Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories Rewind: Area 51, S4, and the Rise of Bob Lazar About this episode This July, we’re revisiting five classic topics in our Conspiracy Theories: Rewind series! Its existence and location were not formally acknowledged by the government in 2013. But “Area 51” – so named for its map designation, as part of the Nevada Test Site – has been shrouded in secrecy since it was established in 1955. From black-budget spy planes, to moon landing conspiracies, to Bob Lazar’s claims of what goes on at the fabled S4 facility nearby, Area 51 was on the public’s radar long before it was officially on the map.
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Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 It’s April 12th, 1955. Somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, thousands of feet above the ground. In the passenger seat of a Beechcraft single-engine airplane, Richard Bissell cranes his neck to look out the window. Just a few years earlier, Bissell was an economics professor at Yale and MIT, but the Second World War had changed everything, and he wound up getting recruited by the CIA in 1954. Which is how he, an economist, finds himself in charge of the agency’s classified Project Aquitone: building the U-2 spy plane.
0:49 Speaker 00 Now, by order of President Eisenhower, Bissell searches the bleak desert landscape below until he sees it. Groom Lake: the perfect location for a top-secret flight-test facility. Now, the lake isn’t much to look at. It’s not even really a lake at all, just a dry salt flat. And yet, Groom Lake is a valuable asset to Project Aquitone. It provides a natural runway for aircraft, it’s surrounded by a towering mountain range, and it’s adjacent to the Nevada Test Site, where the government sets off nuclear weapons.
1:33 Speaker 00 Nobody wanders over here by accident. Or intentionally, for that matter. Bissell makes his recommendation to Eisenhower. Eisenhower okays the plans, and the Nevada Test Site adds to its holdings that section of land where Groom Lake sits. On the map, it’s marked “Area 51”. Before the year is out, the first airplane hangar and makeshift dormitories are built. Over time, the base will expand, new projects will come and go, experimental aircraft will test the bounds of engineering and human flight capabilities.
2:13 Speaker 00 There will also be land seizures, millions of acres taken away from the public and private owners in the name of eminent domain, allegations of unsafe working conditions, stonewalled by the courts. In time, Area 51 will foster an air of intense secrecy. And that's to say nothing of the rumors about what really goes on there, or at the fabled S4 facility just to the south, where physicists are allegedly hard at work, reverse engineering, alien spacecraft.
2:54 Speaker 00 Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts, or check us out on Instagram at the conspiracy pod. This July, we're taking another look at five fan favorite topics as part of our series we're calling Conspiracy Theories Rewind. Today, we're touching down at Area 51, one of the most mysterious places in the United States. The government didn't even acknowledge
3:34 Speaker 00 its existence or location until 2013. By then, the base had already become a reported hotspot for all manner of bizarre sightings and conspiracy theories. From unexplained Dorito-shaped phenomena, to the site's involvement in the moon landing, to Bob Lazar's claims of witnessing UFOs in action nearby, Area 51 has been on the public's radar since long before it was officially on the map. Stay with us.
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5:43 Speaker 00 In 1957, pilot Tony Bavacqua arrives at Area 51 in preparation for his first solo flight in the U-2. Affectionately known as "The Dragon Lady", the U-2 is a highly classified reconnaissance plane built to spy on the Soviet Union. Top-secret tests have been ongoing at the base in the middle of the southern Nevada desert, far away from prying eyes. Only a handful of people have gotten to experience what the U-2 is capable of, and Tony is about to be the youngest pilot to ever fly one. First, he dons his partial-pressure suit.
6:25 Speaker 00 The U-2 can reach altitudes of 70,000 feet. That's 13 miles. So the suit comes in handy if you don't want your blood to start boiling while you're behind the controls. It's dangerous, yes. The idea is that from this height, the plane can fly undetected while photographing the enemy far below. Plus, if the U-2 were to be detected... The belief is that Russian surface-to-air missiles won't be able to reach that high. Well, until they do. In 1960, the US and the USSR are meeting up in Paris. One of the topics on the table: negotiating a healthier relationship between the two countries in the midst of the Cold War.
7:10 Speaker 00 So it's pretty awkward timing when the Soviets shoot down an American U-2 as it's flying over their country, snapping photos. Oh, the US insists it did not intend for the pilot, Gary Powers, to fly the U-2 over Soviet airspace. And President Eisenhower promises no such flights will be authorized while he's in office. But the Soviets aren't buying it. Fair enough. So the meeting in Paris abruptly ends, and Gary Powers, who had parachuted to safety and survived, is convicted in a Russian court of espionage. The US will soon after bring him home in prisoner exchange.
7:53 Speaker 00 One thing is clear: spy planes need to be stealthier, and work at Area 51 needs to ramp up. Quickly. Focus shifts to Project Oxcart, development and testing of a new jet known as the A-12, designed to reach an altitude of 90,000 feet and fly over three times the speed of sound. The A-12 has to withstand extreme temperatures. But as the CIA learned with the U-2 incident of 1960, flying higher and faster alone may not be enough. So the designers are tasked with another challenge: making the aircraft invisible to radar. For well over a year,
8:37 Speaker 00 the team at Area 51 tests the A-12, trying to get its radar signature down to, well, next to nothing. They bring in every type of radar available, and they hoist the A-12 up onto the top of a large pole where they can tilt it around. Sounds a little silly now, but folks who work on Project Oxcart say that, at this moment in history, it is the most important classified program in the United States. Every part of the project is compartmentalized. You are given only the information you need to perform your job, not a detail more.
9:19 Speaker 00 Area 51 workers are forbidden from speaking about Oxcart. One claims he's told it doesn't exist. But eventually, technology moves ahead. The A-12 gives way to the next aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird. And so, portions of the U-2 and A-12 projects are declassified years later. That's how we know what goes on at Area 51 in those early years. At least, that's the official story. In terms of locations that are tied to conspiracy theories, Area 51 is right up there with the Bermuda Triangle and the White House.
10:03 Speaker 00 Visitors from all over the world are drawn to Rachel, Nevada, the closest town to Area 51, hoping to catch a glimpse of something odd flying overhead at night. Like the Aurora. After the A-12 and the SR-71, a new aircraft is allegedly spotted above Area 51's restricted airspace. It's believed to have such an advanced propulsion system that it can reach a speed of Mach 5, five times the speed of sound. And it can fly higher than we ever have before, outside of man's spaceflight. Officially, this aircraft never existed.
10:45 Speaker 00 But a 1985 LA Times report discovered a project called Aurora hidden away in an otherwise inconspicuous document. It appeared as a line item in a Department of Defense list of procurement programs. So some people believe more information on the Aurora spy plane simply hasn't been declassified, yet. Perhaps because it came with such a high price tag. $2.3 billion in 1987. It may never be declassified. Area 51 sightings are still talked about today.
11:25 Speaker 00 In early 2026, the Uncanny Expeditions YouTube channel releases a thermal image taken near Area 51 of what appears to be some kind of advanced aircraft. It stirs up a good deal of excitement, and not just because it looks like a flying Dorito. The shape of this unknown object is reminiscent of another object photographed back in 2014 over Wichita, Kansas. Now, that 2014 photograph has been deemed legit by aviation enthusiasts. But as for what the aircraft was, we never got an answer.
12:06 Speaker 00 Of course, the idea that Area 51 is hiding advanced government technology, far beyond what we know to be possible, is to be expected. Given what we know about the base's history, that barely qualifies as speculation. I mean, there's a reason Area 51 was chosen for flight-testing top-secret projects, right? There's the harsh terrain, the remoteness, the extreme temperatures. Even if you want to camp out there just outside the heavily-guarded perimeter, you're probably not going to see much. It's almost like being on another planet's, or... The moon. Which is how the site winds up getting connected to another well-known conspiracy
12:51 Speaker 00 theory. First, in 1974, and then again in 1976, a man named Bill Kasing publishes a book suggesting that NASA faked the Apollo 11 moon landing. In "We Never Went to the Moon: America's $30 Billion Swindle," he lays out his argument. That the US was losing the space race to the Soviets and unable to actually put a man on the moon first, they won by cheating. They faked the part where two American men actually set foot on the moon. That, he says, was all shot on a soundstage.
13:31 Speaker 00 If the astronauts supposedly landed on the moon in July 1969, Bill poses some questions. Why does the American flag appear to ripple without wind? Why are there no stars in the photos taken in space? And why didn't the lunar module leave some kind of crater on the moon? And the thing is, people feel like Bill has some credibility, because he spent seven years working for Rocketdyne, the company that designed the Saturn rockets that launched Apollo 11. Notably, Bill also suggests where NASA could have filmed the moon landing.
14:13 Speaker 00 He describes a specific area of the Nevada Test Site. "It's maybe the most remote and well-guarded American base," he argues, "with large hangars that could be turned into a soundstage." After all, the desert landscape does bring to mind the surface of the moon. In fact, the Nevada Test Site, which encompasses Area 51, really was used to test lunar rovers and life support systems. All of the Apollo astronauts were sent out there for training at one point or another. And that's more or less how Area 51 first gets tangled up in the moon landing hoax theory. But that's not the end.
14:57 Speaker 00 In 1978, the film Capricorn 1 is released. It stars James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and yes, that is OJ Simpson, as astronauts on a mission to, well, not the moon, but Mars. When plans go awry, the team is whisked away to, where else, a remote military base in the desert to film a faked landing. The desert scene certainly bring Area 51 to mind, and some think Capricorn 1 was inspired by Bill Casing. But the screenwriter, Peter Hyams, has said he had considered a similar theory before he ever knew about Bill's book.
15:39 Speaker 00 While Peter was a journalist covering the Apollo missions for CBS, he says he actually came to his own conclusion that it would make some sense, and perhaps even be possible, for NASA to fake the moon landing. But I do want to point out the timing of Bill's theories and the release of Capricorn 1. Both of them come out at a time when the public's trust in the American government is in rapid decline. Between Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and the revelation of covert operations like MKUltra, people are primed to believe that intelligence agencies could be capable of just about anything.
16:22 Speaker 00 And, well, safe to say, the government never fully gains the public's trust back. If anything, the moon landing hoax theory may be gaining traction. In 1999, a Gallup poll found that 6% of people more or less agreed with Bill Casing. Nowadays, that number may be as high as 25%, depending on which survey you go by.
16:47 Speaker 00 On the other hand, those who believe we did go to the moon have their own long list of evidence, like over 800 pounds of moon rock, photographic proof of footprints, and lunar rover tracks captured on the moon's surface, five subsequent trips back up there, and Buzz Aldrin punching a guy in the face for suggesting otherwise. The very fact that nobody can get anywhere near Area 51 creates a situation where almost anything seems possible. Satellite images of it weren't even widely circulated until recent years. The base has been associated with everything from weather manipulation to bunkers and
17:31 Speaker 00 massive cities hidden underground. The neighboring Nevada test site does have a subterranean tunnel system, by the way. Some theorize the facilities at Area 51 could too, and they could even connect to other bases around the country. When it comes to Area 51, the variety of rumors and legends it's been associated with is truly unmatched. But I do want to take a moment and acknowledge an alleged cover-up that's a little more well documented. Fred Dunham is a former Area 51 security guard. For nine years in the 1980s, he was employed via EG&G, one of their contractors.
18:16 Speaker 00 Fred's job included manning the perimeter of the base. He claims he was instructed to shoot people on sight if it looked like they were going to trespass. From time to time, he also had to oversee the destruction of top-secret materials, and that, Fred claims, is how he wound up with a very serious case of COPD, a chronic lung disease that makes it hard to breathe. He remembers barrels full of toxic materials used to shield government spy planes from radar. In order to get rid of them, the materials were burned, often for 24 hours straight,
18:56 Speaker 00 which, if true, completely flies in the face of environmental law and would be a health hazard. When Fred pursues compensation to pay for his medical expenses, however, he is denied. President Bill Clinton signs a presidential determination excluding Area 51 from “any federal, state, interstate, or local hazardous or solid waste laws that might require the disclosure of classified information,” citing national security concerns. Of course, he doesn’t call it Area 51. It’s the United States Air Force’s operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada.
19:38 Speaker 00 Fred is one of the few who worked at Area 51 to speak out publicly about concerns of what went on there, but he’s not the only one. In 1989, a man whose face and name will forever be associated with Area 51 steps forward to assert that there are bigger secrets being held in the Nevada desert, and they are not of this world.
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21:39 Speaker 00 Okay, now that you know the official story of Area 51 and some of the rumored aircraft built by human hands, I want to take you to May 15th, 1989. Uh, let's say you're a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, and you're getting home from a long workday. So you kick off your shoes and flop down on your brown corduroy couch, grabbing a chunky Radio Shack brand television remote. You switch on the TV and catch the tail end of the 5 o'clock news on K L A S T V, your local broadcast. On screen, there's a man in shadow identified as "Dennis" in quotation marks. Now you probably realize that's not his real name.
22:20 Speaker 00 Whoever he really is, Dennis is telling reporter George Knapp that he knows what's really going on at that secret base you've heard of, just a couple hours outside the city. Dennis says that's where the government is hiding nine spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin. Some can still fly, others are dismantled and studied by a top-secret team. A team that Dennis claims he was a part of up until recently. The whole interview lasts under five minutes. Dennis doesn't get the chance to reveal too many details, but hints there could be alien life forms in the government's possession.
23:04 Speaker 00 As the KLAS reporters kick it over to Dan Rather to tee up the CBS Evening News, you're left wondering, who is this guy? And did he really say what I think he just said? It won't be the last time you hear from Dennis. A few months later, he's back on KLAS. This time, he's not in silhouette. He's not holding back about what he claims he saw near Area 51. And now, he's using his real name. Robert, or Bob Lazar. That November, George Knapp's special report on Bob Lazar, a much deeper dive into his claims, becomes the station's highest rated series.
23:49 Speaker 00 If you ask George, the two of them basically put Area 51 on the map. Sure, people knew it existed. They'd heard the UFO rumors associated with Groom Lake. But out of all the people who must have worked there over the years, nobody had spoken out publicly before Bob. Now, that is, if he's telling the truth. One thing the special report does, undeniably, is launch Bob Lazar into the public eye. It's a spot he will alternately embrace and shy away from as he becomes a poster boy for conspiracy theories.
24:31 Speaker 00 And his stories become fodder for debate. Some people love Bob Lazar and believe he's one of the most consequential whistleblowers of our time. Others think he's an outright fraud, plain and simple. To understand why, let's dig into some of the details of his story. Bob says that back in 1982, he's employed as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the same place where Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb.
25:07 Speaker 00 One day, Bob attends a lecture at work given by another towering figure of science, Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. To a young guy like Bob who works at Los Alamos, this guy's an A-list celebrity. Bob says he arrives at the lecture early and spots Ed Teller off by himself, reading the local newspaper, which just so happens to feature an article about Bob on the front page. There's a photo of him and everything right next to his jet car. Yeah, in his spare time, Bob has added a jet engine to his wife's old Honda Civic hatchback.
25:50 Speaker 00 And this is work he does just for fun in his driveway as a hobby. Sometimes he drives this car around town, which gets him noticed. Anyway, Bob uses the news article as a chance to chat up Ed Teller. Fast forward a few years, it's 1988. Bob no longer works at Los Alamos, and in fact, he needs a job. Although he hasn't kept in touch with Ed, he's desperate enough to reach out and pass along his resume. Apparently, Ed remembers the jet car guy he met six years earlier, and liked the cut of his jib, so he refers Bob to a friend in Las Vegas.
26:30 Speaker 00 And that, Bob says, is how he winds up getting the job that would change his life. He claims he's called in for an interview at EG&G, a prominent defense contractor. As for what this gig actually entails, Bob's interviewers are tight-lipped. They don't reveal much, other than to say it's in a remote area. But Bob wants this to work out. He needs a paycheck. Whatever air of secrecy he may be picking up on at this point doesn't bother him. Before he can go further in the hiring process, though, he needs a higher security clearance. While that's going on, he's left in an office with a stack of briefings to read through.
27:14 Speaker 00 That's when Bob begins to get a better idea of what he might be in for, because most of the paperwork is about UFOs. Today, we'd call them unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. In the 1980s, Bob's still calling them flying saucers. And the briefings Bob says he's looking at seem to describe everything we know so far about a series of spacecraft that came from another solar system. As he's trying to absorb this mountain of information, Bob says he can't believe what's happening. It's like something out of a movie.
27:58 Speaker 00 He's being whisked away to work on a top-secret alien spaceship. But some part of him is hesitant. He suspects portions of what he's reading could be disinformation, a test to see how well he can keep a secret. Like, if he tells anybody what he read, EG&G will be able to trace the leak back to him, so he doesn't really know what to believe at this point. Once hired, Bob is guided from EG&G's offices at McCarran Airport out to a passenger plane. It's operated by what we now know as Janet, the unofficial name for the secretive airline
28:40 Speaker 00 used to fly military personnel and contractors out of Vegas. Onboard Janet Airlines, Bob is taken to Area 51. But his journey doesn't end there. He then has to catch a bus with blacked-out windows to another facility. Just a quick clarification here: even though Bob Lazar is associated with Area 51, he technically never says he works there. His lab, he claims, is a few miles south of Groom Lake. This facility is called S4. So, as he arrives outside S4, Bob says the entrance is difficult to see against the desert backdrop.
29:24 Speaker 00 It's been designed that way: nearly invisible. But as he approaches, he can start to make out doors built into the hillside, and they're painted to look like sand, kind of like NORAD in Colorado, only camouflaged.
29:41 Speaker 00 According to Bob, those larger doors lead to hangars, where they keep the nine UFOs he tells the world about. Eventually, he meets his lab partner, Barry. Barry seems eager to dive into work, and Bob says they're essentially assigned to one spacecraft. It's made of a sleek silver metal wide along its middle, a lot like a classic drawing of a UFO, only without the legs underneath. Bob nicknames it "The Sport Model." "The Sport Model," he says, "runs on an antimatter reactor." How exactly it does that? Well, it's Bob and Barry's job to solve that puzzle.
30:25 Speaker 00 And they're tasked with figuring out how the ship propels itself through space, so they disassemble the ship's parts and study them. They are trying to reverse-engineer the power source. But this is where the job gets really complicated. Bob claims the reactor is made of a metal base with a hemisphere on top. He's able to remove that hemisphere to get down to the actual power source inside, what Bob believes is the ship's fuel. But it doesn't look like the typical propellants we'd use in rockets. This fuel comes in a thin, triangular, copper-colored "solid," and he says they identify it as "Element 115."
31:07 Speaker 00 When Bob first speaks about Element 115 in 1989, no such thing exists on Earth that we know of. It won't be officially discovered until 2003, when it's created synthetically in a Russian lab. But the element that appears on the periodic table, also known as moscovium, is vastly different from the Element 115 Bob says the reactor uses. Moscovium, the official Element 115, has to be made using a particle accelerator. It's one of the heaviest metals in existence, and its atoms are relatively giant, as far as atoms go. That makes moscovium incredibly unstable.
31:52 Speaker 00 It decays in the blink of an eye. Literally. The longest half-life ever measured is 222 milliseconds, which also means moscovium really has no real-world applications.
32:06 Speaker 00 Outside of what it can teach us about atomic structure, it's also highly radioactive. Compare that with the element 115 Bob claims he encountered at S4. He describes a "stable, solid metal." He can hold it in his hands, he can study it for hours. So, I have to assume it doesn't emit radiation. And not only is it useful, he says element 115 is what makes the reactor work, by creating its own gravitational field. "Turn the reactor on, and you can't touch it," he says, "no matter how hard you try."
32:50 Speaker 00 Because element 115 produces a mini-force field around itself. And that's just the half of it. Bob suggests it is element 115 that allows the spacecraft to move through space at incredible speeds. Here's how he describes the ship's propulsion. Imagine you place a bowling ball in the middle of a mattress. The mattress bends around the ball in much the same way a gravitational field warps around a large mass. Now, think about using your hands to press down on the mattress a few inches in front of the bowling ball. The ball rolls or falls forward. That, Bob says, is more or less how the ship moves toward its destination.
33:34 Speaker 00 Its reactor and the element 115 powering it can alter gravity. Reverse engineering the ship isn't quite that easy, though, because that would mean reproducing element 115, or something with similar properties, which Bob says is impossible at that time. Nothing like it exists that they know of. So they can't recreate their own version of the ship's propulsion system. Not with our feeble human minds, anyway. In fact, he concedes what he's witnessing may not even really be gravity. Maybe it's some other type of force entirely, something we don't understand.
34:18 Speaker 00 All he knows is that when the reactor is running, there is some kind of force around it, pressing against outside forces just like gravity.
34:29 Speaker 00 Ultimately, Bob says he only works at S4 sporadically, from December 1988 to around May of 1989. In that short time, he doesn't get all of the answers. He does pick up some other information on the sport model, though, like the fact that when it flies, it turns onto its side, as if the bottom of the ship becomes the front. And notably, he claims he gets a look at the inside of the ship, where he notices chairs for a crew. But these chairs are tiny, as if made for a human child. Obviously, human children wouldn't be flying this thing.
35:14 Speaker 00 To Bob, the small chairs and the science behind the propulsion system all add up to one certainty: The sport model was not built by any US agency, or Soviet agency for that matter. He's convinced that these ships really are of extraterrestrial origin. At one point, while he's at S4, he even wonders if he sees an alien? Whenever Bob walks through the facility, armed guards are always present, barking at him to keep his head down. But one time, he catches a glimpse of something that he'll always wonder about. He doesn't get a clear look, just a quick glance
35:57 Speaker 00 through a small window into an office. But he swears he sees two suited men standing in front of what looks like a small alien, with long arms, sitting in a small chair, like the ones from the ship. Later, Bob will decide it's unlikely that he saw a real alien. It makes more sense, he thinks, that the men were using some kind of puppet as a stand-in, as if they were testing what type of being would sit in a chair that size. If you buy any of Bob's story, it sounds like thrilling stuff, especially if you're a sci-fi lover with a passion for particle acceleration and propulsion systems.
36:42 Speaker 00 Bob certainly finds the job exciting, but a lot of the time, that excitement is overwhelmed by dread.
36:51 Speaker 00 There's a danger in dealing with a power source they know little about. Who's to say they're not messing around with something that could slowly kill them? Or that could kill them instantaneously? See, Bob claims he eventually realizes why he's really there at S4. He suspects Barry's previous lab partner died during an experiment. Bob must have been brought on to replace a guy who made one wrong move and met a grisly end. From then on, going into work every day suddenly feels ominous. He admits he's scared a lot of the time. There's some other information Bob gleaned from Barry, too.
37:35 Speaker 00 Barry has access to the schedule for the flight tests. He knows which nights the sport model will take to the skies out in the middle of the desert. That gives Bob an idea. With the weight of the job, the secrecy, the threat of danger, he's been confiding in a close friend of his, a real estate appraiser named Gene Huff. Well, one night Bob decides to bring Gene with him to try to catch the spacecraft in action. On a Wednesday night in March 1989, about four months into his time at S4, Bob says he drives his wife and Gene out to the desert. They park as close as they can to the restricted area,
38:21 Speaker 00 turn their headlights off, and wait in silence. And then, Gene sees something rise up over the crest of the mountains. He grabs his camcorder and presses "record." On the video, whatever they're watching looks like a bright light. It's hard to see anything clearly, but Gene and Bob insist that the aircraft they witness can make sharp 90-degree movements, unlike any plane or jet they've heard about. Bob returns to the same spot on subsequent Wednesday nights and brings another friend, John Lear. John was brought up in the world of aviation. His dad invented the Lear Jet,
39:04 Speaker 00 and John went on to become a commercial airline pilot. He had also flown cargo planes for the CIA and the State Department during Vietnam. And now, he's kind of a hardcore conspiracy theorist, so he jumps at the chance to tag along with Bob. On his visit, John claims he witnesses the S-4 spacecraft in action too. But on this night, their little team gets into hot water when they're caught by Area 51's security guards. The next day, Bob claims he's fired. Actually, he's told that if he ever goes near Groom Lake again, he'll be slapped with charges of espionage.
39:47 Speaker 00 That's around the time Bob decides he's going to tell the world what he saw. He cites two main motivations. One, the thought of all of these secrets being kept from the public gnaws at him. It's not just the fact that we finally have proof we're not alone in the universe. It's not just the fact that our government is keeping vital information from us. It's that he can see so much potential in this technology if they can learn to harness it and put it to use all over the world. If we could bring all the greatest scientific minds together and figure out how to make our own Element 115, everything would change.
40:30 Speaker 00 There would be life before Element 115 and life after. His second motive, he hopes that putting his story out there will keep him safe from harm. Before Bob ever speaks to George Knapp, he claims his life is threatened if he doesn't stay quiet and stay away. After his first appearance on the news, he says the threats get much worse. His old supervisor, who Bob says is actually named Dennis, calls him and insinuates something bad will happen to Bob. Then, while driving onto the freeway, Bob claims his tire is shot out
41:14 Speaker 00 and he actually sees the man who does it. That's why he shows his face and uses his real name when he goes back to KLAS in November. He calls it insurance. If people know who he is, then maybe there's less chance of him disappearing or dying mysteriously. About six months pass between Bob's first anonymous interview and his second appearance. In that time, his story gains momentum, not just in the US, but in parts of Europe and Japan. Behind the scenes, George Knapp, the Las Vegas investigative reporter, is hard at work. Because so much of Bob's story sounds fantastical.
41:59 Speaker 00 It could be completely made up. A lot of it is impossible to corroborate, and George has no idea yet whether he can trust Bob. But if Bob's telling the truth, George has landed a huge story. Maybe the story of his career. In mid-1989, George begins the process of trying to verify the few parts of Bob's story that can even logistically be verified. That investigation will turn up questions that will divide people on Bob Lazar for decades.
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43:13 Speaker 00 It's 1989 when George Knapp gears up to air his series on Bob Lazar, the man who claims to have worked at a top-secret facility near Area 51. He knows he already has a good story on his hands, a story he mostly can't corroborate. But he can start by confirming this Bob guy is at least who he claims to be. First, George contacts the schools Bob says he attended. He reportedly earned two master's degrees, one at MIT for physics and the other in engineering at Caltech. Should be pretty easy to confirm, right?
43:52 Speaker 00 Only neither school has any records of a Robert Lazar, which is definitely worrisome to George. And when he inquires with EG&G, they also claim to have no knowledge of Bob. George gets the same answer yet again when he contacts Los Alamos National Lab. There's no paper trail proving that Bob worked for them. Three strikes, you're out. Well, George keeps digging though, and he finds something curious. A Los Alamos telephone directory from 1982, when Bob says he worked there, which lists a Robert Lazar.
44:36 Speaker 00 George also finds the jet car article from the Los Alamos Monitor, the one Bob says was his in when he met Dr. Ed Teller. The article is real, and it came out in June 1982. It even mentions Bob's work as a physicist at Los Alamos. George is either convinced or curious enough to move ahead with a special report in November of 89. He doesn't shy away from those lingering questions either. He asks Bob point-blank why all of these institutions are basically saying he's lying.
45:16 Speaker 00 Bob's answer: "Well, they're trying to make me a non-person." He's alleging that someone is wiping all past traces of him to make it look like he never existed, to make it look like he's not a credible source.
45:35 Speaker 00 After the special airs in Las Vegas, Bob and George stay in touch. They even grow somewhat close. George goes on to win a couple dozen regional Emmy Awards for his reporting, and later becomes an occasional host of the celebrated late-night talk show Coast to Coast AM. And he never really gives up on his investigation into Bob's story. He locates two old friends of Bob's who say they dropped him off at Caltech back in the day, right in front of campus. And he reports they believed he attended that university. He talks to experts who say they can't rule out the possibility of someday stabilizing element 115.
46:18 Speaker 00 He appeals to his viewers around Vegas to contact him if they have similar stories to share. And according to him, he finds six more credible witnesses. Their experiences echo Bob's. One woman says she was working for a defense contractor and overheard high-level Air Force officers discussing a crashed UFO. And after she told George about it, she received threats from men she assumed were government agents. George also points to the parts of Bob's story that have seemingly been substantiated over time. Back in 1989, Bob described what he called "a hand reader," a metal plate with a bright
47:03 Speaker 00 light, as part of the sign-in process at S4. Bob says he would place his hand on this scanner. There were small pins to help align your fingers, and as far as he could understand, it measured your bones, kind of like a proto-biometric security measure. For years, Bob's story sounds like good sci-fi, but maybe not reality. Except, the hand scanner is later confirmed to be true. It's called the Identimat, and it more or less looks like what Bob said it looked like and does what Bob says it did. Top-secret bases in Nevada did use this technology.
47:44 Speaker 00 And I use that term lightly because the Identimat was notoriously unreliable. That could explain why it was discontinued by 1987.
47:56 Speaker 00 According to one report, it was pulled from classified sites around that time, which would have been at least a year before Bob's supposed tenure there. Even so, George Knapp finds it impossible that this is a mere coincidence. Then, there's the fact that Bob is able to remember the name of Mike Figpen, a man he says conducted his background check before he was bused into S4. Bob recalls that Mike may have worked for the FBI. Well, George is unable to track down any FBI agents named Mike Figpen.
48:35 Speaker 00 But he does find a guy by that name who works for the Office of Federal Investigation, and Mike does run background checks for security clearances. There can't be that many Mike Figpens running around doing clearance checks, right? And there's an argument to be made about Bob's purported W-2. He produces a tax form that, at least at first glance, looks legit and says he was paid for work completed in 1988, his first month at S4. He even turns this W-2 form over to a judge.
49:16 Speaker 00 In the early 90s, Bob faces unrelated charges of felony pandering. Why? Well, he got into some trouble for helping to set up a brothel in a neighborhood. In court, Bob sticks to his story about where he went to school and where he worked. He provides his W-2 as evidence. Now, a lot of astute people have pointed out that the return address on the W-2 comes from the US Department of Naval Intelligence. It's actually called the Office of Naval Intelligence. So the form gets written off a lot of the time as being inaccurate.
49:58 Speaker 00 However, UFO researcher Bob Exler, recently featured in our episode about the Guardian tape, presented his own findings about the W-2.
50:09 Speaker 00 The strange zip code, he says, belongs to Naval Intelligence. The weird employer ID was also assigned by an intelligence agency. And Exler Reports, a regional IRS office deems the W2 authentic. Any abnormalities on the forms, he explains, were designed to throw people off. As for George Knapp, he comes to believe Bob's story. To this day, the decorated reporter remains one of Bob Lazar's loudest supporters. In fact, practically all of Bob's friends and family say they trust him.
50:52 Speaker 00 Even as Bob returns to the spotlight every few years, whether in documentaries or on Joe Rogan's podcast, the people who presumably know him best continue to stand by him, decade after decade. The public, on the other hand, well, there's no shortage of Reddit posts and blogs calling out Bob as a con artist. People have dedicated serious time going down the Bob Lazar rabbit hole, and they've uncovered some bright red flags in his story. Remember the Los Alamos phone directory that lists Bob?
51:32 Speaker 00 Turns out, it also names him as an employee of Kirk Meyer, a contractor. It's unclear what his job position was while he was there. So Bob might have had access to the laboratory at Los Alamos, but to say he worked for them as a physicist at that time doesn't seem to be true. Any details Bob happened to get right, skeptics say, could have been learned from Bob's friends. In particular, John Lear, the former CIA pilot who accompanied Bob to spy on that test flight at Groom Lake in 1989.
52:13 Speaker 00 John could be the reason Bob knew about the identamat, about Janet Airlines, and even knew the name of Mike Figpen. Legendary ufologist and physicist Stanton Friedman, best known for his investigation into the Roswell incident, did his own deep dive into Bob's claims. He couldn't find a single shred of evidence that Bob attended Caltech or MIT, nor could he locate any classmates who recalled seeing Bob in classes at either school. Furthermore, Stanton claims Bob told him he also attended two smaller colleges in the Los Angeles area,
52:57 Speaker 00 Northridge and Pierce Junior College. Stanton was able to confirm Bob at least took a class at Pierce, and when pressed to remember any of his professors from Caltech, Bob provided the name Bill Duxler, who Stanton Friedman says actually taught at Pierce College, not at Caltech. So what if Bob's claims that the government is trying to wipe his history and discredit him? Well, think about it. If the school you went to suddenly lost all of its files, all the yearbooks, photos, directories,
53:41 Speaker 00 could you prove you went there? Probably so, right? What, you'd have a diploma? Old homework, notes, tests, schedules, syllabus here, a reading list there, pictures of you and your friends on the campus, classmates and teachers who remember you attending the school? Even your parents' generation or your grandparents, without the aid of digital technology, would probably be able to drum up more hard evidence and have a greater memory recall than Bob Lazar seems to have about where he went to college in the early 80s. Skeptics say the hardest issue to reconcile when it comes to Bob's story is the science behind it,
54:26 Speaker 00 or the lack thereof. It's one thing to encounter something we don't understand. But if Bob was at S4, he was hired as a physicist to do some pretty high-level work. His detractors say he rarely describes these experiments or any data in a believable way. He doesn't speak in mathematical terms. He doesn't demonstrate an ability to converse in a way that a physicist of that caliber should. It's like he's giving the abridged version of events and is unable to elaborate beyond that.
55:06 Speaker 00 So there's evidence to suggest that Bob Lazar isn't a most credible source. But does that mean his story is completely untrue? On the whole, people are really divided when it comes to their feelings on Bob Lazar and this legend of S4. Was he chosen for classified work of this nature because he would be easy to discredit? Did Bob really hold some top-secret contractor job and use his insight to spin a lackluster story into a more powerful tale? Or I was thinking, could it be some sort of psy-op planted by the government to distract us from what's really going on?
55:47 Speaker 00 Or is he simply a compelling storyteller? More than 35 years after he first went public, Bob's name continues to inspire heated debate. And it's not just because his story is shocking. It is the way he tells his story that makes it so enduring. So what is it about Bob? Well, even the skeptics say he is a bright guy who thinks outside the box in a really refreshing way. He honestly did build jet cars in his spare time for fun. His mom says he's been doing the same thing since he was a kid, only, well, back then it was with bikes, not cars. He comes off as sincere.
56:30 Speaker 00 The details he recalls are often driven by emotion, like memories usually are. And his supporters seem to respond to the human aspect of Bob experiencing this happening to him, just as much as they're captivated by the plot. Not to mention, UAP disclosure in the past few years has made claims of hidden spacecraft in the desert significantly more plausible. Former intelligence officer Lou Elizondo has confirmed the US government is in possession of UAPs. He asserts, “These were not made by us or any of our known adversaries.”
57:12 Speaker 00 As the one-time director for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Lou has stated with no uncertainty that “we’ve encountered spacecraft that are, quote, ‘performing in ways well beyond our current capabilities.’” And remember the Gimbal video released a few years ago? It shows an encounter with one UAP off the coast of Florida in January 2015. You can see the unidentified object seems to fly at a tilt. Reportedly, when Bob saw that footage, he said that was precisely how the sport model
57:53 Speaker 00 flew, in the same belly-up position he’d been describing since 1989. Bob Lazar maintains that all of the attention he’s gotten has had a net negative impact on his life. Some might point out that he’s made money on his fame through selling sketches of the sport model or bringing awareness to his business, United Nuclear. Others speculate that maybe this was all one big inside joke between Bob and his friends who fed him insider information. But if that’s true, the man has been sticking to his guns for an awful long time now.
58:34 Speaker 00 All we can say for sure is this: Area 51 is real. UAPs are real. And we just can’t seem to look away... from Bob Lazar.
58:52 Speaker 00 Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories Rewind. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram @TheConspiracyPod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include George Knapp's reporting on the Bob Lazar case, Jeremy Corbell's documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers, and the National Geographic's special Area 51: The CIA's Secret. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.
59:37 Speaker 00 This episode was written and researched by Mickey Taylor, edited by Justin Sales, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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