by Phil Patton
Gene Huff first knew him as “Bob, the photo guy.” Huff was a real estate appraiser in Las Vegas who like many in this business used Lazar’s photo shop to develop pictures of houses. Usually, Lazar’s wife, Tracy, delivered the photos, but sometimes Lazar would show up himself. On these occasions Gene Huff and Lazar would talk. They were both interested in explosives and were part of a group that occasionally went into the desert to set off big explosions. Huff once saw Lazar mix up some nitroglycerin at his kitchen table.
Lazar liked fast cars even better than big booms. He once drove a 1978 Trans Am powered by hydrogen, and he built the jet car that had been featured in the Los Alamos Monitor, a Honda CRX with a jet engine in the back and the license plate JETUBET. He borrowed two thousand dollars to build a jet-powered dragster, a thirty-two-foot-long conglomeration of steel pipe with a surplus Westinghouse J-34 jet engine from a Navy Banshee fighter. It could run at over four hundred miles per hour.
Tom Mahood, the most relentless archivist among the Interceptors, traveled to Los Alamos and Las Vegas to document Lazar’s life. He learned that Lazar had been born in Coral Gables, Florida, then adopted. No records exist proving he attended CalTech or MIT as he claimed. He had attended Pierce Community College in California and had a mail-order degree from a place called Pacifica University. But the Los Alamos Monitor did report that he was a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility or, as he called it, the Polarized Proton section.
A geeky-looking character with large glasses—your classic nerd—Lazar claimed that at S-4 he was assigned to figure out the propulsion system of flying saucers. There were nine different kinds of saucers, he reported, and he gave them nicknames like “the sport model” (a term taken from a Frisbee brand name), “the Jell-O mold,” and “the top hat.”
The saucers traveled by means of a gravity-wave generator, involving a reactor of some sort, and an amplifier that directed the waves. Lazar took credit for identifying the fuel on which the reactor ran as “element 115,” a heavy rust-colored substance with an atomic weight far greater than that of lead. He had surreptitiously pocketed some of the supply of element 115. It was to be his ace in the hole, his way of proving his story, but it had been stolen from his house.
Yet Lazar—and here he dons his role as “physicist”—expressed shock at the crude state of the research at S-4 and the low qualifications of those doing it. They tried to make a saucer run on plutonium instead of element 115, he had heard, and the result had been a disaster. And they had foolishly cut open a reactor while it was operating. It was the resulting deaths, in 1987, that had opened up a job slot for him. Lazar declared that, in only a few days, dealing with “materials that were—pardon the pun—totally alien,” he had figured out the operating principle of the saucer’s antigravity reactor. He was a big-time physicist at last, working on a project even bigger than Edward Teller’s.
If anything lent credence to Lazar’s story, it was that he knew when the flight tests for the saucers were scheduled—Wednesday nights, he reported—and they would appear over the Jumbled Hills between the Groom Lake road and S-4.
He took Huff, John Lear, and others up to see the saucers fly. On March 15, 1989, using Lear’s RV, Lazar, Huff, and Lazar’s wife and sister drove up to Groom, turned out the headlights, and headed down the long sloping dirt road that runs up into the mountains and to the Groom Lake perimeter. Looking through a telescope Lazar soon reported an elliptical light rising above the mountains between them and S-4. The light began jumping and dancing around, then came to a dead stop and hovered. But after just a few minutes, the light slowly sank back down behind the mountains.
Huff and Lazar returned a week later. Huff recalls that Lazar’s wife, Tracy, and a friend named Jim Tagliani joined them. The next Wednesday, the group rented a Lincoln Town Car and returned to the area. “We turned our lights off, and went in about five miles on the Groom Lake road. We pulled off on a side road and unloaded our video camera, telescope, binoculars, et cetera, out of the trunk, and we left the trunk lid open.”
The disc came up around the same place, and this time it staged a breathtaking performance. It repeated moves similar to the week before, but now it came down the mountain range toward them. At first it seemed far away, then they’d blink and it would seem a lot closer, then blink again and it would seem even closer. There was no sense of continuous movement; the disc simply “jumped.”
The object was also incredibly bright, so bright that Huff remembered how they moved behind the open trunk of the car, reflexively seeking protection as if from an explosion.
Lazar told them this motion was due to the method of propulsion and the way it distorts space-time and light. He also explained that the bright glow of the disc was due to the way it was energized. “An explosion was the only thing, other than the sun, that we had ever seen be that bright,” Huff recalled. They took a videotape, and the camera recorded the sighting at around eight-thirty. Eventually it set down behind the mountains, and they left. Huff had never seen anything like this in the sky in central Nevada.
The next Wednesday, Lazar, Tracy Lazar and her sister, Huff, and Lear arrived shortly before dusk. Huff recorded, “Numerous security vehicles were sweeping the roads that the cattle ranchers use to round up their cattle after open-range grazing. It seemed that this night, more than the previous Wednesday nights, they wanted to make sure no one was outside of Area 51.
“We tried to sneak in using our usual ‘stealth’ mode,” Huff went on, “but security saw our brake lights and began to chase us. We tried to beat them out to the highway, but they came from all directions and ultimately we had to stop. We told them we were simply out there stargazing, which they didn’t believe for one moment. They agreed that they couldn’t chase us off of public land, but simply said they would ‘prefer’ that we retreat back up to the highway. They issued us a copy of a written warning that said we were approaching a military installation and cited the relevant statutes, including the penalties for taking pictures of the base.”
The group returned to the paved highway, but a short time later a Lincoln County deputy named LaMoreaux pulled them over and asked for identification. He took their IDs and radioed the security base station. It was obvious, Huff felt, that the guards and the sheriff’s office worked together. But the deputy finally let them go.
The next day, Lazar got a phone call. His supervisor at S-4, Dennis Mariani, had learned of his latest expedition to the Black Mailbox. He was to report for debriefing. “When we told you this was secret,” Lazar recalled Mariani saying acidly, “we didn’t mean you should bring your family and friends to watch.”
Mariani drove Lazar the forty-odd miles from Las Vegas to the debriefing at the old Indian Springs airfield. Lazar was told the test scheduled for the night he was caught had been canceled. But according to Lazar, they neither fired him nor revoked his security clearance. He simply never went back to work.
Lazar had violated all the security rules, yet had not really been punished. He had been warned about security from the beginning of his employment at S-4, he said, by men holding a gun to his head. He was sure all along he was being watched. Security people visited his house again and again and dropped in on his friends. The disc of element 115 he had secreted disappeared from his home. When Lazar talked with Gene Huff at Huff’s home, both men felt sure they were being overheard by listening devices, so instead of speaking aloud they passed notes which Huff burned afterward. In the notes, they referred to each other as Bufon and Gufon, a joking reference to the UFO organization MUFON (Mutual UFO Network).
But Lazar believed that his wife was having an affair and that it was this, and not any of his security breaches, that led to his termination. He thought that the security forces at S-4 had recorded and transcribed his wife’s phone calls, and that in their judgment, he was probably unstable and a potential security leak. By May, the couple would be separated.
At that point, Lazar decided to go public. He had already r
ecorded a video interview with newsman George Knapp, but it was for “safekeeping,” and never aired. In May, Lazar agreed to another interview, this time for broadcast, but in disguise.
Not until November 10, 1989, when Lazar appeared under his own name and showed his face, did the story have a major impact. On November 21, Knapp and Lazar together appeared on The Billy Goodman Happening, an AM radio show with a huge audience. On November 25, KLAS-TV ran a two-hour compilation of the Lazar interviews and other clips under the title UFOs: The Best Evidence. On December 20 he was back on the Goodman show. By then the story was getting international coverage.
Lazar increasingly relied on Huff as his confidant and handler in dealings with the press. He wanted someone else to get a confirming look at Dennis Mariani, his supervisor, so he set up a meeting with him at a Las Vegas casino, and without telling Mariani, he brought Gene Huff along.
Huff had been told to look for a bulky-bodied ex-Marine type with a little blond mustache. Huff found Mariani sitting at the blackjack table between two large-breasted women and behaving oddly: He was not looking at them at all. In Las Vegas this seemed highly aberrant behavior. But even worse, Mariani pretended not to recognize Lazar, and the meeting never came off. Perhaps Mariani had noticed Huff; Huff had caught sight of another man with him who he said looked like a security agent.
Early the next year, Norio Hayakawa, a UFO researcher who had seen the KLAS-TV broadcasts, brought Lazar to the attention of Nippon TV, and in February 1990 he took a Japanese crew to Las Vegas. They interviewed Lazar at what was described as his house, but Hayakawa thought it felt strange. There wasn’t much furniture, and the place didn’t look lived in. A man introduced only as “a friend” sat beside Lazar and even followed him to the bathroom. The man wore some kind of beeper on his belt.
Lazar suggested a time and place the crew could watch the saucers fly, film them, and confirm his story. He sent them to the Black Mailbox. At 6:45 one morning they saw a bright light over the Groom Mountains. At 8:15 a brilliant orange orb jumped erratically.
Lazar agreed to appear live on Japanese television and had even accepted plane tickets to Tokyo for himself and Gene Huff. But Hayakawa waited for him in vain in the terminal at LAX. Lazar never showed. When Hayakawa telephoned, Lazar told him that he could not come; his life was in danger. His tire had been shot out when he was on the way to the airport. Significant money had changed hands as well as the plane tickets, and to save face, the network set up a telephone link so Lazar could at least answer phone-in questions live during the show. Some thirty million Japanese viewers saw the program.
Then something even weirder happened. In April 1990, not long after the Japanese show, Lazar was arrested in Las Vegas for pandering, an obscure charge akin to living off immoral earnings. He was convicted on June 18.
Lazar had long boasted about a legal brothel he had wanted to start when he was still in Los Alamos. He planned to call it the Honeysuckle Ranch, and there is some evidence he filed the legal papers necessary and even had T-shirts made up bearing the name. But whether the brothel idea was simply a running joke, a fantasy, or a half-realized business effort remains unclear.
The Las Vegas episode had begun when, after his separation from Tracy, Lazar, in Huff’s singular phrase, “took comfort with a hooker.” He became friendly with the girls and, according to the charges, ended up working with a prostitute named Toni Bulloch and helped set up a computer database for a brothel in the Newport Cove Apartments, a Spanish-style complex near the airport. Sentenced to community service, Lazar helped install computer systems for worthy organizations and showed up at a Las Vegas children’s museum to give courses in computing.
Those researching his probation report found that all government records about Lazar’s past had been sealed away under a federal “need-to-know” restriction, further intriguing the believers. Was it part of a plot to silence Lazar, make him disappear? Had he been set up for the whole charge? Or was the government just protecting its own?
This mystery, possessing the part mirror, part pewter surface of Lazar’s Sport Model itself, made his story intriguing. His manner had the same effect: a combination of bright highlights and dull spots. To John Andrews, the veteran Interceptor, Lazar’s appeal lay in the fact that he was one of the rare UFO witnesses to say “I don’t know” about parts of his story. While most UFO stories were dogmatic in their detail, Lazar’s was full of gaps and limits. He refused to speculate on the source of the saucers, for instance.
There were problems with his story, of course. As Mahood had shown, his CV did not jibe with reality. The Social Security number on the W-2 form did not belong to a man named Robert Lazar.
To those familiar with military programs, the descriptions of the saucer program Lazar gave in his interviews included elements that seemed unlikely. He was shown more than was believable, they thought. Special access programs were famously “compartmentalized.” The engine people were not allowed to see what the wing people were doing, and so on. At Groom Lake, for instance, the SR-71 ground crews never knew the destination of the plane. But for some reason Lazar was offered glimpses of many different aspects of the program. Sometimes he said he thought he was allowed these as tests of his loyalty.
After he went public, Lazar took two lie-detector tests, but both were inconclusive. At best, the tester said, Lazar believed what he was saying, but he might have been relaying on information given to him by someone else.
Tom Mahood’s researches into Lazar’s background had revealed the deception. However much power “they” had to erase his past, it is inconceivable that they could have removed Lazar from all copies of MIT or CalTech yearbooks and directories.
Yet even with all the problems, Lazar’s tale drew an increasing audience; he created a fascination even among skeptics.
In his essay “Lazar as Fictional Character,” PsychoSpy got to the core of Lazar’s appeal: that willingness to admit the limits of his knowledge, the restraint in his speculation, and the almost eerie consistency of his tale through interviews over the years. He was perhaps like a witness who tells too good a story in court. Yes, there were a few places that didn’t gel. Once Lazar said that one of the saucers “looked like it was hit with some sort of a projectile. It had a large hole in the bottom and a large hole in the top with the metal bent out like some sort of, you know, large-caliber four- or five-inch [shell] had gone through it.” But in most interviews he said, “None of the discs looked damaged to me.”
Still, it was remarkable how consistent Lazar was in his telling, and PsychoSpy praised the “impressive coherence and integrity of the story itself.” It is “far superior to most science fiction in creating a world that could be true. His is the sort of story I could believe because it is subtle, detailed, and restrained, involves only a very limited government conspiracy, and does not digress into any kind of speculation.”
It was just these qualities about the tale, PsychoSpy noted, that explain why it “appeals to engineers, computer programmers, and other techie types.” It is “heavy on plausible technical details and free of the emotional overtones” that characterize many shrill UFO accounts. “If Lazar’s story is fiction, it’s great fiction, filled with a richness of plausible details and complex philosophical dilemmas that you can’t find in most popular novels these days.”
It was exactly this similarity to a fictional character’s tale—sometimes detailed, sometimes vague, highly subjective, with even a hallucinatory quality, the sense of an imperfect memory washed out by mind control or other means—that made me, too, think of Lazar as a fictional character.
For me, the weirdest part of the story was not the saucers or the aliens. It was the poster that Lazar said he saw in the offices at S-4, the one with the picture of a saucer hovering above the desert and the words, “They’re here!” It looked, he said, as if it had come from Kmart.
The more I studied his tale, the more Lazar reminded me of the antihero of a science-fiction novel by Phili
p K. Dick. Many of Dick’s protagonists are dweebish, sometimes seedy, average guys who get caught up in matters of planetary import. They live in crass commercial worlds while dealing with what they consider important philosophical questions. And they face realities that fade in and out of each other, raising larger questions: Are there sinister influences at work or only demented solipsism? Is it in my head or is something very wrong with this universe? They often feel they are in a carefully crafted illusion, but that some of the workers have spoiled the effect by leaving empty sandwich wrappers and soda bottles around.
Lazar’s tale has this same quality of a half-waking dream. Levels of reality drift in and out of each other in a strange but compelling way. Details of the quotidian world blend with those of the Lore.
Lazar, for instance, noticed that the security badges bore blue and white stripes and the legend “Majestic.” “It made me crack a smile,” he commented, because “Majestic” is straight out of the Lore: MJ-12, which stood for either Majestic or Majic 12, is the famed and much-debated secret committee in UFO legend charged with recovering and hiding flying saucers. MJ was said to be a security clearance “38 levels above Q,” or top secret.
“I don’t know whether it was a kind of nostalgia thing,” he commented. “I began to wonder is this really the Majestic everyone talks about, or was it something done almost for nostalgia reasons?… Assuming the Majestic 12 documents were false, did these guys just use this insignia for the hell of it, kind of as a joke?”