And what about those qualifications Lazar claimed to possess? No convincing evidence of any sort has ever surfaced in support of Lazar’s claims to have obtained degrees at Cal Tech and MIT. Critics and debunkers gleefully rub their hands together and cry: “Foul, Bob!” Lazar’s response? The government is trying to discredit him by erasing significant portions of his background and life history. On the other hand, it might reasonably be argued that the lack of credible data pertaining to Lazar’s educational assertions would be enough to rule out the possibility of his ever having been considered for employment in the world of government-funded, cutting-edge science.
Lazar’s claims to have worked at Los Alamos were also disputed, and viewed with suspicion by certain elements of both the UFO research community and the mainstream media. In fact, his claims were outright refuted by spokespersons of Los Alamos itself. For a short while, at least. Soon, something came along that turned that issue on its head: KLAS-TV’s George Knapp found Lazar’s name in the October 1982 telephone directory of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When the evidence was presented to grim, red-faced Los Alamos officials by Knapp, they quickly chose to modify their position. The new version of events was that Lazar had been employed by them after all, but under the umbrella of an outside contract company called Kirk-Meyer. They maintained that Lazar never, ever, not even once, worked on issues of a secret or sensitive nature. However, colleagues of Lazar had informed Knapp that Lazar worked at Los Alamos on matters relative to the highly sensitive Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — or “Star Wars” program — that had been grandly envisioned by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
What of those claims about fantastically advanced craft at Area 51 supposedly fueled by a super-heavy element that cannot be found on Earth (Element 115)? Here we have to turn to the strange story of a young Welsh man named Matthew Bevan, who, in the mid-1990s, doggedly set out to crack the UFO secrets of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s so-called Hangar 18. This got the teen terror into scalding hot water with both British and American authorities. Bevan’s full story will be told in due course in a later chapter; as a small section of it relates to Lazar, however, it’s vital that we note it here. One part of Bevan’s experiences — recorded officially by Scotland Yard during the course of its series of interviews with Bevan immediately after his 1996 arrest — focused upon him hacking his way into files and systems at Wright-Patterson that appeared to describe a craft astonishingly similar in design to one of those outlined by Lazar to George Knapp, even down to the super-heavy-element angle. Does that mean Lazar lives to fight another day?
As Bevan told it, on one particular system at Wright-Patterson that he accessed he came across a stash of e-mails in which there was a discussion about some sort of radical aircraft being developed at the base. It was described as very small and split-level, with a reactor at the bottom and room for the crew in the top section. When Scotland Yard’s Computer Crimes Unit asked Bevan if he saw anything else on the Wright-Patterson computers, he replied that yes, he did: He saw classified information on an anti-gravity propulsion system powered by a heavy element. The cops then wanted to know if Bevan had downloaded any of this information, printed it, and then secretly circulated it to colleagues within the UFO research field. Bevan assured them — at least three times — that he had not. The vehicle Bevan described to Scotland Yard sounds very similar to those to which Lazar claimed secret access at Area 51.
The Third Possibility
Even if Lazar is telling the truth as he saw it, does that necessarily mean we can trust his version of events? That might sound like an odd question, but, beyond the issue of whether Lazar is a teller of fantastic truths or a purveyor of outrageous lies, there is that third possibility I alluded to earlier. It’s one that is very seldom considered: Perhaps Lazar faithfully related to George Knapp (and later to many others) what he was told about and saw at Area 51, but Lazar was himself utterly lied to about the real nature of the “UFOs” to which he was exposed. What if the vehicles weren’t actually from another world after all? What if they were just the latest in a long line of amazing, futuristic craft developed and built at Area 51 by a team of technical wizards employed by good old Uncle Sam? What if the E.T. angle was introduced as a convenient cover to mask the terrestrial truth?
Aurora
UFOs and aliens aside, it is a fact that Area 51 has a long and secret history of designing, housing, and test-flying radical, unusual-looking aircraft. Mention has already been made of the U-2, the Blackbird, and the Nighthawk. But those babies are nothing when compared to a craft that has become legendary within both ufological and mainstream aviation circles. Its name, supposedly, is Aurora, and it officially does not exist. It is rumored to be a large, triangular, highly advanced aircraft able to fly almost silently. It is said to be capable of performing astonishing maneuvers, such as hovering for significant periods and traveling at tremendous speeds high in the upper atmosphere. The Aurora has been spotted in the skies of our world more and more often since the 1980s. Thus was born the mystery of what has become known as the Flying Triangles.
One stunning incident that may be relevant to the Aurora controversy occurred late at night in central England on March 31, 1993. The location was a military base in the English county of Shropshire called the Royal Air Force Shawbury. The primary witness was the base’s meteorological officer, a man named Wayne Elliott. What he saw was a gigantic, triangular-shaped object flying at a height of no more than 200 feet, and only about a similar distance from the base’s perimeter fence. Bearing in mind that a meteorological officer would generally be considered a highly reliable witness, well-trained in recognizing numerous types of aerial phenomena, we have to conclude that Elliott was able to accurately judge the size of the object, which he estimated to be somewhere between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Elliott also reported that the craft gave off a highly unpleasant low-frequency hum, and at one point fired a beam of light down to the ground that tracked very rapidly back and forth, sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base. Then it suddenly shot away at a fantastic speed, leaving the meteorological officer staring, awestruck, into the night sky.
Even the nation’s Ministry of Defense sat up and took notice of this event. Many people, including one of the Ministry’s official investigators of the affair, a man named Nick Pope, concluded it was due to the actions of visiting extraterrestrials, but others cast their suspicions in the direction of Area 51 and Aurora. Pope admitted that when the Ministry’s investigation of the incident was at its height, he and his colleagues could not ignore the various rumors that were making the rounds about a supposed Top Secret aircraft developed by the U.S. government called Aurora—or, indeed, any hypersonic prototype aircraft operated by the Americans. Questions were duly asked, but the only response from the United States was this: There is no such aircraft as the Aurora, nor is there any craft even remotely similar to what Elliott claims he saw.
Is it possible that the United States military was being somewhat economical with the truth when replying to the Brits? Let’s look at the words of one Walter Bosley, or, as he used to be known, Special Agent Walter Bosley, of the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Bosley, now retired from the world of officialdom, has gone on the record as stating that while working on counterintelligence programs from 1994 to 1999, he was involved in the secret circulation and dissemination of bogus UFO stories to act as convenient covers to hide and protect the test flights of advanced, terrestrial aircraft utilizing Stealth technology. Some of these craft were the secret developments of McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed. As long as the UFO faithful believed these craft had alien origins, and continued to pursue this false angle, officialdom was pretty much happy, as it kept the pesky, meddling saucer-watchers away from investigating secret, high-tech projects of a distinctly human nature.