(BALTIMORE – August 22, 2026) – I once sat across from the man who directed Project Blue Book—the United States Air Force’s official investigation into unidentified flying objects—and asked him a simple question:
Had he ever seen anything in the sky that he could not explain?
His answer was yes.
Lt. Col. Robert J. “Bob” Friend did not give me some recycled story from a documentary. He was not repeating something another pilot had told him. He told me personally that he had seen something flying—something that was neither regular nor normal.
Maybe it was a light. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, he could not explain it.
That distinction matters. An unidentified flying object is not automatically an alien spacecraft. It is precisely what the name says: something observed in the sky that could not be immediately identified.
But this was no ordinary witness.
Bob Friend was a Tuskegee Airman who flew 142 combat missions during World War II. He was the primary wingman to Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., commander of the legendary 332nd Fighter Group. Friend later spent five years directing Project Blue Book, placing him at the center of the United States government’s investigation into one of the greatest mysteries of the modern era.
And he told me he had seen something he could not explain.
That is news.
Debra’s Daddy Was Already on It
Recent government disclosures have once again pushed UFOs—now more commonly called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs—into the national conversation.
President Donald Trump added fuel to the fire in April when he promised that his administration would release more government information about the phenomenon. He spoke of military pilots who had reported seeing “things you wouldn’t believe.”
Debra Carter, Bob Friend’s daughter, was watching the coverage.
Her reaction was immediate.
What in the hell is he talking about? That’s not even new.
If Debra could deliver one message directly to the White House, it would be this:
Excuse me, Mr. President—my daddy was on this decades ago.
She is right.
What television networks now present as a breaking discovery was her father’s official government assignment more than six decades ago.
That is why this story belongs on BMORENews.com. We call ourselves “The News Before the News” because we have spent nearly a quarter-century documenting people and stories long before the rest of the world decides they matter.
Bob Friend did the same thing. He was studying the phenomenon before today’s cable-news experts were born.
Meet Bob Friend 
Robert Jones Friend was born on February 29, 1920, in Columbia, South Carolina. His father was from Quito, Ecuador, and his mother was from South Carolina.
He was a leap-day baby who seemed destined for the sky.
As a child, Friend devoured stories about World War I flying aces and built model airplanes that could actually fly. He wanted to become a military pilot, but America was not yet ready to give a Black man that opportunity.
He studied at Howard University and later enrolled in aviation courses at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Through the Civilian Pilot Training Program, he earned his private pilot’s license in 1939.
He kept preparing while waiting for the door to open.
That door opened in October 1942, when Friend was accepted as an aviation cadet at Tuskegee, Alabama. The program had been created after years of sustained pressure from the NAACP, the Black press and other civil-rights advocates demanding that Black Americans be permitted to fly in defense of their country.
Friend earned his wings, received his commission as a second lieutenant and joined the 332nd Fighter Group—the Red Tails.
He eventually became the primary wingman to Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who commanded the 332nd in combat and later became the first Black general in the United States Air Force.
For nearly two years, Friend flew missions over North Africa and Europe, first in a P-47 Thunderbolt and later in a P-51 Mustang.
During one mission on December 14, 1944, he attacked an oil barge in Germany. The resulting explosion was so violent that it nearly took his plane down with it. Friend later compared the experience to being in hell. He managed to pull his aircraft out at the last possible moment.
Days later, while flying over Italy, he survived bad weather and a mechanical failure and made it home again.
By the end of the war, he had flown 142 combat missions and served as an operations officer with the 332nd.
America had initially refused to let him fly because he was Black. Once given the opportunity, he became one of the most accomplished military aviators of his generation.
Project Blue Book
Friend continued serving after World War II. His 28-year Air Force career included assignments connected to foreign technology, weapons research and national security.
From 1958 to 1963, he served as director of Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
Project Blue Book was the Air Force’s formal effort to collect, investigate, and analyze reports of unidentified objects in American airspace. Many reported sightings were eventually attributed to aircraft, weather balloons, astronomical activity or other explainable causes.
Some remained unexplained.
Under Friend’s leadership, Blue Book processed hundreds of reports each year. He had to balance public curiosity, military secrecy, scientific uncertainty, and national security concerns—all while serving as a Black officer in the heart of the civil rights era.
By every available account, Friend was the only Black person to direct Project Blue Book.
Think about that for a moment.
At a time when Black Americans were fighting to sit at lunch counters, register to vote and live wherever they could afford, the United States Air Force entrusted a Black officer with investigating reports that could have represented unknown aircraft, foreign technology or something beyond conventional understanding.
That alone deserves a place in Black history.
Yet how many Black children have ever heard his name?
The Whole World Was Watching
America was not the only country looking into the sky.
During the years Friend directed Project Blue Book, governments and military officials around the world were receiving their own reports of unexplained aerial activity.
Canada operated Project Magnet and Project Second Storey. Britain had established its Flying Saucer Working Party. France collected reports of unidentified objects, including sightings near sensitive military and nuclear sites.
Argentina experienced a series of widely reported sightings in May 1962 near Bahía Blanca, Espora Air Base and Puerto Belgrano Naval Base.
Witnesses reported illuminated objects traveling at low altitude. In one account, truck drivers said they saw a glowing object rise from a field, cross a roadway and separate into two objects that departed in different directions. Newspapers published photographs, and Argentine military authorities became involved.
Not every report was credible. Not every light represented something extraordinary. Some cases were undoubtedly misunderstandings, natural phenomena, or conventional aircraft.
But the worldwide pattern was undeniable: people were seeing things they could not immediately identify, and governments were paying attention.
Bob Friend was not pursuing some isolated fringe curiosity. He was standing in the middle of an international mystery.
Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
Long before Project Blue Book, the Air Force or the Pentagon, Black church folks were already singing about a wheel in the sky.
Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air.
The spiritual comes from the Book of Ezekiel, which describes a prophetic vision of wheels moving in the heavens.
Bob Friend and I talked about that connection—the ancient account, the Negro spiritual and humanity’s enduring fascination with unexplained activity in the sky.
Ezekiel did not call what he saw a spacecraft. He described it using the language and understanding available to him.
But for generations, people in Black churches have wondered about that wheel in the middle of the air.
What did Ezekiel see?
We still do not know.
That is the point. The questions did not begin with Roswell, Project Blue Book, or the latest Pentagon disclosure. Humanity has been looking upward and wondering for thousands of years.
“They Know Not”
Debra did not fully understand the magnitude of her father’s life when she was young. To her, he was simply Daddy.
Later, she began to appreciate who he was and what he had accomplished.
She remembers watching old footage of him and rewinding it repeatedly just to hear his voice again. She remembers a phrase he used—three words that captured how he might have responded to people presenting old information as a new discovery:
They know not.
That was his way. He did not need a long explanation.
The skeptics did not know. The people managing the official story did not know. The people convinced that they already possessed all the answers did not know.
They know not.
A Father Who Looked Toward the Stars
Debra remembers that her father kept a large telescope at home. He would take the family outside, point it toward the heavens and encourage his children to look.
That memory says as much about Bob Friend as any military record.
He was a decorated fighter pilot, government investigator and aerospace professional—but he was also a father standing under the night sky, showing his children the stars.
Debra keeps a photograph of herself sitting in a replica of her father’s aircraft at the Palm Springs Air Museum. The same museum hosted his public viewing and memorial service after his death in 2019.
Friend spent decades sharing his history publicly. He appeared in programs about Project Blue Book and UFO investigations and recorded oral histories about his military service. His work appeared in productions including Sightings, Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs—Seeing Is Believing, In Search Of… and, through footage released after his death, the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon.
His name also lives permanently in Irvine, California, where a post office was renamed the Tuskegee Airman Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Friend Memorial Post Office Building.
In 2006, Friend and his fellow Tuskegee Airmen were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
Even into his 90s, he reportedly gave 20 to 30 speaking engagements a year, including visits to elementary schools. He explained his service in characteristically modest terms:
“I never felt that I was anything but an American doing a job.”
He died on June 21, 2019, in Long Beach, California. He was 99 years old and among the last surviving original Tuskegee Airmen.
Firsts Run in the Family
According to Debra, her own life has carried that same pioneering spirit.
While attending DuVal High School in Prince George’s County, she became the first Black young woman elected Coronation Queen by the school’s entire student body. At the time, DuVal was a predominantly white school of more than 1,000 students. Integration was still new, racial tensions were high, and guards were stationed throughout the building. Being elected by her fellow students during her senior year was no small accomplishment.
Debra later became the first woman of color to teach in an academic classroom in Baltimore County and was featured on a state equal employment opportunity poster. She was also the first Black woman to place in the Miss Maryland USA pageant, finishing as fourth runner-up.
Her public service continued when she became the second Black woman to serve as an assistant secretary of transportation for the Maryland Department of Transportation. She was later appointed as the first Black woman to serve on the board of the Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund.
Firsts, it turns out, run in the family.
At Tuskegee Airmen gatherings, men who had served with her father would approach Debra and tell her:
Your father was a genius.
He led us.
Those words meant something different coming from the men who had flown with him—not from a newspaper, museum plaque, or television program, but from the airmen who knew what leadership looked like in the sky.
What He Told Me
Publicly, Bob Friend was disciplined and careful.
He acknowledged that the vastness of the universe made the existence of life elsewhere statistically plausible. But when reporters asked whether extraterrestrial visitors had reached Earth, he often pointed to the immense challenges of interstellar travel.
That was the measured answer he gave publicly.
Our conversation was different.
When Debra invited me to her home in Prince George’s County, her mother was there too. Bob Friend was already well advanced in age, but I found him to be one of the kindest people I had ever encountered.
It took me a moment to reconcile his gentle disposition with the reality of his life.
This soft-spoken man had been a fighter pilot.
I asked him directly what he had seen during his years in the air.
He told me he had seen something flying that was not ordinary. Something was there. Maybe it appeared as a light, but whatever it was, he did not consider it regular or normal.
I am not claiming that Bob Friend told me he shook hands with a visitor from another planet. I am not claiming that every object reported to Project Blue Book was extraterrestrial.
I am reporting exactly what matters:
The man who directed the United States government’s investigation of UFOs told me that he had personally witnessed something in the sky that he could not explain.
That conversation took place years before Washington renewed its public interest in UFO disclosure.
It was one of the most distinguished interviews I have ever conducted.
My Reflection
I have been fascinated by UFOs since childhood. Something in me has always believed that there is more to this universe than what we can see or fully understand.
I grew up watching my own father embalm and prepare bodies. Most people never witness such things, but for me it was part of growing up in a funeral-home family.
That experience taught me early that some people carry knowledge and memories that the rest of us cannot easily comprehend.
Bob Friend carried that kind of knowledge.
He had seen war from the cockpit of a fighter plane. He had confronted enemy fire, mechanical failure and the possibility of death. He later occupied a position that required him to evaluate reports of things other people could not explain.
When a man with that experience tells you he saw something unusual in the sky, you listen.
The UFO mystery has always involved more than a question about visitors from another world. It is also a question of secrecy, military competition and control.
During the Cold War, American officials had to consider whether an unidentified object represented a Soviet aircraft or advanced technology. The Soviets had to wonder the same thing about the United States.
Governments fear public panic. They also fear being technologically outmatched by their enemies.
The antidote to panic and fear is not endless secrecy. It is credible information, serious research and preparation.
We may not yet know what every pilot, radar operator or civilian witness has observed. Admitting that we do not know is not weakness.
Sometimes it is the most honest answer available.
What Comes Next
According to Debra, Bob Friend completed one final, extensive recorded interview with broadcasters in Philadelphia before his death. After a dispute over ownership, those recordings are now back in her possession.
She has not yet listened to all of them.
There may be a documentary in those hours of recorded history. There may also be the foundation of the book about the Tuskegee Airmen that her father wanted to write but never completed.
Whatever those recordings contain, Bob Friend’s place in history is already secure.
He flew 142 combat missions for a country that initially did not want to let him fly.
He served as the trusted wingman of Benjamin O. Davis Jr.
He directed Project Blue Book during one of the most consequential periods of the Cold War.
He spent the rest of his life educating younger generations.
And he told me that he had seen something in the sky he could not explain.
Bob Friend already knew the questions were real.
So did the witnesses in Argentina. So did the governments of Canada, Britain, France and other nations that investigated reports within their own borders. So did generations of Black churchgoers who sang about Ezekiel’s wheel in the middle of the air.
Now, more than 60 years later, the country is once again acting as though it has discovered something new.
Excuse me, Mr. President.
Debra’s daddy was on this decades ago.
They know not that they know not.
