I saw golf balls bounced off the gravity wave the reactor from the saucer generated. I was allowed to read strange documents — autopsy images of aliens, and a history of the earth as viewed from Zeta Reticuli where the aliens came from.
I saw my fellow workers wearing security badges with one light blue diagonal stripe and one dark blue and the letters MJ. My supervisor had one that read “Majestic.”
I saw little chairs in the saucers that suggested little creatures — aliens.
Once I walked by hangars and caught glimpses of — I think — a little alien. But I’m not sure. “It could have been a million things,” [the supervisor] said. But I think I saw one.
It began with a chance encounter with Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and godfather of Star Wars. Lazar had been working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a contractor to the physics labs there called Kirk-Mayer. His job involved particle detection equipment — Geiger counter stuff — and was linked to the Meson or Positive Proton Lab. Locals remembered him as intelligent, kind but a bit of a con man, trying to rustle tools and funds for another project.
In his spare time Lazar had designed a “jet car,” a weird mating of a Honda CRX and a jet engine. The local paper, the Los Alamos Monitor, had done a story about Lazar and his car, right there on the front page, and on June 23, 1982, the day after the story appeared, Lazar went to a lecture Teller was giving in town. Before the lecture, he spotted Teller reading the Monitor. “That’s me you’re reading about,” Lazar told him, and chatted him up.
Several years later, after his marriage had dissolved and his finances gone to rack and ruin, after he had been let go by the contractor in Los Alamos for using government equipment to work on the jet car, Lazar wrote to Teller seeking work. He had moved to Las Vegas in April 1986, in an attempt to start again. On April 19, he married a woman named Tracy Anne Murk at the We’ve Only Just Begun wedding chapel of the Imperial Hotel. Two days later, his first wife committed suicide, inhaling carbon monoxide in their garage. In October he declared bankruptcy. With the bankruptcy and new marriage, Lazar had begun to put the past behind him, to repair his life and his self-image. Teller would direct him to the people who hired him as what Agent X would later call “the Mr. Goodwrench of flying saucers.”
Teller called, saying he didn’t have any jobs for physicists but knew someone who might. Fifteen minutes later Lazar’s phone rang again. It was someone from EG&G, inviting him for an interview that led to the job at S-4.
Lazar would brag that at the interview he had “dazzled” them. Who were they? EG&G hired him, but his ultimate employer, he said, was listed as the Office of Naval Intelligence. Lazar was able to produce a W-2 form bearing a payer ID number assigned to the Navy; it recorded an annual earning of $977.11.
In December 1988, Lazar said, he began work at S-4, which was ten or twelve miles from Area 51.
Bob Lazar liked to feature himself as physicist, and in his most widely circulated photograph he presented himself, chalk in hand, in front of a blackboard covered with abstruse equations, like Oppenheimer or Teller. He claimed attendance at MIT and CalTech and said he had two master’s degrees. He talked of “getting back into physics,” as if he had been a major lab scientist, and referred to Edward Teller as “Ed.” But he was not a physicist in any professional sense. He had made his living as a technician and later as the owner and operator of a fast-photo processing outlet.
Gene Huff first knew him as “Bob, the photo guy.” Huff was a real estate appraiser in Las Vegas who like many in this business used Lazar’s photo shop to develop pictures of houses. Usually, Lazar’s wife, Tracy, delivered the photos, but sometimes Lazar would show up himself. On these occasions Gene Huff and Lazar would talk. They were both interested in explosives and were part of a group that occasionally went into the desert to set off big explosions. Huff once saw Lazar mix up some nitroglycerin at his kitchen table.
Lazar liked fast cars even better than big booms. He once drove a 1978 Trans Am powered by hydrogen, and he built the jet car that had been featured in the Los Alamos Monitor, a Honda CRX with a jet engine in the back and the license plate JETUBET. He borrowed two thousand dollars to build a jet-powered dragster, a thirty-two-foot-long conglomeration of steel pipe with a surplus Westinghouse J-34 jet engine from a Navy Banshee fighter. It could run at over four hundred miles per hour.
Tom Mahood, the most relentless archivist among the Interceptors, traveled to Los Alamos and Las Vegas to document Lazar’s life. He learned that Lazar had been born in Coral Gables, Florida, then adopted. No records exist proving he attended CalTech or MIT as he claimed. He had attended Pierce Community College in California and had a mail-order degree from a place called Pacifica University. But the Los Alamos Monitor did report that he was a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility or, as he called it, the Polarized Proton section.
A geeky-looking character with large glasses — your classic nerd — Lazar claimed that at S-4 he was assigned to figure out the propulsion system of flying saucers. There were nine different kinds of saucers, he reported, and he gave them nicknames like “the sport model” (a term taken from a Frisbee brand name), “the Jell-O mold,” and “the top hat.”
The saucers traveled by means of a gravity-wave generator, involving a reactor of some sort, and an amplifier that directed the waves. Lazar took credit for identifying the fuel on which the reactor ran as “element 115,” a heavy rust-colored substance with an atomic weight far greater than that of lead. He had surreptitiously pocketed some of the supply of element 115. It was to be his ace in the hole, his way of proving his story, but it had been stolen from his house.
Yet Lazar — and here he dons his role as “physicist”—expressed shock at the crude state of the research at S-4 and the low qualifications of those doing it. They tried to make a saucer run on plutonium instead of element 115, he had heard, and the result had been a disaster. And they had foolishly cut open a reactor while it was operating. It was the resulting deaths, in 1987, that had opened up a job slot for him. Lazar declared that, in only a few days, dealing with “materials that were — pardon the pun — totally alien,” he had figured out the operating principle of the saucer’s antigravity reactor. He was a big-time physicist at last, working on a project even bigger than Edward Teller’s.
If anything lent credence to Lazar’s story, it was that he knew when the flight tests for the saucers were scheduled — Wednesday nights, he reported — and they would appear over the Jumbled Hills between the Groom Lake road and S-4.
He took Huff, John Lear, and others up to see the saucers fly. On March 15, 1989, using Lear’s RV, Lazar, Huff, and Lazar’s wife and sister drove up to Groom, turned out the headlights, and headed down the long sloping dirt road that runs up into the mountains and to the Groom Lake perimeter. Looking through a telescope Lazar soon reported an elliptical light rising above the mountains between them and S-4. The light began jumping and dancing around, then came to a dead stop and hovered. But after just a few minutes, the light slowly sank back down behind the mountains.
Huff and Lazar returned a week later. Huff recalls that Lazar’s wife, Tracy, and a friend named Jim Tagliani joined them. The next Wednesday, the group rented a Lincoln Town Car and returned to the area. “We turned our lights off, and went in about five miles on the Groom Lake road. We pulled off on a side road and unloaded our video camera, telescope, binoculars, et cetera, out of the trunk, and we left the trunk lid open.”