Regular Episode
#185 – THE RESURRECTION OF BOB LAZAR(US)
🛸 Who Is Bob Lazar?
Bob Lazar burst into public consciousness in 1989 when Las Vegas investigative reporter George Knapp aired interviews with him — initially with his identity obscured, going by the pseudonym “Dennis.” Lazar’s claims: he was recruited via a chance encounter with physicist Edward Teller (who allegedly noticed local news coverage of Lazar’s jet-powered car), vetted through an extensive security clearance process, flown from McCarran Airport to a classified facility on a bus with blacked-out windows, and put to work reverse-engineering the propulsion systems of nine extraterrestrial craft at a facility designated S-4, adjacent to Area 51 in the Nevada desert. He says he worked there from December 1988 to approximately April 1989 — roughly five months.
To build credibility for his story early on, Lazar took Knapp and others, including John Lear, to a spot near the base perimeter where, at a predicted time, something flew in the sky. For many followers, that was enough. Lazar and Knapp together were instrumental in bringing the concept of Area 51 into the national conversation — at a time when most Americans had no idea the base existed at all.
⚛️ Element 115 and the Anti-Gravity Drive
Central to Lazar’s account is the claim that the alien craft were powered by an anti-gravity propulsion system dependent on a stable isotope of Element 115 — then a purely theoretical entry on the periodic table. When Lazar made these claims in 1989, the element had never been synthesized. Scientists finally produced it in 2003, officially naming it Moscovium (Mc) in 2016. The catch: the synthesized isotopes are highly unstable, decaying in milliseconds. Believers point to Lazar’s early prediction as vindication; skeptics note that a stable, propulsion-worthy form has never materialized. Blake also observes, perhaps for the first time anywhere, that the element’s former placeholder name — Ununpentium — sounds suspiciously close to unobtainium, the generic miracle-propellant of science fiction.
The documentary implies that Lazar may still possess a sample of Element 115 he allegedly pocketed from S-4 — a conversation he and Corbell have carefully off-camera in the woods with their phones off. The very next day, Lazar’s business was raided by the FBI. Corbell presents this sequence as deeply suspicious; Blake notes that Lazar’s company, United Nuclear, had also drawn law-enforcement attention for separately shipping potentially hazardous chemicals.
🎓 The Credential Problem
Lazar claims to hold master’s degrees from MIT and Caltech and to have worked as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. None of these credentials have been independently verified. Notably, it was prominent UFO researcher Stanton Friedman — himself a former nuclear physicist and hardly a skeptic of UFO claims — who first dug into Lazar’s background and found it wanting. Lazar’s explanation: the government erased his records to discredit him. Blake and Karen find this explanation difficult to credit on practical grounds (yearbooks, phone books, former classmates all presumably unaltered), though George Knapp did surface a Los Alamos internal phone directory listing Lazar’s name — a fragment both hosts regard as thin evidence of the claimed physicist role. Friedman’s working theory was that Lazar may have been a contractor rather than a direct employee, which would explain partial records — but would not explain the MIT and Caltech degrees.
🎬 The Documentary: Corbell’s Case for Lazar
The Corbell film narrated by Mickey Rourke is, both hosts agree, a more watchable film than the Skinwalker Ranch documentary — but it wears its advocacy plainly. It provides an intimate look at Lazar’s current domestic life (a nice house, Blake suspects in Michigan, where United Nuclear operates), his jet-powered vehicles, and his wife. What it doesn’t do, Karen argues, is give newcomers a coherent grounding in the story — it presupposes familiarity and spends considerable runtime simply trying to validate claims rather than interrogating them.
Blake’s metaphor for the whole enterprise: Lazar on a jet-powered bicycle. “If you get past the loud noise, it’s still just a bicycle.” Specific documentary elements Blake and Karen discuss include:
– The biometric hand-geometry scanner Lazar describes as the check-in device at S-4 — Corbell presents photographs of similar machines as corroboration, though Blake points out such technology was commercially available to government contractors and need not have come from an alien base.
– A hypnotherapy session included in the film, which Blake regards skeptically as a memory-recovery technique vulnerable to leading questions and false-memory implantation.
– Multiple polygraph examinations Lazar has taken at Knapp’s request — which Blake compares, in terms of evidentiary value, to an e-meter.
– Rourke’s narration, which oscillates between poetry and, as Blake puts it, “a drunk poet at the bar.”
🔍 Skeptical Context: What Else Could Explain It?
Blake floats a speculation he’s carried since first hearing the story on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell in the 1990s: that Lazar may have known someone who legitimately worked at Area 51 and absorbed local lore circulating in the Las Vegas area — a region where many people quietly commuted to the base. Karen raises the parallel of MonsterTalk guest Donald Prothero, whose own father worked at Area 51.
The hosts also touch on the claim — found in Philip Corso‘s book The Day After Roswell — that the transistor, microchip, and other technologies of the computer revolution were reverse-engineered from the Roswell crash. Blake finds this unconvincing: the evolutionary lineage of computing — from mechanical switches to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits — is thoroughly documented and doesn’t require an extraterrestrial shortcut. On the topic of what real secret technology did come out of Area 51: the SR-71 Blackbird, stealth aircraft, and early drone programs are the more supportable candidates.
A darker footnote: workers at Area 51 who were ordered to burn hazardous materials in open pits — without protective equipment — later developed serious illnesses and had to sue the government simply to force it to acknowledge the base existed, in order to obtain medical benefits.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 The Day After Roswell 💵 by Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes
– 📚 Dreamland: An Intimate History of Area 51 💵 by Phil Patton
🔗 Related Links
– Bob Lazar – Wikipedia
– Area 51 – Wikipedia
– Moscovium (Element 115) – Wikipedia
– George Knapp – Wikipedia
– Stanton Friedman – Wikipedia
– Jeremy Corbell – Wikipedia
– United Nuclear – Bob Lazar’s scientific supply company
– Skeptic Magazine
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
A new UFO/Area-51 documentary by Jeremy Corbell (see Hunt for the Skinwalker mentioned in MonsterTalk Patreon Bonus Episode 001) has been very successful. Blake and Karen discuss the documentary and the legend of Bob Lazar. Some of Lazar’s personal history deals with adult topics, so I’m putting an explicit tag on this episode.
WARNING: Adult subject matter in this episode. Listener discretion advised.
Related links
- Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers (documentary)
- Bob Lazar’s company: United Nuclear
- A debate featuring Jeremy Corbell and Stanton Friedman
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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