Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

We have to start somewhere on our quest for the truth about top-secret sites, so it seems appropriate that our attentions should first focus upon the most infamous of all classified installations. Can you guess its name? I strongly suspect you can.

It all goes back to 1989, when a man by the name of Robert Scott Lazar went public with a series of sensational claims that continue to reverberate to this day. A self-admitted maverick scientist, Lazar asserted that for a brief period of time in the late 1980s he was employed in a scientific capacity at an incredibly secret, well-protected installation situated in the harsh wilds of the Nevada desert. The program to which Lazar had been assigned was, he said, one of astonishing proportions and profound implications: a clandestine operation to evaluate, comprehend, and ultimately duplicate an impressive fleet of spacecraft of nonhuman origin that had, quite literally, fallen into the hands of the U.S. government — or, perhaps more accurately, into the sweaty palms of an elite scientific body of officialdom that quite possibly was not answerable to the presidential office. Yep, you read it right: According to Lazar, behind closed doors, watched over 24/7 with a Shoot first and don’t even bother asking questions later attitude, Uncle Sam was intensively researching real-life, honest-to-goodness flying saucers — and maybe even their extraterrestrial crews as well. Thus was born, or was exposed, the legend of Area 51.

Without doubt the definitive secret base, Area 51 is an installation composed of a mass of huge, impenetrable hangars, mysterious underground chambers, and winding, labyrinthine tunnels. The idea that such a place could at the same time be both classified and widely recognized might sound like the ultimate oxymoron, but it happens to be absolutely true. The U.S. government steadfastly — and somewhat ridiculously, given that practically everyone has heard of it and knows of the alien rumors — refuses to discuss the specific nature of the Area 51 facility.

Just the Facts

Before we get to Lazar and his alleged UFOs, let’s first take a look at what we can say with certainty about this particularly intriguing installation. Despite Area 51’s reputation as some sort of remote fortress buried far, far away from civilization, it most certainly is not. The surprising reality is that the base is located less than 90 miles from the glittering lights, spacious hotels, countless slot machines, and gyrating strippers of Sin City. What makes Area 51 so impenetrable — to the vast majority of people, anyway — is not its distance from Las Vegas, but the extent to which its innermost secrets are maintained.

Try piloting a plane over the base’s strictly enforced no-fly zone and you risk being blasted out of the sky by a missile. See what happens if you decide to take the highways and byways to the base: You’ll soon find yourself watched closely by humorless, Men in Black — style private-security goons who, if you fail to heed the signs and stark warnings to turn back, will be only too happy to make life extremely difficult for you. Significant monetary fines, several months of jail time, and even the use of deadly force may be invoked to deter you from making an exciting road trip with your buddies into the desert in search of E.T. Given that such security extends for literally miles outside of the perimeter of Area 51, it’s little wonder that — just as is the case with its glitzy, money-draining near-neighbor — what happens at Area 51 is forever destined to stay at Area 51. At least, most of the time. Just occasionally — to the chagrin of officialdom — some of Area 51’s many cans of worms spill open into the public domain.

In terms of what the base’s name implies today — in short, aliens—“Area 51” is a relatively recent phenomenon; it extends back only a little more than two decades. In terms of the base’s actual existence and its secret workload, however…well, that goes way back; more than half a century, even. And it’s called Area 51 for a very good reason: Rather than being a solitary, stand-alone facility, Area 51 is actually just one of a number of areas on the Air Force’s vast Nevada Test and Training Range that, in total, extends to more than 4,500 square miles.

Just to the northeast of Area 51 is the sprawling dry lakebed known as Groom Lake, where, during the hostilities of the Second World War, practice bombing missions were secretly undertaken. Come the 1950s, by which time the Soviet Union was already the next big threat to the Western world, the CIA very quickly (and very secretly) got in on the Area 51 action. As a result, by 1955, a huge 5,000-foot runway was constructed at the base, from which CIA test flights and landings of the super-classified U-2 spy plane were successfully conducted. As both time and aviation-based technology progressed, so did the clandestine programs at Area 51.

When the 1950s became the 1960s, the SR71 Blackbird aircraft became a staple ingredient of the research, projects, and missions at Area 51. Then, in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, base personnel were engaged in perfecting the so-called Stealth technology that became so famous when, in 1988, the U.S. government revealed to the world the latest addition to its military arsenal: the Stealth F-117 Nighthawk. To demonstrate the depth of the secrecy that surrounded Area 51’s involvement in the development of the Nighthawk, we now know it had secretly been flying missions as far back as 1983—and provoking more than a few notable UFO reports in the process — even though the 80s were nearly over when the world’s media was finally shown the strange-looking, angular, utterly black aircraft. This leads us to Area 51’s cosmic reputation as the U.S. government’s very own top-secret saucer-central.

Lazar’s Revelations

Robert Scott Lazar — Bob to his pals — is a figure who, when it comes to UFOs, has quite possibly caused more headaches for American officialdom than anyone else on the planet. Whether that is because Lazar has successfully blown the lid off a conspiracy of otherworldly proportions or because he has spun an elaborate web of fantasies that the government is constantly forced to deny remains to be seen. But whichever way the coin falls, the story is a humdinger, to be sure.

It was an otherwise normal evening in March 1989 when the cosmic shit hit the fan — with unrelenting force. As the unsuspecting citizens of Las Vegas turned on their televisions at dinnertime to watch KLAS-TV, they could have been forgiven for thinking it was April Fools’ Day. (Some might say they were not so far off the truth.) But let’s not jump the intergalactic gun: They saw a man on TV telling an amazing story to an investigative journalist named George Knapp. The slim, 30-ish, bespectacled speaker was Bob Lazar, but you would not have known it then — at the time (as a result of serious worries for his personal safety, he claimed), Lazar was going by the alias of Dennis. So as the good folk of Sin City sat and listened, Dennis/Lazar claimed that in late 1988 he had been recruited as a physicist into a Top Secret research and development program out at a particular section of Area 51 called S-4. He said it was an intense R&D effort that focused on nothing less than the analysis of nine captured, donated, or otherwise acquired spacecraft from other worlds. The craft operated on fantastically advanced technological principles, and Lazar had seen the evidence for himself.

Despite warnings and less-than-veiled threats from Area 51 personnel to never, ever reveal what was afoot at the mysterious base, here was Lazar doing precisely that: spilling the beans to the world at large. As a result, his life was under threat of termination. With the alien secrets tumbling wildly out of Lazar’s mouth, a government-wielded Sword of Damocles was ready to fall upon him at any moment. His tale of an alien conspiracy and extraterrestrial power systems in the hands of the government was a newsperson’s dream story. It was Woodward and Bernstein for the space age. It was what UFO researchers the world over had waited for so long to hear. But was it true? Simple question; not-so-simple answer.

Who Is Bob Lazar?

Bob Lazar is a character as enigmatic as he is intriguing. Some members of ufological circles view him as a crusading hero, and others view him as an outrageous fraud. Let’s start with the facts: Born in Florida in 1959, Lazar is known to have taken courses in electronics at the Los Angeles — based Pierce College in the 1970s, and to have spent some time employed with Fairchild, a company founded in 1959 by Nobel Prize — winner and coinventor of the transistor, William Shockley. But that’s only part of it. Lazar claimed — and continues to claim — that he received an MS in electronics from the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), and an MS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and also that he worked on some pretty classified stuff in the process.

In 1982, we find Bob splashed across the front page of the New Mexico — based Los Alamos Monitor newspaper, in a lengthy article that detailed his skills in relation to one of his personal passions: building and racing super-fast jet-cars. The article described how Lazar and a NASA friend hauled the engine out of an otherwise innocuous Honda, and then did something pretty remarkable: They replaced the old engine with a new one made of stainless steel and titanium that burned liquid propane, allowing for speeds close to 200 miles per hour — pretty much the automobile equivalent of mutating Dr. Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk. The article showed that Lazar certainly does have brains and technical savvy, but what’s particularly notable about it is that it specifically detailed the hero of the hour as being a physicist then working at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. Today known as the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, the facility has long been at the forefront of cutting-edge research into particle physics. So, despite the fact that Lazar has been dismissed as a hoaxer or fantasist, we have at least some evidence that he was plugged in to the secret world of the highly classified Los Alamos facility, approximately six years before he allegedly began tooling around with alien saucers at Area 51. But how does one go from unleashing super-fast Hondas on the world and earning a wage at Los Alamos to getting the lowdown on the biggest secret of all? It was all due to fate; a chance, life-changing meeting.

In June 1982, legendary theoretical physicist Edward Teller gave a lecture at Los Alamos, and Lazar attended. As Lazar approached the venue on the day in question, he was amazed to see Teller sitting casually outside on a wall, reading the aforementioned Los Alamos Monitor article on Lazar himself. This was highly fortuitous, so Lazar introduced himself and had a brief chat with the man who was one of the inspirations for the deranged Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 movie of the same name.

Lazar’s Introduction to Area 51

Now let’s fast-forward to 1988. At that time, Lazar was running a photo lab in Las Vegas, but was on the lookout for far more gainful employment. He sent out a resume to Teller, who remembered Lazar and his beefed-up Honda. This was very good news. It got even better when Teller agreed to use his contacts to see about getting Lazar back into the world of physics. As a result, Lazar was approached by a representative of Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, Inc. (EG&G), a U.S. defense contractor. Thus began a strange saga filled with many a cloak, dagger, and hall of mirrors.

After interviewing at the EG&G offices at Vegas’s McCarran Airport for a job he was quickly deemed way overqualified for, Lazar was pleased to be called back, for a different potential position. This one was reportedly focused on something that was vaguely explained as an advanced propulsion-based project — surely an understatement of mammoth proportions. The fact that, at the time, Lazar had his very own particle accelerator in his bedroom was enough to impress his interviewers. They made an offer, and Lazar quickly accepted the gig. Things were moving forward. Just how far forward, Lazar had no real idea. He soon found out, however.

Lazar was met at EG&G by a mysterious man named Dennis Mariani, described as being military-like, stern, and to-the-point. Mariani would become Lazar’s immediate supervisor. They took a brief flight, followed by a short drive in a bus with blacked-out windows, to Area 51’s inner sanctum: S-4. Lazar was about to graduate from playing with jet-cars to handling craft that, he was told, originated from the depths of another solar system. The location where the alien ships were being held and studied was appropriately out-of-this-world too: The S-4 facility was said to be just like something out of a James Bond movie. Lazar claimed it was composed of a number of buildings and large hangars that, rather than being built in the open, were actually sculpted right out of the rock of one of the huge mountains that dominated the area. To help camouflage the mysterious installation and protect the dark secrets hidden deep within, the huge outer doors were spray-painted in a sandy color that blended in quite naturally with the surrounding desert landscape.

Initially, things were pretty intense for Lazar, who was still unclear about the precise nature of the program to which he had accepted a position, beyond the fact that it was shrouded in secrecy, sounded seriously intriguing, and was maybe somewhat off-the-wall. Upon arrival, Lazar quickly became acquainted with the fine spirit of teamwork at Area 51 and S-4: He was forced to agree to have his home telephone monitored, and was made to sign a security oath that included a clause to the effect that, upon accepting the position, he agreed to waive all his constitutional rights as an American citizen. The outrageous intensity didn’t end there: Threats were made, guns were pointed, and there were warnings about the use of sophisticated drugs and hypnosis to silence those on the project who failed to toe the line. Lazar was even monitored by an armed guard when he had to go to the bathroom. What was going on? Now was the time for the ace to be played, for the UFOs to finally be unveiled.

It’s not every day that someone invites you to examine a fantastically advanced vehicle designed and built on another world. But Lazar was hardly your average guy, and he embraced the challenge eagerly. And it wasn’t just one such craft that Lazar knew of, but nine. Whether they were obtained as a result of malfunctions, crashes, or generous donations from the aliens themselves, Lazar never did find out. But regardless of how they got there, they were there, laid out before him in the secret hangars of S-4; a veritable armada of flying saucers of the precise type that the U.S. government had for decades officially assured the general public were merely the stuff of fantasy, hoaxes, and misidentification.

Lazar’s time at S-4, destined to be brief, was twofold: Part of it involved him digesting numerous briefing papers on the nature and history of the aliens’ mission on Earth. The bulk of his job, however, was focused on trying to understand and ultimately replicate the power source of the amazing craft — which was reportedly a super-heavy element not found on Earth called Element 115. The ships themselves were strange: All utterly smooth to the touch and circular in shape, they completely lacked nuts, bolts, and rivets, and looked as if they had been extracted right out of molds. They were compact in size, split-level, and did not exactly make for comfortable physical navigation — that is, unless you were a 3-foot-tall alien, as the intelligences behind the craft were reputed to be. From the briefing papers Lazar learned that the project indeed had more than alien craft in its possession: there were extraterrestrial bodies that had been secretly autopsied too. Furthermore, there had been violent, fatal altercations at Area 51 between living alien entities and U.S. military personnel at the base. The briefs led Lazar to believe that the human race was the result of some sort of alien-initiated genetic tinkering in our ancient past, and, perhaps most ominous of all, E.T. seemed to have an interest in the nature of the human soul.

The biggest problem for the surprisingly small body of personnel assigned to the program — maybe 20 at most — was that the successful duplication of Element 115 on our world was simply not feasible given the level of scientific knowledge at the time. As a result, much of the investigation was trial and error, undertaken by personnel who understood the implications of what they were dealing with, but were not necessarily sure how to deal with it. Significant advances were few and far between. Try to imagine a Neanderthal kicking the back tires of a shiny new Corvette and grunting the caveman equivalent of “Hmmm.” That, basically, was the situation Lazar found himself in at S-4. Nevertheless, a few tentative test flights of a couple of the craft were attempted at a very restricted level in front of the hangars, so, clearly, at least some degree of headway had been made.

Bob Spills the Beans

Lazar asserted that he continued working at the base until the early months of 1989, around which time a couple of critical things occurred that ultimately led to the termination of his employment — and perhaps almost to the termination of his life. Despite all the warnings, threats, and intimidation about not discussing his work with anyone outside of Area 51 and S-4, Lazar chose to do precisely that: He quietly told his wife, Tracey, his good friend, Gene Huff, and UFO researcher John Lear — the son of William Lear, of Lear-Jet fame — of the startling secrets hidden at the base. Bad move.

It was too much to hope that Area 51 security personnel would not find out. Of course they found out. They also learned — as a result of their constant monitoring of Lazar’s home telephone — that while Bob was tinkering with alien spaceships at S-4, Tracey, who was taking flying lessons at the time, was secretly tinkering with her flight instructor. Lazar was duly informed of his wife’s affair, and also that his employers knew all about the revelations he had made to his pals Huff and Lear. It was these two issues that led Area 51 staff to quickly revoke Lazar’s security clearance, amid worries about his psychological state and the attendant security risks. Lazar was summarily kicked out of his job, and slung out of Area 51. Adios, aliens.

Shortly afterward, Dennis Mariani telephoned Lazar and demanded that he return with Mariani to Area 51. Fearful that, having violated his security agreement, his bones might very well end up buried in the Nevada desert if he did so, Lazar flatly refused Mariani’s hostile invite. An irate Mariani slammed down the phone on Lazar. Not long after that, someone shot out one of the back tires of Lazar’s car as he proceeded onto a particular stretch of Vegas highway. Whether this was a failed attempt to kill Lazar or merely a carefully orchestrated means to intimidate him into complete silence remains unclear. But Lazar felt it left him with only one viable option: He had to go public.

In Lazar’s mind, the more visible he became, the less likelihood there was of him disappearing at the hands of government assassins. Thus began the revelations on Las Vegas’s KLAS-TV, followed by endless debate on the veracity of Lazar’s story in various books, magazines, television documentaries, radio-based talk-shows, and — more than 20 years later — all across the Internet.

What Is the Truth?

Essentially, that’s the story. But what are the facts? Are there even any facts in this weird saga? Or is it all a bunch of lies and distortions? The answers to those important questions are all dependent upon whom you care to ask, and how you interpret the available evidence. Many UFO researchers and investigators dismiss Lazar’s revelations with barely a second glance. Nuclear physicist and legendary UFO authority Stanton T. Friedman wrote of Bob’s revelations, “THIS IS PURE BUNK. BUNK. BUNK.”[1] And yes, Friedman did put his statement in all caps! But despite the naysayers, whenever an attempt is made to place Lazar’s assertions firmly in the categories of hoaxing and delusions, something always seems to come along that leaves the hangar-door open — or, at the very least, slightly ajar — and offers a degree of support for Lazar’s sensational story.

Let’s go back to the beginning, to Lazar’s claims that he was offered the job of a lifetime as a result of having approached Dr. Edward Teller. When questioned after the murky matter began to take shape within UFO research circles as well as the mainstream media, Teller did not deny having met Lazar. Nor did Teller deny having referred Lazar to additional sources that may ultimately have led him to Area 51. In fact, Teller actually squirmed, with distinct uneasiness apparent in his voice, manner, and appearance, when he uttered the following words, after being put on the spot by an enterprising television journalist: “I probably met him. I might have said to somebody I met him and I liked him, after I met him, and if I liked him. But I don’t remember him.”[2] Right, Edward, that really clarified matters.

And what about those qualifications Lazar claimed to possess? No convincing evidence of any sort has ever surfaced in support of Lazar’s claims to have obtained degrees at Cal Tech and MIT. Critics and debunkers gleefully rub their hands together and cry: “Foul, Bob!” Lazar’s response? The government is trying to discredit him by erasing significant portions of his background and life history. On the other hand, it might reasonably be argued that the lack of credible data pertaining to Lazar’s educational assertions would be enough to rule out the possibility of his ever having been considered for employment in the world of government-funded, cutting-edge science.

Lazar’s claims to have worked at Los Alamos were also disputed, and viewed with suspicion by certain elements of both the UFO research community and the mainstream media. In fact, his claims were outright refuted by spokespersons of Los Alamos itself. For a short while, at least. Soon, something came along that turned that issue on its head: KLAS-TV’s George Knapp found Lazar’s name in the October 1982 telephone directory of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When the evidence was presented to grim, red-faced Los Alamos officials by Knapp, they quickly chose to modify their position. The new version of events was that Lazar had been employed by them after all, but under the umbrella of an outside contract company called Kirk-Meyer. They maintained that Lazar never, ever, not even once, worked on issues of a secret or sensitive nature. However, colleagues of Lazar had informed Knapp that Lazar worked at Los Alamos on matters relative to the highly sensitive Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — or “Star Wars” program — that had been grandly envisioned by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

What of those claims about fantastically advanced craft at Area 51 supposedly fueled by a super-heavy element that cannot be found on Earth (Element 115)? Here we have to turn to the strange story of a young Welsh man named Matthew Bevan, who, in the mid-1990s, doggedly set out to crack the UFO secrets of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s so-called Hangar 18. This got the teen terror into scalding hot water with both British and American authorities. Bevan’s full story will be told in due course in a later chapter; as a small section of it relates to Lazar, however, it’s vital that we note it here. One part of Bevan’s experiences — recorded officially by Scotland Yard during the course of its series of interviews with Bevan immediately after his 1996 arrest — focused upon him hacking his way into files and systems at Wright-Patterson that appeared to describe a craft astonishingly similar in design to one of those outlined by Lazar to George Knapp, even down to the super-heavy-element angle. Does that mean Lazar lives to fight another day?

As Bevan told it, on one particular system at Wright-Patterson that he accessed he came across a stash of e-mails in which there was a discussion about some sort of radical aircraft being developed at the base. It was described as very small and split-level, with a reactor at the bottom and room for the crew in the top section. When Scotland Yard’s Computer Crimes Unit asked Bevan if he saw anything else on the Wright-Patterson computers, he replied that yes, he did: He saw classified information on an anti-gravity propulsion system powered by a heavy element. The cops then wanted to know if Bevan had downloaded any of this information, printed it, and then secretly circulated it to colleagues within the UFO research field. Bevan assured them — at least three times — that he had not. The vehicle Bevan described to Scotland Yard sounds very similar to those to which Lazar claimed secret access at Area 51.

The Third Possibility

Even if Lazar is telling the truth as he saw it, does that necessarily mean we can trust his version of events? That might sound like an odd question, but, beyond the issue of whether Lazar is a teller of fantastic truths or a purveyor of outrageous lies, there is that third possibility I alluded to earlier. It’s one that is very seldom considered: Perhaps Lazar faithfully related to George Knapp (and later to many others) what he was told about and saw at Area 51, but Lazar was himself utterly lied to about the real nature of the “UFOs” to which he was exposed. What if the vehicles weren’t actually from another world after all? What if they were just the latest in a long line of amazing, futuristic craft developed and built at Area 51 by a team of technical wizards employed by good old Uncle Sam? What if the E.T. angle was introduced as a convenient cover to mask the terrestrial truth?

Aurora

UFOs and aliens aside, it is a fact that Area 51 has a long and secret history of designing, housing, and test-flying radical, unusual-looking aircraft. Mention has already been made of the U-2, the Blackbird, and the Nighthawk. But those babies are nothing when compared to a craft that has become legendary within both ufological and mainstream aviation circles. Its name, supposedly, is Aurora, and it officially does not exist. It is rumored to be a large, triangular, highly advanced aircraft able to fly almost silently. It is said to be capable of performing astonishing maneuvers, such as hovering for significant periods and traveling at tremendous speeds high in the upper atmosphere. The Aurora has been spotted in the skies of our world more and more often since the 1980s. Thus was born the mystery of what has become known as the Flying Triangles.

One stunning incident that may be relevant to the Aurora controversy occurred late at night in central England on March 31, 1993. The location was a military base in the English county of Shropshire called the Royal Air Force Shawbury. The primary witness was the base’s meteorological officer, a man named Wayne Elliott. What he saw was a gigantic, triangular-shaped object flying at a height of no more than 200 feet, and only about a similar distance from the base’s perimeter fence. Bearing in mind that a meteorological officer would generally be considered a highly reliable witness, well-trained in recognizing numerous types of aerial phenomena, we have to conclude that Elliott was able to accurately judge the size of the object, which he estimated to be somewhere between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Elliott also reported that the craft gave off a highly unpleasant low-frequency hum, and at one point fired a beam of light down to the ground that tracked very rapidly back and forth, sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base. Then it suddenly shot away at a fantastic speed, leaving the meteorological officer staring, awestruck, into the night sky.

Even the nation’s Ministry of Defense sat up and took notice of this event. Many people, including one of the Ministry’s official investigators of the affair, a man named Nick Pope, concluded it was due to the actions of visiting extraterrestrials, but others cast their suspicions in the direction of Area 51 and Aurora. Pope admitted that when the Ministry’s investigation of the incident was at its height, he and his colleagues could not ignore the various rumors that were making the rounds about a supposed Top Secret aircraft developed by the U.S. government called Aurora—or, indeed, any hypersonic prototype aircraft operated by the Americans. Questions were duly asked, but the only response from the United States was this: There is no such aircraft as the Aurora, nor is there any craft even remotely similar to what Elliott claims he saw.

Is it possible that the United States military was being somewhat economical with the truth when replying to the Brits? Let’s look at the words of one Walter Bosley, or, as he used to be known, Special Agent Walter Bosley, of the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Bosley, now retired from the world of officialdom, has gone on the record as stating that while working on counterintelligence programs from 1994 to 1999, he was involved in the secret circulation and dissemination of bogus UFO stories to act as convenient covers to hide and protect the test flights of advanced, terrestrial aircraft utilizing Stealth technology. Some of these craft were the secret developments of McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed. As long as the UFO faithful believed these craft had alien origins, and continued to pursue this false angle, officialdom was pretty much happy, as it kept the pesky, meddling saucer-watchers away from investigating secret, high-tech projects of a distinctly human nature.

Could it be that this is also what happened at Area 51 with Bob Lazar? Was everything he saw a charade? Lazar believes not, and suggests that one of the key arguments against such a scenario is that it’s wholly implausible to imagine that the permanent stabilization of Element 115—or, as it’s officially known, Ununpentium, an incredibly heavy element in the periodic table — could be achieved on Earth. In 2004, however, Russian scientists from the Dubna-based Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, along with U.S. colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, reported that they had achieved very brief synthesis of Element 115. Can we, therefore, completely rule out the possibility that someone else has secretly achieved long-term synthesis? If so, perhaps they did not originate in some far-away galaxy, but from Nevada — at Area 51’s S-4.

Spy Game

It is a matter of historical record that, particularly from the mid-1980s onward, when the Air Force — by its own admission — illegally grabbed nearly 90,000 acres of open Nevada land as a means to further restrict public access to Area 51, Russian spies were quietly checking out the area, attempting to bribe base personnel into spilling the secrets of what was really going on at that mysterious installation. There were serious concerns, acknowledged openly by Walter Bosley, that members of the UFO research community might be clandestinely exploited by the Russians as a means to uncover the truth about the United States’s secret-aircraft programs.

Gerald Haines, a historian of the National Reconnaissance Office, said, with respect to CIA involvement in UFO investigations in the 1980s, “Agency analysts 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).”[3]

In that case, there might very well have been a great deal of motivation for Area 51 staff to briefly hire a somewhat maverick character like Lazar to act as the fall guy for an elaborate scheme in which they expose the man to what he is led to believe are alien craft. Because they had done background checks on Lazar and his character, they could guess that he would probably be unable to resist talking about such monumental issues, so they wait patiently until he decides to go public. But maybe Lazar doesn’t talk quite as quickly as the S-4 guys might have anticipated or preferred, so they initiate a mock assassination attempt to speed things up — one that was never intended to physically harm Lazar at all, but was certainly designed to scare the you-know-what out of him, and ensure that he quickly went running to some outfit like KLAS-TV. Then, the alien story is out, wildly circulating among the media and the UFO research community, and there’s no turning back.

Then, with tales of UFOs at the base circulating here, there, and everywhere, Area 51 security personnel sit back and wait to see if anyone named Boris or Ivan starts poking their noses around, attempting to bribe both Area 51 employees and UFO researchers with links to the aviation industry as a means to learn more about what’s afoot at Area 51. Then, like a spider moving in on a fly, American agents quickly pounce. Boris and Ivan have been ingeniously lured into a complicated web as a result of Lazar’s revelations, arrests have been made, and — here’s the most important issue of all—no legitimate secrets have been compromised in the process.

So in this theory, the saucers were not alien craft, and the revelations of Lazar were not accurate. But the attempts of the Russians to learn the secrets of Area 51’s super-classified aircraft — such as Aurora—were all too real, and the U.S. government’s real secrets were successfully protected by a complex UFO-themed smokescreen. That the Russians may have been foiled by a brilliantly executed plan involving spurious data on UFOs, aliens, and extraterrestrial technology, with the involvement of Bob Lazar — quite possibly the biggest unknowing patsy since Lee Harvey Oswald himself — is, in many ways, even stranger and more sensational than the notion that Area 51 might really be home to nine crashed (or donated) UFOs from a world far, far away.

It is important to note that even Lazar himself admitted that, while he was at S-4, the base personnel played “so many mind games there.”[4] Those five words — which probably remain unappreciated by most that have followed his story — just might have been Lazar’s most revealing words of all.

Then again, perhaps Lazar really was speaking the literal truth from the very beginning: Maybe, while the gamblers are systematically drained of their dollars and the strippers bleed dry those who prefer to spend their money in more entertaining ways, as the bright lights of the city forever flash with a hypnotic allure in downtown Las Vegas, fewer than 100 miles away, those nine flying saucers still sit in that classified base known as Area 51, their amazing secrets known only to a select few — one of whom, just maybe, for a brief time in the late 1980s, was Robert Scott Lazar.