Those researching his probation report found that all government records about Lazar’s past had been sealed away under a federal “need-to-know” restriction, further intriguing the believers. Was it part of a plot to silence Lazar, make him disappear? Had he been set up for the whole charge? Or was the government just protecting its own?
This mystery, possessing the part mirror, part pewter surface of Lazar’s Sport Model itself, made his story intriguing. His manner had the same effect: a combination of bright highlights and dull spots. To John Andrews, the veteran Interceptor, Lazar’s appeal lay in the fact that he was one of the rare UFO witnesses to say “I don’t know” about parts of his story. While most UFO stories were dogmatic in their detail, Lazar’s was full of gaps and limits. He refused to speculate on the source of the saucers, for instance.
There were problems with his story, of course. As Mahood had shown, his CV did not jibe with reality. The Social Security number on the W-2 form did not belong to a man named Robert Lazar.
To those familiar with military programs, the descriptions of the saucer program Lazar gave in his interviews included elements that seemed unlikely. He was shown more than was believable, they thought. Special access programs were famously “compartmentalized.” The engine people were not allowed to see what the wing people were doing, and so on. At Groom Lake, for instance, the SR-71 ground crews never knew the destination of the plane. But for some reason Lazar was offered glimpses of many different aspects of the program. Sometimes he said he thought he was allowed these as tests of his loyalty.
After he went public, Lazar took two lie-detector tests, but both were inconclusive. At best, the tester said, Lazar believed what he was saying, but he might have been relaying on information given to him by someone else.
Tom Mahood’s researches into Lazar’s background had revealed the deception. However much power “they” had to erase his past, it is inconceivable that they could have removed Lazar from all copies of MIT or CalTech yearbooks and directories.
Yet even with all the problems, Lazar’s tale drew an increasing audience; he created a fascination even among skeptics.
In his essay “Lazar as Fictional Character,” PsychoSpy got to the core of Lazar’s appeaclass="underline" that willingness to admit the limits of his knowledge, the restraint in his speculation, and the almost eerie consistency of his tale through interviews over the years. He was perhaps like a witness who tells too good a story in court. Yes, there were a few places that didn’t gel. Once Lazar said that one of the saucers “looked like it was hit with some sort of a projectile. It had a large hole in the bottom and a large hole in the top with the metal bent out like some sort of, you know, large-caliber four- or five-inch [shell] had gone through it.” But in most interviews he said, “None of the discs looked damaged to me.”
Still, it was remarkable how consistent Lazar was in his telling, and PsychoSpy praised the “impressive coherence and integrity of the story itself.” It is “far superior to most science fiction in creating a world that could be true. His is the sort of story I could believe because it is subtle, detailed, and restrained, involves only a very limited government conspiracy, and does not digress into any kind of speculation.”
It was just these qualities about the tale, PsychoSpy noted, that explain why it “appeals to engineers, computer programmers, and other techie types.” It is “heavy on plausible technical details and free of the emotional overtones” that characterize many shrill UFO accounts. “If Lazar’s story is fiction, it’s great fiction, filled with a richness of plausible details and complex philosophical dilemmas that you can’t find in most popular novels these days.”
It was exactly this similarity to a fictional character’s tale — sometimes detailed, sometimes vague, highly subjective, with even a hallucinatory quality, the sense of an imperfect memory washed out by mind control or other means — that made me, too, think of Lazar as a fictional character.
For me, the weirdest part of the story was not the saucers or the aliens. It was the poster that Lazar said he saw in the offices at S-4, the one with the picture of a saucer hovering above the desert and the words, “They’re here!” It looked, he said, as if it had come from Kmart.
The more I studied his tale, the more Lazar reminded me of the antihero of a science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. Many of Dick’s protagonists are dweebish, sometimes seedy, average guys who get caught up in matters of planetary import. They live in crass commercial worlds while dealing with what they consider important philosophical questions. And they face realities that fade in and out of each other, raising larger questions: Are there sinister influences at work or only demented solipsism? Is it in my head or is something very wrong with this universe? They often feel they are in a carefully crafted illusion, but that some of the workers have spoiled the effect by leaving empty sandwich wrappers and soda bottles around.
Lazar’s tale has this same quality of a half-waking dream. Levels of reality drift in and out of each other in a strange but compelling way. Details of the quotidian world blend with those of the Lore.
Lazar, for instance, noticed that the security badges bore blue and white stripes and the legend “Majestic.” “It made me crack a smile,” he commented, because “Majestic” is straight out of the Lore: MJ-12, which stood for either Majestic or Majic 12, is the famed and much-debated secret committee in UFO legend charged with recovering and hiding flying saucers. MJ was said to be a security clearance “38 levels above Q,” or top secret.
“I don’t know whether it was a kind of nostalgia thing,” he commented. “I began to wonder is this really the Majestic everyone talks about, or was it something done almost for nostalgia reasons?… Assuming the Majestic 12 documents were false, did these guys just use this insignia for the hell of it, kind of as a joke?”
The flip side of Lazar’s unwillingness to speculate is that the big issues raised by saucer lore are ignored: How did we get the saucers? Do the aliens run the base? Was there really a link to Roswell or to MJ-12? Unanswered questions lie heavily over the Lazar story and provide much of its fascinating quality, but the gaps in the tale could also be designed to make it easier for true believers to link it to their own wider conclusions.
Another dreamy effect is the strange alien book Lazar says he saw at S-4. Its pages were translucent, like a series of acetate layers, so that you could see into a house, X-ray style, from shingles to framing to chimney inside. He was allowed to read the book, which combined a history of the earth and a history of a planet in the star system Reticulum 4, where the saucers originated. Human beings are referred to as “containers”—for souls or for genes or whatever is unclear. (The term “containers” caught the imagination of UFO buffs; the Heaven’s Gate cult would use it in their teachings.) Some sixty-five “genetic interventions” beginning in the epoch when men were still apes were described. “Intervention” seemed to Lazar to mean manipulation of DNA, and appeared designed to make humans a breeding species for the aliens — a kind of grafting stock for a race that had lost its ability to reproduce.
The book serves as a means to introduce much more information than would have come to Lazar’s attention directly, but it seems a clumsy plot device, worthy of a computer adventure game or a wavy transition in a film from an opening book to real action.