I first started studying UFO reports on October 17, 1973. By the time I was thirteen years old, I had met and become friends with famed UFO researcher Stanton T. Friedman, who recently passed away at age eighty(see Joe Nickell’s piece in the September/October 2019 SI). Friedman taken me under his wing and was a former mentor of mine. To say he was a great influence on me when I was young is an understatement. Until disagreements over various UFO cases came between us, we still “agreed to disagree”—we remained civil and friends.
1979 San Francisco Examiner photograph of author Kal Korff (right) at the moment Stanton Friedman declared that we’d contact aliens within twenty years.
Though I started out as a hardcore “UFO believer” when I was a teenager, ironically it was in working closely with Friedman that I saw through his schtick, eventually learning to embrace a truly skeptical approach to investigating UFO reports. I have championed this approach ever since.