Robert Scott Lazar born January 26, 1959 is an American conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed physicist who claims he was hired in the late 1980s to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial technology. This work supposedly occurred at a secret site called "S-4", a subsidiary installation allegedly located several kilometers south of the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51.
Lazar purports to have examined an alien craft and read US government briefing documents that described alien involvement in human affairs over the past 10,000 years. His claims brought additional public attention to Area 51 and fueled conspiracy theories surrounding its classified activities. His assertions have been analyzed and rejected by skeptics and some ufologists, although he retains a following of supporters.
Lazar has no evidence of alien life or technology, and elements of his claimed education and employment history have been exaggerated or fabricated. Perceptions of Lazar have also been affected by criminal activity: he was convicted in 1990 for his involvement in a prostitution ring, and again in 2006 for selling illegal chemicals. Journalist Ken Layne states, "A lot of credible people have looked at Lazar's story and rationally concluded that he made it up."
Background
Lazar graduated from high school late, in the bottom third of his class, with chemistry being the only science course undertaken. He subsequently attended Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles.
In 1982, Lazar worked as a technician for a contractor company that provided support staff to the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, within the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He filed for bankruptcy in 1986, where he described himself as a self-employed film processor. Lazar owns and operates United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, which sells a variety of materials and chemicals.
Claims
Education
Lazar claims to have obtained master's degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in electronics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). However, both universities show no record of him. Scientists Stanton T. Friedman and Donald R. Prothero have stated that nobody with Lazar's high school performance record would be accepted by MIT or Caltech.
Employment
Lazar claims to be a physicist, and to have worked in this capacity during his tenure at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. This assertion was echoed by a local journalist who interviewed Lazar about his interest in jet-powered cars in 1982; some media outlets have since dubbed him a "physicist". Inquiry into Lazar's position at the facility, however, revealed his role to have been a technician for a contractor firm, and that he worked neither as a physicist or for Los Alamos. As such, the laboratory has no records on Lazar, whom Prothero states was "in short, rather a minor player." The Smithsonian, and various mainstream news outlets, have stated that his "physicist" designation is self-proclaimed.
Since 1989, Lazar has achieved public notoriety as an Area 51 conspiracy theorist. In May of that year, he appeared in an interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS, under the pseudonym "Dennis" and with his face hidden, to discuss his purported employment at "S-4", a subsidiary facility he claimed exists near the Nellis Air Force Base installation known as Area 51. He claims that the said facility was adjacent to Papoose Lake, which is located south of the main Area 51 facility at Groom Lake. He claimed the site consisted of concealed aircraft hangars built into a mountainside. Lazar said that his job was to help with the reverse engineering of one of nine flying saucers, which he alleged were extraterrestrial in origin. He claims one of the flying saucers, the one he coined the "Sport Model", was manufactured out of a metallic substance similar in appearance and touch to liquid titanium. In a subsequent interview that November, Lazar appeared unmasked and under his own name.
where he claimed that his job interview for work at the facility was contractor EG&G and his employer was the United States Navy. EG&G stated it had no records on him. His supposed employment at a Nellis Air Force Base subsidiary has also been discredited by skeptics, as well as by the United States Air Force.
Lazar then claimed the US government was now waging an all out covert war against him. He said it shot out one of his tires and erased all of his educational records from CalTech and MIT. however, skeptics Donald R. Prothero, Stanton T. Friedman and Timothy D. Callahan find this to be implausible.
Lazar eventually claimed that, while at Area 51, his job was to reverse-engineer an alien material called “element 115” that he claimed was used to power an alien spacecraft. Lazar has repeatedly hinted that he took a piece of element 115 from Area 51, and that this element is of great interest to the federal government.
No evidence of the existence of Lazar’s element 115 has ever surfaced. However, according to Lazar, this alien artifact is a highly radioactive element that allows alien spacecraft to traverse the cosmos, impervious to gravity’s effects. Lazar has said for years that he worked on the material at Area 51, and that it can be used to power spacecraft.
Lazar once told Larry King. "It's a superheavy element,” "It's a unique element. When it's exposed to radiation, it produces its own gravitational field—its own antigravitational field, and it's what's used to lift and propel the craft.”
Conspiracy theorists and Lazar himself have suggested that Lazar stole a piece of Element-115 from Area 51, and that he has it to this day. The only presently known form of Moscovium has a half-life of 0.65 seconds and would thus have decayed very quickly. Nevertheless, the thinking is that the government wants it back, which is why law enforcement raided Lazar’s business.
Lazar has claimed that the propulsion of the studied vehicle ran on an antimatter reactor and was fueled by the chemical element with atomic number 115 (E115), which at the time was provisionally named ununpentium and had not yet been artificially created. (It was first synthesized in 2003 and later named moscovium.) He said that the propulsion system relied on a stable isotope of E115, which allegedly generates a gravity wave that allowed the vehicle to fly and to evade visual detection by bending light around it.
No stable isotopes of moscovium have yet been synthesized. All have proven extremely radioactive, decaying in a few hundred milliseconds. Lazar said the craft was dismantled, and the reactor he studied was topped by a sphere or semi-sphere which emitted a force field capable of repulsing human flesh. He explained that the craft was split into two main levels.
The reactor was positioned at the center of the upper level, with an antenna extending to the top, surrounded by three "gravity amplifiers". These connected to "gravity emitters" on the lower level, which can rotate 180 degrees to output a "gravity beam or anti-gravity wave" and that the craft would then travel "belly first" into this distortion field.
Lazar has claimed that during his joining the program, he read briefing documents describing the historical involvement of Earth for the past 10,000 years with extraterrestrial beings described as grey aliens from a planet orbiting the twin binary star system Zeta Reticuli. As of September 2019, no extrasolar planets have been found in the Zeta Reticuli system. In 1989, Lazar said the seats of the saucer he saw were approximately child-sized and that he had seen alien cadavers of a corresponding size.
He said that while walking down a hallway at S-4, he briefly glanced through a door window and saw what he interpreted as two men in lab coats facing down and talking to "something small with long arms". Three decades later, he said he did not think he saw an alien, but speculated that he saw a doll used as reference for the size of the alleged aliens, and that a nickname used for them was "the kids".
In the years after his initial appearance, Lazar largely returned to private life. He eventually opened a business called United Nuclear Scientific, a scientific supplies and equipment store based in New Mexico, and then Michigan (earlier this month, the company announced it’s moving to Oregon). From radioactive ore to ammonium nitrate, a quick check of Lazar’s scientific supply company’s website reveals the business caters towards the exotic and potentially dangerous side of science. A whimsically Strangelovian GIF on the site’s home page says, “Looking for some URANIUM? CLICK HERE.”
But now, 30 years after initially talking about Area 51, Lazar and United Nuclear Scientific have become part of a new and unusual situation that conspiracy theorists claim is tied to element 115. (It’s worth noting that Lazar’s element 115 is not muscovium, an element that was first synthesized in 2003 and added to the Periodic Table in 2015.)
His story has drawn significant media attention, controversy, supporters, and detractors. Lazar has no evidence of alien life or technology.
In 2017, Lazar's workplace was raided by the FBI and local police which Lazar theorizes was to recover "element 115", a substance he says he took from a government lab. Records obtained through a freedom of information request show the raid was part of a murder investigation to determine whether his company sold thallium to a murder suspect in Michigan. Lazar is not listed as a suspect in the investigation.
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.
According to the report, Lazar said sometime in March 2017 a woman provided him with her deceased brother’s “element collection,” which Lazar agreed to sell through his website. According to the report and Lazar, thallium was indeed one of the elements in this collection. “Thallium is something we never carried before and was just recently donated to us by the family of an element collector that died—so we now had a collection of some unusual materials we’ve never had before,” Lazar said in an interview.
Because the case is still an active investigation, some names and details are redacted from reports. MSP reports suggest that police believe one of their suspects may have purchased materials used in Sturzl’s murder from Lazar. The documents note that investigators obtained search warrants for a suspect's Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results, and seized computers and other data from a suspect. Shortly after obtaining information about those internet searches, investigators decided they wanted to question Lazar.
The MSP report indicates that local and state police traveled to several areas in Michigan to conduct interviews. During this same time frame it’s noted, “efforts will be made to contact/interview Bob Lazar (United Nuclear) in person regarding any Thallium sales; specifically, to [an unnamed individual]." Rajala goes on to say in his report that a police officer “had recently discovered United Nuclear advertises Thallium (for sale) on its website.”
Public appearances and media
Lazar and long-time friend Gene Huff ran the Desert Blast festival, an annual festival in the Nevada desert for pyrotechnics enthusiasts. The festival started in 1987, but was only formally named in 1991. The name was inspired by Operation Desert Storm.The festival features homemade explosives, rockets, jet-powered vehicles, and other pyrotechnics, with the aim of emphasizing the fun aspect of chemistry and physics.
Lazar was featured in producer George Knapp and Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell's documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers and Joe Rogan's podcast. Lazar had met and discussed his alleged works on UFOs with Navy pilot and commander David Fravor, who witnessed the USS Nimitz UFO incident in 2004.
What really muddies this was even further is that In late 2018, Lazar was the subject of a documentary made by filmmaker Jeremy Kenyon Locklear Corbell called Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers.
Lazar and Corbell have publicly said Lazar's company was raided as part of a sustained surveillance campaign against a man who's been called a "reluctant UFO messiah." In the documentary, Lazar and Corbell discreetly discuss the possibility of Lazar having taken a piece of the mysterious element.
The police search of United Nuclear came the very next morning after this cloak and dagger discussion, according to Lazar and Corbell. In an interview with Larry King, Corbell and Lazar claimed during the search that "FBI agents were able to repeat back verbatim" a portion of their previous day's private conversation. At the annual UFO festival in McMinnville, Oregon, Lazar told a crowd that the FBI had played an audio recording of he and Corbell's element 115 discussion." According to the MSP reports, police had already obtained search warrants a day prior to Corbell and Lazar’s conversation.
Corbell told Motherboard that the raid was actually related to the element: "If what Lazar has been telling us for 30 years is true, then a cover-story to distract from the actual intent of the raid is plausible," said Corbell.
Lazar and Corbell’s statements are contradicted, however, by someone claiming to be an employee of United Nuclear who posted on Reddit the day after the raid.
That person, under the pseudonym “PseudoSmarts,” said that “before the rumor mill gets out of control we wanted to set the record straight” in a thread titled “Bob Lazar’s business, United Nuclear, was just raided by the FBI.”
“We had a customer a few years ago that murdered his wife. FBI, local law enforcement came with a warrant to get our records on him. We provided them the documents and all the info we had on him,” they wrote.
To verify the authenticity of their claim, “Pseduosmarts” included a link to an Imgur photo showing Bob Lazar standing in United Nuclear while holding a sign that read, “Hello Reddit, 7/20/17.” When asked about the Reddit post, Lazar declined to comment.
Which makes his claims all the more harder to either believe or refute. Lazar claims one thing and someone else comes out and provides actual proof that what Lazar is saying isn’t actually quite true.
How it seems that Lazar can’t seem to stay away from controversy. Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time Bob Lazar and the sale of deadly toxins have come up. In 2006, several news outlets accused Lazar of “peddling poison” after he was found to be selling the same radioactive poison used to kill former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. Located in Albuquerque, N.M. at the time, United Nuclear Scientific’s website assured customers they would “run no risk of being tipped off to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” Newsweek reported.
Criminal convictions
In 1990, Lazar was arrested for aiding and abetting a prostitution ring. This was reduced to felony pandering, to which he pleaded guilty. He was ordered to do 150 hours of community service, stay away from brothels, and undergo psychotherapy.
In 2006, Lazar and his wife Joy White were charged with violating the Federal Hazardous Substances Act for shipping restricted chemicals across state lines. The charges stemmed from a 2003 raid on United Nuclear's business offices, where chemical sales records were examined. Lazar claimed later during that raid, he’d “heard some members of the SWAT team say ‘this is total bullshit—it’s nothing like they told us in the briefing.'” Which based on everything else, is hard to believe or corroborate.
United Nuclear pleaded guilty to three criminal counts of introducing into interstate commerce, and aiding and abetting the introduction into interstate commerce, banned hazardous substances. In 2007, United Nuclear was fined $7,500 for violating a law prohibiting the sale of chemicals and components used to make illegal fireworks.
Journalist Stephen Rodrick and author Neil Nixon write that further doubts have been cast on Lazar's credibility due to his criminal activity. Author Timothy Good and filmmaker Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, who have perpetuated Lazar's story, concur with this assertion.
To date, there’s never been any tangible evidence proving Lazar ever set foot inside Area 51, much less worked on alien spaceships or obtained any mysterious elements.
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