Long before Dave Grohl copped the name for his excellent band, Foo Fighters were the mysterious UFOs and strange aerial phenomena that bedeviled Allied aircraft pilots (and reportedly Japanese and German pilots as well) during World War II. While most of the reported sightings occurred during that war, there were some seen in the aerial battles during the Vietnam War. However, most references to Foo Fighters since then are about the band, which is why a recent sighting over an Air Force base in San Antonio, with pictures of UFOs amongst US aircraft and a connection to Foo Fighters, is worthy of attention.

“My residence is located under one of the flight paths for Kelly AFB in San Antonio. I regularly take photographs with a Nikkon camera of military airplanes flying over and around my residence in daylight and at night. On November 26, 2018 I was doing yard work in the morning and witnessed two Air Force Fighter jets with full after burners flying very low, and loudly, over my residence. I had heard them taking off from Kelly AFB a few minutes before I saw them. They were flying toward the southwest.”

That MUFON report, case 96768, was picked up by the TexasUFOs website which posted the photographs under the headline “Unidentified objects escorting Air Force Fighter Airplanes” and made the “foo fighters” connection. To their credit, they also point out that the unnamed witness didn’t see the UFOs in the air during the two different times, 2 pm and 2:04 pm, that the photographs were taken and didn’t notice them in the pictures until a few days later. TexasUFOs also says that they obviously could be specs of dust or a lens anomaly. (See the photos here.)

The witness didn’t notice anything unusual about the flight patterns which would indicate the pilots saw anything in their airspace or on their radar screens. There haven’t been any military reports or videos of UFOs around Kelly AFB … no flying Tic-Tacs. That’s why “foo fighters” is really a misnomer for the San Antonio sighting. Most World War II pilots who saw them described them as ball of light or fireballs following their planes but never actually catching up, flying past or showing any unusual maneuvers. And, since there are no reports of them attacking, the term “fighter” shouldn’t have been used in either case. Since they were close, meteors can be ruled out as well (the probable cause of UFOs seen recently by Canadian pilots over Baffin Island). A luminous electrostatic phenomena like St. Elmo’s fire or reflections of light on ice crystals, combined with the stress and intensity of aerial warfare, still seem to be more likely causes.

As for the San Antonio “foo fighters” … the needle at the moment is pointing to foo on the lens. You can have your band name back Dave.

In a recent article here on Bob Lazar, UFOs, Area 51 and Russian spies, I noted how the whole UFO angle of Area 51 might be a big game; an operation chiefly designed to try and reel in Russian spies. In my new book, Area 51, which will be published on January 1, I tell the story of another man who found himself in a very similar situation to Lazar, but close to two decades before Lazar was on the scene. The entire story is way too long to tell here, but here’s a summary: To demonstrate that the connection between Area 51 and UFOs goes back a significant number of years – and long before Bob Lazar almost became a household name – we have to go back to the dawning of the 1970s. The story comes from a man I’ll call John, and who I met back in the mid-2000s. It’s a story of incredible proportions and which clearly demonstrates that when it comes to the matter of aliens and the legendary secret base, nothing is as it seems to be. In fact, it’s much weirder.

From the latter part of the 1940s to around the end of the fifties, John was employed by the New York Police Department. The work was exactly what one would expect in a packed, bustling city like the Big Apple. There was, however, one unusual aspect to John’s career. It was in late 1957 that John and a couple of his colleagues were brought into a program to assist the FBI in uncovering a Russian spy-ring which was afoot in the city. The belief was that the Soviets were trying to infiltrate a certain company that worked in the field of weapons-development for the U.S. Government. By all accounts, the operation ran as smoothly as these things can: two Soviet operatives were rounded up and arrested, as were a couple of Americans, too.

In 1970, John was contacted by an old friend in the police who said that a prestigious job was coming up that John might find of interest. Intrigued, John asked his friend what the gig was. The response was a job with what was then called the Wackenhut Corporation. Today, it’s G4S Secure Solutions (USA). It’s a company that was established back in 1954 and which provided security to numerous companies that undertake contract work for the U.S. military, government and the intelligence community. Wackenhut also had the contract, in 1964, to provide all of the security for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Wackenhut was involved in matters relative to national security on a daily basis. And, John would have a significant position in the field of security – if, of course, he chose to take the job.

According to John’s friend, the jb that was coming up would be at a highly sensitive facility in the Nevada desert. You know the one. John’s friend informed him that the pay would be very good, that the job would guarantee John a lot of new contacts in his working career, and that it was definitely not an opportunity to be missed. John was sold on the idea. Little did he know at the time just how strange his life and world were about to become. John continued his work out at the facility for a pre-planned period, after which he moved into the world of private security, specifically doing background checks on people who were seen as useful for working on highly classified programs at Area 51 and within NASA. John continued with such work until 1981, when he retired.

It turns out that while at Area 51, John was exposed to a wealth of allegedly top secret files that told incredible stories of what the U.S. Government really knew about UFOs: crashed saucers, dead aliens; the usual stuff. Rather notably, despite being shown an astonishing wealth of material out at Area 51, John began to wonder if his whole time spent there was nothing but a cover for something else. After all, John wondered, given that he worked specifically – and only – in the field of security, why on earth was he given access to controversial and jaw-dropping data on the supposed history of aliens on our planet? What would have been the point? The whole situation completely defied logic. John clearly recognized this and speculated on the possibility that it was all some sort of intricate mind-game: to flood John’s mind with bizarre tales and documents relative to dead extraterrestrials, alien autopsies, and spacecraft from other worlds. Maybe, John suggested, it was a loyalty test: to see if he ran to the Washington Post or to the New York Times. John did neither. Rather, he stayed quiet (at least until the 2000s, when he was well into his old age), and as a result of his silence he was offered further, prestigious positions.

John also speculated on another possibility; it was a possibility which involved the Soviets. Although he was somewhat reluctant to address the matter in-depth – which is intriguing – John said he heard a few snippets of data suggesting that there was a small program at Area 51 which was trying to convince the Russians that the United States Government had not just alien bodies, but extraterrestrial technology; even highly advanced, powerful alien weaponry. John wondered if all of this was a mind-game – one designed to scare the Russians into thinking we had something that we never really did, but which the staff at Area 51 were hoping the Russians would come to believe. And come to fear, too. John died in 2013. His widow stated that in his final years John came to believe even more that what he saw and read out at Area 51 in the early 1970s was connected to a project of mind-blowing proportions; a highly detailed and intricate fabrication designed to have the Russians running around like headless chickens, wasting their time on disinformation dressed up as incredible truths and ultimately getting arrested. Ingenious Cold War-era disinformation of a very strange kind, in other words.

It’s been almost a year since the New York Times dropped a bombshell last December, which detailed the existence of a secretive UFO study program overseen by the Pentagon.

The news was shocking for many, as it was the first public confirmation of taxpayer-funded UFO studies undertaken by a U.S. Government agency since the conclusion of Project Bluebook, the United States Air Force study that ended in 1968 (although there are whispers of other, smaller-scale studies that may have occurred since that time).

Few details were given about the program, apart from its name–The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program–and confirmation of its existence by the likes of Luis Elizondo, the former head of the program, as well as politicians like Harry Reid who helped secure funding for it. It was also revealed that much of the funding allocated for the program–a meager $22 million, according to the NYT–was funneled to aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, who used it to outsource UFO research to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). Some of the funding may have also been put toward the furtherance of scientific studies of alleged paranormal activity at a ranch southeast of Ballard, Utah, known as Skinwalker Ranch.

Plenty of questions remain about all of this, of course. Despite Elizondo’s entry into the private sector (he now works for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, along with a number of other scientists with similar backgrounds in the unexplained), few additional details have been forthcoming about the Pentagon’s UFO interests. There were a few videos that were released, however, reportedly made with Raytheon’s Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) system; but as with most UFO videos, these leave much to the imagination, and remain far from being satisfactory “proof” capable of resting the doubts of the more skeptical among us. In other words, nothing conclusive about UFOs themselves–video or otherwise–has emerged with the knowledge of the Pentagon’s ongoing UFO studies.

Nothing akin to further evidence for their existence was even needed, of course, in order to stir the proverbial pot of public interest. A recent article at The Daily Beast, commenting on a summary of the original New York Times piece that appeared in The New Yorker, quoted the latter as saying that, “The internet went slightly more bananas than usual last weekend over The New York Times’ story implying that extraterrestrials are real and the U.S. government has been tracking them for years.” As The Daily Beast notes, “The [New York Times’s] reporting was long-awaited validation for anyone who has ever claimed a UFO sighting, or an inexplicable encounter with the beyond.

Not so fast.

Did the New York Times really imply, as The New Yorker suggests, “that extraterrestrials are real?” In short, the answer is no: the New York Times article never even used the term “extraterrestrial” (nor it’s acronym form, E.T.)… not even once. This was by design, of course: one of the article’s co-authors, Leslie Kean, has long championed the case for renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon by scientific and government organizations. She has also warned against conflating the terms “UFO” and “extraterrestrial,” and even addressed this specifically in the introduction of her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record, where she noted:

It’s extremely important to establish at the very beginning that neither I nor the other writers are claiming that there are alien spacecraft in our skies, simply because we do not deny data showing a physical presence of something there. The term “UFO” has been misused and has become so much a part of popular culture that its original (and accurate) definition has been nearly completely lost. Almost everyone equates the term “UFO” with extraterrestrial spacecraft, and thus, in a perverse twist of meaning, the acronym has been transformed to mean something identified rather than something unidentified. The false but widespread assumption that a UFO is, of necessity, an alien spaceship is usually the reason the term generates such an exaggerated and confusing range of emotional responses. A recognition of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being a valid, although unproved, possible explanation worthy of further scientific scrutiny is something entirely different from approaching the subject of UFOs as if this discovery had already been made.

I doubt that Leslie Kean would call the conflation of terms like UFO and extraterrestrial a “perverse twist of meaning” if she secretly meant “extraterrestrial spacecraft” every time she talked about UFOs. Hence, why it’s all the more important to address the problem she brings to light in the passage above.

No matter how carefully we attempt to frame discussions on the UFO subject, it is often difficult to escape the insinuation that UFOs are synonymous with extraterrestrials. In my own experience, there have been occasions where I have proposed ideas like time travel, interdimensional, or psychosocial phenomenon as alternative hypotheses to explain aspects of the UFO situation (these are speculative ideas, of course, and in my opinion, some are even less likely than the ever-popular “extraterrestrial hypothesis” or ETH. Nonetheless, I have at least been willing to entertain and write about these ideas, though never committing to them in the absence of solid evidence). In such cases, the conversations have often tended to come back around to something like, “so you’re saying that aliens are time travelers from the future?” In essence, the “extraterrestrial” stereotype prevails, even in cases where other theories are on the table.

Even when proposing alternatives like advanced “black budget” or military programs and experimental aircraft as possible sources for some UFO sightings (an idea that should seem entirely plausible, and perhaps even most likely in several cases), the stigma seems to remain. All too often, the idea that our government could have built some of these aircraft becomes attached to shadowy stories of “crash retrievals” and other similar things. In other words, we might be building them… but we couldn’t have learned to do something like that on our own: we must have stolen our ideas from the aliens! 

Note the similarity here between the “back-engineered crash retrieval” theories, and the myriad ancient astronaut ideas that have emerged over the years. Whether it’s UFOs we see buzzing around in our skies today or ancient monuments that seem impossible to build even with modern engineering knowledge, the intellectual black hole that is the ET hypothesis remains ever-present.

Of course, the very fact that there are several competing “theories” about what UFOs are points to the bigger problem: that despite the popularity of the “extraterrestrial” idea, rational-minded thinkers who have looked at the subject all realize that there simply isn’t enough evidence to support this idea, or any other theory about them, for that matter. We literally do not yet have enough evidence to tip the scales in favor of any single theory about what UFOs are, despite the accumulation of anecdotal evidence suggesting that they might exist… whatever “they” might be.

The best we seem to be able to do is acknowledge that some theories appear to be more likely than others. Arguably, the ETH could be seen as being more likely than fantastic alternatives like time travel, interdimensional gateways, or notions that UFOs are “quantum-topological” points of intersection between our perceived reality and the “Matrix” exterior to the simulation in which we operate, to paraphrase something cool that David Bowie once supposedly said about a UFO he saw.

Humans like to deal in absolutes, and nobody ever said that getting to the bottom of something like UFOs would be easy. At least on the civilian level, we appear to still be in the mode of trying to determine if there actually is a phenomenon, apart from all the anecdotal data that implies it. If… and that’s a big if… there is a provable phenomenon here worthy of study (as many have argued over the decades), then perhaps some of it could be of extraterrestrial origin. It’s not impossible, but it remains unproven.

We have a ways to go before we can make any firm conclusions about what UFOs are… and that’s why making presumptions about them in the meantime becomes a real problem.

Duke University in North Carolina is known for its excellent academic programs, high number of Rhodes Scholar graduates and outstanding basketball teams. All of that pales in comparison to the recent announcement that Duke will now offer a course in UFOs taught by a religious studies professor who is also a well-known UFO researcher. Is that enough to convince your parents not to cut off your tuition money when they find out you’ve changed majors to UFOlogy?

Image credit: stockxpert

“It’s not the first time I’ve taught a course on UFOs. In the spring semester of 1996, when I was a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Religious Studies, I gave a seminar called “Special Topics in Mysticism: Heavenly Ascensions and UFO Abductions.” One of my colleagues indulgently labeled it “a funny course.” He didn’t understand. Whatever UFOs are, they aren’t funny.”

David J. Halperin, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offers this bit of his own history on his website as an introduction and an aid for students wondering of a course entitled “UFOs – Encounter, Mystery, Myth” is a good elective. Professor Halperin is no slouch in either of his fields. After receiving his Ph.D. from Berkeley he taught Judaic studies in UNC’s Department of Religious Studies and had a special interest in religious traditions of heavenly ascensions and otherworldly journeys, resulting in five books on Jewish mysticism and messianism. He’s also the author of a novel, “Journal of a UFO Investigator,” and has a non-fiction book, “Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO,” coming out in 2020.

Halperin’s 1996 course covered the abduction story of Barney and Betty Hill, a class assignment to read and discuss Whitley Strieber’s Communion, and student research and presentations on, among other topics, the “X-Files” TV series, alien contact and different aspects of the UFOs’ impact on African-American culture. Halperin retired in 2000 and never taught the UFO course again … until now. Why resurrect it?

“UFOs are still with us, however, enjoying a surprising new respectability in the world that’s emerged from the 2016 Presidential election.”

He’s referring to when candidate Hillary Clinton said she would reopen the real X-files if she were elected president. Halperin’s new course will update his old one, then cover the alleged 1966 UFO landing at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia; the “Men in Black”; the experience of alien abduction’ and a look at what happened in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico. He’ll finish with more on what has happened since the 2016 election and conclude by discussing the same question about UFOs he attempted to answer in 1996: “What do they mean?”

What DOES it mean? It means one of the top universities in the country is offering a course in UFO studies, thus providing a little more legitimacy to a subject begging for it. “UFOs – Encounter, Mystery, Myth” will be offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke from January 7 to March 25, 2019. You can learn more and sign up here.

Go Blue Devils!

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sigmund Freud said that, but he left out a key corollary statement: sometimes that cigar is a UFO. The “cigar shaped” UFO is one of the most iconic and widely reported varieties of unidentified aerial phenomena. It’s been a staple of UFO lore since the beginning. While Freud would probably have some less than polite theories explaining why people keep seeing giant cigars in the sky, in reality it’s not the best description for these UFOs. They’re oblong and uniformly colored, but that’s about it. A cigar shaped UFO  should, at the very least, have a fiery engine or exhaust port on the back. But no, they’re just long ovals.

A recent sighting of a cigar shaped UFO in Texas demonstrates this. According to the Houston Chronicle, a witness, who chose to remain anonymous, took a video of a space stogie in the skies above Keller, Texas, near Fort Worth, on November 15. The video shows a solid white, oblong object against what looks like the evening sky. It doesn’t move at all, and although the video is only a minute long, the witness wrote in a report to the website Texas UFOs that the incident lasted for much longer:

“It was the oddest thing I’ve ever seen. I watched it for about 20 minutes. It didn’t move. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything in the sky stay that still before, not even for a few seconds, let alone 20 minutes.”

This looks way more like a cigar.

The witness says that the object looked reflective. Some have suggested that it could be a blimp, but Texas UFOs says that they could not find any evidence of a blimp in the area. Could it just be a weird cloud reflecting sunlight? Perhaps, but then why wouldn’t the reflected light match the color of the sunset? There’s probably a very good answer for that.

Yet, this isn’t an isolated incident. On their website, Texas UFOshas two more recent reports from all over the state witnessing the same thing. One report is a photograph of two white cigar shaped UFOs in Conroe, Texas taken on September 11. This photo was also taken at sunset and seems to lend credence to the idea that it’s some sort of weather/optical phenomenon.

Another report tells a different story. A report submitted to the National UFO Reporting Center alleges a sighting in the middle of the day in Copperas Cove, Texas. This report states that on November 15 at 2:55 pm, they saw a white oval shaped object hover motionless in the sky for 30 seconds before disappearing. This occurred on the same day as the Keller sighting. As with all UFO stories, however, there’s a catch: There is no photographic evidence given for the Copperas Cove sighting. Obviously you’re not always able to take photos when you see weird stuff in the sky, but without photographic evidence it can’t be used as proof.

Inconclusive. Just the way UFOs seem to like it.

Here at Mysterious Universe, Robbie Graham has just reviewed the new documentary from Jeremy Corbell, Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers. Robbie says the following of Lazar: “He has always come across as absolutely sincere and has always resisted encouragement to embellish his original testimony. I am of the opinion that Lazar has never spoken untruthfully about his recollections of Area 51 and S-4. However, I have also never doubted that the story that he tells is untrue—which is to say that the circumstances and events of Lazar’s story were carefully orchestrated and staged for him specifically as part of a sophisticated and ongoing UFO perception management campaign, which likely has counterintelligence purposes far beyond the UFO subject.”

Robbie continues with regard to Lazar: “As has been documented by George Knapp and others, there is good reason to believe that Lazar really did work at and/or near Area 51 for a short time in the late 1980s. But it appears he was cherry picked for his job based on his psychological profile and his spotty personal and business history. In other words, it was known and desired that he would blow the whistle when the time came, and that it would be easy to publicly discredit him after he did so, ensuring that his story would not be accepted by all, but by just enough to engrain it into a rapidly expanding subcultural belief system.”

Robbie also says of Corbell’s production: “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers makes for entertaining and thought-provoking viewing, but what’s missing is any real sense of the political and UFOlogical climate in which Lazar’s story originally came to light—we get the ‘what’ but we don’t get the ‘why.'”

I can fill in at least a part of the “why.” Right now, matters relative to Area 51 are getting quite a resurgence and a revival. In just four weeks from now my new book will be published. The publisher is Visible Ink Press and the title of the book isArea 51: The Revealing Truth of UFOs, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies. As I note in the book, one of the reasons why a program to highlight a fictitious UFO angle at Area 51 was created, was to try and reel in Russian operatives. In his paper, CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs: 1947-1990, Gerald Haines, historian of the National Reconnaissance Office, stated that in the 1970s and 1980s: “Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft) [italics mine].”

KGB Building, Moscow

Indeed, creating fabricated tales (and documents) to try and “out” Soviet spies (and domestic assets too) gets to the heart of much of this. It’s a fact that in the 1980s – and specifically so in the latter part of the eighties – the Russians were deeply interested in what was afoot at Area 51. They knew, for example, all about a controversial land grab in  the area by the U.S. Government which began in 1984 and which has continued for years. The Russians were also well aware that some highly radical aircraft were being secretly test-flown out at Area 51 and its immediate surroundings. There is another issue too. While Russian espionage agents were spying on Area 51 – and staying low in Las Vegas, as a means to keep the U.S. Government off their backs – U.S. agents were actually fully aware that those Soviet spies were operating in Nevada, looking to find out what was afoot at the infamous base. The problem was that the U.S. Government, military and intelligence community didn’t know where those Russian agents were, exactly, or who they were. Only that something disturbing was afoot locally, and which involved certain UFO researchers who may have “helped” those same Russians, as per Gerald Haines’ words relative to the CIA’s concerns about the KGB.

As a means to try and smoke out those Soviet personnel, and quickly arrest them, disinformation specialists at Area 51 may well have used Lazar as a patsy; as a man who was used by American intelligence to spread tales of acquired UFOs, dead aliens, and cosmic conspiracies. Lazar may have worked out at Area 51’s S-4, and he also may have fully believed those supposedly top secret briefing papers to which he had access and which told tales of ancient encounters between the human race and aliens, and genetic alterations to the human species made by advanced E.T.s. In that sense, Lazar was a completely unwitting figure in this strange mind-game.

It goes without saying that, for the Russians, uncovering the alien truth would have been the ultimate prize; even more so than anything that might be the creation of U.S. scientists. How could the Russians refuse the startling story – dangling like a carrot before them – of incredible alien science that just might give the Russians the upper-hand? Well, the answer is simple: they couldn’t resist it. The possibility of gaining alien technology, and even extraterrestrial weaponry, had the Russians practically hypnotized. The result: no doubt a quiet word from Moscow in the ear of a couple of guys hiding out in Vegas – let’s say Dimitri and Ivan – who are ordered to find out the amazing truth, but who end up getting arrested. Two important Russian spies have been captured and interrogated and, in the process, no real secrets have been compromised.

On this same issue, it’s worth noting one specific and short statement that Lazar made to journalist George Knapp, regarding what was going on at S-4. Lazar told Knapp that while he, Lazar, was at the base, the staff “play so many mind games there.” Lazar also admitted that certain memories from his time spent at Area 51 were not just hazy, but suspiciouslyhazy. This was something which led Lazar to believe that his mind had been tampered with – possibly via chemicals, hypnosis, and MK-Ultra-type “mind-control” technologies. Lazar was out at S-4, Nevada. But, what he was fed was fiction, designed to try and figure out the scope and number of Russian agents (and those suspected assets…) who were prowling around Nevada. They were actually – and originally – looking for highly advanced terrestrial technology. But, a plan was initiated to give those same agents and assets something else: aliens (dead and maybe alive), recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft, and top secret files. There’s just one thing, though: it was all bogus. Bob Lazar spoke truthfully about his experiences. But, what he was told and what he saw was notthe truth. The false stories of aliens and UFOs at Area 51 were born out of (A) the United States’ wholly understandable and real concerns of Russian knowledge of new American weapon-systems and experimental aircraft and of (B) U.S. attempts to bring that penetration to a halt and to figure out who, in those aforementioned “U.S. citizens and UFO groups,” were actively being used by the KGB.

• All of this will be followed (quickly) by another book from me, which will take matters even further. It’s title and subtitle: UFOs and Russian Meddling: Soviet Penetration and Manipulation of the Flying Saucer Scene.

And so it arrives: Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s much-anticipated feature documentary about one of the most controversial UFO stories ever told—a story that, along with the infamous Roswell Incident of 1947, has arguably done more than any other to shape the landscape of modern UFO mythology.

In November of 1989, a thirty-year-old scientist by the name of Robert Lazar was interviewed exclusively by the respected investigative reporter George Knapp for the Las Vegas-based KLAS TV station. The topic of the interview was Lazar’s alleged recent employment at a top secret facility in the Nevada desert called S-4, which was located close to another top secret facility called Area 51 (unknown to the public at the time). The story Lazar told was jaw-dropping, and he stands by it—word-for-word—to this day, despite continuous harassment by incredulous journalists, UFO buffs, and, apparently, various government agencies.

Bob Lazar today, sketching the flying saucer he claims to have worked on at a facility called S-4, near Area 51.

For those with an open mind (okay, a very open mind), it is perhaps easier to believe Lazar than one might imagine. He has always come across as absolutely sincere and has always resisted encouragement to embellish his original testimony. I am of the opinion that Lazar has never spoken untruthfully about his recollections of Area 51 and S-4. However, I have also never doubted that the story that he tells is untrue—which is to say that the circumstances and events of Lazar’s story were carefully orchestrated and staged for him specifically as part of a sophisticated and ongoing UFO perception management campaign, which likely has counterintelligence purposes far beyond the UFO subject.

As has been documented by George Knapp and others, there is good reason to believe that Lazar really did work at and/or near Area 51 for a short time in the late 1980s. But it appears he was cherry picked for his job based on his psychological profile and his spotty personal and business history. In other words, it was known and desired that he would blow the whistle when the time came, and that it would be easy to publicly discredit him after he did so, ensuring that his story would not be accepted by all, but by just enough to engrain it into a rapidly expanding subcultural belief system.

The Emmy-Award-Winning investigative reporter, George Knapp, who broke Lazar’s story to the world in 1989.

Lazar told Knapp how he had been recruited to work at S-4 for just a few weeks in 1988 and 1989. Everything was cloaked in secrecy and the atmosphere at the base was oppressive. Information was shared there strictly on a need-to-know basis and his every move was closely monitored by armed security personnel. He claimed that he was tasked with helping his employers at S-4 to understand the propulsion system of a highly advanced air/space vehicle, which was being stored in one of nine camouflaged hangars at the facility.

When Lazar first set eyes on the craft—which was classic saucer-shaped and which he later dubbed ‘the sport model’—he assumed it was man-made. He had not been a believer in flying saucers. As the days and weeks went by, however, Lazar came to the conclusion that the craft must have been extraterrestrial in origin. Its technology was far too advanced to have been of human design, and, furthermore, its seats were far too small to accommodate human adults. They were child-sized, he said.

A close up of Lazar’s saucer sketch, which he explains in detail in Corbell’s documentary.

While at S-4 on another occasion, Lazar was taken into an office and shown weighty briefing documents, which he was told to study. They described how aliens from Zeta Reticuli—the classic big-eyed Grays—had been interacting with humanity for at least 10,000 years. Literally everything Lazar read in the documents regarding human history, alien biology, and political events supported the disinformative narrative that had been actively sown into the UFO community since the early-1980s by US intelligence operatives in the form the fraudulent MJ-12 documents and by the highly questionable testimony of Mirage Men with names like “Falcon” and “Condor.”

The question is: why was Lazar, who was supposedly employed strictly on a need-to-know basis as a physicist with one very specific technical task, given access to top secret documentation which had literally no bearing on that task? Perhaps the answer is that Lazar was being deliberately seeded with disinformation and was expected to later share it with the public.

The orchestrated nature of Lazar’s experience is also supported by one of his most bizarre recollections of his time at S-4, in which he set eyes on an alien entity working quite literally side-by-side with human scientists. At least, that is what he was meant to believe he saw. Lazar claims that, on the night in question, he was being escorted down a hallway by armed security personnel who had instructed him to keep his eyes forward at all times. With this instruction in mind, as they passed a doorway, naturally Lazar glanced to one side. His peripheral vision detected what he thought in that moment was one of the Gray aliens he had read about in the briefing documents. The small figure was stood between two men in lab coats. The three of them were looking at a computer console, and the “alien” had its back to the door. Lazar’s glimpse was so fleeting that no fine details were distinguishable. He was then pushed further along the corridor by one of the guards who instructed him once again to keep his eyes forward. Lazar himself has always been open to the possibility that this incident was staged specifically for him using a doll or a dummy and has speculated that someone may have been playing mind games with him.

Inside The Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, Nevada, not too far from the gates to Area 51.

Most of the events described above are featured in Corbell’s documentary in the form of archive news footage of Lazar and in on-camera testimony of the UFO icon as he appears today, working in his lab or at home with his wife. We also get some input from his friends, family, and colleagues, all of whom fully support his story. As the reporter who introduced Area 51 to the world, George Knapp features prominently in Corbell’s film, again both in the form of archive footage and speaking from his home in the present day or as a disembodied voice on Corbell’s speaker-phone. Hollywood legend Micky Rourke is billed as narrating the documentary, but his contributions amount to little more than sporadic, largely unintelligible mumblings about the nature of truth and the universe which threaten seriously to derail Corbell’s narrative whenever it finds time to settle into a groove—which isn’t very often.

From the get go, and throughout, Corbell’s film is mired by an intrusive and over-produced electronic soundbed of pulsating intensity. It’s almost relentless, and it serves only to distract from the story itself, which is more than sufficiently compelling to be presented without whistles and bells.

For those already well-read on the Lazar case, Bob Lazar will offer few surprises, but it is fascinating nonetheless to spend time with the man thirty years on from when he rocked the world. Corbell succeeds in showing us Lazar—the man and the legend—up close and personal, revealing, ironically, a pretty down-to-earth guy who has tried his best to get on with his life as a scientist and business man, as removed as possible from the maddening world of UFOlogy. For better or for worse, he has chosen to be a largely-silent spectator to the formation of his own myth.

The film does present some circumstantial corroborative evidence for Lazar’s claims. One scene sees Corbell presenting Lazar with photographs he has acquired of the high-tech hand-scanners used at Area 51. Lazar had always maintained that these devices were used during his time at S-4, but when he described them in the late-1980s, they sounded like science-fiction. Apparently not. The look on Lazar’s face as he examines the photos is one of obvious familiarity with what he’s seeing, and his sense of vindication is palpable.

One of the most interesting and dramatic scenes see Lazar and his colleagues describing a disturbing raid on his home during the production of Corbell’s film by a parade of government agencies in search of… something (I will avoid spoilers here). On the face of it, these events add some support to the notion that Lazar is of considerable interest to the US national security apparatus—and all that that implies. Yet, frustratingly, Corbell makes little of this in his documentary. By the time the credits roll, this crucial scene is almost forgotten.

Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers makes for entertaining and thought-provoking viewing, but what’s missing is any real sense of the political and UFOlogical climate in which Lazar’s story originally came to light—we get the “what” but we don’t get the “why.” Given the recent revelations of the Pentagon concerning UFOs, which are tied in with the efforts of self-styled Disclosure hero Tom DeLonge, understanding the motivations behind UFO disinformation efforts is today more important than ever, but Corbell’s Lazar story is presented in a cultural and political vacuum, dampening its potential relevance and impact.