Ive had a brief look at this case.
Again Ive just skimmed the surface but within a few minutes Ive had some reservations.
For example Fry himself states
allow me to point out that I make no “claims,’ nor have I ever made any.The word ‘claim’ implies the desire or intent upon the part of the claimant to acquire something as the result of the claim
But that's not the definition of "claim"
verb
1.state or assert that something is the case, typically without providing evidence or proof.
This in and of itself is a red flag to me.
Honestly I can see your point but it seems very nit-picky to me. He said that the word “claim”
implied something, not that the word was defined that way. And in practice, he’s right: generally when somebody “makes a claim” they intend to defend the assertion in question, either to convince others of its truth, and/or to make money from sales/interviews/etc. I’ve heard a number of his talks and interviews, and he frequently stated that he wasn’t out to convince anybody of his account; he simply wanted to tell people about it, and they could take it or leave it. He also said that granting interviews and giving talks to various groups about his account, incurred a net loss to him financially that he had to cover with his professional earnings, and that seems likely, given what we know about the scant profitability of ufology.
And the excerpt from
The White Sands Incident sounds like it was written by his publisher, and he said in his interviews that he had no control over the publisher’s promotional material.
So i looked at Fry itself
Truth or fiction
Shortly after Fry went public with his story in 1954, he failed a dubious[3] lie detector examination about his claims.[4][5] Fry also took photos and 16 mm film of supposed UFOs, but subsequent analysis[6] of the original footage has provided evidence the UFOs were fake.
Later, Fry received a doctorate, however the "degree" was from a mail-order outfit in London, England called Saint Andrew College and was a "Doctorate of Cosmism".[7]
Many years later, Fry also changed the date the event took place from July 4, 1950 to July 4, 1949
I havent looked hard enough at this one to say "Fraud", but if we are looking for evidence of the reality of UFO's. Personally i think we could do better than this one.
He wrote about that lie detector experience actually, and it does sound like they were out to screw him over by using a highly biased operator – here’s his account of it:
Polygraph Test? | Daniel Fry Dot Com
As I said in the beginning, the ufo footage was faked, no doubt about it. But if you look back a little bit in this thread, you’ll see Timothy Good’s take on it, which seems plausible: as a professional scientist, Fry knew that people had every reason to dismiss his story without a whiff of evidence. So he may have faked the ufo footage to quell the more aggressive skeptics he often faced. Phillip Klass was especially brutal to him on a live interview, and they even modulated the sound of his voice to make him sound weird, which was a rotten thing to do by any standard.
The doctorate was given to him unbidden, so it’s hard to hold that against him. And honestly in his many interviews and talks he sounds as qualified as any of my physics PhD friends, but he never had a formal education, so I think he craved (and probably deserved) the kind of respect afforded a successful doctorate candidate. But that’s just my feeling about it of course, after studying his books and talks and interviews for years.
He said that he changed the date of his desert incident to provide cover for his contact, who he said was preparing to come down to Earth personally, for unspecified reasons (according to Fry, these aliens could pass for human, but it took a few years to acclimate to the gravity and our biosphere). I don’t know what to make of this, frankly – Fry had no reason to correct the date ten years after the first publication of his account, and doing so only added to people’s suspicions. He gained nothing from it. In a weird way that almost lends as much credence as suspicion to his story.
But really in my mind, the veracity of his account is sort of a moot point: I want to understand the fascinating physical theory that he qualitatively described in his science books, and I want to understand how he predicted advancements in physics and astronomy that were, in some cases, decades away. That’s just freaky and unprecedented. I’ve read a lot of science history, and read a lot of weird stuff in my lifetime, and I’ve never encountered anything like this before. Even Jules Verne and H. G. Wells can’t boast the highly specific and unanticipated developments ahead, like I see in Fry’s books. And in fact it was my follow-up theoretical work on his physics theory that led me to realize that the Lorentz transform employed in special relativity is just the equation of a circle, which conforms to Fry's theoretical description - I was surprised that nobody had pointed that out in school: it's very elegant and intuitive to model it that way.
The best explanations of all this that I’ve been able to come up with are either A.) his account is true, and he threw in some BS about Atlantis to throw off the military security people (as he had claimed), or B.) he became privy to some radical advancements in military research science during his time at White Sands, and he concocted this contact story to work around his nondisclosure agreements so he could get the gist of it out to the public. But both of those explanations are fraught with pitfalls.
So I’ve pretty much given up on trying to figure out the narrative aspect, and instead I focus on unraveling the clues he gave us about the structure of the grand unified field theory that he described in his books. Because his scientific predictions have been correct, and if his physics model is correct, then it’ll fling open the door to a method of gravitational field propulsion which would absolutely change the world and the future of mankind, more or less overnight. And I can’t walk away from that prospect, because human civilization deeply and desperately needs to undergo a radical/fundamental/structural transformation, and flinging open the door to manned interstellar spaceflight would totally kick ass.
