UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part Three: Bob Lazar
This does not represent a complete transcript of the episode or list of my sources, as the podcast version of this episode contains significant archival audio, some of which actually serves as source evidence for the argument I make. Please listen if you are interested!
Just a few years ago, in September of 2019, a proposal for American civilians to descend upon a Top Secret military research installation gained viral support on social media. The U.S. military base in question is located within the Nevada Test and Training Range at Nellis Air Force Base. Specifically, it is part of the Tonopah Bombing Range located at the dry bed of Groom Lake, a tract of land known as Area 51, famous in urban legend for being associated with flying saucers and aliens. The event to Storm Area 51 was treated as a joke by both the media and the participants, but the government appeared to take it seriously, issuing stern warnings ahead of the event and beefing up security during the gathering, which only drew about 1500 curious youth and spectators to surrounding towns, with only about 150 actually trekking out to the gates of the facility. It ended up being more of a fun happening or festival than a serious raid. The response of the federal government, though, only served to exacerbate longstanding myths about the base’s harboring of secret alien technology. Strangely, this event came years after the government began to ease security and tug back the veil of secrecy surrounding Area 51. Indeed, the fact that the dry bed of Groom Lake was being used as an airstrip was rather openly acknowledged from the beginning of the site’s use. Though the existence of the facility there and especially its purpose had long been classified, in 1998, the Air Force did acknowledge the “location known as ‘Area 51’” on Groom Dry Lake, asserting the “[s]pecific activities and operations conducted” there “remain classified and cannot be discussed publicly.” Then in 2013, when in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA finally released an official history of certain spy plane programs, the existence and purpose of Area 51 was further acknowledged, complete with maps of the site. As a result of this declassification and release of information, as well as a great deal of investigative reporting in previous years, the world actually knew a lot about Area 51 and what really went on there long before some kids started planning their Naruto run at its gates. We know that, in 1955, the Central Intelligence Agency visited the Nevada Test Site, a nuclear proving ground under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, and decided that the Groom Lake salt flat was a perfect natural airstrip for their spy plane project. Since the end of World War II, reconnaissance of Soviet atomic facilities had become paramount, and stealth was the name of the game. Groom Lake would be the perfect site for testing the U-2 spy plane and for training its pilots, and the site would remain in use for decades for test flights of the Lockheed A-12 and the F-117 Nighthawk. The flights of these high-altitude experimental aircraft also provide a clear and rational explanation for many of the reports of strange sightings in the skies over the area as well. But regardless of this revelation, which was already something of an open secret by that time anyway, the myth of Area 51 aliens or extra-terrestrial technology persisted and inspired the social media event of 2019 mainly because of the claims of one man, Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked at a secret facility outside Area 51 on a UFO reverse engineering program. This supposed whistleblower has been absolutely discredited, but today another man, David Grusch, is making very similar claims about top secret programs reverse engineering non-human craft, and Lazar, as well as his longtime promoters, have been asserting that Grusch’s testimony somehow vindicates Lazar. In this third and final installment of my series on the longstanding American Tradition of UFO Whistleblowers blowing hot air, I look at Bob Lazar’s complete lack of credibility and suggest that rather than Grusch vindicating him, his disproven assertions rather should cast doubt on the reliability of Grusch’s similar claims.
At the outset of this episode, I must explain how the claims of a UFO hoaxer, which as I said had been thoroughly debunked decades earlier, could have possibly been influential on the Storm Area 51 phenomenon and might even be connected today to the claims of David Grusch before Congress. While it is true that Bob Lazar’s claims had long ago been systematically refuted and exposed as false, because of a recent documentary, he was having something of a moment in 2019. The movie was called Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers, and during the promotion of this film, Lazar appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience. This was in June 2019, and by the end of that summer, millions of people were threatening to storm Area 51. I think it’s pretty common knowledge the kind of reach Rogan’s podcast has. At the time, he was boasting some 190 million downloads a month. The importance of Joe Rogan’s amplification of Bob Lazar’s old, refuted claims and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell’s promotion of them cannot be underestimated. He gave Lazar a massive platform, and though he may have asked a few pointed questions, it’s clear throughout that he’s handling Lazar with kid gloves, as though careful not to confront him too much. After this episode, I’m sure you’ll agree that there is much that Rogan should have raised in the interview and made the audience aware of, facts that Corbell’s documentary also failed to emphasize. The fact that the viral Facebook post suggesting the storming of Area 51 was created within a week of the airing of Rogan’s interview of Lazar, I think makes the connection exceedingly clear. Corbell and Lazar and Rogan absolutely could have gotten some kids shot with their reckless propagation of conspiracist misinformation. And now 4 years later, just this summer, we saw another UFO whistleblower sit before a congressional panel and make very similar claims about the reverse engineering of alien technology. Now I should clarify that Grusch currently enjoys legal whistleblower protections that Bob Lazar never did. In fact, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 came into effect a month before Lazar ever went public with his claims, yet he never attempted to claim these legal protections. Moreover, unlike other true whistleblowers who went public with real information, like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, he has never faced federal prosecution or prison, which should serve to discredit his claims at the outset. While these contrasts may seem to put Grusch into an entirely separate category from Lazar, what may surprise many is that there are suspicious connections between Lazar and Grusch. Now, here at the end of my series, I finally tie that red yarn around a pin in the photo of George Knapp, veteran Las Vegas TV news reporter, and pull it taut to John Lear, whose wild alien conspiracy claims Knapp aired on television, and I take that red string past my photo of Lear’s first supposed whistleblower protégé, Bill Cooper, to the photo of Bob Lazar, another “whistleblower” that John Lear would introduce to the world and whom George Knapp would put on TV. From Lazar’s photo, that red string originating from George Knapp extends to Jeremy Corbell, Knapp’s protégé and cohost of his podcast, who made the film that put Lazar back on the map. And finally, the red string terminates at my photo of David Grusch, who long before his testimony to Congress had met with both Corbell and Knapp, discussing his supposed revelations with them and perhaps even being counseled or coached by them. After all, look at the film of Grusch’s appearance before Congress, you can see these two, Knapp and Corbell, Bob Lazar’s biggest boosters, sitting right behind Grusch.
Bob Lazar is sometimes credited with being the first to reveal the existence of Area 51 to the public, but this is not really accurate. Certainly Lazar’s claims helped to spread the word about Area 51 and to popularize notions about it, but his naming of Area 51 was not proof of inside knowledge of the facilities there. First of all, there had long been reports linking the Nevada Test Site and Groom Lake to UFO sightings. These sightings had actually begun with the first U-2 flights. The extreme altitude at which these planes flew meant that, when the pilots of commercial aircraft caught sight of them, they simply could not comprehend what they might have been. And though they flew at night, they were at first silver and reflected lights from below. They would actually be painted black in order to help them better blend in and reduce the number of such UFO sightings. Nevertheless, Groom Lake had a reputation already, years before Lazar’s appearance, as a hotbed of UFO activity, and Lazar was not even the first to reveal on television that this secret part of the base was called Area 51. This occurred the year before, in 1988, on the television program UFO Cover-Up?: Live! On this program, Bill Moore and his partner Jaime Shandera, the men responsible for spreading the “Majestic-12” forgery, introduced two informants, Falcon and Condor, whose faces were hidden in shadow and whose voices had been electronically garbled, claiming they were high-level UFO whistleblowers. These individuals seem to be the first to publicly identify the facility as Area 51. So who were these men? One common theory about Falcon was that he was none other than Rick Doty, the AFOSI disinformation agent tasked with feeding crazy ideas about aliens to UFOlogists. Bill Moore so strenuously denied this that it seemed like he protested too much. If this were the case, if Doty were Falcon, it would mean the Air Force themselves had revealed that the facility was called Area 51, and that they had done so in order to encourage the false belief that there was spooky alien stuff happening there, rather than the very real spy-plane programs and other classified projects that probably were being conducted. The UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program made a big deal about confirming Falcon’s credentials, which of course, in the case of Rick Doty, they would have been able to do.
But actually, the mention of Area 51 by name came from the other informant on this program, Condor. Even with his voice garbled, the tenor and cadence is very similar to that of John Lear, at least to my ear. Could John Lear, aviator turned “dark side” UFOlogist conspiracy nut, have been Condor? Interestingly, years later, when a screenwriter was working with Bob Lazar on adapting his claims to film, Lazar went through an old calendar with the writer, and on October 14th, 1988, Bob had indicated that he’d watched the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program, and he is on tape telling the screenwriter that he watched it to see John Lear on TV, the same John Lear whom his calendar indicated he had met ten days earlier. Well, this program can be viewed in its entirety online. John Lear did not appear on the program, unless, indeed, he was one of the supposed government informants. And even a year before the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program, back in 1987, John Lear was already telling George Knapp on Channel 8 that the government was hiding alien technology out at Groom Lake. So the question then becomes, how did John Lear learn the official name of Area 51? If we look back into Lear’s past, before he ever went on the air with George Knapp to express his UFO cover-up hypothesis, we find that he was an anonymous source on a scoop story out of Knapp’s news center about stealth aircraft being tested at the Nevada Test Site. Bob Stoldal, the head of KLAS-TV News and George Knapp’s boss, had worked with Lear before, and as it turns out he had done a great deal of digging into the Nevada Test Site for years, learning more and more about a particular patch of ground that went by various names. Apparently, he learned from a map on the back of a brochure printed for the visit of President Kennedy that this section of the test site was designated Area 51. Thus we see the name Area 51 was earlier turned up through good old-fashioned investigative journalism, was probably learned by John Lear through his association with the television news journalists of that station, and was then repeated through a voice garbler on live TV and shared with his other darksider UFOlogists, as well as, most likely, with a certain gangly man who came to meet him in 1989, interested in UFO research, who later that year would claim he managed to get a job out at Area 51.
According to George Knapp, Bob Lazar’s first appearance on television came as a result of a last-minute cancellation. Apparently, Knapp reached out to John Lear seeking someone else to interview, and Lear recommended Bob Lazar. Knapp conducted his first interview with Bob Lazar in a news van on John Lear’s front lawn. Lazar appeared in shadows, using the false name Dennis. He claimed that there were numerous extra-terrestrial craft—flying saucers—being dismantled and tested out at Groom Lake. This is the first time he claims that he was involved in working on the propulsion system of the craft as well. The interview spread these claims very far at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, being aired on other stations. Well George Knapp knew ratings gold when he saw it, and he managed to get Lazar to come back and go on the record under his real name. In this second interview, he went more in-depth about the propulsion systems he was supposedly working on, mentioning anti-matter reactors. He describes being flown to Groom Lake and placed on a bus that drove him to an even more secret facility, S4, at another dry lakebed, Papoose Lake, south of Area 51. Now this little detail, about the flights conducted by military contractor EG&G to Area 51 has been highlighted as proof that Lazar was telling the truth, because EG&G did in fact conduct these flights, called Janet Airlines, ferrying workers to the base frequently. Moreover, his knowledge of the geography of the base seems to impress people that Lazar is being truthful. However, if we examine the calendar that Lazar shared with the screenwriter interested in adapting his story, we find, first, several inconsistencies, as well as indications he had doctored the calendar to support his story, and some indications of what he was actually up to. So for example, he had noted several trips out to the area before he supposedly started working there, and one entry that mentioned getting an old photo of Groom Lake blown up, which is exactly what one might do if they were planning on making up a story about the place. He had also written and then scribbled out EG&G in more than one place. He said some of these entries were his interviews with the contractor, but he could not explain the scribbled-out entries. Perhaps he was actually researching EG&G and learning about their regular flights out to Area 51. Some have suggested the Janet flights were not as secret as has been claimed. But what appears to me to be the biggest indicator that Bob Lazar was never actually on such a flight is that he seems to have told George Knapp that the flights left from EG&G or near EG&G. In fact, they departed from the westernmost terminal of MacCarran International Airport, some three miles from the EG&G facility. Perhaps he knew something about these flights. He may have even known people who did work for EG&G, people had taken a Janet flight out to the base, but as we will see, there are numerous reasons to doubt that he ever did.
The true start of Bob Lazar’s involvement with UFOs appears to begin with his friendship with one Gene Huff. George Knapp identifies Huff as a real estate appraiser. It has since been revealed that Gene Huff and Bob Lazar were already taking an interest in UFOs a full year before he started making claims publicly about working at Area 51, and several months before he was supposedly hired to work there. Gene Huff had contacted John Lear in June of 1988, wanting copies of certain UFO research materials that Lear had and offering to appraise Lear’s house in return. Huff brought his buddy Bob Lazar, who claimed that he had previously worked at Los Alamos National Lab, and because of his Q clearance, he would know whether such things about UFOs are true. As I mentioned in the Bill Cooper episode, this notion that anyone with a Q clearance who works at a lab would be able to confirm or deny all the biggest national secrets is just preposterous. If that were so, my buddy who holds a Q clearance to work at Lawrence Livermore Labs would be keeping some awful big secrets for an IT guy. It appears that Huff and Lazar may have been planning their hoax when they approached Lear for research materials. Huff would be a mainstay in Lazar’s early career, appearing with him in numerous interviews to help him keep his story straight. Once again, Lazar’s calendar and what he said about the entries in it show that he was hiding his early association with Lear, as when an entry indicated multiple meetings with Lear before the development of his claims, such as in September and October, when the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program aired, and November of that year. Lazar tried to claim that some of these were actually some other, random person also named John Lear. In an unbelievable coincidence that John Lear either knew was a lie or was gullible enough to believe, Lazar began telling him that now, since their discussions about UFOs, during which Lazar had supposedly been skeptical, that now he just happened to get a job at Area 51, where the secrets of aliens and their technology were revealed to him.
In March of 1989, he took Gene Huff and John Lear out to a certain spot in Tikaboo Valley to view some lights in the sky, which he claimed were saucer tests. The video footage is too poor to make out anything but a spot of light. We can hear Lear and the others marveling at its movements, but as far as we can tell by viewing it today, these are actually the movements of the camera and the unsteady hand filming it. A few different explanations have been put forth for what they saw that Wednesday night. One is that it was an experimental spy plane. Another is that it was just the Janet Airlines flight taking workers out for the night, something that happened like clockwork. One more outlandish explanation that is still more rational than aliens is that it was a test of a particle beam technology used for radar spoofing, the beam of which would not have been visible, but which would terminate in a bright globe that might have looked like a saucer below and could be dragged around the skies like a spotlight. Whatever it was that they saw, like Bob’s apparent knowledge of the Janet flights, his apparent knowledge of when there would be something to see in the night sky is sometimes touted as proof of his veracity. In fact, though, it was apparently common knowledge among area UFO enthusiasts when activity seemed most common over the base. For example, the next year, Norio Hayakawa, the very same lecture promoter of Bill Cooper briefly mentioned in the last episode, came out to Las Vegas to interview Lazar for a Japanese magazine, and he said that he came on a Wednesday because “that was the day we’d heard on the radio they did flying saucer tests.” And there is very clear, irrefutable evidence that Lazar was already driving up to those mountains and watching lights in the sky months before he ever claimed to have gotten a job there. These excursions appeared on his own calendar, and he told John Lear all about them during those early months when they first met. So there is really no reason to believe he had to have some insider knowledge to know when one was likely to see lights in the sky there.
Bob Lazar’s story was communicated in broad strokes in his interviews with George Knapp and afterward fleshed out in a short film written, produced and directed by Gene Huff and himself, The Lazar Tape…and Excerpts from the Government Bible. In one of the most hilariously melodramatic openings I’ve ever seen, Bob Lazar is filmed driving across the desert in a sportscar, approaching from a distance as eerie music plays until he is close enough to step out of the car and start telling his story. Bob says he was a physicist at Los Alamos. He claims that one day, Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, was speaking at Los Alamos and Bob saw him reading the local newspaper, the Monitor, on the cover of which was Bob, as a local reporter had written a story about him installing a jet engine into his car. According to Lazar, this somehow impressed Teller, and years later, after bankruptcy and his association with John Lear, neither of which he mentions, Teller remembered Lazar when Lazar sent him a resume and asked for his help finding a job. Lazar claims Teller telephoned him and gave him a contact at EG&G, and after some tough interviews, he was hired and flown to Area 51, then bussed to the super-secret S4. It is perhaps worthwhile to recall, here, that according to the lore surrounding Area 51, not even the president had clearance. At least that’s what Bill Cooper used to claim. Yet we are to believe that a civilian with financial troubles was granted access. Financial difficulties, it should be noted, are a well-known reason for the denial of a security clearance since financial difficulties can be leveraged to get people to reveal secrets. But no, Lazar claims he had no difficulties being granted his clearance, and soon he was being shown nine different flying saucers in the hangars of S4. They didn’t work up to this reveal. They didn’t keep him in the dark at first to see if he could be trusted. They just drove him right out to see the flying disks. Lazar described three projects related to the alien craft, projects Galileo, Sidekick, and Looking Glass. The first, Galileo, was about the method of the craft’s propulsion and fuel, which Lazar described as being gravitational wave produced by anti-matter. The second, Project Sidekick, dealt with some beam weapon of extraterrestrial origin. The third, Looking Glass, was about some technology the aliens used to look backward in time. According to Lazar, they read him into all these projects, allowing him to view a file detailing alien contact with human civilization going far back in history. Let’s just consider this. I think most people understand the value of compartmentalization on top secret programs. Lazar explains that he was brought in to reverse engineer the flying disks and worked principally on their means of propulsion. There would have been no clear reason to inform him about Project Sidekick or Project Looking Glass at all, then. So on this, the most highly classified and secret project in our government’s history, there was no compartmentalization at all, and they saw fit to just reveal everything to this former Los Alamos employee simply on the recommendation of Dr. Teller, who himself apparently had nothing to do with the project.
Lazar has told different stories about Teller’s involvement, sometimes claiming that he was not active in anything other than a consultant capacity, and other times claiming he actually ran the UFO program. The only part of Lazar’s claims that appears true is that Edward Teller was at Los Alamos the day after that newspaper article about Lazar’s jetcar appeared, but at the time, and during the 6 years that followed, Teller was not running some top secret UFO program. His papers show where he was traveling, and it was only rarely to Las Vegas. He was devoting his time in those years to political activism, and in fact, on the day that Lazar claims Teller phoned him to recommend him to EG&G, Teller was actually busy giving a speech at Cal State Northridge, which both his archives and the university newspaper confirm. The idea that he would have been so impressed by Lazar strapping a jet engine to his car that he remembered him 6 years later and thought he should be working on reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology is just preposterous. Yet this is really the only evidence Lazar has ever provided that holds up to scrutiny. In his videotape, he puts an image up of the Los Alamos Monitor cover, and then he further shows the image of a clipping mentioning Teller’s visit to Los Alamos, as if this were proof of their meeting. And at the end of his video, he shares a clip of a 1990 interview with Dr. Teller in which it appears that Teller is refusing to answer a direct question about Lazar. If we pay attention to the entirety of that clip, though, it’s clear that he is saying that what the interview keeps badgering him about is just not interesting, and that if the interviewer keeps pestering him about it, he will refuse to answer. In fact, it’s unclear if he even registers the question about Lazar, whose name he may not have even recognized. One can find this snippet of a longer interview, which was edited and taken out of context in The Lazar Tape, all over the internet, but I and other researchers I’ve contacted have been unable to find the entire interview anywhere. I suspect that if we were to listen to it in its entirety, it would be clear that it’s not the nefarious refusal to address the topic that it is presented to be. It is admittedly difficult, given the poor audio and Teller’s heavy accent, but with some effort you can make out what he’s saying at the beginning of the clip: “if you use nuclear fuel, and not definitely, possibly…nuclear fuel is feasible, but whether these very great velocities are feasible, which are interesting if you ever want to get to another star, that is an important question. And that’s about all I can say.” So it seems clear, even from the bit Lazar and Huff took out of context, that the interviewer was putting questions to him about the kinds of propulsion Lazar was describing. Making no remarks that indicate any knowledge of some anti-matter reaction capable of producing gravitational wave propulsion, as Lazar had claimed, Teller was just commenting on the general feasibility of a nuclear fuel, unsure if such a thing might make interstellar travel possible. When he said, “That’s all I can say” it was more like “I don’t know anything more than that” rather than “official secrecy proscribes further comment,” and when the interviewer kept pushing on the same topic, that was when he said he would stop answering the questions. But even if what Lazar said about meeting Teller and about Teller recommending him to EG&G were, despite all likelihood, true, there are other issues that would have certainly come up, preventing him from being granted clearance to the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, for it seems Bob Lazar’s past was just a tissue of lies.
The story becomes even more preposterous as we look further into his credentials and see he has completely misrepresented himself. The parts of his story that have most thoroughly debunked have to do with his education and thus his claims of having been a physicist. He claimed to have masters’ degrees from both MIT and CalTech. First of all, having a master’s degree is simply not as impressive as it may sound. I have a master’s degree, and I would presume that the government, wanting an expert to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology would seek out someone with multiple doctorates. But regardless, there is ample evidence that he doesn’t even hold these degrees. One UFOlogist who actually was a nuclear physicist, Stanton Friedman, was among the first to discredit Lazar based on the fact that he simply did not have the advanced degrees he claimed to have. Neither MIT nor CalTech have any records of his enrollment. He doesn’t appear in their yearbooks. No thesis written by Lazar has ever been produced. The only education of Lazar’s that can be confirmed is his high school education, where he finished in the bottom third of his class, which means he would not have gained entry into the prestigious university’s he claimed to attend. Otherwise, he does appear to have attended a junior college, and records show he was matriculating there at the same time that he claimed to be attending MIT. Moreover, he has been consistently unable to name classmates at MIT or CalTech, and none have every come forward. When asked to name an instructor he had, he feigned an inability to recall, and then actually named an instructor from his junior college in California. Other researchers have dug up his 1980 marriage certificate, which shows that he had only completed the 12th grade. How does Lazar explain these discrepancies? Well, he says that the government is erasing any record of him. Let’s consider that a moment. For this to be true, dozens of admissions office workers at MIT and CalTech would also have to be in on it, as would his instructors and classmates. The government would have to be able to erase memories and doctor all existing copies of those schools’ yearbooks. Not only that, even if the government were capable of such an erasure, Bob Lazar himself would be able to prove it. He would have copies of his own thesis, copies of his own transcripts, copies of recommendation letters from those instructors whose names he conveniently forgot. And Lazar only ever complains about how the erasure of his credentials has discredited him, not how it has affected his livelihood or opportunities in any way, which would be the foremost effect of having one’s hard-earned graduate education revoked. Anyone with some experience of higher education knows that these things are true and thus Lazar’s claims must be false. George Knapp, however, tends to complain that he covered these things right from the start. To his credit, he did mention them. But think about that. Knapp put Lazar on the air with his identity hidden in May of that year, and then in November, he revealed his identity along with the claim that the government had already erased his past. That is a quick cover-up. It seems more likely that Lazar knew, if he revealed his identity, these lies would be promptly exposed, so he simply gave this excuse to account for them. But Knapp claimed that the mere fact Bob Lazar had worked at Los Alamos proved his educational background must have been confirmed at some point in the past. But did Lazar really work as a physicist at Los Alamos?
Knapp himself found that Los Alamos had no record of Lazar’s employment. However, Knapp dug further and discovered a phone book with listings for all workers at Los Alamos during the time when Lazar claimed to be there, and lo and behold, there was Bob’s name. Knapp presented this as evidence of a cover-up. But it has since been shown that the phone book in question listed not only scientists and other staff at the labs, but also contractors working for the Kirk-Mayer corporation, and Lazar’s name had the initials KM afterward, indicating he was just an outside contractor there, not a physicist. Kirk-Mayer hired technicians to do low level work at Los Alamos, and this lines up with other things we know about Lazar’s work history, as that 1980 marriage certificate lists his occupation as “electronics technician.” Later researchers actually managed to get physicists and co-workers of Lazar’s from Los Alamos on the record stating that Bob was something of a do-nothing employee who had been fired for trying to use the labs’ toll-free phones system to run a personal business venture. No one could doubt that Bob was certainly in Los Alamos at the time, because of the newspaper story about him and his jet car in the Los Alamos Monitor. The fact is that Bob probably misrepresented himself to this journalist, Terry England, in the same way he would later misrepresent himself to the world. But Knapp and the documentarian Jeremy Corbell have made much of the fact that the article’s author called him a physicist. Corbell, on Rogan, claimed that England told him he had confirmed Lazar’s status as a physicist at the lab back when he wrote the piece. However, in a more recent interview, England says he took Lazar at his word and denied ever saying otherwise to Corbell. Perhaps even more telling, though, is the fact that records show Bob was running a photo processing business at the same time, there in Los Alamos. On his bankruptcy filing, he lists his photo business and mentions nothing about his work with Kirk-Mayer at Los Alamos National Lab, further indicating that his role there was minor, and certainly not that of a physicist, as it was not his principal source of income.
Further evidence of Bob Lazar not being a physicist is the fact that he has never agreed to speak with a confirmed nuclear physicist who might probe his genuine knowledge. One of the first such nuclear physicists he has avoided was Stanton Friedman. And ever since, he has carefully avoided any one-on-one with anyone who might actually be able to tell he was anything other than an auto-didact, a self-taught science enthusiast who is good at giving the impression of his general understanding of scientific subjects. He is far more comfortable with other auto-didacts, like Joe Rogan. And we know he relies on technobabble to overawe and impress people. Take his jet-powered car, for example, which was supposedly such a feat of engineering that it earned him a job reverse-engineering the most secret technology on earth. Well, it turns out that, growing up in San Fernando Valley, he knew the inventor of those jet engines, Eugene Gluhareff, and as a teen he had strapped a similar engine to his bicycle. In the infamous newspaper article about his car, he claimed that the engine produced 1,600 pounds of thrust, but this is an apparent lie meant to impress the newspaperman, a further example of his self-promotion and misrepresentation. The largest Gluhareff jet engines produced only 700 pounds of thrust, and the one he had in his Honda was much smaller. Such lies for self-promotion even seem to have continued through more recent years. After Knapp’s original promotion of Lazar’s claims, but before Jeremy Corbell reinvigorated his hoax, Lazar ran a business selling mail-order supplies to amateur scientists and science teachers. When his home was raided in 2003 because he was selling the materials make illegal fireworks and explosives, Wired Magazine wrote a short piece about it called “Don’t Try This at Home,” which amazingly made no mention at all of Bob’s claim to fame. In the article, Bob claims to have a particle accelerator in his backyard, a rather absurd claim since any particle accelerator worth its salt would be many kilometers long, and could not be powered by the Van de Graaf generator that Bob claims powers it in the article, as such generators could only produce several megavolts and a real accelerator would require hundreds of megawatts. Not to mention the simple fact that, if the authorities raided his home out of concern for explosive materials he was selling, they certainly would have also confiscated a device that uses high-energy proton beams to collide particles. Such a device could be infinitely more dangerous than any illegal fireworks.
The image used by WIRED magazine for their piece on Bob’s lab supplies business.
The most prominent display of Lazar’s supposed scientific knowledge is provided by his discussion of the means of fuel and propulsion that he claimed was used by the flying saucers he reverse-engineered at S4. In his video, he explains the science in the simplest of terms, as a “science lesson.” To summarize, he claims that the craft fire and collide particles—and here we go again with a small particle accelerator—and these are particles of a non-earthly element that Lazar supposedly located on the periodic table as Element 115. Particles of this element, he says, create anti-matter, can produce gravitational waves, and with this warping of the fabric of space and time, enables the craft to travel great distances. Now, it’s important to note that anti-matter propulsion may actually be feasible. But lest we think that this is proof of what Lazar claimed we reverse engineered in the 1980s, the fact is that we have known about antimatter for a long time, since it was first theorized by Paul Dirac in the 1930s. Even the idea of antimatter propulsion was not new, having been proposed by German scientist Eugene Sanger in the 1950s. But that idea of antimatter propulsion was to harness the energy produced by its annihilation effect, a reaction that happens when antimatter and matter collide. This annihilation effect is also the reason that it has been so difficult to harness. But the important thing to note here is that it is NOT about producing gravitational waves. Nor was the idea of gravitational waves a new idea, having been famously predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity back in 1915, long before Lazar came around. Even the idea that the warping of space and time through gravitational waves could make instantaneous travel across great distances possible was also not new. This idea really was dreamed up by children’s book author Madeline L’Engle, who after reading a book about Einstein’s theory in the late 1950s began adapting the idea for her famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Anyone who read this book as a kid or saw the recent film adaptation should recognize that Lazar was doing little besides paraphrasing some children’s science-fiction. What’s really interesting is that it wasn’t until 2016 that Einstein’s prediction was proven accurate, when the LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, managed to detect gravitational waves, which was not easy, since they are nearly imperceptible. It is worth mentioning, then, that the waves detected by LIGO originated from far away, generated by neutron stars. If the government were testing and operating flying saucers that generate gravitational waves right here on Earth, in Nevada, then the two LIGO observatories in Washington and Louisiana would surely have detected it.
Another supposed prediction of Bob Lazar’s touted as proof that he was telling the truth came in 2003, when Element 115 was officially discovered, or more accurately synthesized. However, any science student with a working knowledge of the periodic table could tell you that predicting an element of that designation was not some incredible feat. It was long known that an element with that atomic number might one day be discovered or created. Such is the nature of the periodic table, and Bob, who certainly did work in some capacity at Los Alamos, would have known about the search for these elements, as the Meson Physics Facility there, where he claimed to be a physicist, houses an incredibly powerful accelerator used for similar work. Teams operating comparable accelerators all over the world had been working on creating and observing these missing elements for decades. In 1970, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, they managed it with the previously unknown elements 104 and 105, and in Russia, they observed element 106, all in 1974. In the 1980s, when Bob worked as a contract technician at Los Alamos, the same was achieved for elements 107 through 109 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, and it surely would have been talked about a lot at Los Alamos. The nineties saw the discovery of 110 through 112 and 114, and the 2000s saw not just element 115 but also 113, 116, and 118. To suggest that the discovery of this element was the result of the recovery of some extra-terrestrial material is just wrong and fails to acknowledge all the hard work of physicists in this field for decades. More than that, one of Lazar’s central claims is that element 115 was stable. Some have suggested that he read this prediction in Scientific American, which had proposed a possible “island of stability” around Element 114 in an article back in 1969, and again in an article called “Creating Superheavy Elements” in May of 1989, the same month that Lazar went on TV. When Element 115 was finally discovered, though, it wasn’t stable as Lazar had predicted, and it could not possibly be used for anything, since it only lasted a fraction of a second. Lazar also claimed element 115’s melting point would be 1740 degrees Celsius, but actually it seems to be 400 degrees Celsius. And While most are focused on the synthesis of 115, Lazar also made very specific claims about element 116, which has also since been discovered and named Livermorium. He said that, when it was synthesized—again in a very small accelerator, by firing a particle at element 115—that the resulting element emits antimatter as it decays. But now that 116 has been synthesized, we know it only emits alpha particles, which is actually typical of radioactive decay.
The problematic W2 and ID badge Lazar provided as his only evidence of his claims.
Beyond the false science that Lazar spouts, there is the false evidence he has provided of his employment at Area 51. First and foremost, his timeline for the granting of his clearance is entirely unbelievable. Understandably, since it would require an extensive background investigation, getting a high level clearance takes a long time. My friend who works at Lawrence Livermore Labs tells me it was a grueling process that took a year and a half and involved interviewing not only him but also his friends and family. But Bob Lazar claims that, for a much higher level clearance and a much more secret facility, he was interviewed by an outside contractor and within five days was on site being shown flying saucers. As evidence of his short-lived employment at S4, the supposed subsection of Area 51 he claimed to work at, he provided a W2 and an ID badge. First of all the ID badge has the letters MAJ on it, which he says was the highest level clearance possible, called Majestic clearance. I think by now my listeners will realize Lazar was trying to jump on the bandwagon of the Majestic 12 hoax, based on forged documents. But besides this, we know from other employees of Area 51 that have since gone on record (more on that shortly), that the ID badges should have showed the name Wackenhutt, the security contractor then in charge of issuing such badges. Moreover, both the badge and the W2 say “U.S. Department of Naval Intelligence.” In reality, this “department” has not existed since World War II, when its name was officially changed to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Moreover, as we know now from declassified information, the Navy was not even in charge of the base or Area 51. It was the CIA and, because they were testing aircraft, the Air Force. The notion that the Navy was in charge likely came from John Lear, who may have gotten it from his contact at the local news station, Bob Stoldal, George Knapp’s boss, who tells a story about a mysterious man claiming to be from Naval Intelligence coming to question him about the sources of his investigation into Area 51. Knapp would later describe the responses he received from the Navy to his inquiriesas his being stonewalled, but knowing the Navy was not in charge of the facility, it rather sounds more like he was seeking information from the wrong entity. Nevertheless, this notion that the Navy ran Area 51 passed via Lear into the darkside mythology of his protégé Bill Cooper, who embellished it by claiming that the Navy got control of Area 51 and alien technology through Majestic 12. We know Lazar was weaving the claims of darksider UFOlogists into his narrative, as he did it more than once. Another thing Lazar claimed was that Russians worked hand in glove with Americans on alien tech there at S4, which again seems to be Lazar’s attempt to confirm things claimed by Lear and Cooper. In truth, everything tested at Area 51 was used to spy on the Soviets, and all the secrecy surrounding the site and probably all the UFO disinformation spread by Doty and the AFOSI, was meant to confuse public perceptions of what was going on there in order to further shield the site from Soviet scrutiny. Lazar eventually admitted the badge was a fake—a “reproduction,” he called it—but he has never admitted the W2 was fake, even though it only showed that he earned a measly 958 dollars for his supposedly high-level work there, and it provided an Employer’s Identification Number, or EIN, that the IRS has told researchers simply does not exist.
In addition to notions about Majestic 12 and Naval Intelligence running Area 51, Bob Lazar also repeated claims made by both John Lear and Bill Cooper about extraterrestrials coming from Zeta Reticuli, a claim with a lot of history in the field of UFOlogy. When we notice these parallels with previous claims, there are two tendencies. We either believe Lazar’s claims corroborate and strengthen them, or we see through him that he is just parroting previous claims and claiming that what he saw substantiates them. When we examine how Lazar’s claims appear to conform to previous UFOlogical claims, it is important to remember that, as they have themselves admitted, months before Lazar ever claimed to work at Area 51, or S4, Lazar and Gene Huff came to John Lear wanting his UFO files and tapes. Specifically, it has been stated that they were interested in Lear’s files on the claims of one Billy Meier. Billy Meier is a Swiss man who in the 1970s began faking flying saucer photographs and videos. According to him, he had been in contact with the pilots of these “beamships” since he was 5 years old. They were very humanlike, he claimed, but came from the Pleiades. This is the origin of the notion of “Aryan” Pleiadians that would later be repeated by Bill Cooper and many other UFOlogists, with a clear undercurrent of racism. Billy Meier, though, was squarely on the light side of UFOlogy, asserting his Pleiadians were benevolent, founding a religion called the Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies, claiming to be a reincarnation of numerous ancient prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad. While his saucer pictures and videos are just manifestly models suspended from strings—if you watch the films, you can clearly see them wobbling and swinging back and forth from what is likely fishing line—they nevertheless appear to have been used by Bob Lazar as the model for his saucer designs, many of which he has sketched in detail. Ridiculously enough, in one of his early interviews with Knapp, an image of one hoax Billy Meier photograph is put on screen in order to illustrate what Lazar says the saucers looked like. And it seems Lazar may have modeled his claims even more on Meier’s claims than just in the likeness of the saucers. Billy Meier too attempted to describe the workings of his saucers through technobabble, though he said they were powered by tachyon particles and thus were capable of time travel. It seems Lazar just tweaked this to make it more believable.
A comparison of Lazar’s and Billy Meier’s saucers
The last of the claims of Bob Lazar to consider, and perhaps the ones most subject to definitive refutation, are his claims about the specific facility where he supposedly worked. Not at Area 51 on Groom Lake, but rather a place called S4 on Papoose Dry Lake some miles to the south and west of Groom Lake. He describes being put on a bus and driven out to S4, where hangar doors hidden in the side of a mountain opened to reveal the nine saucers he saw. It has been pointed out quite a bit that he estimated the hangar door dimensions to be forty feet and elsewhere stated the saucers were fifty feet in diameter. Certainly this is one more piece of evidence against his credibility, but there is strong evidence that no such facility as S4 even exists at Papoose Lake. There is an Area 4, but that is outside of the restricted airspace, on the other side of Yucca Flats, more squarely in the middle of the Nevada Test & Training Range. Probably the closest thing would be Site-4, but this is some 50 miles northeast of there, at the Tonopah Test Range, where they train Air Force pilots in electronic warfare. So what do we know IS at Papoose Dry Lake, where Bob Lazar claims there are secret hollow mountains holding alien spacecraft? Well, we know that about half of this salt flat that he claims was used as a runway for saucer tests isn’t even within the restricted airspace that protects the neighboring Area 51 at Groom Lake, so it doesn’t seem like the government is too concerned about protecting any secrets there. We also have former employees of Area 51, who worked for years in security at the site, who have gone on record saying there is nothing out there. These witnesses’ identities can be confirmed because their employment at Area 51 was declassified when they sued the federal government in the 1990s for exposure to the toxic fumes of massive burn pits, which caused skin conditions and respiratory illnesses. It was this lawsuit and the numerous court filings and FOIA requests that would come with it that would eventually force the government to acknowledge the so-called “black facility” at Area 51. One such employee, a security guard named Fred Dunham, has gone on the record, revealing that those who really worked there view the myths about Area 51 as something of a joke. He further describes that he and another security officer checked on Lazar’s story upon first hearing it, and saw that he had never signed in at Area 51, which any employee flying in on Janet Airlines would have had to do. Speaking of Janet Airlines, he insisted that the lights Bob Lazar showed John Lear in ’89 were just the daily commuter flight. Of Papoose Lake, Dunham insisted there is nothing out there. He further gave the reason that there was nothing out there because that area is irradiated from old nuclear testing by the Department of Energy.
This is perhaps the most important point. If Bob Lazar were telling the truth about working in a facility on Papoose Lake, spending time out on the dry lakebed during test flights, etc., then both he and everyone that worked at S4 would have developed radiation poisoning or cancer by now. They never would have built a facility in such an irradiated wasteland. We further know this to be the case because of the sad story of Jerry Freeman, an archaeologist, who infiltrated the area on foot in search of artifacts left by ‘49er prospectors. George Knapp, who’s made a good deal of money continually promoting Lazar’s story over the years, addressed the Freeman story at a conference in Denmark where he was paid to speak. Freeman did claim to find a chest of ‘49er artifacts though these were later proven to be forgeries, likely perpetrated by him since it’s unlikely anyone else would hike out there to plant them. What’s relevant here is that Freeman spent about a week hiking around Papoose, which even Knapp admits at the conference is still highly irradiated, and it led to his succumbing to cancer not long after. Knapp glosses over this, not acknowledging the evidence that this area is radioactive or the simple fact that Freeman saw no hangar doors or installations or even any UFOs while he was out there. Instead, he takes one little section out of context to suggest Freeman did see these things. What Freeman actually reported in the journal he kept was as follows: “North of my position, I occasionally caught sight of the Black Hawk helicopter, chasing the tourists away from the Air Force's front door near Groom Lake. That night as I lay awake in the darkness, high above that ancient playa, I half expected a "close encounter of the third kind," but no such luck….Near the mountainous side of Papoose I saw lights. Security vehicles? Hangar doors opening and closing? I don't profess to know.” The mention of lights on the side of a mountain, and the speculation about them being hangar doors should have been enough for Knapp. It must be remembered that Freeman was writing in 1997, long after Lazar’s claims about hangar doors on mountainsides had been made, and that Freeman was himself a known hoaxer, so we should not give much weight to his remarks, especially since his later death proved that Papoose could not be an acceptable site for any top secret facility. But Knapp was not content to just pull that bit out of context. Instead, he claims Freeman saw UFOS exit a portal in the sky. This alone should be enough to totally and finally discredit George Knapp, the Las Vegas newsman responsible for delivering the claims of John Lear and Bob Lazar to the world.
Despite all the problems I have discussed, George Knapp consistently tries to rehabilitate Lazar’s reputation and his story, to which Knapp has harnessed his media career. He claimed that Bob had passed lie detector tests. As it turns out, Knapp was close personal friends with the former law enforcement official that he asked to test Lazar, and when the first test showed indications of deception, this polygrapher just kept testing Bob until less deception was apparent. He claimed to have gotten other Area 51 employees on the record confirming all of Lazar’s claims, but those additional witnesses have never been named or confirmed. And it was George Knapp’s protégé, a former yoga instructor and mixed martial artist turned amateur documentarian, who would go on to bring Bob Lazar’s claims back into the limelight again. Initially, it seems Corbell was working on a documentary about Knapp’s first UFO whistleblower, John Lear, but when it turned out Lear had already sold the rights to his story, Corbell went to work on the Lazar documentary. And it is telling that none of the problems with Lazar’s story are mentioned in the documentary except the inability to confirm his education and background, which is heavily implied to be the result of a cover-up. In fact, numerous researchers who have done a great deal to debunk Lazar, some of whose work will be linked to on this blog post, have revealed that they reached out to Corbell to make sure he had this information. But just like his mentor George Knapp, it seems Corbell was less interested in even-handed journalism and more interested in self-promotion. The two have crafted a wide-ranging career out of their UFO cover-up conspiracy speculation, co-hosting a podcast called Weaponized and appearing on Joe Rogan both with Bob Lazar and without him. When Lazar got a book deal for an autobiography out of all this, Knapp wrote the Foreword, and in it, he claimed that Lazar had proven his bona fides by taking him on a tour of Los Alamos, where people seemed to recognize him. I don’t know what to make of this claim. Some have said that the Meson Physics Facility did not require a high level clearance of its employees, but it still does not seem believable that an employee who hadn’t worked there for years would be allowed to give people self-guided tours and that they would be allowed to film. At Lawrence Livermore Labs, where my friend works, current employees may register friends and family to take a tour only every five years or so, and they are held to strict security protocols, led not by the employee who invited them but by a specific guide, and they are explicitly prohibited from filming. So all I can say is, that sounds like another falsehood or exaggeration George Knapp has used in his efforts legitimize Lazar.
Much as Knapp has been guilty of stretching the truth or misrepresenting the facts in order to keep the Lazar story alive, so too has his boy Jeremy Corbell. Not only did Corbell omit from his documentary the preponderance of evidence demonstrating Lazar’s dishonesty, he also misrepresented statements of sources that he cites, such as the aforementioned newspaperman Terry England, but also a Los Alamos scientist named Krangle, who denied telling Corbell that he remembered Lazar being a physicist, as Corbell reported, and Mike Thigpen, who denied confirming to Corbell that he had conducted Lazar’s security clearance, as again Corbell reported. A pattern can be seen here of a lack of journalistic integrity. Why would they risk their reputations in this way? The answer is clear going all the way back to Lazar’s first interview with Knapp, which he says had the highest ratings of any news report they ever produced. His reporting on UFOs earned him accolades from United Press International, and later it got him work with a think tank bankrolled by billionaire UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, who was himself obsessed with a supposed Utah hotbed for UFOs and the supernatural called Skinwalker Ranch. This, of course, led to Knapp co-authoring multiple books on Skinwalker and Corbell filming a documentary adaptation. Since then, Knapp is credited as the producer of not only Corbell’s Lazar documentary, but also another prominent UFO documentary called The Phenomenon. In short, the motivation is probably money and self-promotion. Knapp won a Peabody in 2008 for some other investigative work he produced, but otherwise his entire career is tied up in stories like Lazar’s. Knapp and Corbell would probably protest that they don’t make much from these endeavors, but considering they also get paid to speak at UFO conferences, like the one you heard Knapp speaking at in Denmark earlier, we should take such claims with a grain of salt. Bob Lazar likewise tells people that he never made a dime off his story, but considering that he sold his Lazar Tape back in the 90s for about $30 a pop, and also took a cut of a flying saucer plastic model assembly kit sold by the Testors Corporation in 1996, and has been handsomely paid to speak at many conferences and on many programs, and the fact that he probably was paid nicely for his autobiography, that too seems to be a lie.
The Testors model of Lazar’s saucer.
The events of Bob Lazar’s life continue to be misrepresented by Corbell and Knapp today. Their big gotcha evidence in the documentary has to do not with any evidence that flying saucers or aliens are real, but rather that a hand scanner Lazar described was actually in use back then. Well, Lazar described it as measuring bones, when actually, 1980s newspaper articles about the scanner’s use in Army base ATMs says it “measures the length of fingers and the translucency of the webbing between the fingers.” It turns out, this hand scanner, the IDentimat 2000, was not so secret that Bob could not have heard of it. It appeared in magazines in the 1970s and was actually shown being used in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, making it not impressive at all that Lazar would describe it, knowing as we do that he regularly cribbed from science fiction. And when, during the filming of the documentary, Lazar’s home and business was raided by police, Corbell and Knapp tried to capitalize on it, adding a new dimension to the story by suggesting Lazar had actually stolen some of Element 115 thirty years earlier and the government had only now shown up in biohazard suits to repossess it. The truth was that Bob’s company, which had been raided before for selling explosive compounds, was then being raided in connection with a murder case, because he had sold a chemical to a killer who used it to poison someone. But Knapp and Corbell don’t let facts get in the way of a good story, and that is what makes me even more leery about the claims of David Grusch, which he made before Congress this summer with George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell sitting right behind him. It appears that a year before coming forward, like John Lear and Bob Lazar before him, Grusch came to George Knapp first, at a Star Trek convention. And it seems that Knapp and Corbell were originally supposed to speak under oath at the same hearing, but instead they were just thanked. Maybe this is because congressional representatives realized the credibility of the entire hearing would be undermined by putting those two on the stand. What this should make us realize is that, despite the bona fides of Grusch’s credentials and the official channels he went through as a whistleblower and the legitimate circumstances in which his claims were made, we have no more reason to believe him than we do proven liar Bob Lazar. He is claiming the same things about reverse engineering alien craft. He provides the same amount of evidence, which is absolutely none. And he came to the world’s attention, first and foremost, through the promotion of two known UFO hucksters. So here at the end of our red string, we’ve connected Grusch to a line of BS going back more than thirty years to a crackpot pilot and a hungry Vegas reporter, and hopefully our look back at UFO whistleblowers of the past has shown us that such figures who may arise in the future may be as little deserving of our trust or confidence.
Until next time, remember, behind every fraudster there are always accomplices and enablers, people who either actively take part in the dreaming up of the lies or who support and promote them and spread it far and wide, knowing, I think, deep down, or even not that deep down, that no matter how they garnish it, what they’re helping trying to feed the public is really just a plate of crap.
Further Reading
Aguilera, Jasmine. “Area 51 Is the Internet's Latest Fascination. Here's Everything to Know About the Mysterious Site.” TIME, 17 July 2019, https://time.com/5627694/area-51-history/.
Armbruster, Peter, and Gottfried Münzenberg. “Creating Superheavy Elements.” Scientific American, vol. 260, no. 5, 1989, pp. 66–75. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/24987248. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.
Bob Lazar Debunked. https://boblazardebunked.com/.
Freeman, Jerry. “Desert Diary: Jerry Freeman Chronicles his Trip through the desert.” Wayback Machine, 20 April 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190420154107/http://67.225.133.110/~gbpprorg/stealth/diary6.html.
Gorman, Steve. “CIA Acknowledges Its Mysterious Area 51 Test Site for First Time.” Reuters, 16 Aug. 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-area51-cia/cia-acknowledges-its-mysterious-area-51-test-site-for-first-time-idUKL2N0GH1P020130817.
Jacobsen, Annie. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.
Mahood, Tom. Area 51 and Other Strange Places, OtherHand.org, https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/.
Papoose Lake Institute. https://www.papooselake.org/.
Sicard, Sarah. “How Area 51 Became a Hotbed for Conspiracy Theories.” Military Times, 26 Jan. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023/01/26/how-area-51-became-a-hotbed-for-conspiracy-theories/
SignalsIntelligence. Medium, https://medium.com/@signalsintelligence. (Anonymous research articles with on record interview material and primary source documents)
