Who Is Bob Lazar?

Term: S-4: the name Bob Lazar gave a secret facility near Papoose Lake, south of Area 51 in Nevada, where he said he worked.

Term: Area 51: a real, secret U.S. Air Force test range in Nevada, used for aircraft such as the U-2 and A-12.

Term: Element 115: the element with 115 protons, later named moscovium. Lazar said a stable form of it fueled the craft he worked on.

Who Is Bob Lazar?

Bob Lazar is an American man who said in 1989 that he had worked on recovered flying saucers at a secret site near Area 51. He said the craft were not made by humans. No one has verified his claims, no physical evidence has been produced, and colleges he named said they had no record of him.

What he claimed

In November 1989, Lazar appeared on Las Vegas television station KLAS in a series of interviews with reporter George Knapp. He first hid his identity, then used his own name. He said he was hired to help reverse-engineer the propulsion system of a craft at a facility called S-4, near Papoose Lake. He said the site held nine craft.

Lazar described a propulsion system that bent space and time using gravity, and he said the fuel was a stable form of element 115. He also said he read briefing papers stating that contact with non-human beings went back at least 10,000 years. His story became central to the modern Area 51 legend.

A 2018 documentary by Jeremy Corbell, Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers, introduced him to a new audience. A second film, S4: The Bob Lazar Story, reached Amazon Prime in April 2026, and Lazar gave a round of interviews to promote it.

The element 115 claim

Lazar’s supporters often point to element 115. In 1989 it had never been made. A team at Dubna in Russia, working with scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, first synthesized it in 2003. It was officially named moscovium in 2016.

The match stops there. The isotopes made in laboratories exist for fractions of a second. Lazar described a stable material that could power a craft. Physicists had also discussed very heavy elements and a possible island of stability for years before 1989, so a guess about element 115 was not out of reach for someone with physics knowledge. No stable form of moscovium has been observed.

Problems with his background

Lazar said he held master’s degrees from MIT and Caltech. Reporters found that neither school had a record of him, and the schools told KLAS in 1989 that they had no record. He said the records were erased. Investigators who checked his employment found no record of his work at S-4. EG&G, the contractor he named, told KLAS it had no record of him.

Supporters point to a 1982 Los Alamos newspaper profile that called him a physicist, and to a Los Alamos telephone directory listing. Critics note that he worked at Los Alamos as a technician for a contractor, not as a physicist employed by the laboratory.

Where his story stands

Nearly 40 years later, no one has produced a craft, a piece of the fuel, a document, or a coworker who confirms his account. Area 51 does exist, and it tested secret aircraft, which can explain many strange sights near it. The Pentagon’s AARO reviewed claims about government reverse-engineering programs in its 2024 historical report and found no evidence for them.

Lazar’s supporters say his consistency over time and his early mention of element 115 count in his favor. Skeptics say the missing records and the physics count against him. Lazar has never offered evidence that others can test.

How I use his story

Lazar says the craft were extraterrestrial. My book takes the opposite view. In Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials, I list Lazar among the people who pushed UFOs into public view, and I note that skeptics dispute parts of his story. I do not rest my case on his claims.

Disclosure is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.

Sources

Skeptic magazine, The Strange Case of Bob Lazar (April 2026). Coverage of the 1989 KLAS-TV interviews by George Knapp. Joint Institute for Nuclear Research on the synthesis of element 115. AARO Historical Record Report, Volume 1 (March 2024). Wikipedia, Bob Lazar.