United States Air Force officer, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, and head of Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963, the longest of the project’s directorships and the quietest.
Why the name matters to one specific episode
The AFFA Contact 1959 episode, in which intelligence officers and CIA representatives sat in a room transcribing automatic-writing messages from an entity said to reside on Uranus, is the centrepiece of the third chapter of The Invisible College. Its public trace runs through Friend’s later on-camera account rather than through any released document: the memorandum Jacques Vallee describes has never surfaced in the declassified record. That makes Friend the load-bearing witness for one of the strangest items in the file, and the reason to hold the episode at testimony weight rather than document weight.
Friend’s own position on the phenomenon was consistently that the reports deserved better investigation than Blue Book was resourced to give them, which is close to what J. Allen Hynek said afterwards and quite far from the project’s public line at the time.
Connections
Project Blue Book · AFFA Contact 1959 · The Invisible College · Jacques Vallee · J. Allen Hynek · Automatic Writing · Central Intelligence Agency