The Area 51 team was deeply concerned that if they brought in the most famous, finest minds on the planet, then the top-secret operation would be quickly—and drastically—compromised.
The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
Of course, the big question is: why was the team reliant on less than two dozen personnel when they could have enlisted some of the most famous and brilliant minds in the world? The answer that Lazar received does make a solid degree of sense. The Area 51 team was deeply concerned that if they brought in the most famous, finest minds on the planet, then the top-secret operation would be quickly—and drastically—compromised.
That is to say, it was feared that the finest minds would not be able to resist telling the world that they were working on alien spacecraft—even in spite of the stringent security and threats of prosecution, jail, and death, so they took a very different—and highly alternative—approach: they chose to recruit guys like Lazar, who were definitive mavericks and who thought outside of the box—and, more importantly, who were not at all well known. All of this ensured that the security surrounding the program stayed in place.
The problem, though, was that by using mavericks, the progress was torturously slow, hence the reason why when Bob Lazar was first confronted by the alien technology, he realized just how little the staff at Area 51 really knew about the extraterrestrial technology that had fallen into their hands—and possibly quite literally fallen.
Over the course of a couple of months, Lazar was given the almost unique opportunity to examine the UFOs secretly stored at Area 51’s S-4—both inside and out. This was something else that led him to believe that the vehicles were not of this Earth: all of the seats in the craft were tiny. They clearly did not suit an average, six-foot-tall man. They were the perfect size, though, for a humanoid entity that was around three feet tall. Lazar also watched a few tentative flights of the craft, which were occasionally taken out of the confines of S-4 and tested now and again, albeit to an extremely limited and restricted degree, again because of not being anywhere near conversant with the radical technology involved.
Notably, Lazar mentioned another issue: the Russians had apparently gotten wind of what was being tested out at S-4 and, as a direct result, they had spy satellites in orbit that were specifically targeting Area 51 with powerful cameras. The staff at S-4 were fully aware of when and where the satellites would appear, so they would only ever test the craft outside when the Soviets’ satellites were nowhere near the area above Area 51.
It’s hardly surprising that having allegedly been exposed to alien technology, intact spacecraft from another world (or other worlds), classified files on the origins of the human race, and how we are supposedly the creation of manipulative E.T.s, Lazar was finding it more and more difficult not to tell anyone about the extraordinary secrets to which he had been exposed.
Eventually, and despite the danger he was obviously putting himself in, Lazar blew the whistle. The first person he told was his wife, Tracey. He also confided in a close friend, Gene Huff, then to John Lear—whose father, William Lear, was the brains behind the Lear Jet. At the time, John Lear was heavily into the UFO issue, pursuing any and all leads that might allow him to unravel the truth of what the U.S. government really knew about UFOs and alien life. It was this risky—drastic, even—decision that saw Lazar almost killed. Yes, really.
For a brilliant man, Lazar made a few glaringly foolish mistakes. It turns out that not only was his home phone monitored, but someone had installed wiretaps in the Lazar home, too.
Security personnel at Area 51 were listening in to everything that Lazar told Tracey—which ensured that Lazar’s time at Area 51 was almost over. Additionally, as a result of the spooks at Area 51 surveilling Lazar’s home, they soon learned that while Lazar was at work at S-4, his wife was having close encounters of a very different kind—those of a sexual variety with her flight instructor. It seems that someone on the inside suggested that if Lazar learned this, he would become unstable and maybe even blow the lid on what was afoot at the base. Well, Lazar had already started to do that, but if he found out what his wife was up to, he just might go off the rails, so Lazar was now officially a threat to national security.
Then, strange and ominous things began to occur: it was evident that someone—still unknown to this day—stealthily entered Lazar’s house and installed yet more surveillance equipment. Lazar claimed that someone shot out one of his tires while he was out driving his car in Las Vegas, and something even more sinister went down: Lazar got a phone call from Dennis Mariani, the man who had been responsible for getting Lazar onboard. Mariani demanded that Lazar return to Area 51—essentially to try to smooth matters out, although it’s difficult to know how things might have been rectified given that Lazar had started to blab to family and friends about the alien technology at S-4.