Is Bob Lazar the real deal?

October 29, 2023

Assuming you weren't born at the stroke of midnight yesterday, you've likely heard of Robert 'Bob' Lazar who claims to have worked at "S-4" for a brief time in 1988 before he was dismissed for exposing what was going on there. S-4, he tells us, is a super-secret section of the Nevada Test Range, better known as Area 51, where several alien space craft are kept, along with a potential extraterrestrial being. Lazar claims he was tasked with reverse engineering a component of an anti-gravity propulsion system for one of the captured ET vehicles which he nicknamed the 'Sport Model', that being its element 115 powered, non-ionizing nuclear reactor.

Up to this point Lazar's story sounds plausible. There is indeed a great deal of evidence which strongly suggests that extraterrestrial space craft have been targeted, captured and reverse engineered. The many problems with his story surface almost immediately however.

One of the initial problems is that there is no evidence that S-4 exists at the location where Lazar claims. The following is from The Lazar Report: Fraud, Fiction and Fantasy at S4 by Michael Schratt:

In a 1996 documentary titled "DREAMLAND" (see references below) Lazar made the following statement: "On the first occasion when I drove out there, all the hangar doors were closed, but at close range you could tell that they were doors and they would open. We drove around the left side of the installation, and there was the main entrance in there, and went through some gates and a security checkpoint inside, and it seemed like a typical government building". Note how Bob described how he had to pass through "gates" BEFORE entering the S4 facility. There has never been any evidence of "gates" at Papoose Lake. Commercially available Russian satellite going back to 1993 show no signs of a "gate" near the Papoose mountain range.

Lazar alleges he was chosen for the job at the Nevada site due to his alleged experience in physics, but primarily because the last guy, whom he was hired to replace, allegedly blew himself up when he attempted to crack open the alleged element 115 powered reactor and so his alleged employer, EG&G, was allegedly desperate to find a replacement, thus implying that security concerns took a back seat. Notice all the "alleges" there?

Lazar paints quite an elaborate picture of his short time at S-4, complete with some documents, drawings and a detailed description of how the yet to be discovered element 115 must be machined in a very specific way in order for it to produce the desired reaction. The documents he provides -- those which don't immediately appear to be forged -- support his story according to his followers and his body language doesn't seem to indicate a lot of deception. In a further effort to boost his credibility, Lazar claims to have never profited from his story and hates doing interviews and just wants to put all this behind him and get on with his life. The problem is that his actions contradict his claims. Lazar has given several radio, television and other media interviews, his most recent being his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast along with film maker, Jeremy Corbell, who made the 2018 documentary, Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers, in which Lazar willingly participated.

Element 115 is a keystone of Lazar's story. Both he and his supporters claim the element wasn't known to science at the time he went public, therefore his knowledge of it supports his claims. The problem, as i understand it, is that using the discovery of element 115 to bolster his credibility is essentially equivalent to stating that the number after 10 cannot be known because no one has counted to 11 yet. Nevertheless, many of Bob's fans, including those with a vested interest, such as George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, state that Bob's knowledge of element 115 at that point in time supports his claim to have worked with an advanced propulsion system at Area 51. Some of the problems regarding the 115 claim are addressed in the following article by Luis Cayetano who has a background in evolutionary biology and ecology:

Bob Lazar's litany of lies and whoppers

He played no role whatsoever in the eventual synthesis of element 115 in 2003. He has refused, for over 32 years, to stand in front of a scientific committee or even a qualified scientist to discuss his supposed knowledge about it, even though his contribution - if genuine - could have earned him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and thereby validated and further publicized his story to the very scientific community whose interests he claims to represent.
He has provided no evidence at all that he ever worked with any variant of element 115. He claims that he can't even remember whether he saw a spectrograph of it at "S4" (see further below for details about his 1993 press Q & A in Rachel, Nevada). He has presented no physical samples, despite hinting that he smuggled some of it out of "S4" (also alluded to in press Rachel Q & A).
Currently, science does not know what element 115's emission spectrum looks like. This precludes searching for it in celestial objects and potentially validating Lazar's supposition that it may occur naturally as a result of supernovae. Conveniently, Lazar himself has claimed that he does "not remember" what it looks like from the "tests" that were supposedly run on it at "S4".
"Predicting" an element is as easy as looking at a periodic table, noting which element currently has the highest atomic number on the table, and then adding a few spaces to it. Watch: I predict that someday, element 120 will be synthesized. Does that make me a physicist?
Many other people were predicting that it would eventually be synthesized - a sensible supposition given that throughout the 20th century, various elements that are not known to naturally occur were indeed synthesized. Between 1994 and 2003, seven elements other than 115 were produced in labs around the world, highlighting that this is part of a pattern of discovery in which these sorts of milestones are to be expected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_element#List_of_synthetic_elements In other words, element 115 was bound to be synthesized sooner or later, and it wouldn't have taken much physics acumen to know this.
In short, Lazar's story demonstrates no special knowledge on his part about element 115. His story contributes no scientific knowledge whatsoever to physics or chemistry.

Regarding the secret, state of the art hand scanning device which Lazar claims was used as part of the security protocol at S-4, and which is offered as further evidence by his supporters that he worked there since its existence was confirmed only recently by none other than Jeremy Corbell apparently, the same article states the following:

Many of his fans point to the hand-scanner that Lazar talks about that, to them, "proves he worked at S4". Unfortunately, this device was already publicly available knowledge by the early 1970s. It appears in electronics catalogs of the time, such as this July 1973 issue of Radio-Electronics: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dd2vR7wL3a3_PC26Fd-fQp7tXQx5zhnJ/view?usp=sharing (original link was at http://www.qrzcq.com/mirrors/www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-Electronics/70s/1973/Radio-Electronics-1973-07.pdf but this appears to be a broken link now). A discussion of the IDENTimat hand-scanner is on the 8th page of the file, along with a photo of it. The device also appeared in the 1977 film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (https://youtu.be/Igch3aeWAXM), a film which itself has several aspects that are suspiciously similar to Lazar's story (see further below). Here is a newspaper story about the hand-scanner from 1972: https://i.imgur.com/20kYen8.jpg

Radio-Electronics magazine, July 1973 issue (roughly 20 years prior to Lazar going public with his story)

During Corbell's filming of his documentary, Lazar's business, United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, was raided by the FBI along with state and local law enforcement. The implied motive, as you might have guessed, was the suspicion that Lazar possessed a sample of the illusive element 115 which he smuggled out of S-4. While Corbell squeezes every drop of drama he can from the raid, suggesting that Lazar indeed has a chunk of 115, the evidence suggests that the reason for the raid is far less sensational.

Jeremy Corbell and Robert Lazar (who just want's to be left alone)

Bob Lazar Says the FBI Raided Him to Seize Area 51's Alien Fuel

According to months worth of incident reports obtained by Motherboard, the 2016 raid on United Nuclear was part of an ongoing and extensive murder investigation that includes state, local, and federal authorities. The documents make no mention of element 115.
According to reports written by Michigan State Police Sergeant Detective Thomas Rajala, the events leading up to the search of United Nuclear began in late 2015 with the mysterious death of 31-year-old Janel Struzl. Rajala says doctors concluded Struzl was poisoned and died of "thallium toxicity." Colorless, odorless, and tasteless, thallium sulfate has been described as "the poisoner's poison" due to the substance's high toxicity and difficulty to detect.
Thallium is most often used in the manufacture of electronics, as well as in glass manufacturing and the pharmaceutical industry. When isolated, it looks like tin. Thallium is a regular topic of conversation among elements collectors, who try to obtain samples of as many elements in the periodic table as possible.
According to the Michigan State Police reports and United Nuclear Scientific's website, Lazar's company sells thallium, and the police search was intended to learn more about who he'd sold the material to. Lazar is not specifically listed as a suspect in the murder in the police documents.

There is no shortage of other glaring problems with Lazar's story, any of which could have prevented him from passing a background check and, collectively, would have. Such problems include, but are by no means limited to, his criminal record, including incidents related to prostitution, blackmail, unpaid debt, bankruptcy, forged documents, a "degree" from Pacifica University which was shut down due to it being a diploma mill, and of course his inability to prove he ever attended the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

MIT almost certainly wouldn't have accepted Lazar due to his poor grades at W. Tresper Clarke High School where he placed 261 in a class of 369. Again, from Schratt's article:

Bob Lazar has never produced his degrees from either MIT or Caltech which could help to verify his educational background.
[...]
Bob Lazar never produced a copy of his Master's thesis (on Magnetohydrodynamics MHD) from either MIT or Caltech. All efforts to track down Bob Lazar's Master's thesis (if it ever existed) from MIT have failed. How is this possible if he really did attend MIT?
[...]
No Yearbooks from either MIT or Caltech during the early 1980's show any listing for a Robert Scott Lazar despite his statement indicating he achieved his degree from MIT in 1982. Lazar claims that his Professor at MIT was named "Hostfield". In addition, Lazar claims that his Professor at Caltech was named "Duxler". Records indicate that there never was a Dr. Hostfield who taught at MIT. Furthermore, Professor Duxler never taught at Caltech, but did teach at Pierce Jr College which was confirmed by Stanton Friedman.

Additionally, Lazar exhibited and a wildly unstable family life in which his first wife, Carol, was convicted of 2nd degree murder, conveniently committed suicide while he was in the process of marrying his second wife, Tracy Murk, who was convicted of forgery and who, like his first wife, used several different names in order to avoid legal troubles. The following is from the article, The Shadow of Bob Lazar's First Wife Carol Lazar:

It was previously revealed through Tom Mahood's research that Carol Lazar passed away just two days after Bob married Tracy Ann Murk, despite still being legally married to Carol (certificates).
[...]
On July 27, 1980, Carol Nadine Strong and Robert S. Lazar tied the knot in Woodland Hills, California. Both of them were employed at Fairchild Industries, where they are believed to have met each other. Carol, born in 1942, was 15 years older than Bob. According to SignalsIntelligence's research, Carol's actual family name was Asher, not Strong as she claimed on her marriage certificate. The investigation further revealed that Carol Nadine Asher had been charged with second-degree murder in 1975, to which she eventually pleaded guilty.
[...]
On April 19, 1986, Bob Lazar married Tracy Ann Murk in Las Vegas. The marriage certificate was delivered to an address that belonged to Tracy's father Donald. It's important to note that Bob was still legally married to Carol at the time. However, after Carol's passing, Bob and Tracy married for a second time in October, making their marriage legal. For this second marriage, Tracy used the alias Jackie Dianne Evans. Tracy was six years younger than Bob and half the age of Carol. Tragically, Carol passed away on April 21, just two days after Bob and Tracy's first marriage.
[...]
According to the research conducted by SignalsIntelligence, Tracy was arrested for forgery shortly before her employment with the Lazars. In 1985, she worked as a teller at the Los Alamos National Bank, where an undercover bank agent, investigating theft, coaxed Tracy and two of her friends into attempting to steal money from one of the bank accounts. Their endeavor proved unsuccessful, leading to Tracy's termination and subsequent charges in December of the same year. While awaiting court proceedings, Tracy changed her name to Jackie, reportedly in an attempt to evade prosecution.
Carol Lazar passed away on April 21, 1986. According to the police report, her cause of death was determined to be suicide. She was found in the garage of her Las Vegas home, inside a vehicle filled with exhaust fumes.

Again from the article quoted earlier, Bob Lazar's litany of lies and whoppers:

It's abundantly obvious that someone like Lazar would have been seen as a security liability by his purported handlers from day one:
Given his marital issues, dire financial troubles throughout much of the 1980s (for which he had to eventually declare bankruptcy), and tendency for exaggeration, self-promotion, and lies, Lazar was a poor fit for any highly classified program, regardless of his credentials (which are themselves highly suspect; see further below). Such people are seen as being easily manipulated by enemy intelligence agencies and as a likely source for leaks. And this is even before we consider his close association with the known UFO fanatic John Lear. In other words, we're being asked by Lazar to believe that the US military knowingly hired someone who would have clearly been a KGB/GRU magnet. He then affirms that he's exactly the sort of person who wouldn't be chosen for such projects when he purports that he squealed to his friends, drove around with "MJ-12" license plates on his Corvette (see further below), invested in and helped run brothels, and lied about his education.

Several more of Lazar's claims are addressed in the same article:

Lazar couldn't name his "supervisors" at Caltech and MIT, instead naming people who never worked at these institutions:
Nor has he ever detailed the results from his "MIT master's thesis", and the topic of his "MIT master's thesis" (magnetohydrodynamics) was chosen so that he could flex his UFO credentials to the UFO crowd. Lazar's credentials from prestigious institutions are oddly uncorroborated by ANY certificates, documents, papers, momentos, year book mentions, photos with colleagues, graduation gowns, letters of congratulations, colleagues vouching for him, or draft or final copies of his theses - documents that should be in his own possession (the excuse that "the government wiped his records" doesn't work, because here I'm referring to documents that should be in Lazar's own possession AFTER being issued to him by the relevant institutions and BEFORE he supposedly worked at "S4"). What were the discoveries or implications of his research? How and with whom did he share these results with? Even his close friend and associate George Knapp has asked him to come clean on his credentials so that people can stop discrediting him on this score, but Lazar refuses to do so and clings to the story that he has two master's degrees. Lazar cannot even VERBALLY DESCRIBE from his OWN MEMORY any concrete details, results or discoveries pertaining to these "degrees". Are we to believe that the government therefore also "wiped his memory"? And that they crawled into the basements and attics of MIT and CalTech alumni in possession of the year books (issued in the early 1980s when Lazar supposedly attended these institutions) and then "erased" his name from them? Such a feat might be possible - if yearbooks came fitted with tracking devices.
[...]
Lazar is now closely associated with Jeremy Corbell, another peddler of nonsense and pseudoscience:
Lazar's fans claim that he "doesn't associate with the UFO community", even as he gives speaking tours to UFO conventions, relies upon UFO-affiliated people to promote and "validate" his story and to keep him relevant, litters his own story with UFO lore, and sells flying saucer merchandise on his company's website.
[...]
He claims that "the technology should be in the hands of the scientific community" - yet Lazar has steadfastly refused to EVER be cross-examined by actual scientists about the technology he supposedly worked on or about element 115:
He only EVER appears in front of crowds of adoring fans and is only ever interviewed by gullible radio talk show hosts and credulous reporters throwing him soft-ball questions. Is this the way an actual physicist who not only saw but WORKED ON alien technology would behave? A physicist so brilliant and "out of the box" in his thinking that he was hired to work on technology from another world? In the early 1990s, Lazar was even INVITED by Ben Rich, the then-head of the Lockheed Skunk Works, to give a talk to a gathering of professional aerospace journalists and engineers. Predictably, and unsurprisingly, Lazar declined. He now claims that he wishes he had kept his mouth shut because he wants to work on the "technology". Yet he turned down the head of the Skunk Works?!

Jeremy Rys, a physicist with a strong interest in advanced propulsion and UFOs who runs the Alien Scientist website, shines a bright light through a few of the many dump truck sized holes in Lazar's story during an interview by Danny Jones, Explosive New Bob Lazar Evidence & Area 51 Secrets Revealed | Jeremy Rys. Subjects discussed include:

0:00 - The case against Bob Lazar
2:59 - Element 115
8:39 - Bob Lazar's educational background
16:49 - Site 4 (S4)
21:05 - Evidence Bob made money from his story
28:30 - Mike Thigpin
34:24 - Demon core: the strange death of Louis Slotin
38:58 - Biometric bone density scanner
44:56 - Alfred Loedding flying saucer designs
50:01 - Papoose Lake
52:27 - MIT / Resume
1:04:31 - Quantam Electro Dynamics
1:13:47 - Recent UFO disclosures
1:15:07 - Roswell
1:27:00 - Light propulsion
1:42:10 - Super cavitation
1:46:12 - Tic tac UFO & 'Cube Inside a Sphere'
1:56:40 - Mirage effect technology
2:11:19 - Biologically engineered beings
2:22:40 - Drones & cold fusion
2:41:25 - Cattle mutilation & Robert Bigelow
2:48:36 - Camp Hero / Montauk
2:56:12 - Will Bob Lazar debate Eric Weinstein?
3:03:34 - Malcolm Bendall & building the pyramids
3:23:07 - What if Bob Lazar is telling the truth?
3:31:47 - Hal Puthoff

Like so many others have, i too bought into Lazar's fairy tale for far too long because i never bothered to verify it until very recently and, upon doing so, it didn't take long to figure out that the likelihood of his story being true is approximately zero. Nevertheless, a cottage industry has been created around his nearly 40 year old story which continues to entertain the gullible and which has enriched many people in different ways including John Lear, George Knapp, Gene Huff, Jeremy Corbell, Testors and, contrary to his bullshit, Bob Lazar himself who has profited from various deals including his autobiography. Once again from the article, Bob Lazar's litany of lies and whoppers:

People often claim that he's never made any money out of his story:
The exact opposite is the case. He has made money from the sale of the aforementioned "Lazar Tape" co-produced with Gene Huff; TV interviews with foreign networks; his consultation with the Testors Toy Model company and the model kit they produced for the "sport model saucer"; his current sale of Area 51 and "S4" related merchandise on his United Nuclear company's website, including signed prints of his "sport model" sketch: http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=86. He now has an autobiography titled "Dream Land", where he no doubt tries to cash in once again on his story by selling it to gullible audiences who don't know how (or have no inclination) to fact-check, while providing no scientific information that could verify his story.

Lazar has dug himself into a hole from which there is no escape. Even if he wanted to admit his deception, his followers would likely argue to their graves that he was threatened with his life by the MiB. Personally i'd forgive the guy. Bob is certainly not a dummy and i think you gotta hand it to a guy that can pull off a relatively harmless hoax of this magnitude and manage to keep it rolling for nearly 40 years and counting.

Since Corbell's documentary was released late last year, Lazar's supporters have become more militant about the accusation that the FBI improperly raided United Nuclear to recover element 115. Even the Daily Beast asked, "Why did the FBI raid the home of the biggest alien truther?"

Simply put, there is no fucking way that a serial liar with a bizarre family life and criminal history would have ever passed a background check to work as a school janitor. The thought that Robert Scott Lazar could have been granted a TS/SCI clearance, "38 levels above Q" according to him, to work as a senior physicist anywhere near a highly secure and secretive installation where work on top secret aircraft was being preformed, is nothing less than ludicrous.

Case closed.

Sources