“…I always thought it was important to let the world know,” sounds the unmistakable voice of Bob Lazar during a scene close to the end of the new documentary (S4: The Bob Lazar Story) while an AI-generated view of the legendary hangar—the one full of recovered alien goodies where he allegedly worked in— is shown.
If that doesn’t cement in the viewer’s mind the idea of Bob as the ultimate all-American hero—the real-life Buckaro Banzai, who used to play around with jet cars and explosives in his spare time, while he tinkered with the most exotic materials on planet Earth to decipher the secrets of antigravity at his day job; the man who risked his life and reputation to blow the lid of the Cosmic Watergate wide open—then I don’t know what will.
…I mean, sure, you could ask him to tell that same story he’s been telling for almost 40 years under oath in front of a Congressional panel, but come on! I mean, seriously: Luigi Vendittelli (director and producer of the movie) is showing you actual photographic evidence of the hill base where—if you crank the Photoshop filters up to eleven and squint real hard—you can almost kinda sorta make out some rectangular structures that could be the hangar doors, maybe?
Compression artifacts you say? O ye of little faith…
S4 is about the fourth or fifth attempt to turn Bob Lazar into a superstar outside the UFO subculture where he remains a deeply polarizing figure: The first attempt was courtesy of George Knapp, who recorded a segment with “Dennis” as he was firstly introduced to protect his anonymity (how many people supposedly worked at S4 anyway? You’d think that despite the fake name and the obscured face, it would have taken like two seconds of listening to that unaltered high-pitched, nasal voice of his for anyone to yell, “Hey, that’s Bob!”).
The second was when he and his long-time buddy Gene Huff were selling VHS cassettes with a home-made video in which you could get the scoop from the horse’s mouth, as it were (I assume that without proper distribution, that was as profitable as mail-to-order bootleg porn).
Then the two of them tried to sell Bob’s story to Hollywood, but nothing came of it. After decades of obscurity, the Lazar story was resurrected by Jeremy Corbell, first with a short film and then with a full documentary; it was Jeremy who made a believer of Joe Rogan, who helped bring Lazar to the attention of the younger broculture, at a time when the tide of public perception was once again turning towards a broader interest in UFOs.
Now comes this new film, and aside of being the most beautiful rendition of Lazar’s account֫— Vendittelli says he only used AI sparingly during the production, but it’s hard to believe when the image of the Sport model floating like a jewel over the Nevada desert, while a slop alter-ego of Bob is turning its back on the camera, looks almost exactly like the old photographs of Swiss Contactee Edward “Billy” Meier from the 1980s—what I think I appreciated the most about Vendittelli’s filming style, is that he didn’t subject his audience to countless minutes of him just talking over his damn cell phone.
The title itself should be a forewarning to the potential viewer: this *is* Bob’s story, and there’s no room whatsoever for skepticism, questioning or dissent. Doubts about his education? His role at Los Alamos? His thorny dealings with the law, like when he was accused of running a Vegas bordello? The other (literal) skeletons in his closet? His brief partnership with Robert Bigelow that went sideways after Bob failed to produce the piece of element 115 he supposedly smuggled out of S4 (Vallée writes in his memoirs the material turned out to be a piece of an ordinary industrial insulator)?
All that is brushed aside, swept under the rug, or simply not mentioned at all. I was even surprised that the FBI raid shown at the end of Corbell’s film wasn’t brought up, since it had been clamored by Bob’s believers as proof that the government kept harassing him in their search for the piece of 115 —perhaps Lazar and the producers realized there are battles you simply can’t win.
“Say what you will, I believe in Bob” tweets an angry believer to me after I post a rant pointing out how Lazar’s story has been compiled by taking elements from here and there, in order to provide it a patina of confirmatory plausibility —an old trick harking back to the days of Adamski and the early Contactees: his Sport Model is basically a knockoff of the ‘Pleiadian beamships’ Meier was hanging with a string using only one arm; the ‘MAJ’ security badge he was purportedly issued at S4 was a reference to the Majority/Majestic-12 group, which was supposedly in charge of investigating the UFO phenomenon for the government (ironic that after the 1980s practically the only ufologist who still stood by the MJ-12 papers was Stan Friedman, one of Lazar’s most vicious critics); his aliens (“the Kids” as they were referred in those documents he was asked to read, despite the fact the project was supposedly deeply compartmentalized, so there wouldn’t be any reason to brief a newcoming physicist in all these secrets) came from the Zeta Reticuli binary star system, an idea introduced in Ufology by the famous ‘Star Map’ designed by Marjorie Fish, which was inspired by the Hills’ abduction case; the aliens’ claim that they had genetically engineered our biggest spiritual leaders (including Jesus) sounds a lot like the documents Richard Doty showed to Linda Moulton Howe in the early 80s, while he was an AFOSI officer; the conflict in ’79 when the aliens supposedly stopped cooperating with the government and left, was taken from John Lear and others promoting the Dulce base mythology (for more info, check out ‘Saucers, Spooks and Kooks’).
Lately Bob has been aggregating a few more touches to his story, to make it more palatable to a more modern audience; like his suspicions that the Sport Model is ancient and might have been recovered at some archeological dig, which was probably an attempt to appeal Rogan who is a fan of both Graham Hancock and also Erich Von Daniken (even though Hancock disagreed with Daniken on many things). Bob is also now saying he believes there might be an alien base under the ocean, so clearly he’s keeping his ear to the ground and knows the USOs have been getting popular thanks to Tim Gallaudet and others —that’s one of Lazar’s strong suits: to pretend he’s not a part of Ufology, while piggybacking on the work of others.
Pointing to all of this, or to the subtle ways in which Bob has contradicted himself to disprove the claim that “he’s never changed his story throughout the years,” is of course a futile exercise at this point. “Bob has said the Sport Model was probably ancient since the 90s, get your facts straight” tweets another angry believer at me. That anger is also present in the documentary, voiced by Knapp himself, who is still willing to back Bob after all this time: “I do not give a shit if people believe Bob Lazar (…) I know he’s telling the truth… screw it!”
When the answer to those who keep questioning what is promoted as the best evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life visiting our planet is “Take it our leave it!” then the issue has turned into an article of faith. The church of the SubGenius is a mock religion that worships the prophet ‘Bob’ (who looks a lot like Stephen Colbert if you ask me) but maybe in the future when people say, “Praise Bob!” chances are they will be referring to the one who wore big square glasses instead of a pipe.
Why is it that so many people are desperate to believe in this Bob, anyway? For starters, there’s a level of ambiguity caused by all the gaps in his story, which is an effective storytelling technique in which you let the audience fill in the blanks by themselves —why is it that the aliens, for instance, referred to humans as ‘containers’ according to the documents Bob allegedly read? Containers of what? DNA, souls, or something else?
Leaving those gaps in the story so people could interpret them as they wished was the cleverest way to make the story believable, if you didn’t pry into it deep enough that is. Because so many of the parts in Bob’s script reek of either a cheap spy thriller— “do you have any idea what we’re gonna do to you now?” was the gangster threat of Dennis Mariani (Bob’s boss at S4) after he made the interview with Knapp— or a B-movie with no budget to hire a real science consultant —the actual alien reverse engineering work as described by Lazar sounds more like amateur hour than serious research, what with him and his co-worker Barry goofing around by tossing ping-pong balls to the alien reactor, or how a previous failed experiment before he arrived at S4 had tried to pry it open with a freaking blowtorch —that’s why Bob was hired, you see, because of the ensuing Ka-BOOM…
But there just has to be something else for why people refuse to let go of Bob. Some itch his story manages to scratch in the collective back of Ufology. I began to realize what that was years ago, after I read Blair MacKenzie Blake’s essay ‘Dirt Roads to Dreamland: 51 Trips to Area 51’ in which he described his forbidden forays into the inner sanctum of saucerdom:
“I wasn’t too concerned about Lazar’s lack of credentials, the vagaries of gravity warp drives, or any clever pastiche. What bothered me was that nothing about his story seemed very alien [emphasis mine]. There are more imaginative accounts by witnesses who claimed that the interior of the spaceship they were in was considerably more spacious than it appeared from the outside, or that while observing the UFO from a distance, their eyesight suddenly had become greatly magnified with regards to clarity of detail. I would think that any recovered artifact that was truly otherworldly would be nauseatingly disorienting, so dissimilar would it be to our own creations. Whether the probe of space-faring colonists on an interstellar ark (artificial biosphere), or robotic scouts of a post-biological intelligence, or, for that matter, the lost new toy of a child whose species is immeasurably beyond the level of human intelligence, I could just imagine the pathetic bewilderment of Earth’s greatest minds still trying some 60 years later to find the doorway into the damned thing, let alone understanding how it operates. Unless, that is, it was a dumbed down creation of advanced sentient beings and didn’t in any way represent the pinnacle of their technological achievement.
This – something that humans could handle – they bequeathed to us (though possibly made to appear as if it crashed in order to be retrieved) so as to give us a nudge in the right direction…perhaps even to reshape our future.”
I read Blair’s words at a time in my life when I had moved on from my earlier childhood notions of what UFOs and aliens could be, after I had been introduced to the works of Vallée, Keel and other heretics who questioned the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) dogma. What many people may find appealing in Lazar is probably the same reason so many are stuck with the ETH and refuse to consider more exotic alternatives: his tale, ludicrous or credible as one might judge it, brings a certain level of comfort to those who choose to believe in it —the government might never share with us their heavily guarded off-world toys, but at least they are working in trying to figure them out, and one day they could actually unlock their secrets. Meaning UFOs, despite how magical they seem, are not beyond human comprehension.
The darker, more disturbing alternative to that reassuring scenario —that after all these years, the powers that be still have no clue as to what UFOs are, because the phenomenon represents an ontological threat to our most basic assumptions about the nature of Reality and Consciousness— is too weird and not marketable to the masses in the form of plastic model kits or VOD films.
I reject the Lazar story not because of its logical inconsistences. I reject it because it’s not alien enough.
When I first heard about Bob I was still in high-school. Now I’m in my fifties and I’m convinced we will never get rid of him. His story will remain stuck like a stubborn pebble in the sole (and the soul) of Ufology; an easy target for lazy skeptics accustomed to aim their batteries at the low hanging fruit of ‘woo woo’ tree, and a conundrum to be debated ad nauseam by disbelievers like me—either a useful idiot, disseminating a fabricated disinformation tale of reverse-engineered alien technology thanks to a meticulous gaslighting campaign; or a charismatic con-man who managed to take advantage of ufology’s short-term memory, by continuously repackaging himself to a younger (and gullible) audience.
And for the true believers, there will be the endless repetitions of the Lazar dogma: how he ‘predicted’ element 115 before it was officially discovered; how his academic background at MIT was erased because he worked in classified weapons projects; how he described a ‘bone scanner’ used at Area 51 before anyone had heard of such a thing (anyone who hadn’t watched Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that is). No amount of dissenting evidence will be enough to shake their iron-clad faith as they look up to the night sky and wonder if this year will be the one that brings about Disclosure… and if it is, it will be in no small part to their prophet and savior —“Praise Bob!”
