Lazar Blows the Lid Off
In the late 1980s, a Nevada man named Robert Scott Lazar owned a photo lab that developed pictures for real estate agents and appraisers. Lazar was technologically clever, having installed a small jet engine in a Honda CR-X sport coupe, and executing similar work on a dragster. He confessed to a friend, Gene Huff, that photo work bored him, particularly because he had worked as a physicist in Area 51’s S4 section, a top-secret underground facility. Lazar claimed he had won the job because famed physicist Edward Teller, who had seen Lazar’s resumé, recommended him.
According to Lazar, the Spartan S4 complex was located underground at the east end of Papoose Lake, a dry bed located about ten miles southwest of the main Area 51 facility. Lazar was just twenty-four years old at the time, a reedy fellow with a ready smile, who identified himself as a scientist. In the course of his duties at S4, Lazar explained, he became privy to information about what he called an “antigravity reactor,” a fantastic device that figured in top-secret Area 51 study of propulsion systems. Lazar assumed that the reactor was of human design, and then altered his opinion after being allowed to study nine alien spaceships kept in an underground hangar. (The precise nature of the security rating that cleared Lazar to see the ships remains a little hazy.) Lazar also described a small, gray extraterrestrial he happened to glimpse in a room as Lazar was escorted along an S4 hallway by security men. (In 1995, Atari released Area 51, a video-arcade game in which a Strategic Tactical Advanced Alien Response team—STAAR—fights to round up escaped ETs.) The ships studied by Lazar and others utilized antigravity propulsion that made use of a so-called “Element 115,” an element that does not exist on Earth. This Element 115 is—and is not—related to the Periodic Table’s Element 115, Ununpentium (Uup), an artificial element lacking stable isotopes. The 115 described by Lazar is dramatically more stable—and thus more useful—than the 115 that is presently known.
After becoming aware of Element 115’s potential for propulsion, Lazar was brought onto Project Galileo, a carefully guarded government project that reverse-engineered the nine ships. One early success was the fabrication of five hundred pounds of Element 115. Lazar claimed that the United States would shortly have access to practical antigravity technology.
Lazar and Luff drove to Groom Lake in the spring of 1989 to secretly photograph test flights of the discs that Lazar had helped reverse-engineer.
During the pair’s second expedition, Area 51 security men discovered them and escorted their car from government land. Lazar was subsequently reprimanded; that black mark, plus officials’ fear that Lazar’s emotional equilibrium was imperiled by his wife’s infidelity, caused Lazar to be stripped of his security clearance.
During these years, Lazar married and divorced twice, scrimmaged with the IRS, twice declared bankruptcy, and invested in The Honeysuckle Ranch, a legal Reno brothel.
In November 1989, Lazar contacted George Knapp, a reporter with Las Vegas TV station KLAS. Lazar claimed sensational inside information about the S4 group. Knapp, intrigued, gave Lazar airtime. Lazar’s claims went over well with the KLAS audience, and made good copy for Nevada newspapers. After the story jumped to the wire services and went national, journalists grew curious about Lazar’s job title and credentials; unfortunately, those were as hazy as Lazar’s security clearance, and even his educational background was called into question: Lazar claimed to have studied at Cal State Northridge, Cal Tech, and MIT, but none of those schools have a record of him.
Lazar’s brain kicked into a higher gear. He became convinced that his phone was bugged, and that agents followed him as he went about his daily activities.
A security official who asked Lazar to meet him at a casino showed up, but failed to acknowledge Lazar’s presence. Lazar readily identified government security men stationed around the room.
In 1991, Lazar overlooked or ignored local law when he installed a computer system in a Clark County, Nevada, brothel (not The Honeysuckle Ranch) where he was a regular client. (Friend George Huff recalls that Lazar simply repaired “a stereo or something like that.”) Although some Nevada counties allowed legalized prostitution, Clark County was not one of them. Lazar was arrested, convicted of pandering, and placed on three years’ probation (some sources say six months).
What to make of all this? Details of Lazar’s background, as well as some iffy science, will encourage many to doubt his claims. But if his accounts form a hoax, Lazar would probably have pursued them more aggressively, and profited more. Although he has appeared in eight television documentaries made between 1990 and 2015 (Dreamland: Area 51 [1996] is the best known), payment for such participation by non-celebrities is negligible. Notable only within the UFO community, Lazar soldiers on, lecturing to believers and skeptics alike.