CHARLESTON, WV — Unlike legions of true believers who look to him for all the answers, Stanton Friedman has never seen a bonafide unidentified flying object.

Friedman jokes about his lack of encounter, even of the first kind.

“I have never seen one, except when I was a waiter in a restaurant and I dropped a whole tray of dirty dishes when I was a busboy up in the Catskills. Boy, were those saucers flying.”

That’s where the joshing ends.

“I’m a nuclear physicist,” he says.

“I’ve chased neutrons and gamma rays for 14 years. I never saw one of them. They’re real, too. I’ve never seen Tokyo. It’s there. Do I have to see something to believe it?”

Friedman brought substantial credentials to the table for this weekend’s 55th Flatwoods Monster Anniversary and Flying Saucer Extravaganza, as the marquee on the old Capitol Theater proclaims.

A physicist who once worked for such giants as Westinghouse and General Electric, he has devoted much of his adult life to ferreting out clues in the UFO controversy.

Pitching his case before more than 600 campus audiences, Friedman concludes that alien aircraft have been around for decades and that governments have tried to keep an airtight lid on them. He has six reasons for a massive and sustained cover-up that he labels “the cosmic Watergate.”

First of all, government agents want to figure out how crashed aircraft work. Secondly, no one wants any enemy governments to know what has been discovered.

A third reason is that if some trusted public figures, say the queen of England and the pope, disclosed UFOs, society would be shaken up, and earthlings would begin thinking of themselves as such, rather than as citizens of individual nations.

“Nationalism is the only game in town, as far as I can see,” he said Friday as the weekend event began. “Everybody wants his own country.”

A fourth problem he envisions is the fundamentalist Christian perspective that aliens are “the work of the Devil,” quoting 700 Club founder Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The two said earth contains the only intelligence life in the universe, he said.

“Is there really intelligent life on earth?” Friedman asked. “Look at how we act. Isn’t that kind of an insult to the notion of an Almighty God that this is the best You can do?

“Look around the planet. The U.S. will spend half a trillion dollars on the military this year. Yet, 30,000 children will die needlessly this day, ever single day, of preventable disease or starvation.”

Fifth, Friedman averred, a public confirmation would lead to economic chaos, and lastly, secrecy is a way of life in government.

Friedman pointed to 300,000 pages of still-classified materials in the Eisenhower Library, unrelated to UFOs, and accounts of the government lying to families of downed military pilots, decades after they finally acknowledged their deaths but distorted the truth behind each one.

Without question, he said, thousands and thousands of sighting have been confirmed and kept secret by the government.

Friedman can only surmise why aliens are scoping out the planet, but said there are “a zillion reasons,” including mere scientific research or perhaps mining for precious metals since Earth is the densest planet known.

“Perhaps they’re trying to evaluate behavior,” he said.

More likely, with the rapid technological advances within the past 100 years and the arming by nations of nuclear firepower, Friedman suggested, aliens could be jittery about what’s going on in the galaxy, since they obviously have reached a superior level if they can reach us and we can’t travel to their turf.

“When you break it down, I make one assumption about every advanced civilization — namely, that it’s concerned about its own survival and security. You have to keep tabs on the primitives in the neighborhood but only close tabs on those primitives who show signs of being able to bother you.”

When World War II ended, aliens knew earthlings had achieved three basic steps that suggested they were ready for space travel — nuclear weapons, V2 rockets and powerful radar. Interestingly enough, all three were centered at Roswell, N.M., and in 1952, shortly after the legendary Flatwoods Monster in Braxton County, this country tested its first H-Bomb in the Pacific, a 10-megaton blast that produced a fireball three miles in diameter.

Friedman isn’t sure if the aliens are to be feared. Possibly, he suggested in jest, Earth is the ideal honeymoon capital for newlyweds in the galaxy. For more than six decades of known observance, they have yet to do anything harmful.

Yet, on the other hand, there is the analogy of the domestic turkey.

“Turkeys in mid-November probably say, ‘Look how lucky we are. We have these masters who give us all the food we can eat, more than we can eat, water to drink, and keep us warm when it’s cold inside. They’re nice guys.’ Then Thanksgiving comes along ...”

Frank Feschino, a Florida illustrator who has authored two books on the Flatwoods incident, says he has witnessed numerous UFOs while conducting research on the Flatwoods “monster,” which appeared almost 55 years to the day of the summit in Charleston.

A key witnesses still living, Freddie May, had planned to be a major part of the event until he was sidelined this week by a sudden illness.

Feschino’s second work, “Shoot Them Down,” chronicles what he says was a massive air battle between American fighter pilots and alien craft, one of which, disabled in the fray, strayed into Flatwoods.

In his exhaustive research of the incident and interviews with surviving witnesses, Feschino said he was impressed with the believability of the boys who scampered up the hillside that Sept. 12 evening in 1952.

“These were not city slicker, punk kids,” he said. “These kids were good, old-fashioned kids. They didn’t have money to buy comic books and read about this and that. They were good, old-fashioned people.”