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News articles once again mentioned the talk about alien spacecraft, and subsequent articles in national magazines quoted unnamed sources about things of alien origin flying in Nevada.
Nowhere, like a Shiroco in the desert. He was in silhouette. He comes forward on the news and says, we are reverse engineering alien spacecraft at a place called Area fifty one, which you haven't heard about, but it's out there in the Nevada desert, nine flying saucers. And I was part of that program. And now I'm worried about my life. I feel a threat to my personal safety. That's my story.
That's it.
Don The story of Bob Blazar will never go quietly.
He described a job, not a moment in the sky, but a workplace, a schedule, a commute, the chain of command, he said, or reverse engineering alien spacecraft at a place you've never heard of. That place was Area fifty one.
He says.
He was hired to work at an area called S four. At S four, he says, are flying saucers, technology that is seemingly beyond human capability, and overnight.
A classified military test site became a cultural obsession.
Lazar's story is by any standards, fantastic.
He says.
He's telling it in order to protect himself.
So George Knapp was like, who is this? Lazar guide? His news people were like, is this true? In this I don't know. I'm going to find out.
This week we've heard the contention of UFO researchers that there's a secret government within our government. It's a chilling scenario with worldwide implications that may have its roots right here.
EREA fifty one.
That mysterious corner of the Nevada test site is no longer much of a secret. The fact that secret of things go on here is a given even to the Soviets who make daily spy flights over the facility to take a peek at what's going on.
The question was not just is this true? It was who is this guy?
Very polarizing figure. If people look into the UFO world, can we believe him?
Can we not? Does he have a shorted past? Is he a liar?
If Lezaara is lying, it's an extraordinary line. And if he's telling the truth, it's one of the most important revelations in human history.
There is no middle ground.
I was thirteen years old.
Then to hear on the radio Bob Tzar's voice and George Knapp interviewing him, and that was like my gateway drug.
That's where my curiosity got weaponized.
Strange stories of lights in the night sky. No one who's worked a Dreamland has ever publicly acknowledged what so many people have suspected for years, that alien technology is being tested and then avaded desert.
It's a very interesting building.
It's got a slope of probably about thirty degrees, which are hangar doors, nine flying saucers, flying discs of extraterrestrial origin.
It's there. I saw it. This came from somewhere else.
As a bizarre as it is to believe I know what the current state of the art is and physics, and it can't be done.
He says he was never told exactly what he'd be working on, but figured it had something to do with advanced propulsion. On his first day, he was told to read a series of briefings that immediately realized how advanced the propulsion was.
You're like, okay, well is this possibly true. The one thing he said that blew my mind was the way Bob Azar described the propulsion system.
They run gravity amplifiers.
There's no physical hookup between any of the systems in there. They use gravity as a wave, using wave guides like microwaves. Traveling these distances does require a level of technology that man has not yet achieved, but it has nothing to do with flying in a linear mode. Near the beat of light, we can distort the space time and in turn the distance between the point where we are and the point where we want to be.
Blazaarre doesn't talk like a storyteller. He talks like someone describing a machine. Gravity amplifiers, non reactionary propulsion. I mean, are they just cool buzzwords or does he actually know what he's talking about?
When you have a craft is propelled by something.
Most things are reactionary propulsion rockets to roller skates. You push something out the back, you move forward. The thing that Lazarre said publicly that really struck me. He said, this is a non reactionary PU system. You can move through time and space. You can move somewhere without pushing something out the back. And I'm like, what does that mean.
It's like you push your fist into a bed, and you've got a bowling ball on that bed, and the bowling ball falls into the divot where you put your fist, falling into place. If what he said is true, then the distance between stars and galaxies no longer matters. Because the big argument was, of course there's life out there
in the university. If you had a propulsion system that negated the entire dilemma you have of distance, time and space, then there's no boundary that's stopping contact from other civilizations. So all these things people see disks in the sky for thousands of years.
Well, there's a possibility could be true.
So first time I heard it explained in a way that made sense from a point of physics, and I thought, holy shit. If what he saying is true, then distance doesn't matter. And if that's true, dude, I got to find.
Out the hardware and technology I was exposed to should be placed in the proper hands of the scientific community.
There is physical evidence.
Which proves that there is life elsewhere, and that at least one form of that life has been here.
Lazarre says he worked at S four south of Groome Lake, inside hangers built into the desert. Altogether, he claims to have seen nine craft, all different, all beyond human capability.
What Bob Lazar said, then it is imperative that people try to understand what he meant by that and try to figure out for thisselves if he is worthy of your trust.
And then the story fractures.
When he came forward, whether you believe it or not, the idea was that he he was worried about his safety and as well being. I know everybody who's with him at that time, they don't even like each other anymore. Some of them they don't get along. They all agree on one thing. What Bob said happened happened. He was temporarily employed trying to reverse engineer these UFOs. Immediately when he came forward, George Knap tried to dig into these claims and say, what can I prove what is real?
What is not real?
Schools deny his education, agencies deny as employment records just disappear.
Checking out Lazar's credentials proved to be a difficult task. He says he earned degrees in physics and electronics, but the schools we contacted say they've never heard of him. He also said he worked as a physicist at Los Alamo's National Lab, where he experimented with one of the world's largest particle beam accelerators, a half mile long behemoth capable of generating seven hundred million volts.
Very clearly worked at Los Alamos, because guess why George Knapp went there bob led him in.
There's video of that.
Los Alamos officials told us they had no records of a Robert Lazar ever working there. They were either mistaken or were lying. A nineteen eighty two phone book from the lab lists Lazar right there among the other scientists and technicians. A nineteen eighty two clipping from the Los Alamos newspaper profiled Lazarre and his interest in jet cars. It too mentioned his employment at the lab as a physicist.
At the same time, physical evidence refuses to cooperate with that denial. Phone books, newspaper clippings, actual video footage from Los Alamos. This is where the Bob Lazar story becomes impossible to hold together in a clean way.
Obviously worked at Los Alamos. Why did they tell George Knapp that he didn't work there? Never worked there?
They don't know what he's talking about.
We called Los Alamos again. An exasperated official told us he still had no records on Lazarre. EG and G, which is where Lazarre says he was interviewed for the job at S four, also has no records. It's as if someone has made him disappear.
Well, they're trying to make me a non person.
They explain, you called where, well, the schools that I went to, the hospital that was born at past job, and essentially nothing comes up with my name in it.
He smiles, but out of futility, knowing the whole thing must sound ridiculous. According to Lazarre, his employer was the United States Navy. He says he and other government employees would gather near EG and G flight to Groom Lake. Very few people would get into a bus with blacked out or no windows and drive to S four. It took a while, Azar says before he actually saw one of the flying discs. However, there were hints everywhere.
They had a poster and it looked like a commercial poster, almost like it was lithographed and you could buy it at a kmart or something. But they were all over the place, and it had the disc that I coined the term the sport Model.
The sport model his name for the craft stashed in the desert.
When I was let in.
It was the first time I saw the Sport Model in the hangar, sitting down, and I was told they could have walked me in the front door, but they purposely wanted to walk me by it. I was still not to say anything and just keep my eyes forward and walk past the disk into the office area. As I went by it, I just kind of stuck my hands on it, just to run it alongside the thing. And after that I got to see it. I actually
left off the ground and operate. The hangars are all connected together and there are large bay doors between each one, and there were nine total that I saw, each one being different.
Security it asked four was oppressive, Lazarre says, and his superiors used fear and intimidation almost as a brainwashing tool.
Did everything but physically hurt me. Put a gun gear.
Head, Yeah, guards there with them, sixteens and guys slamming their finger into my chest, screaming in my ear, some people pointing weapons at me.
It's not a good place to work.
Either he lied about parts of his background or someone tried very hard to erase him.
Paul, I've just presented to you is true, and the government is keeping this a secret. How can I make a video telling you about it? Well, the bottom line is if there are any repercussis from making this video, well, it simply confirm that what I told you is true.
So what you do with this information is up to you.
What's going on up there could be the most important event in history. You're talking about contact, physical physical contact and proof from another system, another planet, another intelligence. That's got to be the biggest event in history period. I am telling the truth. I've tried to prove that.
Not every detail is perfect.
So the question becomes, does one false truth or unresolved mystery collapse this story?
Altogether?
We have people ostensibly with credentials who are frauds. And who have blommed on to pop culture. Robert Scott Lazarre, supposedly a nuclear physicist with a master's and physics from MIT, a master in electronics from cal Tech, who supposedly worked at Area fifty one back engineering flying saucers. I did a lot of checking on Bob. I tried to meet with them twice. I was supposed to on one occasion, and he didn't go along. I checked at MIT, I
checked at cal Tech. Neither one ever heard of him. Well, but the government wiped his records clean. As the response. I talked to the legal counsel at MIT.
No way to do that.
I talked with the guy who has the.
Degrees, the commencement lists and all that sort of thing. No mention of Lazarre. None of the yearbooks show Lazar for a master's degree. You need a thesis. I talked to the guy who holds those No Lazarre item there. And the story goes on and on beyond that, and I got people telling me, well, I don't see why you don't believe him. He seemed so sincere. Sincerity is not a check on truth.
So if you go back in his history and he talks about going to college. There's no record of him being at this college. How is that? So, what is the explanation for that?
So let's open this up so your audience understands. So now we're going to like one of the points of contention. One of the first things George Knapp couldn't confirm was Bob Azar's education history. There are certain things he couldn't ever prove. Doesn't mean they didn't happen, just George couldn't prove him so in the first report, because I cannot verify his claimed educational roles what he said that he had. So it leaves you with one of three options. Either
Bob a Zart lied about his educational history. That doesn't negate the fact that he did work at Los Alamos, and doesn't negate the fact of what we now know about his employment out at the test range area fifty one. That's version one. Okay, I'll accept that. If that's true. Already you've got one thing cool. Does it make the difference for me? It's a part of it. Maybe I just want to know he's he a liar? What is the value of that to you? Maybe you're trying to figure out if he's a liar.
Well, it's like if you're on trial and this person had a history of lying about this, the defense would use.
That that's evidence. You know, you look at the idea of well, what's the other options.
The other option is that back in the eighties or eighty nine, when things were not as digital as they are now, could you and would you scrub elements of his educational background?
Okay, I could see some of that happening. So then the third option is.
What if Bob Blazar hasn't told us everything? What if he did have education at those schools he claimed, but he was maybe protecting a little bit the exact nature of that education. That's something that maybe Bob can talk about if he ever wants to. But that's a third
option and want people to keep on the table. When you bring up one aspect of the Bob Blazar case that is on your mind, you have to assign it a value, like how important is that if we already know he worked at Area fifty one and we have some proof of that, like I have people that testified they saw him there, So then you have to assign a value to that. How much value does that one thing have you? It gave you three possibilities. Maybe we don't know the full story.
That's how I would write the ship for you.
The educational background of Bob Bazaar is that maybe there's something that we don't fully understand yet, or he's lying, or they scribed it a sign of value to that. Just keep an open mind. If I found out he was lying, I would have already said so, and I could.
Swallow the pill that if he came forward and said, hey, man, I lie about this, think he's more credible if he told me though, But just to.
Be fundamentally clear, my understanding, like my belief, I guess my direct knowledge is that Bob Azar is telling you how it is, and there's probably more to hear from him. The other thing I think you should consider, if there's tons of evidence in the favor of Bob having experienced what he said he did. We can't dismiss all of that based upon a few things that are unlooped for you.
Don't discount there is a mountain of evidence. The other thing you can reconcile is that it is possible that someone like Bob Bazaar is the perfect person to bring into a program Rocket guy. He's a pirate. If you want to this credit, Bob, you can do it.
The bottom line is some things add up, some things do not, and there's no one explanation that covers all of it, at least in a clean way. So instead of arguing about Bob Blazar as a person, let's widen the frame. The deeper question is about how we decide what counts as knowledge, what do we accept as evidence, and how much uncertainty are we willing to take before we stop looking.
More than a dozen agents serving federal search warrants Tatan is.
Now chief investigator George Knapp now with the exclusive story.
Secrecy has always been paramount.
That Area fifty one, a once obscure outpost in then about a desert that might be the world's best known secret base.
He was pulled into court in crazy ways, pulled into court for setting up a security system for a brothel. Bob had a crazy life. And when you talk about discrediting the messenger so that you can discredit the message, that's where it gets sticky. Just because you can discredit somebody from what a moral standpoint, doesn't mean what they're
saying ain't true. You should be disturbed by certain lacks of information in the Bob Blazar report, in what he has reported to us, it would make logical sense for you to be a little bit like, well, wait a second, there, Wait a second there. I was trying to catch Bob Bazar and a lie absolutely every day from my own knowledge, and I'm sorry to report bizarre has never ever been disingenuously, not even disingenuous.
You gave me acceit to everything.
Thirty years ago.
Today, KLAS aired a live interview with an anonymous man who made some really astonishing claims. He alleged that the US military was secretly studying alien technology out of the Nevada Desert area fifty one.
A lot has.
Changed in the decades since Bob Blazar first told this wild story. The Pentagon recently admitted that it really has been secretly studying UFOs, and then it wanted to figure out and duplicate that technology.
Pentagon officials reluctantly admitted to The New York Times that the military has secretly studied UFO incidents in parts of it might figure out the technology.
It is what it is, But ultimately I wasn't there. I don't know for a fact that everything he saw was what he thinks it was the mysterious case of Bob Blazar. He's a hell of a guy, a really good person, and that's more important to me than flying saucers.
The bottom line is some things add up, some things do not, and there's no one explanation that covers all of it, at least in a clean way. So instead of arguing about Bob Blazar as a person, let's widen
the frame. The deeper question is about how we decide what counts as knowledge, what do we accept as evidence, and how much uncertainty are we willing to take before we stop looking To help do that, I wanted to bring in two minds who approached this problem from a very different angle, not as whistleblowers or journalists, but as thinkers, scientists who are less interested in answers than in frameworks.
That brings us to Gary Nolan, who you heard briefly in episode one in the Legendary Jacques Valet.
It's like the end of that lessons and now you need to get a job, and you need to get money, and you get to invest in structures, which is what doctor Nolan is leading. And that's possible now because I think in part because of people like me writing those books, and those books getting attention through the web. On a number of people know the basic facts, you know, the basic data, and a number of people have started to
do their own investigations. And if you have a computer today, you can build a professional level catalog and you can do your own statistics. If you're no statistics, you know, you don't need to wait for somebody to give you authorization to do that. That has changed the audience. It's made it a lot larger, and it has changed the level of professionalism that you can apply to them. The mystery goes through phases, and every phase is taken up by the media and then forgotten and then reboard some
other way. So I've seen all these different waves of of interest along the way. Then it became international. Today most of the information suddenly that I get or the people here get is through the web. Now everybody can be in contact know what's going on in other countries. I think we're at a point of major transition.
You know.
The media has driven that. You know, once you have television, then people have access to a larger audience. Before it was just radio interviews, you know, once in a while, and they will only happen when there was some event. Journalists are not going to be interested in the subject where there is no breakthrough, when we're still standing here with no real answer to the mystery. I'm taking the time to answer your question because I think that's the
profound question. There isn't one truth. I'm an information scientist, So what I'm going to do is ask how many cases like that are there? And I'm going to build a little catalog of those cases if I can. I'm going to go talk to the witnesses in the other cases they are like it. Then I'll try to build a pattern or a model of what the operation or what the situation was, and where that person was with respect to that situation. And I think that's all I can do. That's the best I can do.
Data is different than evidence. The same data I kind of a list of numbers. It could be you know what last year's wine harvest is, or what the output of the sewage plant was across the United States.
Numbers.
That's just data, right, But contextualize data, at least in science, in the context of a hypothesis, saying, Okay, here's data that I've collected around biology. Does the data support in the context of the question whether or not the hypothesis is correct. At that level, it starts to become evidence, and we call it evidence, but it's not Evidence is not proof. Evidence is no more proof in biology or
uap UFOs than it is in a courtroom. Evidence is evidence, and you have a jury of your peers who you are looking at the evidence and how you the prosecutor or the defense pitch it different ways of interpreting what the evidence means. But the evidence truly is just data.
The question is what is the nature of evidence? I mean, there has to be a framework. It's like in court, you can have a witness who is telling the truth about what he saw and he saw a blue car. Now I'm going to get other witnesses to come forward, and some of them will be truthful, and they will have seen a red car. Okay, and they're both telling the truth as they experienced it at the time. But
at the time the event was confusing. There were many people, there was blood on the floor, there was an accident, there was something happening. The police arrived with sirens and lights and everything else. Ambulances arrived, and everybody got very confused.
If you look in the papers and you read the actual science of the papers. Biologists and even often physicists will leave themselves so much diplomatic room to be wrong. They'll always say it is supportive of the hypothesis.
Do you leave yourself room to be wrong?
Scientists are right today, wrong tomorrow, but right the next day. You know, so what it is, It's an incremental reinterpretation of reality.
Reality is a construct of my brain based on my perceptions. And my perceptions are limited, and they are limited by my culture. They are biased by you know, my beliefs. Some people might see the virgin Mary and I'll just see a light. If you want to go back to was it real or not? You have to ask that question. And what do you mean by rail? You know what I mean? Was there a physical version Mary there? And if saw? How come only one person saw her?
There's only really one place where proof exists, and that's in math, because you have set the parameters so tightly. Usually in a mathematical regime, you've created a sandbox within which it's either right or wrong. One plus one equals to always. But we do come eventually to conclusions. Certain things get accepted as fact because so many people have looked at it over time. That is like, okay, well,
I don't need to check it again. Every time I've checked it, and all the things that I do based on it.
Continue to be true.
So therefore I can proceed as if it was a formal conclusion.
And if you dequote it the way I try to decote those, it says your idea of time is wrong and your idea of space is wrong. Now I can introduce you to my own some of my friends in the physics and you know, in theoly call physics while telling me the same pain. There is no such thing as time, There is no such thing as space. Those are things that our brains and eyes and are constructing to account for things around us well enough that we can survive, you know, in this environment for a while. Okay,
that's all there is. But that's not true in terms of the way the universe is constructed. All those messages, whether they are overt or you know, more subtle, planted in the brain or whatever they they are at another level that needs to be needs to be decoded. But you find the same message being told in many different cultures,
in many different ways intependently. You know, the physicists today are starting to teach that time and space are convenient valuables to do math about this world, so we can build the Eiffel Tower. But that's really not the basic physics is a form of uncertainty, you know, form of of quanta or something like that. Okay, So physics is in a crisis because of that. They need to reconcile with reality the way the way it is, the way
the way we manipulate it. We're facing something that's where ahead of us, with control of physics that we don't understand, and control of life, you know, at a level that we haven't considered yet. To me, the driver is that this should be an inspiration for us. This is not a threat, which is why the Air Force wanted to get out of it, because you know, everything they do is designed for war. Okay, this is not a war.
We don't know what it is. The science is based on observing nature and being seduced by nature or threatened by nature and adapting to it. So this is part of our learning, you know, about the universe. Generally we think we understand the earth, and that's not true when you talk to you know, the Navy people who are here. So I think we're getting humble as out of this, and it's good for us to be a little bit humble. For example, there are three universities in the United States
that are now engaged with projects that are funded. There is you know, Stanford and the Columbia and Harvard. Excuse me, but those are not depending on money from the government. They do whatever they want, and a professor with tenure in one of those universities, like doctor Nolan or doctor Avilbe at Harvard can pretty much raise money from from companies or from interested people and design the project he
wants and get his students involved. At the very beginning, when I spoke to doctor Heinez, there were a number of secret projects, if you remember, on the Air Force in the US. So the hypothesis was that this was, this could come from an adversary, you know, as part of the Cold War, that this was part of spying, this was and that hypothesis didn't work. I mean, what they were observing was beyond the capabilities of even the
Soviet Union. The thing that I saw as a kid, I have no idea I would compare it to you know, I could give you hundreds of observer stress like it between ten and fifteen meters in diameter, a disc that flies without noise or trail and has some sort of a dome on dup priceauser.
When you listen to people like Jock Valet and Gary Nolan, it forces you to slow down, not because they're giving you answers, but they remind you how limited our frameworks still are, how much of reality we explain through habit and comfort instead of actual understanding. Science likes clean categories, clear definitions, results that are repeatable, but the human experience is never that tidy, making this season of high strange. There's so many nuanced details that stand out to me.
People's tone, they're timing, body language, what somebody hesitates on, what they tend to rush through, and what feels heavy. Not just the stories themselves, but the real life moments around them. Sitting across from someone and feeling the room change when a certain detail comes up, watching people light up or shut down, realizing how much information lives in these pauses. They don't show up in transcripts, they don't fit neatly into an evidence folder, but they matter.
This show is not just about what people say happened.
It's about how they carry it, how it sits with them, how it shaped the way they move through the world.
And the same goes for us.
Every interview, every drive, every late night conversation, all that becomes part of the story too. So in the next episode, I sit down with my team and we pull the camera back even further. We talk openly about the people we've met, the places we went, the moments that's stuck with us, and the stories that never quite fit into a single episode. But I just have to tell you, since twenty twenty three, we've been researching this topic at length. We have dozens of more stories to share with you.
That's why we're coming back again. Season three of High Strange will be even longer and begins on June six. And before we get there, let's take the gloves off and talk about some aliens. High Strange is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeart Podcasts, created, hosted and edited by myself Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are myself and Donald Albright, editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner and myself.
Original scorer by Makeup and Vanity Set, sound design, mixing, and mastering by Cooper Skinner, Additional production by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, and Meredith Stedman.
Our cover art is by Polygon.
Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, and Beck Media and Marketing.
Check out the show's website.
At high Strange dot com, and if you're enjoying the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast and share it with your friends.
Thanks for listening.