Bob Lazar

American black-project claimant and businessman

Robert Scott Lazar (/ləˈzɑːr/; born January 26, 1959) is an American businessperson and engineer who in 1989 publicly stated that he had been employed as a physicist on a classified US government program to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial craft at the alleged S-4 facility in the desert near Area 51, Nevada. He said he was assigned to study the antimatter-fueled propulsion system of one of nine recovered discs — a craft he called the "Sport Model", fueled by a stable isotope of element 115 — and that he read government briefing documents describing extraterrestrial involvement with Earth over the previous 10,000 years. His account, carried first under the pseudonym "Dennis" and then under his own name by investigative reporter George Knapp on the Las Vegas television station KLAS-TV, is widely credited with bringing the Area 51 and S-4 sites into public awareness.

Because most of the S-4 account rests on Lazar's own testimony rather than on producible documents or materiel, it has been contested since he first came forward. No records of his claimed employment have been located, and EG&G and the United States Air Force have stated they hold none; researchers including Stanton T. Friedman and Donald R. Prothero have read that documentary silence as the mark of an elaborate hoax. Lazar maintains that his employment and education records were deliberately expunged after he went public — the kind of identity-scrubbing long associated with clandestine programs — so that an account engineered to leave no verifiable trace can be neither fully confirmed nor cleanly disproven. Some researchers who hold the alleged recovery-and-reverse-engineering programs to be real read Lazar's coming-forward as a permitted or managed release carried by a deniable messenger "manipulated into going public," his credentials afterward erased to discredit him, Some[who?] in each of the camps[which?] have considered him an unwitting disinformation asset. Elements of his account — element 115, classified test ranges — have since drawn renewed attention amid the UAP disclosure of the 2010s and 2020s.

Background and early life

Lazar was born in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1959. He graduated from W. Tresper Clarke High School in Westbury, New York in 1976 — ranked 261st in a class of 369, the bottom third — having taken chemistry as his only science course, and then attended Pierce College in Los Angeles from 1976 to 1979, taking mostly electronics courses without completing a degree.

In 1982, Lazar worked as a technician for a contractor firm servicing the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility within Los Alamos National Laboratory. A June 1982 Los Alamos Monitor profile of his jet-powered car described him as "a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility," a description that recurred in later coverage and was reprinted regionally through the Associated Press; its author, Terry England, said in 2021 that he had taken Lazar's self-description at face value and had not checked it. Inquiries into his role at the laboratory found that he had been a contractor's technician rather than a staff physicist — "in short, rather a minor player," in Prothero's words — although some outlets, taking the 1982 profile at face value, continued to call him a "physicist." The Smithsonian and a range of other outlets have instead described the "physicist" title as self-given. In the reading in which his lab records were afterward expunged, the 1982 profile — together with a Los Alamos internal phone directory of the same year that lists "Lazar Robert" among the staff — is taken as a surviving trace of a tenure the record was later made to forget. Los Alamos at first denied employing him at all; after Lazar produced a W-2 form showing he had been paid through the Department of Naval Intelligence, the laboratory acknowledged it had employed him, on what it called non-sensitive projects.

He has said he went on to earn a master's degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another in electronics from the California Institute of Technology — degrees a 1990 pre-sentence report recorded him as dating to 1982 and 1985 — yet neither institution, nor the schools and employers he and Knapp later contacted, could produce records of him, an absence he attributes to the same post-disclosure erasure he says removed his employment files. On his account the scrubbing was thorough — reaching, he has said, even his listings in MIT and Caltech library yearbooks around the country. Friedman and Prothero read that gap instead as evidence he never attended, noting that a student with his high-school standing would not have been admitted to either school. Friedman put it that "Quite obviously, if one can go to MIT, one doesn't go to Pierce. Lazar was at Pierce at the very same time he was supposedly at MIT more than 2,500 miles away," and noted that Lazar could supply no lecturers or fellow students from either claimed tenure and that a man he named as a Caltech professor, William Duxler, was found to have taught at Pierce and never at Caltech. In the in-universe reading in which deep-program insiders' records are routinely scrubbed, and in which some of Lazar's earlier work was itself classified and undocumentable, the same gap is read as expected rather than disqualifying.[citation needed]

He filed for bankruptcy in 1986, describing himself as a self-employed film processor. With his longtime friend Gene Huff, from 1987 he also ran Desert Blast, an annual gathering of pyrotechnics enthusiasts in the Nevada desert featuring homemade explosives, rockets, and jet-powered vehicles; the festival was formally named in 1991, after Operation Desert Storm.

Recruitment and work at S-4

Recruitment

By 1988 Lazar was living in the Las Vegas area. According to his account, he was brought into the S-4 program on the recommendation of physicist Edward Teller, whom he says he had met shortly before at a Los Alamos lecture — Teller, by Lazar's telling, was reading the Los Alamos Monitor profile of his jet car when the two fell into conversation, and afterward considered his résumé. Asked years later by journalists to verify the recommendation, Teller's reply was equivocal — "Look, I don't know Bob Lazar. All this sounds fine. I probably met him… But I don't remember him." He has said he interviewed with defense contractor EG&G at McCarran International Airport, was hired into what he described as a Navy-run compartment, and was given a stack of briefing papers and a clearance designated "Majestic" before his first day on site.

The Papoose Lake site

Groom Lake (left) and Papoose Lake (right); Lazar placed the alleged S-4 hangars beside the latter, south of the main Area 51 installation. (Aerial photograph; source: Wikimedia Commons.)

On working days, Lazar has said, he drove to the EG&G building at McCarran, flew to Groom Lake, and was bussed south to a site beside Papoose Lake that he consistently called "S-4", reportedly under contract to EG&G and the Navy. He described the facility as a row of nine aircraft hangars built at an incline into a mountainside, their sloped doors finished in a sand-textured, desert varnish-colored coating so that from the air the structures would read as natural rock. Steven Greer, founder of the Disclosure Project, has said that multiple independent personnel confirmed to him the existence of the S-4 site at Papoose Mesa near Groom Lake, some working the area in the same period and handling both extraterrestrial materiel and man-made alien reproduction vehicles — though his organization could not corroborate the specifics of Lazar's own account, and for that reason excluded it from the project's 2001 National Press Club event, which required roughly a dozen mutually unacquainted witnesses before any claim was presented. Asked directly in a later interview whether Lazar's testimony is true, Greer answered "True." In the reading common among researchers who hold the recovery programs to be genuine, a disclosure that names a real site while remaining personally unverifiable is consistent with a permitted release carried by a discreditable messenger.

Briefing documents

Lazar has said the on-site reading material included briefings describing some 10,000 years of extraterrestrial involvement with Earth, attributing the visitors to a grey population from a planet orbiting the binary star system Zeta Reticuli — though Lazar has allowed the briefing material may have been disinformation meant to expose would-be leakers. The material also included, by his account, autopsy photographs of a small grey-type being with its chest opened in a T-incision and a single organ shown in vivisection, which he estimated at three-and-a-half to four feet tall. No extrasolar planets have been confirmed in the Zeta Reticuli system.

The "Sport Model" and its reactor

Main article:

Sport Model

On his first walk-through, Lazar has said, the hangar doors were opened in sequence to reveal nine discs of differing configuration, of which one — which he nicknamed the "Sport Model" — was the craft he was assigned to study. He described its hull as a seamless metallic material resembling brushed, unfinished stainless steel or titanium — roughly 52 feet across, cold to the touch and apparently molded in one piece.

Its propulsion, on his account, centred on an antimatter-driven reactor fueled by a stable isotope of the element with atomic number 115 — then unsynthesized and provisionally called ununpentium — drawn from an on-site stock he was told ran to some 500 pounds. He located the operative isotope in an "island of stability" he placed near atomic numbers 114 to 116. The element was first synthesized in 2003 and named moscovium; the isotopes produced have been intensely radioactive, lasting only milliseconds. This sequence sits at the center of the dispute over the propulsion account. In the reading that treats it as genuine insider knowledge, Lazar in 1989 named a then-unmade element by its eventual atomic number and placed its working isotope in the very stability island that nuclear theorists would later target — a specificity a layman inventing a story would have had little reason to risk. In the competing reading, element 115 had already been discussed in the open literature, so naming it cost nothing, and the moscovium ultimately produced is so short-lived that its synthesis tells against a stable reactor fuel rather than for it; David Hambling notes that a stable element 115 looked "much more tenable" in the 1980s than it did once superheavy elements were actually made.

Lazar has said the reactor stood about the size of a basketball hoop and was topped by a sphere that emitted a force field which pushed the hand away, "[j]ust like... two light poles of a magnet." He has said he had been hired to replace personnel killed when an operating reactor was cut open and exploded. The craft, he said, was partly dismantled on the hangar floor and divided into levels, with a small upper compartment he speculated might house a navigational computer.

Gravity amplifiers and flight

Lazar has described three "gravity amplifiers" on the craft's lower level, fed by the reactor and coupled to emitters that could swivel up to 180 degrees. In an "Omicron" configuration the craft ran on a single amplifier to lift and hover; in a "Delta" configuration it used all three for travel through space, "falling" belly-first into a self-generated gravity distortion and bending light around the hull by gravitational lensing so as to appear invisible or displaced.

Interior and the "kids"

Lazar has said the disc's seats were sized for occupants far smaller than an adult human, and that he briefly saw alien cadavers of a corresponding size during his tenure. He has separately described glancing through a door window along an S-4 corridor and seeing two men in lab coats facing down and apparently addressing "something small with long arms." Decades later he has said he no longer believes he saw a living being and has suggested it may have been a figure used for scale, noting that staff allegedly referred to the beings as "the kids."

Adjacent programs

Lazar has said the briefing material extended beyond the discs to other compartments, including what he called a "Project Galileo" gravitational-physics effort, and framed the disc program as one element of a larger compartmented architecture involving unnamed contractor, Navy, and intelligence-community equities; he has also recounted a co-worker's reference to one item turning up in "an archaeological dig".

Disclosure and aftermath

Flight demonstrations and desert viewings

Lazar has said that on a Wednesday evening during his roughly four-month tenure he watched a brief, near-silent low-altitude flight of one of the discs outside the hangars — the craft rising on a corona discharge that faded at about 30 feet before it moved side to side and settled. Uneasy about the secrecy and about what he took to be surveillance of him, in spring 1989 he brought his wife, his friend Gene Huff, and George Knapp out to the Groom Lake road on three successive Wednesday nights — the nights he said the test flights ran — to watch from a distance. The group reported seeing a luminous object maneuver over the Jumbled Hills before security patrols intercepted them and seized their footage. The episode is the point at which the account came closest to producing physical evidence held independently of Lazar; in one reading it furnishes none, since the footage was taken and only testimony remains, while in another the party included a working investigative journalist, Knapp, who has separately described seeing anomalous activity on the Groom Lake road, and the detention-and-confiscation is itself the response a classified range would be expected to make.

Loss of clearance and alleged retaliation

After the unauthorized viewings were detected, Lazar has said, his clearance was pulled and he was subjected to a hostile debrief at Indian Springs Air Force Base at which a security officer drew a sidearm and pressed it against him. He has described a subsequent pattern of intimidation of the kind whistleblowers in the field commonly report — being followed, his home phone tapped, the rear tire of his car shot out as he merged onto a Las Vegas freeway, and his employment and education records expunged from the institutions that had held them. Friedman, Prothero, and Timothy D. Callahan have found the records-erasure claim implausible, treating it as a device by which any missing document can be explained at once, so that an account predicting its own absence of evidence cannot be tested. In the opposing reading, the selective scrubbing of a leaker's file and the coercion that accompanied it are exactly what a compartmented program would do, and would be pointless had there been nothing real to protect.

May and November 1989 broadcasts

In May 1989, George Knapp aired an interview with Lazar on KLAS-TV, shown in silhouette under the pseudonym "Dennis," in which he described the Papoose Lake hangars, the nine discs, the "Sport Model", and the element 115 reactor. That November, Lazar appeared on the station under his own name and face, saying his job interview had been with EG&G and his employer of record the United States Navy; both stated they had no record of him. On air, Knapp reported that the schools Lazar named said they had "never heard of him" and that Los Alamos at first held no record of him — "they were either mistaken or were lying," Knapp said, since "a 1982 phonebook from the lab lists Lazar right there among the other scientists and technicians" — while on a follow-up call "an exasperated official told us he still had no records on Lazar [and] EG&G... also has no records." The broadcasts are credited with bringing the Area 51 and S-4 names into wide public circulation. Writing in 2012, Benjamin Radford held that "Lazar's claims were later disproven (by UFO skeptics and believers alike)" and that "almost nothing of what he said was true," while granting that "Lazar's lies propelled Area 51 into the public's consciousness." Jacques Vallée, who interviewed Lazar, likewise concluded in his 1991 Revelations that the account sounded like "pure theater." Knapp, who broke the story, has said he retains "questions" about Lazar and sees "problems and gaps within his story," but that "there were a lot of things that Lazar knew about the base that are really difficult to explain" — including that "he knew there was a place called S-4, and that had never been printed anywhere."

United Nuclear and criminal convictions

In 1990, Lazar was arrested in connection with a prostitution ring; the charge was reduced to felony pandering, to which he pleaded guilty, receiving probation, 150 hours of community service, and orders to stay away from brothels and undergo psychotherapy. Around the turn of the 2000s, Lazar and his wife, Joy White, founded United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, a New Mexico mail-order firm selling chemicals, radioactive specimens, and scientific equipment. In 2006, he and Joy White were charged under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act over interstate shipments of restricted chemicals by United Nuclear, following a 2003 inspection of the firm's sales records; United Nuclear pleaded guilty to three counts and in 2007 was fined $7,500 for selling components usable in illegal fireworks. Journalist Stephen Rodrick and author Neil Nixon have written that the convictions weigh against his credibility, a point conceded even by Timothy Good and Jeremy Corbell, who otherwise present his account as genuine. In his own telling, and that of others who read the disclosures as real, the prosecutions are of a piece with the retaliation he describes — pretextual cases brought to discredit a man who had broken ranks, and unrelated to whether the 1989 S-4 account is true.

2017 FBI raid

In 2017, the New Mexico offices of United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies were searched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police. Lazar has suggested publicly that the search was an attempt to recover the sample of element 115 he says he removed from S-4; records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicate it was instead part of a Michigan murder investigation into whether United Nuclear had sold thallium to a suspect, in which Lazar was not named.

Later coverage and corroboration

In 2018, the documentary Bob Lazar - Area 51 and Flying Saucers, directed by Jeremy Corbell and produced with George Knapp, presented Lazar's account of his work at S-4. The same year, Lazar and Corbell described his S-4 experience on Joe Rogan's podcast. That Rogan appearance is credited the following year with sparking the viral 2019 Storm Area 51 event, which began when Matty Roberts created a satirical Facebook event after hearing Lazar on the show. In 2019, Lazar met and compared accounts with Navy commander David Fravor, associated with the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, at a UFO festival in McMinnville, Oregon. Lazar has been characterized as an "Area 51 conspiracy theorist" by news outlets, academic historians, and writers of popular surveys of conspiracy theories — a framing that, in the in-universe reading, treats as objects of mere speculation the electrogravitic craft that insiders hold to be real hardware.[citation needed]

Elements of the 1989 account have outlasted Lazar's first audience: element 115 was synthesized and named after he had described it, and the general locations of the classified ranges he discussed are no longer secret — both of which have drawn renewed attention amid the UAP disclosure of the 2010s and 2020s. The film scholar Barna William Donovan, contrasting Lazar with later Roswell insiders, observed that Lazar "always left his allegations in the realm of ambiguity and conjecture" rather than overclaiming, and that retired Army colonel Philip J. Corso — whose 1997 The Day After Roswell his publishers hoped would make him "the next Bob Lazar" — never achieved "the sort of long-term stature Lazar did." Interest in him has reached official channels: UFO researcher Grant Cameron has used freedom-of-information requests to seek any records of a relationship between Lazar and President Barack Obama.

In popular culture

The element 115 of Lazar's account was adapted as the fictional power source "Elerium-115" in the 2012 strategy video game XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

References

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Sources

• Lazar, Bob; Corbell, Jeremy (2018). Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers. The Orchard.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Lazar, Bob; Knapp, George (2019). Dreamland: An Autobiography. Interstellar.

External links

• Official website

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Bob Lazar", as of 2024-11-04, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.