The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
Lazar—as an astute and clever guy—instantly wondered if the plan to get him back to Area 51 was a trick. Lazar feared that maybe no attempt would be made to try to come to a compromise, but instead, he just might be coming back for a bullet or several in his head. To some, this might all sound like paranoia, but not for Lazar: he was a frightened man, worried that his bones would be buried in the desert, somewhere at Area 51, never to be found. Lazar knew what he had been exposed to, and he knew just how high the stakes really were. He had no doubts that termination with extreme prejudice was not at all out of bounds at Area 51, so Lazar did not take up Mariani’s dark and disturbing request to return to the base—possibly for one last time. What Lazar then did do was to contact the local media.
In Lazar’s mind, he was now a man on the run, a man who had made the first steps to revealing to the world that we are not alone in the universe, so he approached none other than investigative journalist George Knapp of Las Vegas’s KLAS-TV. It was thanks to Knapp’s extensive interviews—which, in essence, told the story I have related above—that the saga of Bob Lazar came cascading out. Those same interviews soon ensured that Area 51 became a household name—even among those who had absolutely no interest in UFOs.
It’s no surprise, given the nature and content of his story, that some people believe that the tales of Bob Lazar are simply those: tales, a story weaved by Lazar himself as a means to make him money, to achieve fame and infamy, maybe even significant stardom if Hollywood came along and offered a deal for his story, which they did but failed to deliver. One of those who had no faith in the Lazar story at all was Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist whose deep interest in the UFO phenomenon dates back decades. Friedman is a firm believer that aliens crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947.
Friedman also believes that Uncle Sam has more than a few dead alien bodies stored and preserved in military facilities around the United States. At the same time, Friedman had no intention of endorsing Lazar’s controversial claims. Friedman came straight to the point, calling Lazar’s story nothing but absolute “bunk.” However, Lazar may not have been the liar that some concluded he was for good reasons. Typically, those who engage in hoaxes—particularly UFOthemed hoaxes—are looking for something significant in return. We’re talking about book deals, endless appearances on the lecture circuit (for hefty fees), and big- bucks Hollywood movies based on their lives.
While, as noted above, Hollywood did take an interest in the story for a while, Lazar never went on an unending lecture circuit for significant dollars. Hoaxers typically do something else, too: when the initial story has been worn out to the finest degree possible, lo and behold, they claim new experiences that allow them to continue their ruse for forever and a day.
Lazar, rather notably, does not fit this particular bill. He has never written a book about the time that he says he spent at Area 51’s S-4. He has not given permission for anyone else to write a full-length book on his experiences. He has never elaborated on, or embroidered on, his original story of 1988–1989. He tells exactly the same tale as that which he spoke of three decades ago. None of this is the typical behavior of a skilled liar with an agenda, but it is the behavior of someone who found himself in a strange and controversial world and who could not keep it to himself. Also noteworthy is the matter of Edward Teller and what he really knew of Bob Lazar.
You will recall that, according to Lazar, it was all thanks to the famous physicist Edward Teller that he got the gig out at S-4. This implies that Teller himself, in all likelihood, knew exactly what was afoot at Area 51. Teller knew that we were not alone in the universe and knew that the government was hiding such a monumental fact from the people of Earth, the media, and the scientific community—and hiding it at Area 51. If all of this was simply something that Lazar had concocted off the top of his head, one would expect Teller to have hit back—maybe even with a lawsuit. This scenario makes even more sense because Lazar didn’t just keep the Teller story to himself: he revealed it publicly. This would have given Teller even more reason—and ammunition—to attack Lazar verbally and from a legal perspective, too, but Teller did not dispatch a team of high-powered and high-paid attorneys to hammer Lazar into the ground. No.
Teller did something very different.
Teller made a statement to the media that was so couched in careful terms that it almost became laughable. In fact, it sounds like the carefully chosen words that a lawyer would advise his or her client to use. Teller said, and I quote exactly: “I probably met him. I might have said to somebody I met him and I liked him, after I met him, and if I liked him. But, I don’t remember him.” All of this sounds very much like Teller wanting the story to go away, and to go away as quickly as conceivably possible in a way that didn’t incriminate or implicate him in any fashion at all.
The fact that Teller claimed not to have remembered Lazar is at significant odds with his, Teller’s, recall of Lazar in 1988—six years after the pair had a brief, person-to-person chat about Lazar’s passion for superfast jet cars. Teller clearly remembered that short chat more than half a decade after it happened, but suddenly, when the issue of UFOs and Lazar is brought up by the media, Teller’s memory is suddenly hazy—very hazy —or, as today’s politicians are so keen to say under awkward circumstances, “I don’t recall.” Note, too, that Teller never denied meeting Lazar. Nor did Teller deny recommending him for a job. Teller simply said that he didn’t remember. Of course, if anything of a substantial nature surfaced in relation to Lazar’s story, Teller could still claim that he wasn’t lying. Rather, Teller could maintain that his memory was not what it used to be.