The articulate Stanton Friedman took a contrary view: “Asimov doesn't seem to know the difference between calendars which measure time and maps which show the distribution of things in space. Knowing the fraction of available time during which there has been a civilization on earth tells absolutely nothing about what fraction of planets have civilizations now, in the past, or in the future."

This kind of assumption, that Earth is the basis for all assumptions, Friedman thought obscured the issues. Asimov “assumes that nobody got started sooner than we did at having a civilization or at having an industrial one. This is un incredible assumption,” Friedman continued, "especially the solar system has been around almost 5 billion years and there are stars 5 billion years older than the sun...an error of only 1/10 of 1 percent in the 3 billion years would be 3 million years. The discussion also leaves out colonization, migration, the exiling of prisoners, or the dispersal of civilizations by those who started sooner.”

Asimov is only one of the popular science fiction writers Friedman took to task. Arthur Clarke, best known for authoring "2001: A Space Odyssey,” felt that the International Geophysical Year (1958), an extended series of experiments among nations, discouraged much interest because “they never discovered a single flying saucer.” Friedman cautioned Clarke to check the record, noting that one of the best photos of a UFO, the celebrated Trinidad photos, was taken on board a ship that was participating in the International Geophysical Year.

Clarke also used the ballistics missile warning radar system as a defense for why he believed no sightings are real, reasoning that such a sensitive system would surely pick them up. Friedman found this type of comment particularly questionable. “Considering that he was a writer and not a professional scientist or engineer working on radar for NORAD, I cannot believe that he would be on the distribution list for radar UFO reports.”

One of Stanton Friedman's favorite phrases— “absence of evidence is presumed to be evidence for the absence of evidence”—applied here, as it does to page after page of rebuttal and refutation which he compiled, all addressing the remarks, articles and appearances of science fiction writers. He battled egos as often as errors.

“As writers, surely they didn't or haven't worked on classified government sponsored programs. I worked on classified programs for 14 years and I am certain that secrets can be kept. As I have often noted, 80 percent of the engineers and scientists responding to the question, “Do you think the government has revealed all it knows about UFO's?" said, ‘No’ .” And Friedman's role as “Perry Mason” occasionally put him in circumstances where he tilted against a Supreme Court of scientists. Having a scientific background,” he reminded, “in no way assures that you'll treat UFO's appropriately.”

Indeed, an elder statesman of science, Dr. Lee DeForest, who invented the Vacuum tube, was convinced that, regardless of whatever discoveries were made by man, we would never visit the moon. DeForest made these views known in 1957. Hong Ye Chiu, a NASA/Goddard scientist, had written that, “It is unthinkable that the sun would be favorably selected among the 100 billion stars in the galaxy as the most desired star to visit.” Friedman countered: “Nobody says they think of us favorably, or that this is the most desired star—after all, Chicago isn't my favorite place to visit, but I seem to fly there fairly often.”

Even Dr. J. Allen Hynek, professor of Astronomy at Northwestern University, director of the Lindheimer Observatory and for nearly 20 years scientific consultant to the Air Force's Project Blue Book UFO study group, did not escape the Friedman scalpel. In answer to Hynek's contention that there is “no possibility" for space travel, Friedman had this to say: “Since fusion is the major source of energy for the earth and is the major source of energy production in the great majority of stars, one would certainly expect all astronomers to be aware of the fact that a combination of the right nuclei can produce vast amounts of energy per unit weight of the materials reacted. If the right nuclear reactions are involved one can produce charged particles coming out the back end of a rocket with more than 10,000,000 times as much energy per particle, as particles can get in the run-of-the-mill, brute force chemical rockets which we are currently using.”

Friedman felt that there was no way of telling just how many visits we received, and whether multiple sightings are all derived from the same visit. A comparison he enjoyed making is one between a mother ship with smaller earth excursion modules and a Navy aircraft carrier with 75 fighter or bomber planes aboard.