Written by Grant Cameron

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“Area 51” is an unofficial title that often refers to an area in southern Nevada containing United States Air Force (USAF) facilities. The USAF does not recognize owning or operating any facility regarded as “Area 51.” They do recognize operations at the Nellis Range Complex which includes an Operating Location near Groom Lake, Nevada. However, much of the information regarding activities at these sites remain classified.

March 27, 2008 Inventory letter to FOIA 2006-0527-F asking for files on Area 51.

This paper is an analysis of the key facts behind the Bob Lazar S-4 story. It is intended for those who are already familiar with the basic story. It is not intended as a telling of the story.

 

General Overview of the Facts

The Bob Lazar story can be summed up best with two general opposing set of observations;

1.      Everyone involved seemed to be telling the story truthfully to the best of their ability. The one exception seemed to be the claim by Lazar that he had two masters degrees, one from MIT and one from Cal Tech. Nothing found in any investigation of the claim gave the education claim any support. Despite the fact that everyone seemed to be telling the truth there were a lot of pieces in the puzzle that did not fit together. Some of these discrepancies included a) Lazar being hired at S-4 without any apparent visible qualifications b) Lazar starting work the day after the final interview and receiving a security clearance reportedly 38 levels above “Q level” when security clearances at the time were taking 12-18 months to process. c) On the first day of work he gets to read over 100 documents detailing various government alien research programs, when the rule would be that all this would be highly compartmentalized, and his “need to know” should only allow him to only read briefings related to the part of the program he would be working on. d) After taking Lear and others to watch the flying saucer tests from the edge of the base, Lazar was not fired. Instead he was told that his security clearance would be suspended for 6-9 months and he could apply to get it back. More bizarre is the fact that Lazar was told that the security clearance was pulled not because he violated his security clearance by telling and showing people what was going on in a Top Secret program, but because his wife was having an affair and this made him psychologically vulnerable. After this debriefing, he doesn’t even have to wait the 6-9 months. He is called back to work at S-4 shortly after when they now know for sure he was passing classified material to people with no “need to know.”

2.      Although there were many indicators that things should not have happened the way Lazar claimed, Lazar’s basic story of being at the base and being exposed to a back-engineering program related to flying saucers remained intact after an 6 month investigation by investigative reporter George Knapp at KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and investigations by other researchers. There were many things that indicated Lazar might just be telling the story exactly as he had experienced it such a) Lazar underwent regressive hypnosis which would be a strange move by someone who was making up a story. These sessions revealed no deception and indicated he had in fact been involved a program that looked like a flying saucer program. b) Lazar underwent four lie detector tests which he did not fail. The second session of two lie-detector tests was conducted by Terry Tavernetti who worked for the casino industry and who did lie-detector tests every day. Tavernetti was hired by KLAS-TV and his conclusion was “If he’s (Lazar) lying he should be in Hollywood because he gave absolutely no physiological indication of attempting deception.” c) Lazar named Mike Thigpen as the member of the Office of Federal Investigations (OFI) who interviewed him related to his security clearance. Knapp confirmed in his investigation that there was a person by this name working for the OFI and that the agency’s job was to do background checks on people who get clearances to work at the Nevada Test Site or at Nellis AFB. Later in his investigation he actually tracked Thigpen down and confronted him about visiting Lazar, but Thigpen claimed he couldn’t remember. d) Despite the fact that Los Alamos National Labs (where Lazar claimed he had worked and held a Q clearance) denied any connection to Lazar, Knapp was able to verify Lazar’s claim by finding his name in the Los Alamos lab phone book, recovering an article that identified Lazar as being a physicist working at Los Alamos, and having Lazar take him on a tour through the buildings at Los Alamos. During this tour Lazar appeared to know the staff, was allowed to go anywhere he wanted and seemed to know his way around d) 

        Most importantly, Knapp found two dozen witnesses at the base, or connected to the base, who substantiated all or parts of Lazar’s story that there were recovered alien saucers and a live alien at the base. e) Knapp arranged for someone who had worked at the base to question Lazar about how things operated at the base that would not be common knowledge such as where is the cafeteria and how do you pay for your food there. Lazar was able to answer the questions. f) Lazar was questioned many times on his story and never contradicted himself. g) There are many witnesses around Lazar (including Knapp, Lear, and Huff) who will testify that in the months following Lazar leaving the program that phones were being tapped, houses being broken into, and people were followed. The strongest evidence in this regard is given by Knapp who stated that on six occasions, people who had agreed on the phone to go on camera were quickly visited by people “flashing badges” or claiming to be with the secret service threatening them. In all six cases the people backed out of going on camera. In the case of one woman, who claimed to have been in meetings discussing the movement of alien material from Wright-Patterson AFB to Area 51, twenty years later she will still not even talk to Knapp after implied death threats to her and her daughter. h) Finally, Lazar was able to take witnesses out to the edge of the base on March 22 and March 29, 1989 and let them see a flying saucer test over S-4 that all agreed appeared to be an object best described as a UFO. The object appeared where Lazar said it would appear at exactly at what time Lazar said it would appear.

Of the many theories that have been floated to explain the Bob Lazar/ Area 51 story the theory that best seems to explain the various discrepancies and facts of the story is that this was a move to gradually disclose the basic fact that there was some sort of crashed saucer program at S-4. It was masked with various misdirections (some might use the word disinformation) to prevent researchers from obtaining solid proof of the saucer program and therefore end the cover-up.

This disclosure conclusion is accepted by all the main participants as a possible answer to what had occurred to Bob Lazar.

Knapp, who conducted the biggest investigation of the case, came to this conclusion;

“I’ve worked it longer than anyone and my opinion is that while it is not a black or white story and it is not clear as to what was going on whether Bob was really telling a revelation or whether he was telling a story that was supposed to be told. I don’t believe he was consciously telling some disinformation thing. I think he was led down a path. I think they let him see glimpses of stuff. They decided to pick someone who could be easily discredited after the story gets out and he was perfect for it. He had such crazy wild interests and had credentials that were not easily provable. They figured let’s see what happens when we tell this story of Area 51… I believe Bob really was out there. I believe he really did see some of this. He saw something that looks very much like flying saucers…I think maybe there are factions that wanted this story out. Would people really freak out? How would they react? It could very well be that they did have the intention – let’s tell this story. Bob gets discredited and then everyone will leave us alone, because we really do have exotic things flying around out there. No one will ever believe a story about what is flying around out here ever again… The effect was that they put it out and then pulled it back. They allowed Bob to spill the beans, allowed us to tell the story, and then in the eyes of a lot of people discredited him entirely.”1

When presented with this theory that Lazar had been taken to the base knowing that he would spill the beans and then get exposed, John Lear agreed and stated that he and Lazar had actually discussed the possibility;

“That’s certainly plausible. I’ve always thought that it was possible they were trying to get the information out. They said Lear is interested in it. Let’s work this out so that he can get the information out. I’ve always told Bob (Lazar) that we tried our best but we didn’t do a very good job.”2

Lazar’s close friend Gene Huff said;

When you extrapolate that out that there must have been some people that wanted to get it out and some who didn’t – right? I think there was a conflict there because if there was a consensus that they wanted to get it out it could have been accomplished. They certainly tried to prevent it after the fact. He asked them when he was there, “How do you keep this secret?” and they said it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. As long as you don’t prove anything one way or the other – as long as you keep people on the fence and ridicule those who believe or who have seen things, and dismiss the rest it is easy to keep secret because everyone wants to say there’s no life anywhere else that we have discovered.3

The time line of the Lazar story is supported by other apparent gradual disclosure events that were occurring at the same time. President Reagan was leaving office just as the Lazar story happened. Reagan had a big interest in the UFO subject, and researchers around at the time will remember that there was a lot of talk about Reagan disclosing the truth before he left office, including one rumor that stated Reagan would appear in a video message with the live alien.

Lazar was hired only five weeks after the UFO documentary “UFO Cover-up Live” which was hyped prior to its airing as a disclosure effort by those controlling the UFO secret. Most of the people involved in the documentary didn’t like participating because the whole production was carefully scripted. Everyone was forced to read from cue cards, and the material on the cue cards was not what they had written. No one knew who had written the material on the cue cards. In the small audience of less than a dozen quietly sat the Falcon from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was Falcon who had contacted Bill Moore for almost a decade providing him the whole MJ-12 and Project Aquarius story.