There is almost no public commentary on Fry’s story, however, Ray Stanford, a psychic, channeler who personally knew many of the early contactees, was interviewed by Chris and Gene of the Paracast.  Gene Steinberg had sent Ray Stanford a link to a few of the forum topics on Fry that had been created by Randy Morrison.  Randy listened to the podcast (paywall) and posted his rebuttal, which I have reproduced here with permission.

Here is Randy (“Me” in the rebuttal below) on the points brought up by Ray Stanford:

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April 5th, 2017

I’d like to respond to the various objections that Ray Stanford offered to the Daniel Fry case.

Rather than arguing for the veracity of Daniel Fry’s story, which is still in my “grey basket,” I offer these responses to illustrate that while his story may not be true, the points raised against it are in many cases unconvincing, and sometimes simply untrue. So I still wonder about it, and specifically I wonder about the many surprising scientific claims that still remain unexplained to my satisfaction.

I suppose I was hoping for something more substantive to disprove this case, like someone who was working at White Sands with him at that time coming forward to say that he wasn’t there that day, or perhaps a confession to his wife or a friend that he’d made it up. But apparently that didn’t happen in the >30 years of telling his story.

“Z-Grade Sci-Fi writing” in The White Sands Incident
Ray: Daniel Fry’s books read like “kid’s stuff.”
Me: To be fair, he was a rocket instrumentation technician with no writing experience beyond technical writing at his job. If I had experienced an audio conversation with an alien being and ridden aboard an empty alien cargo craft to NYC and back, then written about it, I could scarcely expect to do much better, and I doubt that many of us could.

But I don’t necessarily accept his story as true, to me that’s only one of many possibilities. But I do have some valid questions about specific scientific aspects of his books, which are generally written in deceptively simple language. Because there are a number of striking scientific claims in his books which only appear –even more- valid today than when he wrote his books. Sure, they’re written about in simple terms, as we’ll see below, but the substance is often keenly sophisticated and has on many occasions been validated by the latest developments in theory, observation, and contemporary experimentation. That’s 180-degrees in opposition to all of the other contactee stories, which are readily disproven by known physics and astronomy, and which grow increasingly laughable with the passage of time

And I’d like to point out that someone’s writing talent isn’t a useful measure for the veracity of their claims. So I’m looking for factual disproofs within his writings. And I’ve found a few questionable items, and identified what he claimed to have inserted into his first book to get the clearance to publish it. But I’ve also found many absolutely striking scientific concepts and predictions that can’t be explained away as confirmation bias or coincidence. So I want to understand how that happened, because it’s anomalous. And his descriptions of dark energy and gravitational field propulsion are eerily prescient, which merits careful scrutiny.

Lighting at the time of The White Sands Incident
Ray: a ~76% waning gibbous Moon just under the horizon at late dusk couldn’t have produced any appreciable light.
Me: Why not? With any light cloud cover in the upper atmosphere, the light of the Moon just below the horizon could easily illuminate atmospheric moisture or particulates to cast a glow well above the horizon, just as the light of the Sun lingers in the sky for quite some time after the Sun sets below the horizon. So it’s only a question of relative magnitude, and at the onset of night the diffuse illumination of moonlight can be reasonably bright.

Daniel Fry’s technical qualifications
Ray: Daniel Fry was a “Z-rate engineer,” he was only self-trained.
Me: It’s true that he was self-taught and learned on the job. But as we’ll see below, he designed and built transducers for Aerojet’s military rocket research programs, which made the company millions of dollars. And he was one of the twelve founding members of the Pacific Rocket Society, established in 1944, and he picked up a lot of experience with their early rocket tests. So clearly he was quite capable. And I would also hope that none of the people working at the largest US military base engaged in rocket experimentation were “Z-rate engineers.”

And I find this to be an odd criticism from a self-taught paleontologist who has made significant contributions to the field without any academic training. History is rife with examples of very accomplished autodidacts. I admire such people. Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist, and one of the most brilliant minds in the history of science, who, I should mention, discovered and formulated the principles of gravitoelectromagnetism in 1893 – over twenty years before Einstein’s general theory of relativity codified those principles of gravitation into the academic canon of physics, and he also may have been the first scientist to propose the existence of gravitational waves (which were only detected for the first time last year, over a century later, by the LIGO project):
Oliver Heaviside – Wikipedia

White Sands personnel on the base on the 4th of July
Ray: White Sands is closed down on the Fourth of July with only a skeleton crew of essential personnel on the base.
Me: Do you know this for a fact, or is this supposition? I’d like to see proof; we’d need to see the base records to know for sure. Perhaps John Greenwald could help with an FOIA request for those base personnel records. It seems to me that a rocket testing crew in the middle of a project might stick around over a holiday break to get back to work early the following day.

The description of the “differential accumulator”
Ray: Daniel Fry is trying to impress the dumb reader by using a technical term.
Me: He’s describing an energy storage device that’s not a chemical battery and not a reactor, so what else is he supposed to call it? It seems like a fair term to use. Calling it a “battery” would give the false impression that it’s like a Duracell, and that can’t be accurate because one would imagine that the energy density would be vastly greater than a common chemical battery. And any other applicable term is going to sound even wordier, like “electrical potential storage device.” I suppose it might be as simple as some kind of capacitor, but that seems unlikely given the problems of storing energy that way (which is why we use chemical batteries in our smart phones instead of capacitors). Perhaps it consists of some kind of room-temperature superconducting magnet that stores electromagnetic energy in kinetic form, or even an L-C circuit that oscillates the energy between static and kinetic states. We don’t know, but the term “differential accumulator” seems like a reasonable term to explain what it does, without getting into these kinds of details.

It just seems like there’s an unwarranted level of hostility in this kind of critique, rather than substance. A similar objection is raised with the use of the word “amplitude.” What’s so objectionable about that? “Amplitude” is a common word synonymous with “magnitude” – anyone with half a brain knows exactly what it means. In fact I’m hard-pressed to think of another word that would convey the same idea accurately. The mockery/hostility I’m hearing in these objections seem more emotional than factual. I mean, it would be one thing if Daniel Fry was using these words wrong. But he’s not. So what’s the problem?

The magnetic field propulsion description
Ray: This description of magnetic field propulsion sounds like a seventh-grader writing sci-fi.
Me: This description appears to be a red herring. A far more compelling gravitational field propulsion description was provided in the 1973 edition of the book, which I included in my previous post. For a host of excellent reasons, a gravitational field propulsion system is currently the most credible concept for an interstellar or even advanced terrestrial propulsion system. And since gravitational field propulsion is a central theme in all of his other books, the 1973 description of that operating principle is the one to critique.

EDIT: I completely forgot about this – Daniel Fry always described the propulsion system of the craft, in his talks and interviews, as a gravitational field propulsion system. Here he is explicitly describing the gravitational field propulsion system in relation to the absence of g-forces that he experienced aboard the alien vessel, during his interview on the Long John Nebel show on August 1st, 1958 (this unique characteristic of a gravitational field propulsion system didn’t appear in the academic literature until 36 years later, in 1994)

Daniel Fry’s description of gravitational repulsion at the intergalactic scale anticipated the discovery of the “dark energy” effect 42 years later in 1998
Ray: Fry didn’t say anything to indicate that, and other people were talking about this kind of thing at the time.
Me: Yes he did state it very explicitly. Please see my earlier post; it’s indisputable. And it’s not an effect that a clever person could just figure out on their own: the world’s top astronomers were shocked when they discovered this effect. If you can cite a source where someone else is describing an intergalactic gravitational repulsion at the time of Daniel Fry’s writings I would be very grateful to see it because I’ve never found another reference about it from that era.

Daniel Fry’s 1954 descriptions of the characteristics of gravitational field propulsion accurately anticipate the first theoretical descriptions of the subject published in Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 warp drive paper
Ray: You’re reading into it, he didn’t do any such thing.
Me: I touched on this a little in my previous post, and I wrote a chapter on the subject for Sean Donovan’s comprehensive 2014 biography of Daniel Fry. So I’ll just offer two examples of this and we can get into it in more detail later on if anyone’s interested.

In this brief passage, Daniel Fry describes the absence of g-forces within the gravitational field propulsion system of the craft, even under high accelerations. The absence of acceleration forces within a gravitational field propulsion mechanism weren’t described in the scientific literature until Miguel Alcubierre published his 1994 paper about gravitational field propulsion:

“A moment later, the ground suddenly fell away from the ship with incredible rapidity. I say that the ground `fell away’ because I did not feel the slightest sense of motion myself, and the ship was as steady as a rock. In spite of the fact that we must have been accelerating at the rate of at least ten g’s, I could have sworn that we were standing still.”

The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1954

And that’s now known to be true – Alcubierre clearly describes how a passenger and his craft propelled in this manner would “free fall” along a geodesic, so no accelerations are experienced within the field, even when executing rapid accelerations in speed or direction. This is absolutely unique to a gravitational propulsion system. Within a gravitational field propulsion system a craft can execute hairpin supersonic maneuvers with no stresses on the craft or the passenger, as if they were motionless – the world outside a window in the craft would appear to scroll around erratically like a movie projected on a wall. But it gets even more interesting with this next passage that explains a more exotic technical detail of a gravitational field propulsion system:

“’But in this case,” I thought, ‘why am I not floating around in the air as things are supposed to do within a missile which is in free fall?’”

‘The answer to this also should be fairly obvious,’ was the reply. ‘Before the ship was put into motion, you were resting upon the seat, and there was a force of one gravity acting between your body and the seat. Since the force which accelerates both the ship and your body acts in exact proportion to the mass, and since the earth’s gravity continues to act upon both, the original force between your body and the seat will remain constant, except that it will decrease as the force of gravity of the planet decreases with distance.’”

The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1954

This is exactly correct, and I’ve seen no other references about this effect in the literature of that era. Alcubierre explained in 1994 that the region within the acceleration field remains “flat” with respect to spacetime geometry, so conditions aboard the craft would remain unaltered. But an external gravitational field intersecting the craft would pass right through the field and persist as if the gravitational propulsion field doesn’t exist. So hovering above the Earth, the passenger and objects within the craft would still feel the Earth’s gravity, until they rose far enough from the surface of the Earth that the field became too weak for any observer at that height to experience the gravitational field of the planet. To the best of my knowledge, nobody understood this until Alcubierre published his paper 40 years after Daniel Fry published his book The White Sands Incident in 1954.

The nature of the scientific process
Ray: Science isn’t conducted by looking at later findings and comparing them to earlier claims.
Me: That’s exactly wrong: this is precisely how science is conducted. A claim is advanced in the form of a prediction, and then it’s either confirmed or refuted by subsequent theoretical developments and/or experimental observations. And time and time again I’ve found that many of Daniel Fry’s assertions accurately describe subsequent developments in the scientific literature. That’s what makes his books so unique and scientifically compelling – no other alleged contactee can boast a series of accurate scientific predictions. So how did he do it? I wish I knew; none of the explanations I’ve considered seem to satisfactorily explain all the various aspects of this case.

Daniel Fry’s discomfort when suddenly in free fall
Ray: Astronauts don’t report this when they become weightless.
Me: Astronauts never experience instantaneous free-fall, their rise out of the gravitational field is gradual and the burn-out of a rocket engine isn’t instantaneous. In Fry’s account, he experiences an essentially instantaneous change from 1 earth-gravity to free-fall, which would indeed be an alarming and uncomfortable experience, like having the floor instantly drop out from underneath your chair. Here’s the description in Fry’s book:

“Instantly the compartment light came on. After the total darkness in which I had been, the light was blinding. While I was attempting to adjust my eyes to the light, my stomach suddenly leaped upward into my chest. For a moment I could plainly feel my heart beating against the lower end of my throat, while my lungs and other upper organs seemed determined to extrude through my ears. I had been through steep dives and sharp pull-outs in airplanes, and have ridden in many amusement devices calculated to produce the feeling of weightlessness, but had never felt anything like this before. There was no sensation of falling. It simply felt as though my organs, having been released from a heavy strain, were springing upward like elastic bands, when released from tension. Fortunately this sensation was of short duration. In a few seconds I felt almost normal again.”

The White Sands Incident, Daniel Fry, 1954, p. 62

Personally I wouldn’t want to unexpectedly experience a change from 1g to free-fall in an instant. And I think it’s rather a bit of hyperbole for dramatic impact to state “my lungs and other upper organs seemed determined to extrude through my ears,” but I think a little exaggeration helps convey the sense of dismay and discomfort that anyone would experience in that situation. Because even though the change in acceleration (~9.8ms^-2 to zero) is fairly small in this instance, the rate of change of acceleration (what physicists call “jerk”) can produce significant mechanical stresses, upon the body or anything else, and in this case the jerk appears to be very high.

Daniel Fry’s scientific sophistication
Ray: Fry was a poor technician with no real science training and little scientific understanding.
Me: He was a successful rocket instrumentation technician working with major US defense contractors like Aerojet, on cutting-edge rocket systems under development after WWII. This is all documented in Sean Donovan’s book Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth? I assume that he worked alongside Operation Paperclip rocket scientists, and must have held a security clearance to work at the base on these projects, because they were working on advancing the V2 rocket technology. And his books demonstrate a firm grasp of the key concepts of nuclear physics to thermodynamics to relativity, as well as prescient descriptions of the dark energy effect and gravitational field propulsion physics that weren’t elucidated in the scientific literature until decades later. And the ability to describe physics in layman terms is a sign of real understanding. Louis de Broglie attributed this apropos quote to Albert Einstein: “that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description ‘that even a child could understand them.’”

Regarding Daniel Fry’s professional credentials, they are actually rather impressive – Sean Donovan did an amazing job of researching his background and interviewing family members and digging up the history of his professional career for his biography about him. Sean writes:

“A custom measurement system utilizing what would eventually be called a “transducer” was built. It consisted of a tiny thin-walled tube wrapped in wires, and when the pressure in the tube changed the resistance of the wires changed, which could be measured on an oscillograph, an early type of oscilloscope. Although Daniel didn’t create these transducers for the Eaton Canyon Project, this is likely where he learned how they worked. Daniel would eventually design, build and install these and more advanced types of pressure transducers for Aerojet, making Crescent Engineering millions in sales.”

Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth?, Sean Donovan, 2014, p. 40

“As the war drew to a close and the demand for rockets subsided, all on-site production ended in September of 1945. In April six months earlier, Daniel returned to full-time work at Crescent, which now had 35 employees, and worked as a supervisor of plant number two. Crescent was performing contract work for other large rocket companies during the blossoming rocket age, including the manufacture of stainless steel components for Aerojet’s liquid-fuel JATOs. The work that kept Daniel busy at plant number two was fixing thousands of solid-fuel Aerojet JATO rockets. A number of planes had plunged into the trees during takeoff because the carbon shields that protected the metal rocket nozzles were not properly fitted, and during take-off they would vibrate, disintegrate and substantially reduce thrust. The JATO revision work kept Daniel and plant number two busy for six months until the end of the war on September 2, 1945.”

Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth?, Sean Donovan, 2014, p. 41

“Early in 1949, with Elma bearing a third child, Daniel left his family in Grants Pass, Oregon and took up a job with Aerojet General, which was now testing and launching some of the largest rocket motors ever built. The rockets were launched to perform atmospheric experiments at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Aerojet knew of Crescent Engineering and Daniel because he had worked for them during the war, fixing their JATO rockets. It was during this time at the White Sands Proving Ground that Daniel had his life-altering experience.

Below is Daniel’s story about this event, which is now combined into one complete book[1] for the first time. It begins on July 4, 1949[2]. Daniel Fry, now 41 years old, is setting up test equipment including transducers for upcoming static tests of the Aerobee rocket engines. The “Aero” in Aerobee stood for Aerojet and “bee” for “Bumblebee,” a name given to it by the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) which sponsored the research. In early 1946, as the supply of captured German V-2 rockets was used up, a general-purpose research rocket was suggested. There were various types of Aerobees and Daniel helped to test a 12-meter-tall variant called the XASR-SC-1, a helium-pressurized rocket which flew for the first time in late 1949. The Aerobee had two sections, the first was a solid-propellant rocket booster and the second was a single-stage liquid-fuel spin-stabilized rocket. The booster was necessary to bring the rocket up to speed at the top of the launch tower where the fins would take effect, the solid-fuel booster was then jettisoned a couple of seconds later and the liquid-fuel section would take over. The first Aerobees reached altitudes of 120 kilometers with a payload of 68 kilograms, and would ultimately see over a thousand launches in broad applications by the U.S. military research agencies. Daniel’s part in the tests was to design, build and attach the transducers to the rockets on the test stands where they measured thrust performance and other parameters.”

Contactee: Was Daniel Fry Telling the Truth?, Sean Donovan, 2014, pp. 41-42

The alleged UFO footage and photographs
Ray: Daniel Fry faked the film and photographs of UFO’s
Me: Yes he did. And that is the single most compelling reason to discount his entire story.

But there are two issues that weigh on my mind about this. I’ve already mentioned the first issue: this fakery seemed to comprise 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. Even good people sometimes do bad things. Here’s what Timothy Good had to say about this in his 1998 book Alien Base:

“I have always been dubious about the authenticity of Fry’s 16 mm films of UFOs (copies of which are in my possession), particularly an object he said he saw in Oregon in May 1964, which to me looks like a couple of lampshades or similarly shaped devices fixed together and suspended with fine twine. He went into some detail as to the circumstances of the filming, and claimed that some frames show the limb of a cloud coming in front of the saucer. I remain unconvinced; the movement of the craft gives every indication of being a suspended fake. Perhaps I am wrong. But does this prove that Fry was lying about all his previous experiences? I think not. Most probably, he thought that a few fabricated movie films of “saucers” would bolster his unprovable claims.”

I’m frequently tempted to write the whole thing off because of these faked images, and I think that others are wholly justified to do so.

But the other thing that weighs heavily on my mind is the combination of the subsequently confirmed scientific assertions, and the apparent incongruity of this deception with the rest of his life, which Sean Donovan researched exhaustively and wrote about in great detail. We’ve already touched on a few of the scientific topics that, while written about in simple terms, are very striking in many respects.

But after reading (and providing a complete editorial revision) of Sean’s book about Daniel Fry, he sincerely strikes me as a guy who started from nothing and made something of himself through hard work and independent study, and ended up working alongside some of the brightest defense industry minds on the planet, within the early rocket research program. He was nothing at all like the weird, fickle, and often stupid characters who populated the “contactee scene.”

I’ve listened closely to his radio interviews and his audio talks on scientific subjects, and he comes across as a very earnest, knowledgeable, credible scientific technician with a better grasp of a wide variety of scientific subjects than Ray Stanford gives him credit for. His answers in response to a dizzying variety of questions related to ufology are always thoughtful, sensible, and often quite insightful. His story didn’t “evolve” over time – every re-telling of his alleged experience at White Sands remains unchanging, even across the decades of audio I have of his talks and interviews.

And he had a Lot of truly great ideas. For example, in one of his science talks called “The Many Varieties of Energy,” he closes with a speculation perhaps one day we’ll be able to convert matter into antimatter, under extreme pressures and temperatures, and thereby permanently solve the energy problem for human civilization. He argues, rightly, that such a process would not cost energy (other than setting up the proper conditions) because mass-energy would be conserved in the transformation, and that charge is also conserved in such a process. It’s a brilliantly novel and sensible idea that nobody else seems to have ever thought of before, to the best of my knowledge. And although it’s assumed to be impossible, very recently a theoretical physicist at CERN by the name of Dragan Hajdukovic has published a fascinating theory about antimatter and gravity that suggests precisely this same idea: that the universe periodically re-collapses (but not into a singularity) and “bounces” into a new Big Bang – but in the process all of the matter in the universe is converted into antimatter. The universe would then evolve exactly as our own matter universe has, because the laws of physics appear to hold perfectly for antimatter, until it recollapses again and the antimatter is converted into matter again with the next “bounce.” And this would solve one of the biggest conundrums in astrophysics today: the baryogenesis problem. In this model, baryon number is conserved over vast timescales as antimatter-dominated universes oscillate with matter-dominated universes.

And decade after decade I’ve seen this kind of thing happen, unique to Daniel Fry’s work: something he said is verified or echoed in new scientific papers. And ultimately, that’s why I can’t just write it off as just another crazy story by some opportunistic hoaxer.

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You can find the original rebuttal from Randy here until the link dies.