researching and fact checking the Majestic 12 documents, Friedman said that there was no substantive grounds for dismissing their authenticity. In 2004, on George Noory's Coast to Coast radio show, Friedman debated Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute's Senior Astronomer. Like Friedman, Shostak also believes in the existence of intelligent life other than humans; however, unlike Friedman, he does not believe such life is now on Earth or is related to UFO sightings. Friedman hypothesized that UFOs may originate from relatively nearby sunlike stars.(p. 217) A piece of evidence that he often cited with respect to this hypothesis is the 1964 star map drawn by alleged alien abductee Betty Hill during a hypnosis session, which she said was shown to her during her abduction. Astronomer Marjorie Fish constructed a three-dimensional map of nearby sun-like stars and claimed a good match from the perspective of Zeta Reticuli, about 39 light years distant. The fit of the Hill/Fish star maps was hotly debated in the December 1974 edition of Astronomy magazine, with Friedman and others defending the statistical validity of the match. SETI Friedman stated strong views against search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research. Friedman contested the implicit premise of SETI that there has been no extraterrestrial visitation of the planet, because it was his claim that SETI was seeking only signals, not extraterrestrial intelligence or beings. He maintained that the prominence and widespread public claims of those involved with SETI have tended to prevent serious research, including research by journalists, of UFOs.(p. 129) Friedman was a classmate of Carl Sagan at the University of Chicago. Friedman criticized Sagan, a proponent of SETI, for ignoring empirical evidence, such as "600-plus unknowns" of Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. Friedman argued that these empirical data directly contradict Sagan's claim in Other Worlds that the "reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable". Specifically, Friedman referred to a table in Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 that he said "shows that the better the quality of the sighting, the more likely it was to be an 'unknown', and the less likely it was to be listed as containing 'insufficient information'"(p. 42). Public and scientific opinion Friedman said of the response to his talks, "I know that most people are unfamiliar with the several large-scale scientific studies ... because I ask, after I show a slide and ask about each one, 'How