The disc came up around the same place, and this time it staged a breathtaking performance. It repeated moves similar to the week before, but now it came down the mountain range toward them. At first it seemed far away, then they’d blink and it would seem a lot closer, then blink again and it would seem even closer. There was no sense of continuous movement; the disc simply “jumped.”
The object was also incredibly bright, so bright that Huff remembered how they moved behind the open trunk of the car, reflexively seeking protection as if from an explosion.
Lazar told them this motion was due to the method of propulsion and the way it distorts space-time and light. He also explained that the bright glow of the disc was due to the way it was energized. “An explosion was the only thing, other than the sun, that we had ever seen be that bright,” Huff recalled. They took a videotape, and the camera recorded the sighting at around eight-thirty. Eventually it set down behind the mountains, and they left. Huff had never seen anything like this in the sky in central Nevada.
The next Wednesday, Lazar, Tracy Lazar and her sister, Huff, and Lear arrived shortly before dusk. Huff recorded, “Numerous security vehicles were sweeping the roads that the cattle ranchers use to round up their cattle after open-range grazing. It seemed that this night, more than the previous Wednesday nights, they wanted to make sure no one was outside of Area 51.
“We tried to sneak in using our usual ‘stealth’ mode,” Huff went on, “but security saw our brake lights and began to chase us. We tried to beat them out to the highway, but they came from all directions and ultimately we had to stop. We told them we were simply out there stargazing, which they didn’t believe for one moment. They agreed that they couldn’t chase us off of public land, but simply said they would ‘prefer’ that we retreat back up to the highway. They issued us a copy of a written warning that said we were approaching a military installation and cited the relevant statutes, including the penalties for taking pictures of the base.”
The group returned to the paved highway, but a short time later a Lincoln County deputy named LaMoreaux pulled them over and asked for identification. He took their IDs and radioed the security base station. It was obvious, Huff felt, that the guards and the sheriff’s office worked together. But the deputy finally let them go.
The next day, Lazar got a phone call. His supervisor at S-4, Dennis Mariani, had learned of his latest expedition to the Black Mailbox. He was to report for debriefing. “When we told you this was secret,” Lazar recalled Mariani saying acidly, “we didn’t mean you should bring your family and friends to watch.”
Mariani drove Lazar the forty-odd miles from Las Vegas to the debriefing at the old Indian Springs airfield. Lazar was told the test scheduled for the night he was caught had been canceled. But according to Lazar, they neither fired him nor revoked his security clearance. He simply never went back to work.
Lazar had violated all the security rules, yet had not really been punished. He had been warned about security from the beginning of his employment at S-4, he said, by men holding a gun to his head. He was sure all along he was being watched. Security people visited his house again and again and dropped in on his friends. The disc of element 115 he had secreted disappeared from his home. When Lazar talked with Gene Huff at Huff’s home, both men felt sure they were being overheard by listening devices, so instead of speaking aloud they passed notes which Huff burned afterward. In the notes, they referred to each other as Bufon and Gufon, a joking reference to the UFO organization MUFON (Mutual UFO Network).
But Lazar believed that his wife was having an affair and that it was this, and not any of his security breaches, that led to his termination. He thought that the security forces at S-4 had recorded and transcribed his wife’s phone calls, and that in their judgment, he was probably unstable and a potential security leak. By May, the couple would be separated.
At that point, Lazar decided to go public. He had already recorded a video interview with newsman George Knapp, but it was for “safekeeping,” and never aired. In May, Lazar agreed to another interview, this time for broadcast, but in disguise.
Not until November 10, 1989, when Lazar appeared under his own name and showed his face, did the story have a major impact. On November 21, Knapp and Lazar together appeared on The Billy Goodman Happening, an AM radio show with a huge audience. On November 25, KLAS-TV ran a two-hour compilation of the Lazar interviews and other clips under the title UFOs: The Best Evidence. On December 20 he was back on the Goodman show. By then the story was getting international coverage.
Lazar increasingly relied on Huff as his confidant and handler in dealings with the press. He wanted someone else to get a confirming look at Dennis Mariani, his supervisor, so he set up a meeting with him at a Las Vegas casino, and without telling Mariani, he brought Gene Huff along.
Huff had been told to look for a bulky-bodied ex-Marine type with a little blond mustache. Huff found Mariani sitting at the blackjack table between two large-breasted women and behaving oddly: He was not looking at them at all. In Las Vegas this seemed highly aberrant behavior. But even worse, Mariani pretended not to recognize Lazar, and the meeting never came off. Perhaps Mariani had noticed Huff; Huff had caught sight of another man with him who he said looked like a security agent.
Early the next year, Norio Hayakawa, a UFO researcher who had seen the KLAS-TV broadcasts, brought Lazar to the attention of Nippon TV, and in February 1990 he took a Japanese crew to Las Vegas. They interviewed Lazar at what was described as his house, but Hayakawa thought it felt strange. There wasn’t much furniture, and the place didn’t look lived in. A man introduced only as “a friend” sat beside Lazar and even followed him to the bathroom. The man wore some kind of beeper on his belt.
Lazar suggested a time and place the crew could watch the saucers fly, film them, and confirm his story. He sent them to the Black Mailbox. At 6:45 one morning they saw a bright light over the Groom Mountains. At 8:15 a brilliant orange orb jumped erratically.
Lazar agreed to appear live on Japanese television and had even accepted plane tickets to Tokyo for himself and Gene Huff. But Hayakawa waited for him in vain in the terminal at LAX. Lazar never showed. When Hayakawa telephoned, Lazar told him that he could not come; his life was in danger. His tire had been shot out when he was on the way to the airport. Significant money had changed hands as well as the plane tickets, and to save face, the network set up a telephone link so Lazar could at least answer phone-in questions live during the show. Some thirty million Japanese viewers saw the program.
Then something even weirder happened. In April 1990, not long after the Japanese show, Lazar was arrested in Las Vegas for pandering, an obscure charge akin to living off immoral earnings. He was convicted on June 18.
Lazar had long boasted about a legal brothel he had wanted to start when he was still in Los Alamos. He planned to call it the Honeysuckle Ranch, and there is some evidence he filed the legal papers necessary and even had T-shirts made up bearing the name. But whether the brothel idea was simply a running joke, a fantasy, or a half-realized business effort remains unclear.
The Las Vegas episode had begun when, after his separation from Tracy, Lazar, in Huff’s singular phrase, “took comfort with a hooker.” He became friendly with the girls and, according to the charges, ended up working with a prostitute named Toni Bulloch and helped set up a computer database for a brothel in the Newport Cove Apartments, a Spanish-style complex near the airport. Sentenced to community service, Lazar helped install computer systems for worthy organizations and showed up at a Las Vegas children’s museum to give courses in computing.