-
- Note - The information in George Knapp's presentation,
even though presented some time ago, remains well worth reading. Our thanks
to Skye Turell for doing this transcription and calling our attention to
it.
-
- Transcript Of George Knapp's presentation at
"The UFO Experience" Conference In New Haven, CT, October 1993.
-
- From Skye Turell <mindtrekker@mindspring.com
8-23-00
-
-
- JOHN WHITE: George is Sr VP of Altamira Communications
in Las Vegas, where he is producing a multi-part UFO documentary series.
George is an award-winning investigative journalist. He created, produced
and directed a documentary series, "UFOs: The Best Evidence,"
which won an award from the Fund for UFO Research. Formerly the anchorman
for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, Nevada. His UFO investigations have been honored
by the Associated Press, UPI and the Fund for UFO Research. It was George
who first brought the claims of the controversial physicist Robert Lazar,
concerning secret programs in the Nevada desert, to the pubic through his
news programs. George will give us a history of what are called "Black
Projects," meaning highly classified, at Groom Lake NV, an Air Force
facility just north of Las Vegas. And he also relate witness accounts and
reactions to these reports from Ufology, and mainstream media and the U.S.
military. Please welcome George Knapp.
-
- GEORGE KNAPP: Good afternoon, everyone. I heard the news
about midnight last night, as I was spilling out of a plane and into a
taxicab, that President Clinton was in town here this weekend and I thought
to myself at that time, "Boy that John White sure knows how to spice
up a UFO conference!"
-
- It is unfortunate that Mr. Clinton will not be here to
learn about the UFO experience. I suspect that his knowledge of the topic
is as limited and distorted as that of most people. Perhaps more so. After
all, we all recently saw the photo in the Weekly World News of Clinton
meeting with that infamous space alien. And that same publication later
shocked the world with the story of Hilary Clinton's adoption of a cute
little bouncing baby alien. We also read that 5 U.S. senators are secretly
extraterrestrials, which perhaps explains the difficulty that Mr. Clinton
is having in communicating with Congress.
-
- Fictional nonsense and ET gobbledygook certainly aren't
limited to the pages of the tabloids. They can also be found in the writings
and ramblings of those people who presumably take this topic seriously.
In the four years that I've been working on the Area 51-Bob Lazar story,
I have heard and read the most outrageous assortment of rumor, innuendo,
baloney and BS from UFO types that it is sometimes hard to believe that
we are all talking about the same story.
-
- This afternoon I'd like to address some of these fantasies.
To review what evidence and testimony exist concerning the Nevada situation.
To highlight some incredibly sneaky stuff that's being pulled in the name
of Ufology. And finally, I intend to share with you some exciting new photographs
that have never before been made public. They've never been shown anywhere,
in fact I obtained this information only yesterday. And I hope it is going
to shed an entirely new light on the story that is just is still emerging
out in Nevada.
-
- Heard any good ones about Bob Lazar lately? Because I
certainly have. I heard he's running a meth lab in Las Vegas. That he's
got a string of hookers in South America. That he's a secret agent for
the government. I heard from a prominent ufologist that he started getting
letters from Nazi's after meeting with Bob. I also heard Lazar is in disappeared,
is in hiding, and is dead. Busy guy. Area 51? I've heard some doozies about
that as well . Kidnapped children are taken there from all over the country
to be tortured. Horrible medical experiments. Mind control beam weapons
are being developed there. There's a man who calls himself the World's
Greatest UFO Authority, he earned this title by charging people $99 a head
to give them a tour of the Groom Lake area. He swears that aliens from
the planet Krondak control the base, no less.
-
- If you really want to know what Bob Lazar is or isn't
doing these days, we can hear it from the man himself. These are some excerpts
from an interview that I conducted earlier this year. This will kind of
set the stage for what we're going to be talking about this afternoon.
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- LAZAR (ON TAPE): Fantastic rumors. I've been underground.
People have been hiding me out, slipping from hideout to hideout. I've
been killed; you've been killed. You name it. I've heard unbelievable storiesradiation
detectorsOne of the things people thought I did was develop film badges.
I don't know where they came up with that idea. I don't do that.
-
- The main problem I have with the UFO community is number
one: Here are people that essentially their income is derived from UFOs.
That's the number one thing I have problems with... They need to come up
with ridiculous stories You are dealing with a collection of people that
are psychics, astrologers, people who believe that every other person on
the Earth is an alien. There are Reptilians and all these different species
that live underground. Aliens that walk down the street hassling people
simply to annoy them. Believe me I'm not part of that, I don't deal with
those people. That's essentially what happened with Jacques Vallee when
he came down heredidn't have a very high opinion of me. Movie producershysteria...things
like that. ..nothing to do with other dimensionsif you contradict what
they say, again, they make their income.
-
- GEORGE KNAPP (ON TAPE): A lot of attacks on you personally
, a lot of attacks on the story, a lot of disbelief from media people,
UFO people. Do you stick by the story, now that it's been a couple of years?
-
- BOB LAZAR (ON TAPE): Absolutely. Coming up on four years.
That's what happened.
-
- GEORGE KNAPP (ON TAPE): Nobody from the military, nobody
representing Nellis, none of those folks ever said anything about it.
-
- BOB LAZAR (ON TAPE): They probably can't. Well, there
hasn't been much word officially on it at all. In fact, I don't think there's
been much word officially in terms of denial.
-
- GEORGE KNAPP (ON TAPE): Any progress over the last ensuing
couple of years in verifying parts of your background?
-
- BOB LAZAR (ON TAPE): No, I don't have to pursue that
at all. People think I'm a researcher essentially chase UFO stories or
even gather information. I have nothing whatsoever to do with that. Even
before I became involved in the project I was one of the greatest disbelievers
on Earth. I could have topped Phil Klass. I would have nothing to do with
it. And essentially I knew then the equipment and technology I was exposed
to I really didn't carry my beliefs much further than that.
-
- GEORGE KNAPP (ON TAPE): Do you think the UFOs, the flying
saucers, disks, the equipment that you saw, are still out there?
-
- BOB LAZAR (ON TAPE): I doubt that equipment is still
there. There has been so much coverage, so many people looking into that
area. Civilian and otherwise. They've had ample time to move things. Where
it is, I don't know.
-
- You know about the new one, right? Apparently you, I,
John Lear are all Shriners or 32nd level Masons, whoever they are. There
are no aliens, it's the Shriners that actually have the flying saucer technology
and we came up with the alien story to confuse the public. I don't remember
the rest of the story, but it's really pathetic.
-
- GEORGE KNAPP (LIVE): So the next time you go to a parade
and see Shriner's riding around in those little cars with the funny hats
keep this in mind.
-
- The really cool thing to say in ufological circles these
days is that the whole Area 51-Bob Lazar story is disinformation. Lazar
is an agent of disinformation. The story is pure theatre. A show, a farce,
put on for some nefarious, but not so clear purpose, by the bad guys. I
don't know exactly how this conclusion was reached. I certainly don't remember
getting a vote on it. I don't remember hearing anything about the government
breaking down to admit that it made the whole thing up. So it would seem
that this conclusion that it's all disinformation is based more on supposition
and conjecture and gut feeling and personal suspicions than on anything
else.
-
- The story about alien technology in Nevada did not begin
with Bob Lazar. Nor does it end with him. Similar information was floating
around in Nevada before Bob Lazar was even born. The Area 51 story, I think,
shares a common ancestry with one of the best documented and most widely
accepted premises in all of ufology, namely the premise that alien hardware
has been recovered or otherwise acquired by the U.S. government and/or
military. Friedman and Berliner, Bill Moore, Schmidt and Randall, and others
have impressively documented the story of a recovered saucer in New Mexico.
Len Stringfield and others have accumulated considerable information about
other alleged crash sites. You heard earlier from Dennis Stacey about some
of that information. UFO files buldge with testimony from former military
men who say they've seen disks and/or other alien material, perhaps even
alien bodies at various military facilities around the country. At a minimum
we have volumes of testimonial or circumstantial evidence to suggest that
someone somewhere has acquired alien hardware. So where is it?
-
- The Area 51 investigation seeks to answer that question.
I submit to you that if the government or military really did get their
hands on alien vehicles or technology or even bodies, that Nevada's Area
51 would be at, or near the top, of any list as a storage and testing location.
For 38 years Area 51/Groom Lake has been the location of choice for all
manner of Black Projects: the U2, the SR-71, the Stealth Fighter, the Stealth
Bomber, Starwars, NASA training, special commando training and a host of
other secret stuff that the public has never heard about.
-
- By now the various nicknames for the base are familiar
to many of us: Groom Lake, Dreamland, Watertown Strip, The Ranch, The Funny
Farm, and Area 51. I'm told the place now goes by a new still-classified
name these days because too many people knew about the old one. Nellis
pilots who fly near the area refer to it simply as "The Box,"
named for its highly restricted airspace around that facility. It is an
isolated, sparsely populated region, ringed by mountains and desert and
a radioactive hellhole known as the Nevada Test Site. It's a good spot
for secret stuff, or at least it was.
-
- In 1984 the Air Force illegally ceased 89,000 acres of
land around Groom Lake to use as a further buffer between the public and
black projects. It has since resorted to all manner of security measures
there including audio and video surveillance gear, motion detectors, ammonia
detectors, choppers, fighters, missiles, and at least three separate and
distinct security forces to keep people out. Signs around the facility
now warn that the use of deadly force there is authorized and the newest
version of these signs, which keep getting further and further out, extended
onto public land, declare it is not only illegal to photograph the base,
it is illegal to photograph anything that flies over the base.
-
- Stories about encounters with security forces near the
area are now the stuff of legend. People say they have been roughed up,
buzzed, shot-up, gassed, harassed and threatened with death. Unfortunately
for the military there was a slight oversight in their security plans.
They overlooked what you are about to see here, which is called Whitesides
Mountain, just happens to afford a pretty good, although still distant
view of the Groom Lake facility. Over the past few years, a couple of hundred
people have made the tough climb up the mountain to get a glimpse of the
base that officially doesn't exist. This is footage obtained during a trip
that I took up Whitesides. We are still a couple of miles away, but it's
clear the base has grown tremendously in the past few years. Now the people
at Groom Lake say they know when anyone is on the mountain and that these
intrusions force them to shut down all of their operations. According to
people I know who've been on the base, these interruptions really drive
them crazy.
-
- Dallas TV station captured this footage, which is some
of the best that I've ever seen. They got buzzed by a helicopter while
they were there and they also got hassled by Lincoln County cops once they
came down from the mountain. Interestingly, that new hangar that you are
looking at in this footage has been nicknamed "Hangar 18" by
the people at the base. It's a little joke that they aim at the so-called
ufobiacs who cause them so much grief.
-
- I've been told by congressional personnel that another
land-grab is in the works. That they are going to grab this mountain so
that in the future people won't be able to look down on this base.
-
- Since 1989, when our news reports were first broadcast
about alleged aliens operations at this base, thousands of people have
trekked into the desert armed with cameras and video gear in hopes of seeing
whatever it is that's been buzzing around out there. For the most part,
very few of these visitors go away unsatisfied. Most are able to see whatever
it is they came to see. The saucer enthusiasts see things that they deem
to be UFOs, or more accurately they call them HPACs, "Human Piloted
Alien Craft." The aviation buffs that go out there think they see
advanced planes, like the TR-3A Black Manta or diamond-shaped drones. A
few even think they've seen, or at least heard, the legendary Aurora. And
the folks who think it's all disinformation consider what the other two
groups are seeing is merely a show or some sort of diversion put on by
the military for their benefit.
-
- In my opinion there are problems with all three of these
viewpoints. With so many people looking for alien craft it doesn' t seem
likely that anyone would still be flying them at Groom Lake or S-4, as
it's also known. As for advanced airplanes, the Air Force and other entities
have sworn to key Congressional personnel - sworn - in high-level meetings,
that no such planes exist. Highly informed sources of mine, who are familiar
with the black budgets, say absolutely there have been no appropriations
for such projects. No Aurora. No Black Manta. As for the disinformation
theory, if this had all been a sneaky plan, designed to drawn attention
away from other projects at the base, it was a miserable failure. People
are up there every night of the week looking for whatever it is that might
be underway at Area 51. And if it's all a show, it has to rank as the longest
running show in history. Longer than Cats and Phantom and My Fair Lady
combined. Because it had to begin before the base at Groom Lake was even
built, before Bob Lazar was born, before anyone had heard of John Lear
or Falcon and Condor or aliens who eat strawberry ice cream.
-
- Residents of Lincoln and Nye Counties report seeing flying
disks and other UFOs in and around military facilities in Nevada since
the early 50's. A highly credible source that I have developed, and about
whom you'll hear much more later, states alien technology was brought to
Nevada from Ohio in '52 or '53. And was stored and studied at a base called
Indian Springs, which is near Area 51. A journalist named Robert Door,
quoted in Tim Good's book, "Alien Contact," sites an Air Force
intelligence officer who says that alien craft were tested in Nevada from
'53 to '55 and that attempts were made to fly this craft by attaching conventional
aircraft engines.
-
- Another man named Michael Hunt surfaced in 1980. He says
he worked for The Atomic Energy Commission at Groom Lake in the 1960's
and claimed he saw an alien disk in flight along with a lot of other detailed
information. He also said this was part of something called Project Redlight.
I tracked down Mr. Hunt, but he refuses to answer any other questions.
-
- Project Redlight also pops up in the research of former
Air Force Col., Wendell Stevens. Who says he's been contacted by several
former military men who worked in Nevada in the 50's and who claimed knowledge
of alien hardware being tested under the auspices of something called Project
Redlight. We also know that the documents known as the Snowbird and Aquarius
documents mention Nevada as the place where alien craft were being tested.
Although there certainly has not been any definitive determination about
the legitimacy of these documents. Journalist Linda Howe and Bill Moore
both say they were shown documents very similar to Snowbird and Aquarius
alleging government possession of alien technology. And those shadowy sources,
Falcon and Condor, said on national TV back in 1988, that alien stuff could
be found in the Nevada desert. Allow me to emphasize again, thought, I
am not endorsing the claims of Bill Moore, Wendell Stevens, Falcon or Condor,
or anyone. I'm merely pointing out that information similar to Lazar's
has been around for awhile.
-
- Many other people I've been able to locate have been
able to add bits and pieces of information that would indicate that craft
very similar to UFOs have been active in the Groom Lake area for decades.
A Nellis radar technician says he tracked something that traveled at 7,000
miles an hour, but which could stop on a dime above Groom Lake. When he
reported this to a superior officer, he was ordered to ignore it. An FAA
radar supervisor, his long range radar station just outside of Las Vegas
has often detected odd aerial activity over Groom, including something
that is capable of really great speed, but which would often just hover
over the base.
-
- An electrical engineer I met in the television business
used to work at Groom Lake for a period and says he saw a disk-shaped craft
there under a tarp in a hangar.
-
- A former Wackenhutt security guard with a "Q"
clearance who worked at the test site from 1984-88, while pulling a shift
for the internal entrance for Area 51, says he and others were buzzed by
a small glowing sphere which came from the direction of the base.
-
- A Las Vegas attorney who served in the military in the
'70's, says he witnessed a disk-shaped craft land outside of Area 51, where
it was quickly surrounded by security personnel. The lawyer says he was
subjected to several days of tough interrogation and was ordered to forget
what he had seen.
-
- Radar readings and disk sightings don't necessarily prove
that this is alien technology, of course. But when you combine this sort
of information with the testimony of several sources that I've cultivated,
who claim more knowledge of the origin of this technology, a distinct pattern
begins to emerge.
-
- Here's a summary of some of these sources. The first
is a golf pro. What's he got to do with it? Well, this golf pro happened
to be the pro at Nellis AFB. He became close friends with several high-ranking
military officers, two of whom, during an out of town trip, confided in
him after seeing a television program about Roswell, that the Roswell incident
was real. And that some of that material had been taken to Area 51. It
seems unlikely that a golf pro would be targeted for a disinformation campaign.
-
- Second source, a tax preparer named Lloyd Byron. His
clients included several people who worked at Groom Lake. Byron says he
learned a great deal about Groom from his clients and was told in no uncertain
terms that alien technology was stored there. This information was given
to him as far back as 1976.
-
- Third source, an employee of the Clark County court system
in Las Vegas says she previously worked for a company called Holmes and
Narbour, a defense contractor, and that she had sat in on meetings in which
alien technology at Groom had been discussed in the company of military
personnel. After giving me some of this information, this woman says that
she and her family were physically threatened by her former employer. Roy
Byron, the tax preparer, says he was also leaned on by men who identified
themselves as government agents.
-
- An electrical engineer, who spent 15 months at Groom
Lake, working for the US Army in the 1970's, says he developed friendships
with two technicians who told him they had seen alien disks at the base.
-
- A flight engineer, whom I met through an elected official
in Nevada, says that while stationed at Groom he had seen not only alien
craft but alien bodies. He confided this to the elected official, confirmed
it to me, but now refuses to answer any other questions about it.
-
- A photographer who worked on the above ground nuclear
testing in Nevada, says he and others who were there in the early 60's
says they would often see flying disks at Groom Lake. And they were told
by their supervisor, a physicist named Otto Kraus, about an alien crash
in New Mexico - and remember, this is years before anything had been written
about Roswell. He says that Kraus also told him that the program in Nevada
was aimed at duplicating the alien propulsion system.
-
- Doug Schroeder is an EG&G technician. EG&G is
a major defense contractor in Nevada and is also involved in NASA programs.
This guy was put in charge of his company's video unit in Nevada. In essence
it was his job to travel around and document on video all of EG&G's
various programs in Nevada. He said that as part of that he saw alien disks.
According to Schroeder, he saw test flights, we weren't doing so well with
the propulsion studies, but we'd learned a great deal about metals fabrication
from this alien hardware. Schroeder died unfortunately, two years ago,
but I've interviewed his former co-worker, a man named Doug Smith, who
says Schroeder also told him about seeing the disks.
-
- John Harbor is the name of a former Air Force security
officer who worked at Groom Lake in the late 80's. He says that alien technology
was being stored and tested in Nevada and the story was being withheld
from the public because it was felt that it would cause disintegration
of our social institutions if it ever came out. In particular they were
worried that people would stop paying their taxes.
-
- Mr. Harbor has disappeared, by the way, and I've been
unable to locate him.
-
- Jim Taglione is name of a computer troubleshooter, who
formerly worked attached to the stealth fighter program in Tonopah Nevada.
He is also, by the way, known Bob Lazar since the 70's and we'll talk more
about that in a moment. Taglione said he had several conversations with
both civilian and military personnel about alien technology and concluded
that knowledge of this program was fairly common among persons with high
security clearances in Nevada. And, as a side note, to tell you about his
association with Lazar, Taglione was grilled by Air Force OSI agents following
the broadcast of my 1989 report.
-
- A couple of other sources. Dr. Dan Crane is the name
of a well-known biologist in Las Vegas. He said he has been involved in
research on alien tissue samples. He came to my attention when various
people started sending me bits and pieces of information about him, completely
unsolicited. I'd get a letter from his next door neighbor, "Check
this guy out. I think he's involved in something." I'd get letters
from his old girlfriend, "Hey, this guy is really weird, check him
out." All unsolicited. Dr. Crane agreed to turn over to me some documents
to prove his involvement, but he suddenly dropped out of sight, quit all
his professional and community activities, and is now working as a security
guard at a Las Vegas hotel, which is kind of a strange career twist for
a biologist.
-
- Marion Williams is the name of 30-year veteran of the
CIA. His story first appeared in the MUFON Journal in 1992. In 1981, again
years before Bob Lazar, Williams confided to members of his family that
alien technology and alien bodies were being studied at Groom Lake.
-
- This video was captured in December of 1992 by a television
crew from Las Vegas. That's a pretty weird little craft there. They were
actually looking in another direction and this came from the other side.
You can see it appears to have windows. And with a little bit of enhancement
you can see what appears to be a disk-shaped craft.
-
- It appeared twice. There were about 12 witnesses. They
had no idea if it was one of ours or one of theirs.
-
- This was captured by NBC News. They went out into the
desert in search of Aurora and found something else instead. A large glowing
ball of light that just floated around in the desert. In the words of the
reporter, "it seems to defy the laws of physics like a flying saucer."
-
- Although the stories about flying saucers at Groom Lake
did not begin with Bob Lazar, they certainly were boosted into the public
consciousness by his 1989 revelations in our KLAS reports. In a nutshell,
here is what Lazar said, if you don't know.
-
- He claimed to have degrees from Caltech and MIT. Claimed
to have worked on classified projects at Los Alamos National Labs. And
says he was hired by the United States Navy to work at a facility that
he called S-4, a few miles south of Groom Lake on the Nellis Range. There
he says he worked on back-engineering alien technology. He says he saw
one alien disk in a test flight. He saw 8 others that were stored in these
hangars built into the side of a mountain at S-4, which is located on Papoose
Dry Lake.
-
- The craft, he said, were powered by an anti-matter reactor,
which was linked to gravity generators. In essence these craft can create
their own gravitational fields. He also says he was allowed to read a series
of briefing papers, papers which included alien autopsy reports, reports
on how aliens had been involved in human evolution, and how they viewed
humans as "containers for souls."
-
- Now Lazar concedes that he underwent some kind of mind
control operations while he was out there, including the use of hypnosis,
drugs and certainly intimidation. After he became disenchanted with the
program he told a few friends about it and on three consecutive weeks he
took people, as we saw on that video, with him to see scheduled flights
of what he said were alien disks. He was caught eventually, threats were
made and he didn't go back and that's about the time I met him.
-
- Criticisms of Lazar's story are many and I think many
are deserved. He's lacksidasical about documentation, indifferent as to
whether anyone believes him or not, especially anyone associated with Ufology
as I think you heard, and seemingly has little interest in helping anyone
prove his story. There are a lot of gaps, periods in his life that can't
be accounted for or documented. Parts of his story that simply do not make
any sense.
-
- However, much of his story, too much of his story does
make sense to simply dismiss it or categorically label it as disinformation.
Lazar has said all along that someone is trying to wipe out his background,
to make him a non-person, possibly in an effort to discredit him. While
I suspect that some of the gaps in his personal documentation are his own
fault, it now seems more than apparent that someone really has been messing
with his records. My own efforts to verify his employment and education
have been met with road blocks at every single step of the way. A U.S.
Congressman, whom I know well and who has tried to help me in trying to
obtain Lazar's paperwork, says that he too has never seen anything like
it.
-
- The main questions concerning Lazar. First, did he ever
work at Los Alamos National Lab? Now, for me, this was a central question.
Because if he had worked at Los Alamos, it suggests he had to go to school
somewhere. They don't just hire people off the street for jobs there. And
if he worked in classified programs, it's at least conceivable that he
could have been hired to work on other classified programs, for example
in Nevada.
-
- At first Los Alamos Labs denied having any records whatsoever
on Lazar. They later admitted they found an employee ID number for him
but that was it. Then they said he worked there, but he didn't work for
the Lab, he worked for a contractor at the lab. Kirkmeyer is the contractor,
it's a kind of headhunter technical firm. Over the years they've been even
less cooperative than the lab itself. At first they told me, "Yeah,
we're got records on Lazar. We'll dig them up and send them to you."
Then they clammed up, wouldn't answer any phone calls, wouldn't return
any letters at all. The next time I did talk to them they said, "No,
we don't have any records. Sorry."
-
- We know Lazar worked at Los Alamos. We know he worked
for Kirkmeyer for at least a time. Lazar is listed in the laboratory's
own phone book. An article in the Los Alamos newspaper mentions him as
a lab physicist. I have interviewed three lab employees who remember him
working on classified projects. One of those is a guy, Joe Vananedi, a
technician who is listed in the same phone book with Lazar.
-
- During the past two months, I decided to again try to
contact Los Alamos and see if they'd changed their tune. A public information
officer was very helpful, to my surprise. She said that she'd found two
of her own lab employees who remembered Lazar. She conceded that classified
projects had been undertaken at the facility where he worked and she said
that in her estimation "it appears that what Lazar is saying is true."
-
- I called Kirkmeyer again, figuring that I'm on a roll
here. They still have no records on Lazar, but they did tell me that in
the early 1980's the company was a technical headhunter for the lab. They
went out and found people to fill jobs at the lab. That's the contract
it had with Los Alamos. As part of that work, it conducted background checks
to make sure that the people it hired were actually qualified. To that
extent then, it only makes sense and seems likely that they went out and
recruited Lazar, as he said, checked his background and then hired him.
At least at that point in his life, he had a background to check. Not anymore.
It suggests also that he had to go to school somewhere.
-
- Did he go to college, and if so, where? Caltech and MIT
both deny having any records that he went to either school. The only confirmed
college course that Lazar ever took was an electronics class at a California
junior college. I ask you if that is enough to get hired at Los Alamos
National Laboratories? Or to be recruited by Kirkmeyer. I don't think so.
And yet I've had no luck in proving otherwise.
-
- This is probably the weakest part of the Lazar story.
Bob has been unable or unwilling to come up with any diplomas or grades
or check stubs or names of classmates or teachers that can be verified.
However, those who think this automatically disqualifies him as being a
liar, should keep in mind that this is where the investigation began. It
was the first information that I obtained from him was that he had no background
to speak of. So it hardly ranks as some kind of new revelation that tosses
his story out. And secondly ask yourself this: If someone wanted to screw
around with your college records, could they do it? MIT and Caltech get
millions and millions of dollars in defense contracts every year. You think
the DoD has any juice at those schools?
-
- You probably, however, still have copies of your own
records. Bob does not. That's fine, but just think about it this way. If
your schools didn't have copies, what good would your copies be? I mean,
if the school says you were never there, what good would it do? Even if
Lazar had a copy of his diplomas, it would not convince anyone of anything
except maybe that he's a forger as well as a liar, as long as the schools
still deny that he went there.
-
- There's another reason why he doesn't have any records.
In 1986, his first wife died. And Lazar in essence left everything behind.
His house, his books, his records, all his photographic equipment. What's
more, I'll tell you this, gives you a little insight into what his mindset
was at the time. She didn't just die, she committed suicide. There was
a lot of guilt involved there and he basically walked away from his former
life, and everything involved with it.
-
- I have however found one person who says he remembers
Bob Lazar going to Caltech in 1980. His name is Jim Taglione, he's the
stealth technician. He worked with Lazar at a place called Fairchild Industries.
It was their job to test computer chips for bubble memories. Taglione says
that Lazar was always juggling his work schedule so he could make the long
drive to Pasadena to take classes at Caltech. Here again, we see that Lazar
was working for a reputable employer in a technician job, but there are
no records to prove that he went to school.
-
- None of this, of course, proves that he worked on flying
saucers, either. But I submit that there are a lot of things that Lazar
knew about the program in Nevada that he couldn't have known otherwise.
For instance, he knew there was a place called S-4. There are some people
in UFO circles who say that they knew there was a place called S-4, but
if they knew it, they didn't print it anywhere because I haven't found
any record of it previous to Bob.
-
- A Nellis spokesperson confirmed for me, there really
is a place called S-4, but he wouldn't tell me where it was or what was
done there. So I filed a Freedom of Information Request in Washington earlier
this year, actually it was late last year, and the request was denied.
I just said "You don't have to tell me there are flying saucers there,
I just want to know the place is real. Put it in writing." No, can't
do that. I appealed it, they denied it, I appealed it, they denied it and
that's where it stands. However, I did recently find a written reference
to S-4 in an old document relating to a nuclear testing program. It's real
it's there and nobody before Bob Lazar has said anything about it that
I can find out.
-
- Something else Lazar knew, he knew when and where test
flights of these disks were going to take place. He took people out to
see the flights, three weeks in a row, videotape the test flight. How did
he know?
-
- He also knew a great deal about the internal operations
of Area 51 itself. He knew that EG&G, the company, handles employment
interviews. That employees are flown into the base. That they are transferred
to these buses with blacked-out windows. All true. The electrical engineer
that I cited earlier as one of my sources on Area 51, he met with Lazar
on my request, spent a couple of hours going back and forth. Not on the
big questions about flying saucers, on the picky little questions. Where
do you eat at Groom Lake? How do you pay for your meals? That sort of thing.
Something that would make it abundantly clear if you were lying, that you
were lying. Lazar passed.
-
- Lazar also should not have known the name Mike Thigpen.
Thigpen works for something called the Office of Federal Investigations
(OFI). They do background checks for all the test site employees in Nevada
and a lot of Nellis personnel as well. But they aren't even listed in the
phone book. I had never heard of them, as a journalist. And few people
know that this OFI even exists. Lazar knew. He knew the name of the agent
who came to his house to check him out. Mike Thigpen. He really does work
for OFI.
-
- And something else Lazar knew. He knew how to pass a
polygraph exam on his truthfulness. Polygrapher, Terry Tabernetti, a former
police officer who I contacted to conduct the test, he says he has no doubt
whatsoever that Lazar is telling the truth or at least thinks he's telling
the truth about S-4, the saucers, and the anti-matter reactors.
-
- The final big Lazar question. Was he really involved
with illegal prostitution? The answer is yes. Now, imagine you're me, and
the main witness in the highest profile story you've ever done in your
professional career comes to you and says he's involved with an illegal
brothel, and oh by the way, this same brothel is on the same street where
I lived at the time. Well, after my professional life flashed before my
eyes, I told Lazar that he had to get out of the operation and we had to
do a story on it before someone else did. I won't go into every detail
about this, because much has been written about the incident, suffice to
say that he did go public at my insistence, probably should have talked
to a lawyer before he did it. The cops ended up busting him. He was sentenced
to probation. There's a lot about this whole affair that really stinks.
-
- The madame who was running the operation, has basically
been a hooker since Bob Lazar was 12 years old. It's hard to figure out
how he could corrupt her. Yet, she was was charged with a misdemeanor and
he was charged with 6 felonies. Guess what this woman is doing these days?
If you get these sleazy tabloids they hand out on the street corners in
Las Vegas on the strip, there she is back to her old tricks, and I use
that term loosely. She goes under the name of Mistress Victoria Cats, sells
S&M services these days. Lazar corrupted her, I guess.
-
- For many people this seals it, thought, Lazar could never
be a scientist, he could never have been allowed into a saucer program
if he had a penchant for hookers. And to that I say, we all know smart
people who have done really dumb things. If Einstein had been busted for
DUI, it wouldn't mean the Theory of Relativity was bogus.
-
- Lazar's disgust for conventional mores is more than obvious
to anyone who knows this guy. He races jet cars on city streets, he loves
machineguns, he loves fireworks and stages his own outlaw fireworks shows
out in the desert. He flies a pirate skull and crossbones flag above his
house. He has "MJ-12" as the personalized license plate on his
car. On the first resume I ever saw of his, he listed his previous interest
in a legal brothel in Nevada, as if that's a real selling point for getting
a job.
-
- Why would the Navy hire a guy like this for its most
secret program? Well, one possible answer, and one answer only comes to
mind. He may have been just what they were looking for. Someone who was
technically qualified, but who could be discredited if it became necessary.
On that score Lazar may have been the most qualified person in the country.
I'll return to that thought in a moment.
-
- Bottom line on this prostitution mess came to me while
I was reading court documents from his trial. Lazar was facing up to 60
years in prison for this prostitution thing. The parole and probation department
in Clark County had actually recommended that he do some hard time. And
the reason they wanted him to do hard time was they couldn't verify his
background. Welcome to the club, is what I wanted to say to them, you know.
It hit me thought, here he was facing prison time. If he lied to the court
and they caught him lying about his background, he was going to do time.
He was going to do a lot of time. But the story he told them was the same
story he told me. And the same story he has told to you, if you've seen
the programs. Right down the line. If he was a UFO conman or scam artist
that was the time to come clean. Lazar, however, stuck to his story. Los
Alamos, Caltech, MIT, S-4 - all the way down the line.
-
- As part of the court record, Nevada Congressman Jim Billbray's
office sent a letter to the court explaining how they had also tried to
get Lazar's records from various agencies. Agencies which had to conduct
background checks if he did the things he was supposed to have done. Even
if he only worked at Los Alamos. The Congressman's office noted that they
had never had a case like this, ever. And that every agency it had contacted
had dragged its feet every step of the way. They wouldn't say they didn't
have the records, they just said they were merely looking. And they are
still looking to this day.
-
- I want to share with you for a couple of minutes some
sneaky stuff that's really dishonest and rotten stuff that some people
have been pulling under the guise of honest investigation into this matter.
As many of you may know, maybe not, a major movie studio wants to make
a movie about Bob Lazar. Certain people tried to stop that movie, so they've
been criss-crossing the country and burning up the phone lines, looking
for dirt. I do not use this term loosely, it is exactly the word used by
these junior UFO investigators when they showed up at the home of one of
Lazar's friends in Los Alamos, or a former friend. "We're here looking
for dirt on Bob Lazar." And I ask you, is that how you open up an
honest inquiry?
-
- One of the people they contacted is a man to whom Lazar
owed some money. This man told the questioners that Bob is a no-good conman
who doesn't pay his bills. When asked how he knew Bob, he said "Oh
I remember him from when he worked on those classified weapons programs
at Los Alamos." Now this would seem to be a fairly significant statement,
wouldn't you think? But the only information that comes out in those investigators'
notes from that meeting is Lazar is a conman, nothing about confirming
that he worked at Los Alamos.
-
- A well-known Ufologist was in Los Alamos recently for
a lecture. After the lecture is over, a friend of Lazar's approaches the
speaker and says something like this, "So you think Lazar is a conman?"
And this speaker said, "Yeah, that's a good term for him." But
by the time this story was related to me, the Ufologist claimed that "A
Los Alamos employee had come up to me after the speech and told me 'Bob
Lazar's a conman.'"
-
- This sort of thing is dishonest. Someone showed up at
Lazar's high school a couple of weeks ago, claiming to be his friend and
saying he wanted his high school records, that he could help his friend
Bob. A ufologist called the high school seeking that same information.
According to this ufologist, Lazar ranked at the bottom of his class and
he only took one science class the whole time he was in high school. So
he could never possibly have qualified to get into MIT.
-
- Well, I called the high school. Lazar called the high
school. They vigorously, vehemently denied giving out any such information
to anyone. To do so, for them, would be illegal. The only information the
school would give out is to confirm that Lazar graduated from there in
1976. As for this stuff about the single science course, by law as you
know, students have to take more than that to graduate. This is dishonest,
plain and simple.
-
- These same people have been spreading another rumor about
Lazar. That the death of his first wife wasn't a suicide. That maybe he
had something to do with it. Letters they have written to each other, that
I have acquired, clearly state that they hope to take all their information
to the movie studio in order to quash this film project. And I've got news
for 'em, rather than stopping this film, they might find themselves in
it!
-
- A lot of people simply don't want to believe Bob. They
concede that something might have been underway at Area 51. But they insist
that Lazar himself is a phony. Maybe it's his distain for ufology or maybe
it's the fact that he might know more about this story than anyone else.
For those people, we will never have enough information to prove his story.
Sure, he might have worked at Los Alamos, but was it on classified projects?
Maybe he was a janitor there. OK, maybe he was a scientist, but that doesn't
prove he worked at S-4. And even if he worked at S-4, it doesn't mean there
are disks there. And even if there are disks, it doesn't mean they are
alien disks. On and on and on. Maybe so. Maybe Bob was chosen for this
whole Area 51 program, so the recovered saucers genre could be discredited.
Maybe that's the disinformation that these people have had in mind all
along.
-
- Remember this, thought. Lazar's story is consistent with
the work of a lot of other people. It's consistent with the recovered saucer
research. It's consistent with documents which have been shown to other
researchers. It is even consistent with information that I obtained during
a recent trip to Russia, which by the way, I hope to share with you at
another time in the future.
-
- If you take Bob Lazar out of the Area 51 story, it is
still a story. And today for the first time anywhere, I want to share with
you something that may prove further substance to Lazar's claim.
-
- What you are going to see here is a satellite photograph
taken by a Russian satellite on July 17, 1988 from a height of 172 miles.
This photo was purchased from the Soviets from a California company and
was blown up and analyzed by NASA personnel hired by the movie studio working
with the Lazar project. The highlighted area there is the part of Papoose
Lake where Lazar says the hangars were located. Notice if you will, thought,
the circular objectWhat does that look like to you?
-
- The NASA people say they are very intrigued by this object,
so they blew it up even more to get a better look. The bigger it got, the
bigger their eyes got. We're going to show you the next shot, there it
is. If you were to take a photograph of a flying saucer from above, this
is what it would look like. The NASA guys estimated the craft to be about
50 feet across. They said it appears that the Russians caught a snapshot
of one of our disks in flight. They say it's a metallic craft, flying above
S-4. Because they can see this surrounding terrain reflected off of this
craft, they guess that the disk was flying at a height below that of the
surrounding mountains. They also noticed this, this odd circular impression
on the ground. Something which resembles, I don't know, a landing pad.
This is all the more significant for this reason, because of what can be
seen at Papoose Lake today, which is nothing.
-
- Two persons associated with the Congress of the United
States, whom I know, have been to Papoose Lake within the past two months.
Both of them asked for tours of Papoose because I told them I'd like to
know what the heck is going on out there. So both were told there's nothing
there, they said they wanted to go out there anyway. They get in a helicopter,
both of them take a couple of passes, there's nothing there. No hangars,
no saucers, looks like it's just been desert, there's never been anything
there at all. And that's what the military told them. Nothing there. No
programs there, in fact the lake there is radioactive, you'd be killed
if you go down there.
-
- Well, this photo I think clearly indicates that someone
is lying, that there was, at least in 1988, which is right before Lazar
went to work for these people, was something there. Other photo enhancements
using this stuff are underway at this moment. I haven't seen them yet,
so I can't make too many claims about their veracity, but I am told that
they show roads leading into the mountain. That they show black buses parked
where Lazar said the hangars were. So, one other note of interest. The
Soviets will also sell you a list of all the days, all the times when they
took satellite photos of this area. In themonths leading up to Lazar's
revelations, in fact in the months leading up to May, 1989, the photos
that the Soviets were taking were fairly infrequent. Maybe one every other
month or so. After May of 1989, there was an explosion of Soviet photos
of this area. Dozens of different photos taken from space. On an almost
daily basis. May of 1989, of course, is when Lazar went public with his
allegations on our television station.
-
- If you take Bob Lazar out of the Area 51 story, it is
still a story. If you keep him in the story, thought, if you can discredit
him, you can cut a wide swath through all of ufology. You can cast doubt
on the crashed saucer theory. You can forever wipe out the silly rumors
about UFOs being tested in the Nevada desert. You can get in a few shots
at MJ-12 while you are at it. And scare the dickens out of anyone else
who might some day want to talk about secret programs they've worked on.
Which is exactly how Lazar's legal problems have been viewed by person
who work in top secret programs.
-
- If this is disinformation, it did not originate with
Bob Lazar. By picking someone like Bob for the program, by letting him
see certain documents, even before his clearance had been upgraded, by
messing with his mind, they had a built-in perfect safety valve. By discrediting
him, you give the mainstream press another reason to vilify UFOs. You give
UFO luminaries an excuse to attack it as well. You give the lunatic fringe
something to embrace and embellish and you almost guarantee that no official
in his or her right mind would get anywhere near this mess to find out
what really might be going on. I can assure you that there are very serious
people in the Congress who are truly interested in finding out what is
going on. People who suspect that there really have been recovered saucers.
And who suspect that someone has kept this information from the American
public. They want to see the proof. They need to see the proof before they
are ever going to make their interests known.
-
- I would hope that some of the nastiness and dishonesty
aimed at Lazar, Area 51 and this whole story, could be channeled into the
more productive pursuit of finding out the truth and getting the information
into the hands of the people who could put it to good use. As Roy Neary
said in the movie, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "We
just want to know what's going on."
-
- Thanks very much.
-
- QUESTION/ANSWER SESSION (QUESTION NOT ALWAYS AUDIBLE
ON TAPE):
-
- KNAPP: No name for the movie yet, that I know of.
-
- KNAPP: The question was, why does the military if they
really have these things, use them and quit wasting money on the space
shuttle? And my answer is, perhaps the point is to waste the money. I suspect
that what is really going on here is the program itself has been taken
out of the government. It's in the hands of private contractors. They've
been spending millions and millions of dollars on military technology that
we really don't need, just in order for it to go into their pockets.
-
- KNAPP: The question is, the information concerning the
possibility that there really is a live alien. I can tell you this, that
my source said that there was a live alien, in fact thought, the way the
conversation went was, I was asking him some questions, "Does the
President know about this program out there." And he said, "Well,
I think he would have to in case something went wrong." I said, "You
mean, if some one of these things crashed or something." He said,
"Or if someone got out." Then we started pursuing a line of questioning,
he wasn't giving me much help on it, he did tell me that this alien had
been living out there in Nevada for awhile and that he started chuckling
about it, he said this creature had looked like a current political figure,
Ross Perot. He also told me, I said, "Didn't you feel guilty about
keeping this live being that had come from so far away in a cage?"
He said, "You have to remember at the time we came into possession
of this, we didn't know what it was. Is it a crime to keep a dog in a cage?"
Yeah, I agree it's a crime to keep a dog in a cage, too. "We just
simply didn't know what to do with it." He did have conversations
with his colleagues, I guess, and they were involved in the nuclear testing
program, "Hey, maybe we're making a big mistake here. Maybe we're
going to pay a price for this eventually." It was an interesting conversation.
-
- KNAPP: The question is, has Bob Lazar ever displayed
any scientific knowledge to other scientists? He has had some discussions
along those lines with Stan Friedman. I know Jacques Vallee came to Nevada
to meet him and put him through some scientific paces and found him to
be credible. There have been a couple of other people. Dr. Jack Casher
finds him to be credible in terms of his technical and scientific knowledge.
There are others, thought, who would give you a different opinion. There
are scientists who are saying that what he's saying doesn't make sense.
-
- KNAPP: He's suggesting there's a similarity between a
flying saucer picture taken in Brazil and something taken during Persian
Gulf War and I'm sorry, I'm unfamiliar with it.
-
- KNAPP: Unfortunately, no. I've really been looking forward
to the knock at the door one of these days and it never comes. You want
to get that to make you think that you're on the right track, which means
that either I'm completely on the wrong track or they don' t care what
I'm doing, or they're glad I'm doing it. However, several of the people
I've contacted as sources have had that knock at the door. I've mentioned
a couple of them for you. I used this statement on a television program
one time and I don't think it's an exaggeration, "People are more
afraid of their own government than they are of the Mafia." I've covered
organized crime in Las Vegas for more than 10 years and they are more afraid
of their government than they are of organized crime. They're scared to
death. It's amazing, our phones were being listened to, at least for awhile
because I would talk to these people and in 5 different instances, for
sure, who were visited the next day and were told to keep quiet. And that's
a really frightening thing.
-
- KNAPP: Does he have any earnings statements, from government
work? There's virtually nothing. There's a W-2 form that surfaced for Bob.
I had requested that he request it and months went by and no records came
and suddenly this thing shows up in the mail. It lists him for getting
one paycheck from the U.S. Department of Naval Intelligence. Well, there
is no Department of Naval Intelligence, it's the Office of Naval Intelligence.
I made the mistake of saying, "Hey that's great" and went on
television with it and probably should have taken our time to do a little
more work on it before we went public because it just adds to the mess
and makes it look like he's forging this thing.
-
- KNAPP: The question is: Does his family, siblings, etc.,
verify that he went to college? The family, even for me, as close as I've
been, has always been off-limits from Bob. Again, I'll say that he's been
very uncooperative in terms of there are parts of himself that he will
not open up. First, he was afraid that his parents would think he was a
rat for selling out the government. I guess now they realize that their
son, Bob the UFO Guy, is not such a bad guy after all, and are said to
be fairly comfortable with it. Still, I have not been given access to his
parents. He does have a sister, I haven't been given access to her either.
I wish I could.
-
- KNAPP: The question is: Did Lazar get a student loan?
That had occurred to me as well, but apparently his father is pretty well
off and he didn't need one. Now the question is, does Dad have check stubs?
I'm told that he does, I haven't seen them and I haven't been able to talk
to Dad either.
-
- KNAPP: The question is, he wanted some clarification
about Bob undergoing hypnosis. Bob has some real short term memory problems.
He underwent hypnosis, regression, at my suggestion after he was out of
the program to try to recall some of the details of documents that he had
read. In those sessions it came out that he had been asked or, or ordered
to drink some kind of green liquid that tasted like pine and then had some
kind of hypnosis session. He also recalls being in these intense intimidation
sessions. Pointing and yelling and I know the government has a method called
"The Orion Method," in which they use a combination of hypnosis
and drugs and intimidation in some kind of mind control-type program but
that's as detailed as it gets. As for whether Bob could be the source of
the MJ-12 documents, I find that to be an extremely remote possibility
because they were out before he was even involved in ufology.
-
- KNAPP: The question is, how probable is it that the Holloman
AFB film actually happened? It's out of my area. I'd like to know, I'd
like to see it, but I just don't have that knowledge.
-
- KNAPP: Would I like to comment on the credibility of
John Lear's information? It's a mixed bag for me. John had helped me when
I first started this research, locating a lot of documents, and getting
acquainted with the field in general. I thank him for that. In the past
years since then, he's kind of gone off the deep end. He makes a lot of
claims about aliens are here to eat us and things of that nature. Claims
that just rattle out of his head like he doesn't even think about them.
He doesn't worry about proving anything. I think a lot of the problems
that Lazar has had are because of his association with Lear. Lear with
make claims about things that Lazar has supposedly told him that are completely
untrue. So I have a lot of problems with John Lear's credibility.
-
- KNAPP: The question is, did Bob ever work on the alien
craft itself? And if so, what did he do? His job was back-engineering the
propulsion system itself. Apparently one of these units had been taken
out of the disk, and inside the hangar and they conducted experiments with
that. Bob was only out there 6 or 7 different times. He would fly out to
the base infrequently. I know that he did see disk in a test flight at
one point, and he describes that in some detail. He did see inside the
disk and he describes it as, it looked like it was molded out of one piece
and it had little furniture, like it was built for children.
-
- KNAPP: About 1800 right now. The question is, how many
people work at Groom Lake, S-4? Yes, it's a lot of people to keep quiet,
but if you look at Roswell, there are thousands of people involved with
that as well.
-
- KNAPP: Did he have any tax forms? There is virtually
no record of Bob from the time he left Los Alamos.
-
- KNAPP: The first question is, would I like to comment
on Bill Cooper? I guess it will be a black mark on my broadcasting career
forever because I put Bill Cooper on television for the first time. I suspect
that Bill Cooper did see some documents at one time, at some point in his
military career, but those documents have grown and grown and grown as
Bill has appropriated more wacked out stuff over the years. He has done
more harm to ufology than any other single person I can think of. He's
scared the hell out of people passing that stuff around about this big
deal between us and the aliens and we're all going to be put in concentration
camps and we have to rally 'round the flag and old time religion. It's
just made a big mess. I think he's not a good person.
-
- The second question is concerning my documentaries. As
John mentioned in the introduction, our company is producing what I hope
will be a 10-part series of hour-long documentaries, that approach this
topic in a very comprehensive way. We plan to market them direct to home
video.
-
- KNAPP: Her question is, how could we hold an alien, because
they seem to have this mystical magical powers over us, and how would we
get their UFOs if they're so powerful and I can't answer the question.
I don't know. I think it's symptomatic of ufology in general that none
of the big questions, where they're from , why they're here.
-
|