allegedly claimed to be a human being whose ancestors had left the Earth thousands of years ago. Apparently Fry’s only direct personal contact was with a “cargo carrier” craft that was set down at White Sands Missile Proving Ground, where Fry was employed at the time working for Aerojet setting up instrumentation for testing their large Aerobee rocket engines. These were the projects that the Project Paperclip scientists had been recruited to work on, to help us surpass the performance of the V2 rocket engines, probably en route to nuclear ICBMs.

Perhaps I should also mention that I’ve read Sean Donovan’s excellent and deeply researched biography about Daniel Fry (in fact I spent a month or two providing an edit for Sean), and it’s just not accurate to imply that Daniel had any sort of cult or “followers.” He founded an organization, akin to MUFON, for people who were interested in ufology. And some of the friends he made through his various talks and appearances at ufo conferences around the country would sometimes write articles for their newsletter. But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that it was ever anything more than a loosely-knit group of enthusiasts. I think Philip Klass tried to make it sound like some kind of “ufo cult,” but like most of Klass’ disingenuous character assassination tactics, there’s no basis in fact to support it. I’ve listened to hours of Fry’s old talks and interviews, and he comes off as a rigorously rational scientific thinker of humble and placid character.



Gene – I’ve seen some comments to that effect elsewhere online: it seems that Mr. Stanford’s feelings about the 50s-era contactees are infamously dismissive.

The irony is that in most cases I tend to agree. The stories of most of the other contactees of that era involve such blatantly false claims that I had written off the whole rotten business myself, early on.

But then one day I was perusing the physics library at a local university and stumbled across Fry’s 1960 publication Atoms, Galaxies and Understanding – a modest little book describing physics from the atom all the way up to this surprising repulsive gravity interaction between galaxies. This was 1995 – three years before Riess et al. and Perlmutter et al. discovered dark energy (for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011). There’s no mention of Fry’s contact experience or aliens of ufos anywhere in the book, but the central thread running through the chapters is the suggestion that all of the forces of nature are all interrelated and can be harnessed.

Soon after I discovered Fry’s 1956 book Steps to the Stars, which elegantly describes both of Einstein’s relativity theories, and outlines a concept for a unified field theory with an eye toward using a polarized gravitational field to propel a spacecraft. And again, there’s no mention of Fry’s contact experience or aliens or ufos, just a series of fascinating discussions of theoretical physics. In fact it was this book that eventually led me to the little-known realization that the Lorentz transform (the key function employed within special relativity to describe time dilation, relativistic mass, and length contraction) is nothing more than the equation of a circle. The circle and the sine wave play key roles in the unified field theory hinted at throughout the book.

It still mystifies me that a contactee would write two quite good and accessible science books that make no mention of the author’s otherworldly encounter. Perhaps I should also mention that Daniel Fry provided a diagram of the warp field propulsion mechanism employed by the craft that he said he encountered, in his 1954 book “The White Sand Incident,” and that the design and operation perfectly matches the experimental warp field generator currently undergoing testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Their tiny little table-top prototype seems far too under-powered to produce a detectable effect, imo, but the design is quite distinctive so the precise correlation seems highly improbable as a statistical fluke.

 

[Vimana]

I have a book by Fry in my collection somewhere, now I gotta go find it and read it.

Thanks for this interesting take on his story. Always good to broaden my boundaries.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Thank you Vimana; I'm glad you find this strange story to be of interest. Sean digitized all of Daniel Fry's books and uploaded them to his website for anyone to read for free - you don't even have to sign up. He did the same with his vast collection of newsletters by Fry's organization, Understanding Inc. So if it's okay to post a link, here it is: Daniel Fry Dot Com

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this subject. Because, as strange as it may seem, it appears that Daniel Fry's books may have accurately described gravitational field propulsion technology, and the basic physics of warp field navigation. And it seems to me that he definitely predicted the discovery of dark energy. To the best of my knowledge, these appear to be the first bona fide scientific predictions to ever emerge from ufology.

 

[Vimana]

Thanks for the link, I'll be diving in soon.

 

[Mulvaney]

I have a soft spot for that era. The space people wanted us to live in peace. Adamski was investigated for being a communist. Patrick Moore (presumably) could make Cedric Allingham sound plausible. We know that Buck went to Venus because he drew pictures of the buildings there; Vivenus just wanted the light to grow brighter and brought music to enjoy; the Clarions were good Christians but poor Truman was left behind when Aura Rhanes disappeared. Things were so much better before the grays came with all that talk about abductions and strange things with cows.

I keep telling my wife that all I want for a present is a copy of My Saturnian Lover - although I would accept Those Sexy Saucer People. And I even created a character named Aura Raines for some other things that I do from time to time.

But I have never investigated Daniel Fry. After reading this thread, it seems I will have to do that.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Thanks for the link, I'll be diving in soon.

But I have never investigated Daniel Fry. After reading this thread, it seems I will have to do that.

Jeez apparently I completely forgot to mention that Sean Donovan has a website that generously provides all of Daniel Fry's books online to read for free. I think he digitized all of Fry's Understanding newsletters as well. Here's a link to the first Daniel Fry book that I ran across "Atoms, Galaxies, and Understanding," which I stumbled across browsing through physics books at Tulane University. What grabbed my attention is the elegant simplicity with which he describes the fundamental principles of physics, and subtly implies new and as-yet-unrealized possibilities. And at the end he describes the repulsion between galaxy clusters which was only confirmed in 1998, roughly 40 years after he published the book, with the discovery of dark energy:
https://danielfry.com/daniels-writings/atoms-galaxies-and-understanding/

I want to restate something that's frequently overlooked. All of the other 1950s contactee stories read/sound like dime-store pulp fiction novels, and while they do have a certain naive charm in some cases, I've never found anything even remotely credible about them. Especially with respect to physics and astronomy. Scientifically, they're laughable. Except for Daniel Fry's story and his books - the stark contrast is genuinely alarming. Even after 50-60 years, instead of seeming increasingly naive with the passage of time, his work seems eerily prescient and increasingly contemporary. His description of dark energy is only one example. He also conveyed a range of subjects from nuclear binding energy to stellar nucleosynthesis and the principles of relativity with graceful clarity and simplicity, and described key features of gravitational field propulsion that were only elucidated in the academic literature in 1994 when Miguel Alcubierre published his landmark paper about warp field propulsion. Daniel Fry also described phenomena that are only now becoming a technological reality, like the electromagnetically induced transparency of metals. Our scientific and technological progress appears to be converging on the elements of his story and his writings. That's a very hard thing for me to dismiss, because I've read a lot of science dating back many decades and I've never found anything that so clearly and consistently anticipates real scientific breakthroughs, either in scientific writings or in works of fiction.

It's shame that his books and interviews have been lumped together with the ignominious class of "the 1950's-era contactees," because there's simply no comparison between the likes of Billy Meier and Truman Bethurum, and the enormously sophisticated scientific and technical material offer in Daniel Fry's body of work. Perhaps some of that distinction is attributable to his professional career as a scientist working in the early rocket industry, but even that doesn't seem to account for the uniquely prescient descriptions of our contemporary theoretical physics and experimental technological advancements. Which is why I find it so haunting, I suppose.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

This is interesting. He was so easily dismissed in those days.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I looked up the Wikipedia entry and found a link to a failed polygraph test. There were lots of excuses as to why, but he also evidently never attempted such an experiment on his own with his own selected operator. Or at least I couldn't find a record of any.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

This is interesting. He was so easily dismissed in those days.

That’s very true of the other 50’s-era contactees – silly stories usually full of huge holes: very easy to dismiss. I think that created a climate where any remotely reasonable objection to a contactee’s claims were taken as proof that they were lying. And operatives like Philip Klass pushed hard to create that climate of ridicule and derision, resorting to outright deceit to assassinate someone’s character if a story couldn’t be debunked on its own merits.

But a few audio recordings of Daniel Fry’s interviews and talks have survived, and I’ve heard them all, or nearly all of them anyway. There’s a 1966 interview with Philip Klass on the Betty Grobley show which is clearly a hit job – they even tweaked the audio to make Fry’s voice sound irritating, and I looked into Klass’ claims and found that his main objections were wrong (for example, he got the name of the college wrong when trying to track down the source of the honorary doctorate that Fry had been granted, and then falsely claimed on the air that the institution didn’t exist).

However when you hear Fry’s interviews, like the one on the Long John Nebel show, Fry’s responses are absolutely credible on scientific and logical grounds. His grasp of the theory of relativity is bulletproof, his explanations for the variety of ufo reports makes complete sense, and his grasp of the unique properties of a gravitational field propulsion system have been validated by the recent theoretical developments in warp field propulsion (and an experiment is currently underway at NASA’s Eagleworks which is founded on a series of papers and even an experimental design that strongly resembles Fry’s descriptions of both the physics and the design of such a system).

Sean Donovan provides a list of these fascinating interviews and scientific talks on his website. He offers them for free where he can (those are at the bottom of the page), but most of the copyrights are owned by others so he can only offer free samples of those, with the links to the sources. Perhaps you already have some of these audio recordings, or know someone who does. I find them fascinating:

Audio | Daniel Fry Dot Com

I looked up the Wikipedia entry and found a link to a failed polygraph test. There were lots of excuses as to why, but he also evidently never attempted such an experiment on his own with his own selected operator. Or at least I couldn't find a record of any.

Daniel Fry wrote about this experience, and I’ve found discussions of it elsewhere as well. It’s easy to see why polygraphs are no longer considered reliable or admissible in court: the device doesn’t decide what’s true or what’s a lie – the operator does. And if the operator doesn’t believe in ufo’s, then they’ll tell you that the subject is lying, regardless of what the instrumentation says. The only way to use a lie detector scientifically would be to conduct a double-blind examination of the polygraph charts themselves, using multiple examiners, to eliminate bias. But that’s never done; I’m not sure why. I suspect that if it were done, it would immediately prove that polygraphs are no more reliable than phrenology or palm reading:

Polygraph Test? | Daniel Fry Dot Com

In addition to the clear and credible discussions of physics offered in Fry’s books, I find the comparatively unsensationalistic nature of his story to be unique. Fry never set eyes on his contact – they only communicated verbally via some kind of audio transmission system. And he only encountered a craft one time, he said, and that didn’t change throughout the decades that he told his story. In fact the only two factors that set his story apart from other very common eyewitness accounts, are the direct audio discussion he described and the 30-minute trip that he described within an empty “cargo vessel” to New York and back. Hardly the kind of wild stories about dinner parties on the Moon and sexy Venusians that you find in the other tales.

But then there’s also the context, which is interesting. Daniel Fry did work at White Sands Missile Proving Ground at the time, where the event allegedly transpired. We’ve learned since then that a great deal of UFO activity was taking place around that facility, for example:
White Sands Apr 24, 1949. McLaughlin Case
UFO Report

And I seem to recall documents about theodolite and cinetheodolite equipment being used at White Sands to collect data on the sightings near the base, and some connection to the 1954 Twining memo that didn’t surface until 1985, but I don’t keep records of that stuff because I’m focused on the physics of this subject not ufology in general. But I find that subsequent corroborating data is always compelling, because a false narrative tends to unravel with subsequent information, while the true ones tend to tie loose ends together as time progresses.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Thanks for the update. It also does appear that Ray Stanford is none-too-impressed with Fry. I'm looking into that further.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Thanks for the update. It also does appear that Ray Stanford is none-too-impressed with Fry. I'm looking into that further.

Thank you Gene - I'd love to hear the basis of Ray Stanford's objection to the Daniel Fry case; Chris mentioned that they'd met back in the day, so he may have some "inside baseball" that I've never heard about.

I've been trying to debunk this case on scientific/empirical grounds for decades, but the harder I've looked into it, the harder it's been to dismiss.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

As you wish. Ray has agreed to come on and discuss Fry and the rest of the bunch.

Remembering the Original UFO Contactees: Ask Ray Stanford!

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

As you wish. Ray has agreed to come on and discuss Fry and the rest of the bunch.

Remembering the Original UFO Contactees: Ask Ray Stanford!

Wow - that amazing Gene! Thank you so much: I've been scouring the Earth for new insight into this case for decades, and Ray Stanford is probably the one person on the planet who can actually provide it...hot dang, you totally rock!

 

[Trajanus]

Because, as strange as it may seem, it appears that Daniel Fry's books may have accurately described gravitational field propulsion technology, and the basic physics of warp field navigation. And it seems to me that he definitely predicted the discovery of dark energy. To the best of my knowledge, these appear to be the first bona fide scientific predictions to ever emerge from ufology.

What are we to make of that? Was Fry a genius, a good guesser, or did he have access to a source more advanced than ours.

 

[ChrisJohnsen]

I was very excited to hear that the man himself, Thomas R Morrison, will be a guest on an upcoming episode of The Paracast. He's currently one of the most engaging and interesting participants in the forums and I look forward to his discussion with Gene and Chris!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

What are we to make of that? Was Fry a genius, a good guesser, or did he have access to a source more advanced than ours.

I've struggled with that question for decades - in many ways that question burns within me even more deeply than my questions about my startling multiple-witness sighting experience as a child.

I could possibly accept that Daniel Fry possessed the uncanny scientific acuity to discern the performance characteristics of a gravitational field propulsion system over 40 years before those concepts were elucidated in the academic literature (although it is quite a stretch). But I balk at his published prediction of the dark energy effect 42 years before astronomers stumbled upon it: that's not something that someone could just "guess," because there were no indications of it until 1998. He had to have gotten that knowledge from a source. I suppose it's possible that somehow this knowledge existed within some classified military science research project of his era, and someone leaked that information to him - but that seems very unlikely given the state of technology back then, and the difficulty in determining the subtle recessionary accelerations of distant galaxies (and I've never heard of a top secret military astronomy project). So I have great difficulty taking the extraterrestrial explanation off the table. Especially after scrutinizing his account and seeing other key scientific features of his writings become hot areas of theoretical and experimental research in recent times. Because it's a clear, indisputable scientific prediction - here's a direct quote:

"We can explain the observed actions of the present universe by postulating that an attraction exists between the individual bodies within a galaxy, because their total mass and distance is such that they are within the positive portion of the gravitation curve with respect to each other. In the vast spaces between the galaxies however, the curve dips below the zero line, with the result that a repulsion exists between the galaxies themselves. This also explains why matter, although rather evenly distributed throughout the known universe, is not distributed uniformly, but is found in quite similar concentrations at comparatively regular distances." [emphasis mine]
Steps to the Stars, Daniel Fry, 1956

I was very excited to hear that the man himself, Thomas R Morrison, will be a guest on an upcoming episode of The Paracast. He's currently one of the most engaging and interesting participants in the forums and I look forward to his discussion with Gene and Chris!

Wow - the cat's out of the bag! Thank you for the encouraging words Chris. I'm very excited to chat with these gents on the show, and I feel very honored to be invited. I'm looking forward to sharing a lot of fresh material with my fellow denizens here in the Paracast cosmos, and I think that the exceptionally scientifically literate listeners of the show will be pleasantly surprised by the converging paths of today's most exciting theoretical and experimental breakthroughs at the frontiers of academic science, and the paranormal experiences that have brought us together.

 

[Double Nought Spy]

This is really fascinating, and I'm glad to hear you will be on the show to discuss it. Thank you for pursuing it in spite of indifference from those who should be at least a little bit curious but can't get past the "contactee" part. It reminds me of the Seth material, another trove of information most people rejected out of hand decades ago, but which is also being shown to be amazingly accurate by one modern Scientific Discovery after another.

When I came across your postings here on this matter recently, I followed a link you provided to Fry's books. I had come across The White Sands Incident many years ago in a library somewhere and started to read it. I may have been just a kid, and I may have been away from home and unable to check the book out or whatever, and was never able to find it again. This time I was seriously underwhelmed. It reads like a fairly wooden attempt at a novel. It's not convincing at all as a first-person narrative. If it had been as exciting and compelling as Communion, who knows what might have happened. Anyway, that has no more bearing on the predictive aspect than whatever Fry was caught doing as he faked his movies or whatever. As you point out, he has made clear and undeniable predictions. Somehow. Of course the Self-Appointed Guardians of the Rationalist Worldview will seize on whatever they can in order to avoid considering the points you have so eloquently and patiently raised here. The SAGotRW are childish and intellectually dishonest, but then what else is new? They have been terrified of this stuff for centuries.

I pay less and less attention to what is currently known as the "paranormal" these days because it seems to get more and more lame and silly, but I am looking forward to this episode.