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Bob Lazar - Did he really study a UFO??

4 years ago3,480 words

Back in late 2019, ∞ I wrote a post about UFOs ∞, specifically the Nimitz incident - where a bunch of army pilots, most notably Commander David Fravor, saw, detected on radar, and had interactions with a tic-tac-shaped craft - and a guy called Bob Lazar - who claimed to have worked on a secret program reverse-engineering retrieved saucer-shaped craft. The former seemed too genuine to discount, and got me really seriously wondering whether we were on the verge of a cultural shift, but the latter guy, Bob Lazar... I wrote that he seemed far too outlandish, and had far too much going against him to possibly be believable. Now, though, after looking into his story in depth from several angles, I'm wondering whether he's actually telling the truth...



Recently, I started listening to some of those longer Joe Rogan interviews while drawing - I should look into some other podcasts, but I've never done that before so it was easier to turn to a familiar(ish) one - but while looking through the list of all videos for new ones and realising I either didn't care or know anything about most of his guests, I ended up listening to the Fravor (tic tac) interview a second time. Seemed no less convincing than the first time. Next, again due to lack of options, I went back to the Bob Lazar one... and what he said in it - and the way he said it - nagged at my mind for a while afterwards.



There's something about the very specific details he gives about the mechanics of the craft that stands out among all other UFO stories. Usually they're sort of wishy-washy, vague anecdotes about either lights in the sky, or abductions by either cold, probing analysts who treat them like meat and leave them scarred, or new-agey peace-and-love star siblings who bring warnings about how we're defiling our environment. But Lazar describes the specific layout of the UFO he worked on - three levels, seats arranged in an equilateral triangle, three gravity emitters powered by a single central reactor with a very specific shape, outer shell like it was all formed from one moulded piece - in a way that at the very least would make for some compelling sci-fi.

But he can't be telling the truth, can he? I mean, his Wikipedia article begins like this:



He sounds like an absolute nutbag! Or a deliberately deceitful charlatan. Doesn't he?

And yet it continued to nag at me... I don't care about all his claims about government conspiracies or anything like that, but as a creative person who's often designing things, his description of the alien ship just feels so... satisfyingly alien to me. So strange. Certainly different to how space craft were depicted in the media of the time (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc).

I found out that he released an autobiography in 2019 called Dreamland (after a nickname for Area 51, though it'd be funny if it was all just a fantasy and he'd chosen that name as a double-meaning'd joke). I got it, and read it, alert for discrepancies from the story I'd heard him tell on the Rogan podcast. And I found some! Kind of. He mentions in the podcast that some of the UFOs might have been from an archaeological dig, and in the book he mentioned seeing pictures of dissected aliens in the papers he was given to look through, but neither of those facts were included in both. Ah-ha! Got him! He's a liar, then!

But... So much of the other stuff was the same. The whole order of events, many specific details he'd mentioned in the podcast...

I included this (~7 minute) video towards the end of the first post I wrote about all this:



In it, some professional animators try to draw cartoon characters they've seen many times - probably recently - from memory, with comically inaccurate results.

And if you were to try and remember some specific event from your own personal history, how accurate do you think your recollection would be? How about the second time you told it? The third? I wrote in that post how I'd studied in Psychology that memories tend to warp and degrade each time they're remembered, so it's not possible for anyone to retain perfectly accurate memories of anything. It's why witness testimony can be so dangerously unreliable in court. We're not exactly cameras or computers.

And yet Bob Lazar's story is remarkably consistent!

At this point, I was feeling... shaken, maybe? Or maybe just confused, wondering. I didn't want to believe some crazy UFO nut, or - worse - a deliberate fraudster, but there were a lot of similarities, consistencies, and there's just something both emotive and mundane in what he wrote about that I find so interesting. He spent a lot of his autobiography expressing frustration at how he couldn't wrap his head around the technology, and how he messed up his chance to continue studying it because he spoke out about it. All things someone who really was in that situation probably would say. If he's making it all up, he's wasting his gifts by not acting or writing novels.

So I googled it a bit. I found a Quora question: ∞ Do you believe Bob Lazar? ∞ The guy at the top seems to disbelieve him because of what sounds like a pre-existing belief about the workings and nature of the government. He already knows what the deal is, and this Lazar's story isn't in line with it, so in the bin it goes. A lot of the other ones are the sorts of crazies whose rantings make other people embarrassed to be associated with the whole UFO topic.

One of the replies mentioned ∞ this debunking by Stanton Friedman ∞. He's a big deal, right? I at least know his name (though nothing else beyond that). Essentially, it goes into the main concern that critics have about him: his background qualifications are for the most part missing. There are also some specific science concerns. Important quotes:



The element 115 thing is interesting, because some people use it as proof that he knew something before it was confirmed to be real... though wasn't it pretty much inevitable? Looks like they're up to element 118 at the moment - or so a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests - so would me suggesting the existence of element 120 mean that when they find it, I'm a prophet? It's why I never put much weight to that aspect of his story myself; it makes sense that aliens might use elements we don't commonly use, but it'd also be trivially easy to lie about something like that.

Assuming that current technology being unable to do something means it's impossible is a recurring theme throughout this critique.



That's a bizarre assumption about the nature of memory!



Lazar talks a lot - with what looks to me like genuine bafflement and frustration - about how what he saw violates physics as he understands it. He seemed particularly annoyed by how the reactor he worked on didn't emit heat radiation - it was 100% efficient - and would require tremendous amounts of energy which seemed impossible considering its tiny size. It's not like he invented it though! He was just trying - unsuccessfully - to understand it. He even tried to explain it via an analogy, which I'll paraphrase: it's like dropping a nuclear generator in mediaeval times. They wouldn't have a clue how it's working, and if they tried to disassemble it, they'd die of radiation without even knowing what radiation is even though it's all around them.

It seems extremely arrogant to think that we know it all now, that there's nothing we could ever find that we're currently unequipped to understand.

There is at least this editor's note at the bottom:



An alien race thousands or even millions of years ahead of us would obviously know how to do stuff we don't know how to do now; it'd be harder to believe if what he talked about was in line with known physics!



Lazar also talked quite a bit in his autobiography about the security measures at the S4 lab, and they seemed absurdly stringent. He expressed frustration - which also came up in the Rogan interview, I think - about how they compartmentalised everything, so for example the propulsion team (just him and a guy called Barry) weren't allowed to exchange information with teams who were studying other systems like navigation or alien biology. It's ridiculous, he said; you need to be able to talk with others to understand the whole, and being denied that just leads to stagnation.

The impression I got of whatever organisation he was working for was that they were above the law, the government, and morality. Had Lazar been assassinated following his spilling of their secrets, might that have made him a martyr, lent credence to his case? What if instead they used devious means to delete or alter his background?

In which case, it was clearly effective at convincing the cleverer people that he's lying. Maybe the crazies will still believe him, but who cares, they don't matter. Nobody with intelligence and influence would believe someone whose Societal Intelligence Approval Certificates were missing.



There's a recently-made documentary on Netflix called Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers, which I also watched. As seems to inevitably be the case with anything in this domain, it's framed with hokey, dramatic ambient stings and pretentious, vapid quotes about the nature of reality and existence - with a mumbling delivery by Mickey Rourke, for some reason - that rob it of a lot of credibility.

The guy behind it, Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, also accompanied both Lazar and Fravor in their interviews with Joe Rogan. ∞ People in the comments for some clips from them seem not to like him. ∞ Makes me think of how creators might have a vision to share, and the public might be receptive to that vision, but they need to use marketing guys or business executives as intermediaries, who are such different animals that this just leads to frustration on both sides. Not exactly the same thing since I wouldn't class Lazar as a 'creator', but it's the same idea.

Despite that, though, in the documentary, again Lazar told essentially the same story that he's been telling for three decades. In the Fravor interview with Rogan (I think it was that one?), they said that Lazar's 'just a normal guy' (not a lunatic), and he does come across that way. He comes across as someone who's genuinely been through something outlandish, trying their best to explain it as it happened. How might you, if you'd been through what he claims he has?

I was still looking for suspicious details, some smoking-gun slip-up which would reveal his big ruse without a doubt... I saw this on youtube, an analysis of his body language - by someone who specialises in that, not in UFO conspiracy theories - assuming it'd shine light on the suspicious bumps beneath his trench coat:



That's a long video - an hour - and I'd say it's perhaps the most valuable one I've seen, since it directly compares interviews with him from very recently and from when he first started speaking out. His story hasn't changed. And - to the disbelief of the guy analysing the videos - his body language is congruent with the story that he's telling; if he's lying, he's one of the greatest actors ever to have lived, the guy says.

All subconscious signals - or lack thereof - point to him telling the truth.

Polygraphs came up in the Netflix documentary, and maybe that video too, which made me scowl a bit. Polygraphs aren't exactly magic lie-detecting machines, and success or failure at them doesn't mean all that much. I'd probably fail a polygraph test while telling the truth due to my anxiety condition! While a pathological liar - or 'mythomaniac', apparently - might lie so easily they don't give off any physiological signs of distress doing so. Still, Lazar passed several of those.



One of the things that made me shrug off his story a couple of years ago was this line from the Wikipedia intro:



I thought he wouldn't bring that up in his autobiography, that he'd pretend it never happened, like a charlatan would. He did mention it, casually; he mentioned investing into a 'legal brothel' before all the UFO stuff, for money reasons, but never mentioned it again after that. It also came up in the Netflix documentary, where... I think it was George Knapp - the journalist who gave him his first, silhouetted interview and who's been following and supporting his story ever since - found out about it, thought his career was over because of how bad it sounded, and he contacted Lazar about it, who mostly found it funny. In court, he was facing potential jail time, and it would have served him well to admit to his hoaxing... but he stuck to his story.

Hmm.

The overall impression I get of the guy from the various sources I've seen is of someone who's a bit of a maverick - he installed rocket engines in his bike and car, for example - and it could well be that they hired him because they needed a mind that'd take a different angle to someone more by-the-books. Creativity and eccentricity come hand-in-hand - trait Openness, as I've talked about a few times before - and they'd help at seeing new solutions that others, constrained, would miss. That - combined with some of his other traits - would also incline him towards risky activity that doesn't exactly stay within the bounds of the law.

It makes sense that someone inclined towards deviant thinking would be taken on to try and understand something that's beyond us all. And importantly, it'd also be easier to discredit him if he did speak out.

There's this scene in the first Men in Black:



Will Smith gets the job because he's not like the other, more apparently qualified military guys there. He thinks differently.

And maybe Bob Lazar doesn't even have some - or all - of the qualifications he claims, and they actually did want someone like that because it makes it harder for anyone to believe him later? Imagine if he was some highly renowned scientist who could easily provide all details about himself together with the outlandish evidence he was providing. His words would hold much more weight, which would be great for the wider world, but how would that benefit whatever shadowy forces might be hoarding this strange and powerful technology for themselves?

And it's not like if defies belief that there'd be some powerful group of people who - if they got their hands on something like this - would do all they could to prevent it falling into their competitors' hands. A tiny number of billionaires control the majority of the world's wealth, that's a fact, and they don't want to give up or share that power. It's just the nature of mankind. Something with such massive implications for warmongering would be held onto even more fiercely.

It's like if you found a suitcase in your back garden, which you knew contained a billion dollars, but you couldn't decipher its complex lock. Would you share it with others hoping for a quicker solution, or would you keep it to yourself, working on the solution in private? I imagine - or would hope - that pretty much all of us here would at least believe we'd ask for help, and that we'd share the vast wealth with others when we opened it, but maybe if we were actually in the situation, we'd become concerned about whether we'd get any of the wealth. Maybe someone else will open it first and refuse to share? It's not like you could do anything about that. The whole thing with The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings was about this aspect of human psychology.



I wrote all that about a week ago, but wasn't sure whether anyone would care enough for it to be worth posting about, especially since it's long. But on Reddit this morning, ∞ I saw yet another navy-recorded UFO video that the government has acknowledged as genuine ∞, so I thought I might as well.

I'm really hoping all this buzz about UFOs is actually going to lead to something within my lifetime! There's supposed to be some big announcement from the government or something soonish regarding all this, though I don't know much about it and don't exactly hold high hopes about it being anything world-changing.

The Bob Lazar thing is so strange though because what if he is telling the truth? How would someone who had been through such a thing go about revealing that to the world? How would you?