This transcript details a live, on-stage interview with Bob Lazar, discussing his background, his alleged work at the S-4 facility near Area 51, and the aftermath of his decision to go public.
[Introductory music and applause]
Introduction & Personal Background
George Knapp: Contrary to what Bob is worried about, we're going to have some fun here. He was just here like 1990; it was like yesterday. I thought maybe we'd start with a couple of questions that let you get to know Bob a little bit.
So, they played one of the great Super Bowls of all time last month. Which of the teams did you like?
Bob Lazar: Really? We're going to do sports questions? I don't even know who plays.
George Knapp: That's right. Tomorrow is the Oscar broadcast. Who do you think is the best picture?
Bob Lazar: I have no idea.
George Knapp: Because you don't watch a lot of movies, right?
Bob Lazar: Yeah.
George Knapp: Breaking Bad or Sopranos? Which of those series did you like best?
Bob Lazar: Yeah, you're just not on my channel.
George Knapp: Because you live in "Bob World," right?
Bob Lazar: Right. What I'm trying to convey is you live in "Bob World." I know I live in a scientific bubble, that's just about it. My work is my life. Whether I'm working or having fun, it's pretty much the same thing.
George Knapp: Tell them what you do. Where you live and your business.
Bob Lazar: I unfortunately live in Michigan. I would really like to be back here. The business is United Nuclear Scientific. We sell and build lots of scientific equipment and supplies for schools, universities, the government—everybody. We also do R&D contract work, designing and prototyping weird things for different companies. If they have a problem, they'll come to me and just say, "Make this work."
But the bulk of it is really just selling scientific equipment and trying to bring that back. Back when I was a kid, you used to be able to go into a hobby store and buy chemicals and have a chemistry set. Now, if you see any glassware in somebody's house, you just think they're cooking up meth or something. We try to change the tide and bring back hands-on stuff.
George Knapp: That's one of the stories told about you, right? That you had a meth lab, among others.
Bob Lazar: Oh yeah, that's true. I forgot about that.
Government Contracts and Scientific Credentials
George Knapp: Do you have any government contracts?
Bob Lazar: We do bid on government contracts.
George Knapp: You see where that could go. People say, "Ah, he's working for the government, they're paying him off. He did his job, spread disinformation, now he's working for the government."
Bob Lazar: No, I don't work for the government. But if there's contracts, I bid on it. And you know, every faction of the government doesn't know what the other one's doing. It's a complete mess.
George Knapp: The question is raised, "You're not a scientist." What kind of scientist are you? I haven't been to your house in Michigan, but the last time I visited you in New Mexico, there was something built in the building right behind your home: a 30-foot particle accelerator. You built it. What do you do with a home particle accelerator?
Bob Lazar: At the time, I was working on an efficient way of storing hydrogen for automotive use. Some of the most efficient hydrides—materials that absorb hydrogen like a sponge absorbs water—were restricted because they were used in thermonuclear bombs. You couldn't purchase these materials, but there was a loophole where you could make them. So I had to build a particle accelerator to make the material to run tests on.
George Knapp: You don't fit the mold of a typical scientist. You're not a member of any science organizations. You don't typically write and submit papers.
Bob Lazar: No, not in the normal sense. When I first went to Los Alamos, what was really annoying to me was the typical, pompous, self-righteous scientist. When I worked there, I relabeled some important equipment "whirligig" or something along those lines, and it really pissed them off. I was the new guy coming from the west into the hardcore scientific field, and I was able to run circles around these guys because they followed a set path. I just looked at things from a different point of view and simplified things. People say, "Boy, you don't talk like a scientist." Yeah, I'm trying to make everyone understand.
The Job at S-4
Getting Hired and the First Day
George Knapp: Let's get to flying saucers. You got hired through EG&G to work for the U.S. Navy. Do you remember day one?
Bob Lazar: The first day was going to Area 51 proper, signing all the agreements, and doing all that paperwork. It was a lot of security stuff—questioning my family, where we had moved. It was boring.
George Knapp: They had investigated you? They'd been around talking to everybody you knew?
Bob Lazar: Yeah, clearly. Because I already had previous security clearance, it made it a little easier as opposed to somebody starting from scratch, which typically takes about 13 months for a top-secret or civilian Q clearance.
George Knapp: So you get on the Janet plane in Las Vegas, fly up there, land at Groom Lake (Area 51), and then they put you on a bus with blacked-out windows to go to S-4?
Bob Lazar: Yes. It was an old bluebird school bus, but navy blue.
George Knapp: You had told me they started showing you these briefing books. Was that at Groom or at S-4?
Bob Lazar: That was at S-4. No material like that would ever get to the people at Groom Lake. People from Groom say, "I never heard any of this stuff, I've never seen any flying saucers." There is no flying saucer stuff at Area 51. When I worked at S-4, there were 22 people that had clearance and knowledge of the ET material and crafts. That was it. We were given the list, we knew the names on the list, and those are some of the things that I never say anything about. It's something I have to keep to myself to verify if some other guy comes up and claims they worked with me.
The Facility and the Craft
George Knapp: Back to day one. You take a bus to S-4 at Papoose Lake. What did you see?
Bob Lazar: The first time I went, we drove around the end of a little mountain. At the very end is an entrance, a flat wall with doors, and that's where we went in. It wasn't until the second time I was taken down there that we stopped in the middle, because the side I thought was flat was actually nine hangar doors, cleverly blended into the side of the mountain to look like the desert.
[Bob goes to a whiteboard to draw a diagram.]
Bob Lazar: Inside, there are doors between the hangars. On one occasion, these doors were all open, and you could see that there were different craft in each bay.
[Applause]
George Knapp: Let's talk about the crafts. The first time you saw one.
Bob Lazar: The first time I saw one was the second time I went. The last bay door was open, and that was the "Sport Model" sitting in there. We went in through the big bay door.
George Knapp: Before that, you had seen posters on the walls.
Bob Lazar: Yeah, they went through the trouble of actually making a commercial-style poster of the Sport Model lifting off of Papoose Lake, and it just said, "They're here." They looked like they were lithographed. It was good to see that level of lightheartedness out there.
George Knapp: First day, you get a look at the Sport Model. What are you thinking?
Bob Lazar: "Alien flying saucer" did not enter my mind. It was the opposite. I thought, "Well, this explains all the UFO sightings. We have some advanced propulsion technology." It made perfect sense to me. I was excited to be part of this project. It even had a little American flag stuck on it. I dragged my hand across it, it felt cold, and I got yelled at immediately.
George Knapp: At what point do you realize we didn't make it?
Bob Lazar: The briefing books just did not make any sense. They covered engineering, material analysis, power systems... it was so far beyond what I was expecting. I was confused, thinking, "Is this a test, or is this actual material?" It really didn't hit me until I went in and was introduced to my working partner, Barry. The way they worked there was very compartmentalized. Barry was excited to show me everything.
The Reactor Demonstration
George Knapp: Tell us about the reactor demonstration.
Bob Lazar: The reactor is a small device, roughly a foot square with a hemisphere on top. For size comparison, think half a basketball on a plate. There were no moving parts. Barry took the top off, then put it back on and told me to grab the sphere. As my hands approached it, I couldn't touch it. It felt exactly like pushing two like poles of a magnet together, but it was a force field around my hands. He said, "You're feeling an artificially produced gravitational field." That floored me. I began to run through my mind how this could be faked, and there's just no way. That was the first time the dominoes started to fall.
George Knapp: The golf ball demonstration?
Bob Lazar: He said, "Check this out," and he winged a golf ball at the reactor. It bounced off the field, hitting one of the suspended ceiling tiles and knocking it out of place. He flipped out, worried his supervisor, Dennis, would see. We were trying to fix it when Dennis walked in.
George Knapp: What was your job? What were you supposed to do?
Bob Lazar: The bottom line wasn't to figure out how it works, but "Can we make another one of these?" The answer is no. Not even in the same ballpark. It's because of the materials and because we just don't understand the physics.
Bob Lazar: This is like dropping off an iPhone in the wagon train days and saying, "We're gonna need more of these."
[Applause]
The Technology
Element 115 and the Propulsion System
George Knapp: Let's talk about the fuel: Element 115. How did you know that's what it was?
Bob Lazar: We weren't given the task to analyze the fuel, just to identify it. Inside the reactor is a small triangular piece of what we called the fuel. We had it tested, and it became obvious that this isn't even on our usable periodic chart. We were told Los Alamos had something to do with storing it and that there were 500 pounds of it.
George Knapp: You told me we couldn't make it. Why?
Bob Lazar: To make super-heavy elements, you have to do it on an atom-by-atom basis in an accelerator. You might get a particle that flies off and hits a detector and you say, "That was 115," but you don't get a usable quantity. To make a gram would take the resources of a country forever.
George Knapp: When this was first discussed, Element 115 didn't exist. They've made it since, but people say it doesn't behave like you described.
Bob Lazar: What they made was a different isotope. Hydrogen is Element 1, but it has multiple isotopes: protium (stable), deuterium (stable), and tritium (radioactive). They're all still hydrogen. No doubt Element 115 has god-knows-how-many isotopes. We know at least one is stable.
George Knapp: How does the reactor work?
Bob Lazar: You put the fuel in, put the lid on, and it just turns on. There's no on-switch. It generates its own artificial gravitational field.
George Knapp: How does the craft fly?
Bob Lazar: The craft has two modes, which they labeled Delta and Omicron. In Omicron mode, one of three gravity emitters swings out to the side. It creates a gravitational distortion—a divot in space-time—and the craft essentially "falls" or rolls into that distortion. It's the opposite of our propulsion, where we push something out the back. They create a distortion in the front and move toward it.
The Test Flight and the Craft's Interior
George Knapp: You got to see it fly.
Bob Lazar: Yes, once, up close. The craft silently lifted off the ground with an obvious high-voltage corona discharge—a purple-blue glow. As soon as it lifted about 10 feet, that dissipated. It just moved around and sat back down. It was incredibly impressive.
George Knapp: You said it can achieve a kind of invisibility.
Bob Lazar: Absolutely. The gravity field bends light around it. You could walk underneath it, look straight up, and not see the craft until you stepped to the side and it became visible again. This is gravitational lensing, but here it's from an artificial source. All the science fiction things become reality: your invisibility cloak, your impenetrable force field, your field propulsion system.
George Knapp: You got inside the craft. Describe the interior.
Bob Lazar: Very bland. It looked as if it was all made out of wax, heated up, and then cooled. There were no sharp angles, everything had a smooth curve. It looked like one giant, injection-molded piece, with no seams, rivets, or fasteners. There were no buttons and no wiring. The seats were very small.
George Knapp: You mentioned "furniture."
Bob Lazar: Yeah, that was during the first TV interview. I was stressed and couldn't think of the word "seats," so I said "furniture." It looked like a little furniture set for kids. You had to hunch over to walk around. Whatever built or used the thing was obviously smaller than me. They referred to the beings that ran the craft as "the kids."
Going Public and the Aftermath
Why He Left the Program
George Knapp: Why would you walk away from a scientist's dream job?
Bob Lazar: It was more of a personal nature. My work schedule was erratic; they would call at any time, day or night, and I'd have to go. I couldn't tell my wife what I was doing, and she thought I was having an affair. To give her something to do, I got her flying lessons, and she started having an affair with the flight instructor. The security team was monitoring my phone, so they were listening to this affair progress while I knew nothing about it.
One of their main requirements is that you be mentally and physically stable. They got into a quandary about what to do with me, so the calls just stopped. I started getting really concerned. They want to know where everyone with this knowledge is 24/7, and now they're not even calling me. I thought I was just going to disappear.
The Decision to Speak
Bob Lazar: I had charts of the test flight days. They were always on Wednesday nights. So I told a few people, "This is going to be an unbelievable story, but this is what I've been doing. I can show you." I just wanted somebody else to see what I had done in case I was gone one day. We went out there, and sure enough, everything happened like I said. That's when my wife finally realized I wasn't having an affair. It was just a giant, embarrassing mess.
George Knapp: After they caught you the third time, a lot of bad things started happening.
Bob Lazar: Yeah. When we got caught, we were out on the dirt road. We were joking around, saying silly things into the darkness. Right after we said something about having 150 team members ready to storm the base, a little green thing fell on the ground and rolled toward us. A bunch of guys were standing there in the dark watching us through night vision scopes, and one of them had dropped his. They turned on the lights and took us in. After that, there were break-ins at my house, my car... it was real.
George Knapp: At some point, you decided to talk to me. John Lear said, "Unless you talk to this guy George Knapp and go on the air, they'll be afraid to... " wait...
Bob Lazar: He said they wouldn't be afraid to do anything to me unless I went on air. I was a very reluctant witness.
Reflecting on the Story and the Controversy
George Knapp: You regret it?
Bob Lazar: Yeah, it has changed my life. Not for the good. It's entertaining to me when people say, "Oh, you made up some story, I bet you're making all kinds of money." Where? I had opportunities with movie studios, but they wanted to embellish the story. I said, "Either you tell the story how it happened, or leave me out." So, we didn't do it.
George Knapp: Of those who don't believe your story, they believe you're either making it up or spreading disinformation.
Bob Lazar: No, I'm not making it up. That's way too much for me to handle. Look, I understand how my story can interfere with other people's income streams or belief systems, and they need to attack me. But what I said happened, absolutely happened. Period.
George Knapp: But you can understand why people have trouble with it.
Bob Lazar: I can. If the tables were reversed, I honestly could not say I would believe my story. I can't provide enough information—and in some cases, won't—to back it up. So I have to agree with the skeptics. Unless you can provide more proof, I can't say I'm behind it.
George Knapp: You've never done an event like this before. Why did you decide to come here?
Bob Lazar: I really didn't. The people that arranged this, and you, said, "This is a class thing, just come down. It's 25 years. Once in your life, just say something." I finally just said okay, fine, just to stop you from hassling me.
[Laughter and applause]
Bob Lazar: Seriously, I don't understand why people are so interested in hearing from me. But they made it clear, aside from the fact they'd sue me if I didn't show up. So, I am here.
George Knapp: When you see Area 51 mentioned in movies like Independence Day, or the Las Vegas 51s baseball team...
Bob Lazar: It's overwhelming. It's hard for me to grasp. The last thing I want is a movie coming out. It would be a catastrophe. Being "the UFO guy" is a big problem. It's hard to get contracts and be taken seriously.
George Knapp: People are just excited to hear it directly from you.
Bob Lazar: I certainly understand why people would have a hard time believing it. I do too. But it really is true. It really happened, exactly that way.
[Extended applause]
George Knapp: Thank you all for coming. Hope you enjoyed the conversation with Bob, and maybe I can pester him into doing this again sometime. Thank you very much.