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Hey indie directors: if you want to promote your movie hitting Netflix, go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. After controversial UFOlogy figure Bob Lazar appeared on the show last week, interest in Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers has skyrocketed. The doc, which was just added to Netflix in mid-June, details the story of Bob Lazar, a man who claims to have worked at a branch of Area 51 known as S4. His job: reverse engineer the propulsion system powering one of nine flying saucers kept on the base.
Whether or not Lazar is telling the truth is something you have to decide for yourself. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction in even the most boring subjects nowadays, let alone one that would reframe everything humanity knows about the nature of existence. The mild-mannered Lazar has a lot of stories to tell, though, and not even one feature length documentary can contain all of them.
Lazar and documentary director Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell appeared on Rogan’s podcast and, over the course of a two-hour conversation, got into way more than could be covered in any one film. Below you’ll find nine bits of intel that either didn’t make it into the doc or should’ve been elb
1. Bob Lazar touched the first UFO he ever saw: He took the gig at S4 not really knowing what he was getting into. In fact, he thought the UFO that he was assigned wasn’t actually a UFO when he first saw it.
“This time that I went in, there were hangar doors open. I went in through the hangar door and in the hangar door was the disc, the flying saucer that I worked on. I saw it sitting there and we walked by it. It had a little American flag stuck on the side and I thought, ‘Oh my god, this finally explains all the flying saucer stories. This is just an advanced fighter and this is fucking hilarious.’ So I went by, I slid my hand along side it. I got reprimanded immediately for touching the thing. There was an armed guard that followed us in and said, ‘Keep your eyes forward and your hands at your side and just walk in the door.'”
2. Bob Lazar replaced a dead guy: How does a job open up at S4? It’s not pretty!
“I was replacing somebody that [Lazar’s lab partner] Barry worked with prior to me and I think there was some horrific accident that I didn’t have a whole lot of information on. Barry alluded to that… where somebody died.” Lazar says that he thinks the accident involved the scientists trying to cut into the saucer’s reactor. “This must have been a very desperate attempt because it’s not a very scientific process to analyze something that way, but it looked like they used a plasma cutter or something into an operating reactor.”
3. The flying saucers came from Zeta Reticuli: “There was some paperwork that indicated that this [UFO] was from the Zeta Reticuli star system. How they obtained that, I haven’t the slightest idea. It wasn’t just from the Zeta Reticuli star system, it was what they called ZR3. It was the third planet in that star system. There was no other information about it, other than that’s supposedly where the craft came from.”
Zeta Reticuli might sound familiar as it’s been part of modern UFO lore almost since the beginning, dating back to the first reported alien abduction case. Barney and Betty Hill claimed they were abducted by aliens in fall 1961 and Betty, under hypnosis, drew a star map of where they were taken. An amateur astronomer named Marjorie Fish spent years analyzing the map and concluded that it was a map of the Zeta Reticuli system. Whether or not it is has been debate, with Carl Sagan coming out against it in an episode of Cosmos in 1980.
4. Here’s what the inside of a UFO looks like: “It’s a very ominous feeling because everything is one color. It’s like a dark pewter color. There are no right angles anywhere. It’s as if somebody took a model and fashioned it out of wax and then heated it just for a short time so everything melted. Everything looks like it’s fused together. Everything has a radius, a curvature where two items meet. It’s a really weird looking thing. There was almost nothing, other than a small foldable hatchway, that looked recognizable. Everything was really unworldly.”
5. All 9 UFOs at Area 51 were really different: “One looked like what I called a jello mold. It looked like a classic jello mold with the rippled sides to it. One was a very flat disc, like a straw hat or something like that.”
6. Some of the UFOs may be ancient: “At least one of them was part of an archaeological dig. So… it’s old. At least one of them is old. I don’t know if it was the one I worked on, but I remember something to do with an archaeological dig. That means it’s not just old, it’s ancient.”
7. There was a physical wrestling match over that initial news report: After being dismissed from S4 for telling people about his job, taking friends to watch the test flights, and videotaping the saucers, Lazar went to investigative reporter George Knapp (also a producer on the new doc). He sat down for an interview but, as Lazar recalls, he wasn’t always into the idea of it airing. When Knapp finally said that he was going to air it on that night’s 5 o’clock news, Lazar had second thoughts–and that led to an actual physical altercation over the tape before it was aired.
“I think it was more of a pulling match [over the tape]. I don’t think we ever hit the ground, but he got the tape, put it in the player and boom, 5 o’clock news was on.”
8. Bob Lazar’s birth certificate is also M.I.A.: The documentary goes into great detail about how there’s no record that Lazar went to MIT or Caltech, and that there are no records of his employment at the Los Alamos National Lab. The theory put forth in the doc is that this is the government’s way of discrediting Lazar. Apparently this plan extends to Lazar’s birth certificate as well.
9. Bob Lazar makes no money off of any of this: “I don’t get any money out of this at all. I didn’t even let you guys [Rogan] buy plane tickets for me to come out here or anything. When Jeremy previewed the movie up in Michigan, it brought in a couple thousand dollars. I made sure that $2,000 went to science programs at the local high schools there… I don’t take any money from this stuff.”
