Unlike many UFO sources, Lazar had begun as a skeptic; he had gone on record as deriding the youfers. A convincing detail is Lazar’s statement that when he first caught sight of the saucers, he thought they were terrestrial military craft. “Well, there’s the explanation for UFOs,” he thought. We must have made them. But when he learned they were not from Earth, he had a strange reaction. That night, he said, he lay in bed, giggling, unable to sleep. Lazar had a charming reluctance to overstate. “I hate to mention this,” he’d begin. “I don’t want to get too deeply into that,” he would say in answer to a question, or “I don’t like to talk about this.” He was almost coyly casual about his one sighting of an actual alien. It could have been a mannequin, he says, or a mock-up. “It could have been a million things.”
But Lazar’s story has the useful feature, too, of suggesting associations with the rest of the Lore, like the round tabs of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The very vagueness and limits of his knowledge inspires listeners to make their own links. He’s not sure where the saucers he saw came from — could it have been Roswell, or the storage site at Hangar 18 at Wright-Pat? He hears rumors of a shoot-out with aliens — perhaps it was at S-4, or Area 51, or at Dulce, as the Lore tends to have it?
A recurrent theme in Lazar’s story was his feeling that his employers at S-4 were “trying to make him disappear” by removing records. This happened even before he left the job. He claimed it was this sense that he was being made invisible that led him to go public. He couldn’t find records of his own life, he said. “They’re trying to make me look nonexistent,” or, in an oddly dislocated locution, he felt “that someone was going to disappear.”
Worse, he was forgetting things. Had they done something to his mind? Had he been given something to drink, as the Lore held they often did to interlopers (it was supposed to smell like Pine-Sol)?
His memories were disappearing, too. By September 1990 he was complaining he had forgotten the name of the two modes of travel of the saucers — one low speed, the other high, intergalactic speed — and resorted to calling them alpha and beta. Nor could he any longer remember an important coefficient for one of the processes or certain frequencies of the gravity wave and other details he was convinced he had once known. “I’ve developed a mental block,” he said. “It really bugs me.” He went to a hypnotherapist to help him remember, but it was not very successful.
Lear noticed that Lazar had begun to forget things. “Don’t you remember that night you came over to my house all excited?” Lear asked him. Lazar had completely forgotten.
One night in December 1988, or January 1989, Lear recalls, Lazar came by his house in a state of high excitement. It was bitter cold, “but we talked outside because it made him more comfortable. He was in shirtsleeves. He told me about seeing the alien. He was very excited. Now, he can’t remember it.”
“I saw a disc,” Lear says Lazar told him.
“Ours or theirs?”
“Theirs. I just got back from the test site.”
“Oh my God. What are you doing here? You should continue to work up there for a while. Don’t jeopardize your security clearance.”
“But, John,” Lazar replied, “you’ve taken so much flak about this stuff that I’m going to tell you.”
“And for the next three hours and forty-seven minutes he proceeded to tell me all of it. He told me we did have secret bases on the moon and Mars. He told me things, some of which were so unbelievable [that] had I not known Bob I would have been very suspicious.”
Once Lazar was asked, “Don’t you feel — no pun intended — alienated? In fact aren’t you kind of connected with them, and removed from the rest of society that doesn’t accept that?”
“Absolutely,” he answered. “I feel like I really know what’s going on, and everyone’s an idiot. I really feel that way. Alienated is the perfect word for it.” He was, you might say, a classically alienated type. But the S-4 experience had given order to his life.
The saucers, he said, “made it all make sense. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It takes a lot of the confusion out of things. A lot more knits together…”
Still, as PsychoSpy had urged in his essay “Lazar as Fictional Character,” consider Lazar’s story as story. He implies that if Lazar did not exist, the youfers would find it necessary to invent him. That they may have invented him, or that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) or some other government organization may have invented him, or that he invented himself — all are possibilities that hang in the air like the lights over Dreamland. But who would invent Lazar, and why? Was he a government disinformation agent? Why? As cover for secret programs? To make sure that people believe the lights they see moving above the Jumbled Hills are flying saucers instead of manned terrestrial aircraft or, more likely, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)? The Stealth fighter was revealed in the autumn of 1988 just as Lazar went to work at S-4. Was there a connection? (Indeed, the first images of the Stealth fighter, heavily airbrushed, were released about the time Lazar surfaced.) But Lazar’s story would only draw more curious viewers to the perimeter, where they might see real aircraft while looking for Lazar’s saucers.
Did Lazar create Lazar? For money or for fame? There was a film deal with New Line Pictures, although the amount of Lazar’s income from the rights was unclear. The film languished in production. Originally due in 1994, it went through many scripts and suffered from troubles at New Line. He had been paid to serve as consultant for a plastic kit of the saucer “Sport Model” for the Testor company. Packed with each kit was a poster, just as Lazar had described, bearing the words “They’re here!” Was his goal to become a legend in his own mind, to feel comfortable and real there in front of the blackboard in the pose of Teller or Oppenheimer, to become at last a real authority?
Lazar’s story hovers about the Ridge. Chewed over, tugged at, poked, prodded, and twisted, it quickly became a modern legend, obsessing viewers who came to the Black Mailbox to see if they could see Lazar’s saucers.
4. Aurora
It was cold, Chuck Clark told me, sitting across the table at the Little A“ Le”Inn, twenty below, when he saw the Aurora. “But I served in Korea where it was colder than that all the time. I’d been waiting for hours and only saw it for a few seconds, silhouetted against the light when they pulled the hangar door open. It rolled out and the door closed and it took off.” What shape was it? He was vague. “But many times I’ve seen the blue flame of the methane engines on the test stand behind the hangar”—the big hangar, the one the youfers called Hangar 18. “It exists.”
Aurora, the most mythical of the planes above Dreamland, was believed to be the successor to the Blackbirds, a mother-daughter ship arrangement, flying at Mach 8, perhaps the craft that leaves the little putt-putt doughnut-on-a-rope contrail.
In the 1890s, strange reports began to surface of mysterious airships drifting over the Midwest and West. They were heard in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Harrisburg, Arkansas, but Texas had the largest number of reports. Some of the crews talked to people on the ground. One group asked for food. Another was said to have sung “Nearer My God to Thee.” There was even a cattle mutilation report: A steer had been lassoed, pulled into the airship, roasted, and eaten, with only the skin and bones dropped back overboard.
The reports resembled those of the post — World War II flying-saucer era, except that the speeds cited were tens or hundreds of miles per hour, rather than hundreds or thousands, and the materials described were no more exotic than aluminum.