A UFO Report, the Pentagon, and Bob Lazar
Article by Glen Meek June 1, 2021 (nevadacurrent.com)
• This month, the US Senate expects to receive a highly anticipated report on UFOs/UAPs, with declassified portions made public. Will this shed light on the physicist Bob Lazar’s claim of working on a captured extraterrestrial spacecraft at a secret government facility called S-4 near Area 51 in Nevada?
• Lazar surfaced publicly in 1989, when he was interviewed by George Knapp of KLAS-TV, Las Vegas. Lazar’s claims were fantastic: that the U.S. government had in its possession nine crashed or captive spacecraft from another world — at least one of them shaped like an actual saucer. Lazar claimed he’d been part of a team hired by the government to “reverse-engineer” the craft. Lazar said he was fired from his job at the base because one evening he brought some friends into the desert near Area 51 to surreptitiously watch a saucer being test flown. A Lincoln County deputy caught the group leaving the area and the deputy ratted Lazar out to the government.
• While publicity surrounding Lazar’s claims literally put Area 51 on the map, it also shined a spotlight on Lazar himself. It wasn’t long before people started picking apart his story. Places where Lazar claimed to have gone to college — like CalTech and MIT — said they’d never heard of him. About a year after his initial TV interview, Lazar found himself criminally charged for helping operate what prosecutors described as an illegal “high-tech whore house.” That didn’t help his credibility much.
• As his case worked through the legal system, Lazar produced a W-2 form, reflecting income of less than one thousand dollars, paid to him by the Department of Naval Intelligence – one of the few bits of physical evidence that he’d worked at a secret base. Skeptics pointed out that there’s an Office of Naval Intelligence within the Department of the Navy — but not a Department of Naval Intelligence.
• Yet, despite a dearth of physical evidence and lack of corroboration from other scientists, Lazar’s astounding tale has not only survived over three decades but has thrived. His claims received renewed attention in 2018 with a film documentary produced by Jeremy Corbell on Netflix, which led to Lazar appearing on the popular Joe Rogan podcast. Corbell did say that he believed there was more evidence that Lazar was telling the truth than there was that he was lying.
• Just because you don’t know what something is doesn’t mean it is extraterrestrial, however. The request for the Senate UAP study makes no mention of alien intelligence or extraterrestrial space vehicles. But the language of the request calls for such a comprehensive study that the results should either confirm or debunk Lazar’s claims. The Senate report calls for “A detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting… including data and intelligence reporting held by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force”.
• The report also calls for “Identification of any incidents or patterns that indicate a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities that could put United States strategic or conventional forces at risk.”
• Thus, the upcoming Senate report has the potential to paint Lazar as an unfairly maligned interstellar whistleblower with more impact than Edward Snowden, Karen Silkwood and Daniel Ellsberg combined. Or it may suggest that Lazar is a liar or a loon. Is there any chance that the government findings would reveal that it has “alien technology in our possession capable of performing the same kind of high-speed, gravity-defying maneuvers we’re seeing in these videos”?
• It is doubtful that such a world-shattering revelation is about to be made. When Barack Obama was asked about UFOs in a recent interview with CBS-TV’s James Corden, he said he was aware of real incidents involving unknown objects in the sky making incredible, unexplained maneuvers. “When I came into office, I asked (about aliens), right?” said Obama. “I was like, alright, is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceship? They did a little bit of research and the answer was no.”
• If the upcoming Senate report does not vindicate Lazar, what will it say about him – if anything? Or is Lazar considered a mere minor player who made extraordinary claims but was an ordinary employee at Area 51 who never got near a saucer, because there weren’t any?
• It is likely that the report will contain new details about many incidents already reported, and new reports of other previously secret sightings. Some events might even seem to defy conventional explanation. But people who are expecting the military to finally provide evidence validating Lazar’s resume as a saucer mechanic will be disappointed.
• One thing you can say about Lazar: he did not drop vague, tantalizing hints – e.g.: that scientists have possible “exotic materials” that need further testing to determine whether they’re of alien origin. Lazar flat out said our scientists have nine captive alien craft, that they’ve been studying these craft for more than thirty years, and that he personally worked on the craft.
• If Lazar’s case remains unconfirmed, however, true believers may decry the Senate report as just another whitewash – a 21st century redux of “Project Bluebook” which looked at more than 12,000 UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969 and concluded there was no evidence any of them involved extraterrestrial vehicles.
• At the very least, the request for the report indicates the government and military are starting to take these phenomena seriously, and whether they pose a threat to our national security. That’s progress.
This month, a highly anticipated report is slated to be delivered to the United States
Senate on the subject of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) — what we used to call Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The report is to be made public (although it may have a classified annex) and was requested as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act attached to a COVID-19 relief bill. Its purpose is to provide lawmakers with the best information available from the Pentagon and the intelligence community about incidents that appear to involve vehicles with amazing flight characteristics far beyond those of our most advanced aircraft.
But, this report should also shed light on — and, in theory, resolve — a thirty-year old, major UFO puzzle with Nevada origins: did a young physicist named Bob Lazar actually work on captured extraterrestrial spacecraft at a secret government facility called S-4, in Lincoln County near Area 51?
Lazar surfaced publicly in 1989, when he was interviewed by my former colleague George Knapp of KLAS-TV, Las Vegas. At first, Lazar spoke only in silhouette, and used the pseudonym “Dennis”. Later, he came forward under his own name and with no disguise. Lazar’s claims were fantastic: that the U.S government had, in its possession, nine crashed or captive spacecraft from another world — at least one of them shaped like an actual saucer. Lazar claimed he’d been part of a team hired by the government to “reverse-engineer” the craft, which would unlock for American scientists the propulsion secrets they
needed to pave a path to the stars.
Lazar said he was fired from his job at the clandestine military base because he brought some friends into the desert near Area 51 one evening to surreptitiously watch a saucer being test flown. A Lincoln County deputy caught the group leaving the area and the deputy ratted Lazar out to the government.
Lazar’s story combined the most compelling elements of alien abduction stories and shadow-government conspiracy theories. The tale had a profound influence on popular culture from cartoons like American Dad to movies like Paul & Independence Day.
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Also on the show was filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who recently released a movie about Bob Lazar. (Ugh.) He briefly derails the conversation a couple of times talking about Lazar and some Ancient Aliens type stuff, but also adds in several good details about the recent revelations.
For 70 years, the UFO community has been engaged in active debate regarding physical debris from unidentified flying objects, but the general public got a true taste of that in 2017 when the New York Times ran an article about a secret Pentagon UFO program. The article tantalizingly noted that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, whose interest in UFOs is no secret, modified buildings to house “metal alloys and other materials…that [allegedly] had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”