Undoubtedly, one of Bob Lazar’s most inflammatory claims was that the UFOs he saw stored and tested out at Area 51’s S-4 facility were powered by a heavy element not found on Earth: Element 115. Even within the heart of the UFO research community itself, this particular claim was derided and denounced by well-known ufologists. However, a fascinating story suggests that ufologists should not have so rashly wiped their hands of the Element 115 affair.
It’s a strange story that, at its heart, is about a teenage boy who may have found vindication for Lazar’s assertions and who also found himself in scalding hot water when he tried to prove that what Lazar had to say was the absolute truth.
The story dates back to 1994 and a man named Matthew Bevan—who, at the time, was that aforementioned teenaged boy. Bevan had—and still has— deep interests in two areas: computer hacking and UFOs. Frustrated about the distinct lack of definitive UFO data coming out of the U.S. government, Bevan decided to go and look for the answers himself. In doing so, he almost found himself with a potential decades-long jail sentence hanging over his head.
Knowing that many of the tales of crashed UFOs and dead aliens held in the possession of Uncle Sam originated with employees—and former and retired staff—from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, Bevan decided that he would do his utmost to penetrate the heart of the base as a means to try to find the information that he yearned to uncover. Incredibly, Bevan achieved exactly what he set out to do on nothing more than an old Commodore Amiga 1200, which was released onto the market in 1992, and in doing so, he ensured that the saga of Element 115 was not quite as dead as so many in ufology had assumed.
Bevan first hacked various elements of NASA as well as the Rome Laboratories at Griffiss Air Force Base in New York—and he did so successfully. While he didn’t find anything of a UFO-themed nature in the files he penetrated, all of this spurred Bevan on chiefly because he had entered the systems and checked out various classified files related to advanced U.S. weaponry without being caught—or so Bevan thought. At the same time, Bevan delved deeper into UFO lore, reading books and articles on the likes of the legendary UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in early July 1947. I had the good fortune to interview Bevan.
The following are Bevan’s words from that same interview: “I’ve been interested in computers probably since about the age of eleven. I had a ZX81 for my eleventh birthday and upgraded several times and eventually got a Commodore Amiga 1200—which is the one I was using when I hacked Wright-Patterson back in ’94. “When I first started getting on the Net, I began looking at all the various bulletin boards that were available and began making friends with other users.
One guy—in Australia—had on his bulletin board all these text files about UFOs. This was about 1994. Well, I’d never really been interested in UFOs. I’d seen ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, like everyone else; but that was about it and I certainly hadn’t read anything in-depth on the subject. He had some very interesting files on there and I pulled down about five hundred of these and started getting into it. There was also a magazine called PHRACK that listed a whole host of military bases where people were looking for UFO stuff, and rumors were circulating that a group of hackers who had found something out about classified computerized UFO files had gone missing. I thought, if they’ve gone missing, maybe they found something. Maybe I can find something.
“I was on the computer for hours at this time, but I didn’t run up a big telephone bill because a friend had given me a black-market program that allows you to make calls for free. The way it works is that it uses tones within the computer that fool the telephone exchange into believing that there’s no one using the line. This is called Blue-Boxing. “In a nutshell, computer hacking is the art of getting into other people’s computer systems without any prior permission. Basically, it’s a criminal offence in the majority of countries if you have no permission; it’s determined as unauthorized access.
You need to start off with a fairly good idea of computer systems, I think. At the moment, it’s very easy for people to do because there are so many sources on the Internet with very detailed and explicit descriptions on how to actually hack systems. Well, I got a modem when I was about sixteen and began getting into it a few months later—early 1990s. First of all, in ’93, I tried going for universities in the States, because I knew they were regularly hacked anyway and that I would be less likely to be prosecuted for hacking a university and it would be good experience. “You see, people often tend to go with the same password for multiple systems; so, the chances are that if you can access their password for one system,“
A then that password may well work on another system, too. But you certainly don’t have to sit there and type in hundreds of different passwords until you get the right one. There are actually programs that will do this for you and will get you into the system. They literally search millions of words until they find the right one, and then you’re in. Now, sometimes at these universities, you will have a professor who may be doing work for the military as well, and they may use the same password on both systems. For example, it only takes a few seconds to find out all of the publicly accessible files of say, NASA, which are on the Internet.
However, if you hack a university and find out that a particular professor is doing work for NASA and you have his university password, you can find out a bit more about the material that isn’t publicly accessible. Without getting too technical, if we take NASA as an example again, there are, as I said, the publicly available files that NASA puts on the Net. But these are by necessity connected to additional computers that are a part of their inner network —the classified material. But there have to be computers that are on the front line, as it were.