LAZAR AS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER
By Glenn Campbell
Published in MUFON UFO Journal, February 1994

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I have been living for over a year now in the tiny settlement of 
Rachel, Nevada, in the shadow of the unacknowledged Air Force 
base at "Area 51" and twenty miles down the pike from the 
mysterious Black Mailbox.  This area is supposed to be the 
hottest UFO hot spot this side of Gulf Breeze, but I confess that 
I ain't seen nothin'.  

That's not to say there's nothing alien out there along Highway 
375.  You may have read in the August 1993 MUFON UFO JOURNAL of 
an alien abduction reported in this vicinity--at Milepost 26 to 
be 
precise.  I have also spoken to countless visitors just back from 
the desert who report nighttime lights in the sky they feel 
certain are alien craft.  I do not dismiss all of these 
sightings; I just haven't seen or experienced any of these things 
myself.  When I go out into the desert at night, I see a lot of 
spectacular aerial displays, but nothing yet I haven't eventually 
explained.  I see meteors, flares, aircraft lights and many 
manifestations of the bombing runs and war games that take place 
almost nightly in the surrounding Nellis Air Force Range.  

Part of the problem may be that I have a "bad attitude"--wanting 
data not just anecdotes.  Perhaps the aliens can sense my 
skeptical nature, equate me with Phil Klass and refuse to put on 
any kind of show for someone who isn't prepared to trust them 
totally.  Many people who come here expecting to see UFOs do seem 
to see them, while those who don't expect them, like aviation 
enthusiasts looking for human-built Stealth and hypersonic 
aircraft, seem to miss the UFOs altogether--even when they are 
only one hill away from the saucer seekers.  

I do not expect to see alien craft here myself because whatever 
UFOs are, they are certainly a subtle phenomenon.  I would not 
expect to see them on a "timetable basis," as some talk-show 
ufologists have loudly claimed, or to see them much at all near 
such a widely publicized location as the Black Mailbox.  If the 
government or aliens weren't smart enough to take the obvious 
precaution of not performing as published, then I would not 
expect UFOs to have remained so elusive for all these years.

THE STORIES

Most of the current interest in Area 51 by UFO watchers stems 
from Bob Lazar's tale about working with alien craft at nearby 
Papoose Dry Lake in 1988 and 1989.  There were nine flying 
saucers, he says, housed in camouflaged hangers built into a 
hillside near the lake bed.  Lazar says he saw no aliens, only 
what appeared to be alien craft that the government had somehow 
"obtained."  He won't speculate about the aliens and their 
motives, but he can describe the propulsion system of their craft 
in detail based on what he claims was hands-on experience.

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's the sort of story that appeals to engineers, computer 
programmers and other techie types: heavy on plausible technical 
details and free of the emotional overtones that complicate many 
other UFO tales.  Aliens don't visit Lazar at his bedside; they 
enter the story only by implication and through briefing 
documents Lazar says he read.  The beings described are the kind 
of extraterrestrials I can get along with:  low-key and 
reclusive, having physical, dissectable bodies and pursuing their 
own private agenda with little more than clinical interest in 
individual humans.  

Lazar has never recommended the Black Mailbox--a rancher's 
mailbox 
along State Route 375--as a place to look for alien craft, but he 
and his companions do claim to have seen them nearby in 1989.  
Whether this is still the best place to set up watch is a matter 
of debate even among believers, but since this valley is the 
closest a civilian can get to Papoose Lake, this is where the 
pilgrims come.  While the Lazar story is subtle enough to torture 
the brain, I am less comfortable with the countless stories of 
sightings, abductions and psychic experiences reported here by 
visiting "ufo-tourists" after Lazar went public.  Some of these 
stories could indeed be true, but in my view most of the 
publicized UFO claims for this area have a cartoon silliness to 
them.  They assume either a vast, all-inclusive alien-government 
conspiracy or that the aliens and bureaucrats lack any brains at 
all.  

People come here expecting the flying saucers to conform to their 
own schedule and expectations. According to conventional wisdom, 
Wednesday nights are the time to see alien craft and at 4:50 am 
Thursday morning you are sure to see the oft-photographed "Old 
Faithful."  I see only the landing lights of a Boeing 737 then--a 
scheduled crew flight to Groom Lake--but, again, maybe that's 
because my bad attitude is influencing events.  Some watchers 
report a flying saucer which TURNS INTO  a 737 just before 
landing, which I guess is a reasonable compromise.

I see the desert skies here as a kind of Rorschach ink blot test, 
presenting a nightly sequence of ambiguous events that each 
visitor impresses his own feelings upon.  Bright white orbs that 
I interpret as aircraft landing lights or distant car high beams 
others may see as pulsing, jumping disks that couldn't possibly 
be earthly craft.  To see the orbs come closer and eventually 
pass--as a car--just a few feet away does not diminish the alien 
aura for some people.  Did you see it turn into a Chevy?  One 
talk-show ufologist, in all seriousness, has taken film footage 
that I interpret as landing lights and blown up the blinding orb 
to enormous proportions so it occupies the whole screen.  He 
displays for audiences the changing images frame by frame with a 
running dialog about what each form means.  In one, we see a 
face, in the next, a continent, and in the third--my God, it's 
Mickey Mouse!

 Visitors coming here in search of flying saucers have a tendency 
to "personalize" whatever they experience here.  Many flatter 
themselves by thinking that invisible aliens and government spies 
are monitoring their every move and that any unusual event in the 
sky or on the ground is a show put on especially for that 
viewer's benefit.  If you thought you saw something out of the 
corner of your eye but when you turned to look it was gone, then 
the saucer pilots must have sensed your glance and shot away in 
the nick of time.  The area is especially fertile ground for 
conspiracy buffs, who see a pattern of sinister, high level 
intent in even the most innocuous happening.  Every flat tire, 
passing security patrol or shooting star "could not possibly be 
coincidence" and is lovingly knitted into the Great Conspiracy.

Some people come here believing they are in direct psychic or 
spiritual contact with the aliens--or indeed are aliens 
themselves.  The extraterrestrials are either hailed as 
ambassadors of love or cursed as instruments of the Devil.  Many 
people expect the aliens to solve their personal problems for 
them--to carry them away from their earthly mess, perhaps, or to 
finally reveal to them the meaning of life.  Some come in search 
of religious inspiration:  The sight of "Old Faithful" fills them 
with hope and reassurance, and I see nothing wrong with that.  I 
cannot disprove these claims, but they do not appear to have any 
basis in Lazar's story.  Personally, I find it more plausible 
that the aliens and government are pursuing their own narrow 
agenda on their own schedule and don't really give a damn about 
the people below.

The trouble with this flying saucer hot spot, and probably every 
other claimed UFO venue, is that the original story is soon 
overwhelmed with noise.  Once the frenzy of fantastic claims 
starts, then it feeds on itself, and the original spark that set 
it off is almost forgotten.

THE BIG QUESTION

What everyone wants to know is, Is Lazar telling the truth?  Did 
he work on alien craft at Papoose Lake, or is his story a well-
crafted hoax?  Whichever side you choose to defend, there is 
plenty of circumstantial evidence to support your case.  

On one side is the impressive coherence and integrity of the 
story itself.  Anyone can lie or fantasize about working at a 
secret UFO facility, but to tell the story repeatedly with so 
much internally consistent detail is no easy feat.  Telling the 
truth is easy--you just recall what happened--while maintaining a 
lie of such complexity would seem to require infinite gigabytes 
and megahertz of internal processing capacity to avoid tripping 
yourself up.  Lazar is alive and well and clearly uninterested in 
cooperating with UFO researchers, but on the rare occasions when 
he takes questions, he always seems to come up with the right 
answers.  Whether you ask him about gravity propulsion systems or 
the environment in which he worked at "Area S-4," the answer he 
gives now is consistent with everything else he ever said in the 
past and seems to make perfect, down-to-earth sense to anyone who 
thinks it over.  His story is restrained, logically consistent 
and full of the rich and unexpected nuances that normally only 
reality can provide.

One the other side, Lazar's background and credentials, or 
pointed lack thereof, provide fertile ground for doubt.  His 
claims of having earned degrees as MIT and Cal-Tech are dubious 
to say the least.  Sure, a sinister government agency could pull 
a former student's records from the Registrar's Office, but could 
they remove every record from every on- and off-campus agency, 
knock off every professor the student took classes with or 
intimidate into silence every classmate he once knew?  Get real.  
At a conference in May, Lazar willingly provided the names of two 
of his professors--one at MIT and one at Cal-Tech--with the same 
apparent sincerity as his description of anti-matter reactors.  
Didn't check out.  Prof. Hohsfield or his ghost never haunted 
MIT, while Prof. Duxler was never at Cal-Tech, only at the junior 
college where Lazar did once take classes. 

Lazar's bankruptcy proceedings prior to his alleged employment 
and later criminal charges against him relating to an illegal 
brothel do not lend him instant credibility, but to a disciplined 
observer they do not necessarily disprove his claims either.  
Lazar is, by all accounts, an eccentric and creative guy, and 
people like this who do not fit any social mold do tend to get 
themselves in embarrassing messes.  Questions about "character" 
do not change the facts of what did or did not happen at Area S-4 
and do not provide a "smoking gun" to prove or disprove the 
saucer claims.  No human witness is morally perfect or immune to 
scandal, and an argument could be made the most idiosyncratic 
people--and thus the most scandal-prone--are just the sort who 
would have the courage to challenge a threatening authority and 
make a story like this public.

Also creating doubt is Lazar's long association with ufologist 
John Lear, who was telling colorful UFOs-at-the-Test-Site stories 
long before meeting Lazar.  By the most accounts, the two met 
each other by coincidence a few months before Lazar's alleged S-4 
employment.  Lazar reportedly thought Lear was Loony Tunes back 
then but changed his mind about a least some of Lear's claims 
when he encountered the craft himself.  The prior meeting raises 
the suggestion that Lazar's own UFOs-at-the-Test-Site story was a 
hoax generated initially for Lear's benefit that evolved from 
there into a media event.

On the other hand, life is full of "unbelievable" coincidences 
that turn out to be more plausible on closer inspection.  A 
disciplined observer cannot discount the possibility that their 
meeting was indeed by chance and that Lear played a role not in 
molding Lazar's story but in bringing him into the public eye.  
Of the many workers living in Las Vegas who would have known 
about alien craft at the Test Site, only Lazar had a friend who 
would believe him, want to know more and press him to go public 
with his story.  According to Lazar, it was his "field trips" 
with Lear and companions to the Black Mailbox area that got him 
in trouble with his employers and eventually forced him, by a 
complex but understandable sequence of events, to make his public 
disclosures.

The speculation can go on and on.  Theories about Lazar seem as 
numerous as the theorists and seem to reveal more about the 
person doing the talking than about Lazar himself.  Some say his 
story is half true and half false, while others contend that 
Lazar has been brainwashed by the evil world government into 
THINKING he worked on alien craft.  There is a theory for every 
UFO subculture; each seems as good as any another, and all seem 
to tire with time.

DOES IT MATTER?

In my view, the Lazar question is like the riddle that Captain 
Kirk would pose to the evil robot to make the robot overload its 
memory banks and self-destruct.  You can debate this one for 
hours and not get anywhere.  I say, give it a rest.  Most people 
seem obsessed with absolutes:  They want to know right away 
whether a story is true or false.  If they think it's true, they 
are willing to listen.  If they think it's a lie, they'll dump it 
fast no matter what other insights it may offer.  Most people 
want to see things as black or white; they can't tolerate gray.  
Like the robot, they'd rather burn out their circuits and blow 
smoke.

I say, just relax and enjoy the story.  Maybe Lazar is a fraud, 
and maybe his tale is no more real than Alice in Wonderland, but 
that doesn't mean we can't learn something from him.  Some of 
history's greatest role models never existed.  Sherlock Holmes 
didn't live at 221B Baker Street; Steed and Peel never solved a 
real Avengers case, and Mssrs. Spock and Data did not and will 
not ever roam the galaxy, but these and other fictional 
characters can sometimes teach us lessons we can apply to our own 
real lives.  

Like Holmes, Spock, Data, Steed and Peel, the Bob Lazar that is 
conveyed in interviews is a character of great intellectual 
discipline.  He'll tell you the facts of what he directly 
observed but will not speculate about what they mean.  He always 
draws a clear distinction about what he has personally 
experienced or deduced by his own logical processes and what he 
knows only from secondhand sources and cannot confirm.  He seems 
comfortable with the "gray" of not knowing and readily admits the 
limits of his knowledge.  Even with his own direct evidence, he 
continues to express skepticism about most UFO reports.

"It seems as if even knowing that we possess alien technology 
hasn't made you a believer."  said one questioner at a UFO 
conference.  

"That's probably true," Lazar replied.

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.  The 
briefing papers Lazar says he read indicate that the aliens have 
interacted with the human race for millennia, intervening in our 
genetic development and nudging us into a form of their choosing.  
It could be fiction, but it is a lot more tangible fiction about 
our origins than most religions seem to offer.  

Humans are referred to as "containers" in those briefing papers.  
Containers of what?  The soul?  Consciousness?  Dwelling on these 
concepts a while reminds us how little we really know about 
ourselves.  Sure, our bodies could have evolved from the 
primordial muck by wholly natural processes, but where did our 
consciousness come from?  What are we made of, really, and if 
those aliens poured some special liquid into our otherwise empty 
containers, where did THAT substance come from?  These are 
overload-the-memory-banks questions that we will probably never 
satisfactorily answer even if the aliens reveal themselves, but 
they are still interesting to mull.

GOVERNMENT SECRETS

The Lazar story is far superior to most science fiction is 
creating a world that could be true.  There is probably no better 
place on earth to put a secret saucer base, but it real or 
fictional, than at Papoose Dry Lake in Nevada's vast military 
restricted area.  There is already at least one unacknowledged 
secret base next door, at Groom Dry Lake, and all the mechanisms 
of secrecy have long been in place here to keep virtually 
anything under wraps.  The Cold War, and especially the arms 
buildup of the Reagan Administration, have left behind an 
imposing internal security apparatus reminiscent of the KGB and 
fully capable of keeping workers muzzled.  Employment within the 
Restricted Zone is so compartmentalized and the funding pathways 
so convoluted that even our most privileged government leaders 
may not know everything that is going on here.

Even if no "secret saucer base" ever existed in the Restricted 
Zone, just the fact that something this important COULD be 
effectively hidden here is disturbing in itself.  This country is 
supposed to be a democracy with strict controls on the power of 
government; yet here in Nevada we still have our own Berlin Wall 
with a mysterious totalitarian regime hidden inside.  Some level 
of secrecy will always be important to national security, but 
limitations on power are also a keystone of our freedom, and with 
the fall of the Soviets, the balance needs to change.  When any 
government agency has reached a level of isolation where it can 
do what it wants without any accountability to its constituents, 
there is grave danger for democracy.  History has shown that such 
power is inevitably abused, supporting more the jobs, egos and 
self-destructive crusades of the people who wield it than the 
needs of the nation.

For decades, the military could hide virtually anything behind 
the Soviet threat.  In the shadow of billion-dollar Star Wars 
projects, a small unauthorized research program like what Lazar 
describes could easily find funding and a secure niche in which 
to operate.  Since the end of the Cold War, the justification for 
much of our military secrecy has become increasingly flimsy.  
Apart from the Saddams and disintegrating republics that cannot 
possibly match our technology, who does the military expect to 
fight--France?  

For all the absurdity of the status quo, it is unrealistic to 
expect the government to change on its own.  While the existence 
of a base at Papoose Lake remains unproven, the big Groom Lake 
facility has been widely reported in the popular press.  The 
latest reports call this the home of a new high-speed spy plane 
dubbed Aurora.  As of this writing, you can even view the base 
yourself from public land near Rachel.  (The Air Force has 
applied to seize this land so the opportunity may not last for 
long.)  

Soviet satellite photos of the Groom facility are freely 
available on the open market, and 1994 is expected to mark the 
implementation of the Open Skies Treaty in which many of our 
former Communist will be permitted to overfly Groom and Papoose 
Lakes with sophisticated reconnaissance aircraft.  As America's 
most popular and best publicized secret base, Groom Lake's 
continued official nonexistence seems a classic exercise in the 
use of secrecy to suppress not foreign spies but domestic 
political opponents.  The military LOVES secrecy, even over its 
most mundane tasks, because it helps to neutralize critical 
oversight and disable Congressional opposition.  

If the Lazar story, be it fact or fiction, attracts attention to 
this place, then it is doing a service for our country.  
Increased public attention and anti-secrecy activism may also be 
the only way we will ever find the truth of that story.  If you 
shake the secrecy tree, then whatever is up there--flying 
saucers, 
Auroras or simply Cold War waste and mismanagement--will 
eventually fall out.  You may or may not believe that the U.S. 
Government is keeping secrets about UFOs, but the fact that they 
COULD keep such secrets should be disturbing to everyone.

[Glenn Campbell is author of the "Area 51 Viewer's Guide."  He is 
also the secretary of the White Sides Defense Committee, a 
citizen group fighting the proposed military land seizure of the 
Groom Lake viewpoints.  He can be contacted at:  HCR Box 38, 
Rachel, NV 89001.]

[Note: Above is the submitted version of the article.  The 
version actually published was edited for space.]

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