Bob Lazar

 

Robert Scott Lazar (/ləˈzɑːr/; born January 26, 1959) is an American conspiracy theorist. In 1989, Lazar claimed to have been part of a classified US government project concerned with the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology; he also purported to have read government briefing documents that described alien involvement in human affairs over the past 10,000 years. A self-proclaimed physicist, Lazar supposedly worked at a secret site near the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51. His story brought additional public attention to the facility and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.

Lazar has provided no evidence of alien life or technology, and his claims about his education and employment history are replete with fabrications. Lazar also has several criminal convictions: he was convicted in 1990 for his involvement in a prostitution ring, and again in 2006 for selling illegal chemicals. As well as being dismissed by skeptics, Lazar has been renounced by some ufologists.

Background

Lazar graduated from high school late, in the bottom third of his class. The only science course he took was a chemistry class. He subsequently attended Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles. In 1986 Lazar, who at the time described himself as a self-employed film processor, filed for bankruptcy.

Claims

Education

Lazar claims to have obtained master's degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in electronics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). However, both universities show no record of him. Scientists Stanton T. Friedman and Donald R. Prothero have stated that nobody with Lazar's high school performance record would be accepted by either institution. Lazar is unable to supply the names of any lecturers or fellow students from his alleged tenures at MIT and Caltech; one supposed Caltech professor, William Duxler, was in fact located at Pierce Junior College and had never taught at Caltech. Friedman asserted, "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."

Employment

"Lazar's claims were later disproven (by UFO skeptics and believers alike). He was found to have fabricated not only his employment at Nellis but indeed his entire background; almost nothing of what he said was true. Still, Lazar's lies propelled Area 51 into the public's consciousness." ~Benjamin Radford, Live Science

Lazar claims to be a physicist and to have worked in this capacity during his tenure at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. This assertion was echoed by local journalist Terry England, who interviewed Lazar about his interest in jet-powered cars in 1982; some media outlets have since dubbed him a "physicist". Asked about the article in 2021, however, England admitted that he took Lazar's claims at face value and did not fact-check his credentials as a physicist. Inquiry into Lazar's position at Los Alamos revealed his role to have been a technician for a contractor firm, and that he worked neither as a physicist nor for the lab directly. As such, the facility retains no records on Lazar, whom Prothero states were "in short, rather a minor player". The Smithsonian, along with various other mainstream news outlets, has stated that his designation as a "physicist" is self-proclaimed.

Since 1989, Lazar has achieved public notoriety as an Area 51 conspiracy theorist. In May of that year, he appeared in an interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS, under the pseudonym "Dennis" and with his face hidden, to discuss his purported employment at "S-4", a subsidiary facility he claimed exists near the Nellis Air Force Base installation known as Area 51. He claims that the said facility was adjacent to Papoose Lake, which is located south of the main Area 51 facility at Groom Lake. He claimed the site consisted of concealed aircraft hangars built into a mountainside. Lazar said that his job was to help with the reverse engineering of one of nine flying saucers, which he alleged were extraterrestrial in origin. He claims one of the flying saucers, the one he coined the "Sport Model", was manufactured out of a metallic substance similar in appearance and touch to liquid titanium. In a subsequent interview that November, Lazar appeared unmasked and under his own name, where he claimed that his job interview for work at the facility was with contractor EG&G and that his employer was the United States Navy. EG&G stated it had no records on him. His supposed employment at a Nellis Air Force Base subsidiary has also been discredited by skeptics, as well as by the United States Air Force.

Lazar has claimed that the propulsion of the studied vehicle ran on an antimatter reactor and was fueled by the chemical element with atomic number 115 (E115), which at the time was provisionally named ununpentium and had not yet been artificially created. (It was first synthesized in 2003 and later named moscovium.) He said that the propulsion system relied on a stable isotope of E115, which allegedly generates a gravity wave that allowed the vehicle to fly and to evade visual detection by bending light around it. No stable isotopes of moscovium have yet been synthesized. All have proven extremely radioactive, decaying in a few hundred milliseconds.

An Area 51 gate

He said that while walking down a hallway at S-4, he briefly glanced through a door window and saw what he interpreted as two men in lab coats facing down and talking to "something small with long arms". Three decades later, he said he did not think he saw an alien but speculated that he saw a doll used as reference for the size of the alleged aliens and that a nickname used for them was "the kids". Lazar's claims about S-4 brought additional public attention to its supposed parent facility, Area 51, and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.

Lazar alleges that his employment and education records have been erased, an allegation that Friedman, Prothero and author Timothy D. Callahan consider implausible. His story has drawn significant media attention, controversy, supporters, and detractors. Lazar has presented no actual evidence of alien life or technology.

Lazar owns and operates United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, a company that sells a variety of materials and chemicals. In 2017, Lazar's workplace was raided by the FBI and local police. Although Lazar theorized the raid was intended to recover "element 115", a substance he says he took from a government lab, it was reported as part of a murder investigation (in which Lazar is not listed as a suspect) to determine if United Nuclear sold thallium to a murder suspect in Michigan.

Public appearances and media

Lazar co-operated the Desert Blast festival, an annual event in the Nevada desert for pyrotechnics enthusiasts. The festival features homemade explosives, rockets, jet-powered vehicles, and other pyrotechnics.

Lazar was featured in Knapp's and Jeremy Corbell's 2019 documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers and he has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Criminal convictions

In 1990, Lazar was arrested for aiding and abetting a prostitution ring. This was reduced to felony pandering, to which he pleaded guilty. He was ordered to do 150 hours of community service, stay away from brothels, and undergo psychotherapy.

In 2006, Lazar and his wife Joy White were charged with violating the Federal Hazardous Substances Act for shipping restricted chemicals across state lines. The charges stemmed from a 2003 raid on United Nuclear's business offices, where chemical sales records were examined. United Nuclear pleaded guilty to three criminal counts of introducing into interstate commerce, and aiding and abetting the introduction into interstate commerce, of banned hazardous substances. In 2007, United Nuclear was fined $7,500 for violating a law prohibiting the sale of chemicals and components used to make illegal fireworks.

Journalist Stephen Rodrick and author Neil Nixon write that further doubts have been cast on Lazar's credibility due to his criminal activity. Author Timothy Good and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who have perpetuated Lazar's story, concur with this assertion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar