Speaker 1: Okay, okay, So picture this. It's the summer of twenty nineteen, right,
the world is already feeling a little bit strange. But
the Internet, in its infinite wisdom, decides, you know what,
we can make this weirder.
Speaker 2: Oh, I remember this like it was yesterday.
Speaker 1: A Facebook event pops up, and at first it's just
a joke, it's a meme. It's titled storm Area fifty one.
They can't stop all of us.
Speaker 2: And the premise was, I mean, it was just pure
Internet absurdity.
Speaker 1: Old absolute Internet gold.
Speaker 2: The plan, if you can even call it, that was
to Naro run past the guards.
Speaker 1: Yes, the Naruto run for anyone who you know, maybe
isn't familiar. That's running with your arms just flailing straight
behind you like a character from a Japanese.
Speaker 2: Anime, because apparently that makes you move faster than bullets.
Speaker 1: Obviously, it sounds ridiculous, it is ridiculous. But then something
happens that I don't think anyone really expected.
Speaker 2: It blew up.
Speaker 1: It went completely viral. Millions of people and I mean
millions click going on this event, and it suddenly stops
feeling like a joke and starts feeling well. It starts
feeling like a movement.
Speaker 2: It was this really fascinating, kind of bizarre moment in
social history, right. Yeah, you had this perfect intersection of
like gen z Internet humor colliding with with what with
very real, very lethal Cold War era military.
Speaker 1: Infrastructure, and that collision that's exactly where we're starting today.
Welcome everyone to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: It's great to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, and today we are pulling on what
might just be the biggest, the most tangled, the most
controversial string in the entire tapestry of American conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: And I'm here to you know, hopefully help untangle it
a little bit, or at least to make sure we
don't get completely lost in the Nevada desert.
Speaker 1: It's a real possibility. Today we're working from a transcript
of a History Channel documentary called Inside Area fifty one.
We were going to look past the memes, you know,
past the Naruto runners, and try to understand the terrifying
reality of the most secretive place in America. We're going
to talk about the fortress, the physicist, and of course
the saucers.
Speaker 2: It's a story that really touches on everything. It's about
national security. It's about erased identities, and it gets to
that fundamental question, are we alone in the universe?
Speaker 1: Or maybe more to the point.
Speaker 2: Does the government know we're not alone? And have they
just been I don't know, keeping the proof locked in
a filing cabinet somewhere for the last seventy plus years.
Speaker 1: That's the question. So let's go back to that summer
twenty nineteen, the storm Area fifty one event. It's everywhere,
It's on Twitter, it's on the news. My friends are
talking about it. Everyone I know is just laughing.
Speaker 2: About it, right, a huge joke. But there was one
group of people who were definitely not laughing, not at all,
the United States Air Force. They were not amused, not
in the.
Speaker 1: Slightest, not even a little chuckle.
Speaker 2: And you have to see it from their perspective. What
started as, I mean, let's be honest, in an internet
shit post. Yeah, it transformed very quickly into a genuine
national security crisis for them. How so, well, put yourself
in the shoes of the base commander at Groom Lake.
You're sitting inside a facility that for decades officially didn't
even exist, and now you're seeing millions of people online
pledging to physically overrun your perimeter.
Speaker 1: You can't just assume they're all kidding.
Speaker 2: You absolutely cannot. You have to plan for the worst
case scenario. You have to take it seriously.
Speaker 1: And according to our source material, they took it very,
very seriously. They didn't just you know, put out a
press release and hope it would all blow over.
Speaker 2: No, they mobilized. The source is explicit about this. They
sent in reinforcements. But here's the part that really, I mean,
it stopped me cold when I read it. What's that
The source states that personnel at the base were authorized
to use deadly force.
Speaker 1: Deadly force.
Speaker 2: Let that just sink in for a second. The authorization
to kill American citizens over a meme.
Speaker 1: That is just it's insane to me, the idea that
you could get shot because you wanted to see an alien.
Speaker 2: And that's the paradox, right, That's the stark contrast that
defines this in higher topic, and it's what we really
have to unpack today. On one side, you have this
fun pop Kota thing, you know, cartoons, t shirts, internet jokes,
and on the other side, you have highly trained soldiers
with automatic weapons who have been given permission to end
your life to protect a patch of dirt.
Speaker 1: And the logic of the meme was they can't stop
all of us, the logic of a zombie swarm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the idea, kind of safety in numbers,
that a huge crowd could just overwhelm the security.
Speaker 1: But they can stop all of us, can't they Well.
Speaker 2: They absolutely can't, and they would have, there's no doubt
in my mind. So what ended up happening, Well, in
the end, the whole thing kind of fizzled out. Crowd wise,
A few thousand people showed up for some festivals in
the nearby towns, like.
Speaker 1: An alien themed Coachella.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and only a handful, maybe a couple hundred people
actually went up to the gates. But the military's reaction,
the mobilization, it served as a huge stress test for
their protocols and.
Speaker 1: It revealed just how serious they are.
Speaker 2: It was a very public reminder that this is not
a tourist attraction. This is a fortress.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's talk about that fortress. Let's unpack the
security because the source material describes it as an impregnable box.
And I think most people, myself included, probably picture you know,
a tall chain link fence with some barbed wire, and that's.
Speaker 2: Just not it at all. Functionally impregnable is the phrase
used in the documentary. We are not talking about a
simple fence and a padlock.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what are we talking about.
Speaker 2: We're talking about a layered system of defense. It starts
miles and I mean miles before you can even see
a building or a runway.
Speaker 1: So it's not just the base itself.
Speaker 2: No, the perimeter is huge. You have the obvious stuff. First,
you'll see signs, warning signs telling you that deadly force
is authorized. Then you'll hit checkpoints, you see guards and trucks.
But that's just the.
Speaker 1: Visible layer, the human layer, right right.
Speaker 2: Then you have the technology. Our source specifically mentions motion detectors.
Speaker 1: So like a light goes on if you walk past it.
Speaker 2: It's way more sophisticated than that. Think buried seismic sensors.
These are sensors in the ground that can apparently tell
the difference between the footsteps of a human being and
say a coyote or a jackrabbit walking by. Seriously, they're
scattered all across the terrain, hidden in the scrub brush.
You step off the road and somewhere miles away, a
light blanks on a console inside a security center. They
know you're there instantly. That's terrifying.
Speaker 1: And what about the guys in the white pickup trucks,
the Camo dudes.
Speaker 2: Ah, Yes, the famous Camo dude.
Speaker 1: They're legendary and the lure of this place.
Speaker 2: They are. They're private security contractors. They drive these unmarked
white pickups, usually Jeeps or F one fifties with government plates.
They wear full camouflage and they are heavily armed.
Speaker 1: And what do they do do They talk to you.
Speaker 2: Never, that's the thing. They just watch you. They'll park
on our ridge overlooking you. They'll film you with long
lens cameras. Their job is intimidation. It's to make you
feel so uncomfortable that you just turn around and leave.
Speaker 1: It's a psychological barrier as much as a physical one.
Speaker 2: Completely. And it's not just surveillance from the ground. It's
from both too, satellites constant satellite monitoring. They're watching everything
to one undred and four seven. But for me, the
most the most stifling part of the security description, and
this is something that pilots really get, is the airspace.
Speaker 1: They call it the box, right, the box.
Speaker 2: It's this large chunk of restricted airspace. It is a
no fly zone of the absolute highest order. It's officially
designated R forty eighth eight N.
Speaker 1: And it's so sensitive that, what did the source say?
Even our own military pilots can't fly in there.
Speaker 2: That's right. Even pilots from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base,
which is this huge training ground for the best fighter
pilots in the world, they are forbidden from entering the box.
Speaker 1: So an F twenty two pilot, a US Air Force pilot,
can't fly over a US Air Force base.
Speaker 2: Not unless they are specifically read into whatever programs are
happening at Groom Lake and are assigned to fly there.
If you're just a pilot training at NELLISA for a
huge exercise like Red Flag, and you accidentally clip the
edge of the box, your training exercise is over immediately,
you're ordered to land, you are seriously debriefed. It is
a potential career ending mistake. Wow, that's how serious it is.
It's a black hole on the aviation map.
Speaker 1: It really paints this picture of total isolation. You can't
drive in, you can't walk in without being detected, you
can't fly over it. It's like it's been surgically removed
from the United States.
Speaker 2: It's a sovereign state of secrecy, as you said. And
then there's the final layer, which might be the strongest one,
the human factor, the people who work there, the engineers,
the scientists, the janitors.
Speaker 1: The cooks, because obviously thousands of people do go in
and out of there every day.
Speaker 2: They do, and the source mentions. They all have to
sign non disclosure agreements, which you know is pretty standard
for sensitive government work.
Speaker 1: But these aren't your typical NDAs.
Speaker 2: No, this isn't like you can't talk about the next iPhone.
These are binding for your entire life, for life, for life,
and they come with severe penalties. We're talking serious prison time,
crippling finds the complete loss of your government pension.
Speaker 1: So it's not just a piece of paper, it's a threat.
Speaker 2: It creates a psychological fortress that's just as strong as
the physical one. The people on the inside cannot talk
to the people on the outside, not to their spouses,
not to their kids, not even on their deathbeds.
Speaker 1: That sounds incredibly lonely to have this massive central part
of your life be a complete black hole to everyone
you love, it.
Speaker 2: Is, and what it does on a macro level is
create a perfect vacuum of information. And as we know,
nature abhors a vacuum where there is no official information,
speculation and conspiracy will rush in to fill that void.
If the government refuses to tell us what they're doing
in the box.
Speaker 1: Our imaginations will invent something to put in there exactly.
And that speculation, that's what brings us to the origins
of this right, this ghost base, because it wasn't always
the center of the alien universe, not at all. Back
in the early nineteen fifties, it was just dirt.
Speaker 2: Just a long, flat, dry lake bed called Groom Lake.
It's a hostile environment. It's desolate. The closest town is Rachel, Nevada,
which to this day has a population in the what
double digits.
Speaker 1: It's the definition of the middle of nowhere, and that's
by design. I found the detail about the name fascinating
Area fifty one. It sounds so inherently mysterious. It makes
you ask, well, where are areas one through fifty?
Speaker 2: Did something happened to them? Yeah? It sounds very sci fi,
but the reality, according to the source, is much more. Well,
it's bureaucratic, it's boring, it is surprisingly mundane. It comes
from an old Atomic Energy Commission map from the nineteen fifties.
The whole Nevada test site where they were detonating nuclear
bombs was divided into a grid system for administrative purposes.
Speaker 1: Like a big piece of graph paper over the desert.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the location of Groom Lake just happened to
fall inside the square designated Area fifty.
Speaker 1: One, such as a map coordinate.
Speaker 2: It's a clerical designation. It could have just as easily
been Area twelve or Area eighty four, but Area fifty
one is the one that's stuck. It's a great reminder
that sometimes the most terrifying thing have the most boring origins.
Speaker 1: So early fifties, it's just a grid on a map,
but then the source points to a specific year, nineteen
fifty five. That's when everything changes.
Speaker 2: Nineteen fifty five is the turning point. Before that, it's
a dry lake bed. After that it becomes a hub
of top secret activity. And this is where the UFO
hysteria really begins to take root in that area.
Speaker 1: But for reasons that are actually ironically based.
Speaker 2: In reality, completely grounded in hard physics and top secret engineering.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's walk through this because this is one of
those moments where everything clicks into place. The locals, the
ranchers in places like Rachel, they start seeing things in the.
Speaker 2: Sky, strange lights, aircraft behaving in ways that seem impossible.
Speaker 1: And flying at altitudes that shouldn't be possible.
Speaker 2: That's the key. They're seeing these things at fifty thousand feet,
sixty thousand feet, sometimes even higher. Now you have to
put yourself back in that area. In nineteen fifty five
and nineteen fifty five, your commercial airliners, your DC six
is your constellations. They're flying in maybe twenty thousand feet
on a good day. Even the military fighter jets at
the time didn't cruise that high.
Speaker 1: So imagine you're a rancher. You're out checking on your
cattle at dusk. You look up and you see this
glint of silver way way higher than any plane you've
ever seen before.
Speaker 2: And it's not just the height, it's the way it's lit.
There's this phenomenon called the twilight phenomenon. Okay, because the
earth is curved. When the sun is already set for
you on the ground, it's still shining brightly up at
sixty thousand or seventy thousand feet.
Speaker 1: Ah, so it can be pitch black where you're standing, but.
Speaker 2: The aircraft way up there is still fully illuminated by
the sun.
Speaker 1: So what does that look like from the ground.
Speaker 2: It looks like a glowing orb, a fireball, a silver
disc that seems to be generating its own light.
Speaker 1: So the rancher sees this glowing object moving at incredible
speed at an impossible altitude. He knows it's not a
United Airlines flight.
Speaker 2: He's pretty sure the Air Force doesn't have anything they
can do that.
Speaker 1: So his brain, through a process of elimination, goes to
the only other explanation that makes sense to him.
Speaker 2: It has to be from another planet. Martians.
Speaker 1: It's a perfectly logical conclusion if you're missing a key variable.
Speaker 2: And the missing variable was the U two spyplane, the
Dragon Lady, and later its successor, the A twelve ox Cart,
which evolved into the SR seventy one Blackbird. These were
top secret CIA and Air Force reconnaissance projects being tested
out of groom.
Speaker 1: Like and they could fly that high.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the YouTube was specifically designed to fly at
seventy thousand feet. That was its whole purpose to be
high enough to avoid Soviet surface to air missiles while
it took pictures.
Speaker 1: But the government couldn't exactly put out a press release saying, hey, everyone,
don't worry about the weird lights, it's just our brand new,
super secret spy plane that we're using to photograph Russian
missile sites.
Speaker 2: They were completely stuck. Admitting the truth would have compromised
a vital national security asset. So when all these reports
of UFO started flooding in from Nevada.
Speaker 1: Did you just let the alien theory run?
Speaker 2: In a way, it was the perfect cover store. Think
about it. If the Soviets hear rumors about flying saucers
over Nevada, they'll probably just dismiss it as crazy American hysteria.
Speaker 1: But if they hear credible rumors of a high altitude
reconnaissance aircraft.
Speaker 2: That's a massive intelligence failure for them. So the UFO
story was actually beneficial to the secrecy of the U
two program.
Speaker 1: So they basically weaponize the conspiracy theory against their enemies,
or at the.
Speaker 2: Very least, their silence and their clumsy denials just poured
fuel on the fire. And our source draws a direct
line from this back to the Roswell incident in nineteen
forty seven.
Speaker 1: Ah, the original sin.
Speaker 2: Roswell is the grandfather of all this distrust. It's set
the precedent.
Speaker 1: We have to talk about that for a second. The
classic government flip flop.
Speaker 2: It was a public relations disaster that still haunts the
military to this day. In July nineteen forty seven, something
crashes in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. The Army
Air Forces. This is the actual military, not some tabloid paper.
They issue an official press.
Speaker 1: And the headline was incredible.
Speaker 2: The headline in the local paper read RAAF captures flying
saucer on ranch in Roswell region.
Speaker 1: They used the words flying saucer in an official capacity.
Speaker 2: They did for about twenty four hours. The official position
of the United States government was yep, we got one.
And then you can just imagine the panic in the
higher echelons. They scrambled. They retracted the story immediately. They
held a press conference, brought out some debris that looked
like tinfoil and wooden sticks, and said, sorry, everyone, our mistake.
It was just a weather balloon, which I.
Speaker 1: Mean, even if it really was a weather.
Speaker 2: Balloon, which is a whole other thrilling thread for another day.
Speaker 1: It just looks incredibly suspicious. You don't confuse the spaceship
with a weather balloon unless you're either completely incompetent or
you're lying exactly.
Speaker 2: And it taught the American public a very specific, very
powerful lesson, which is the government might find aliens, and
if they do, they will lie to you about it.
They'll say one thing one day and change their s
the next.
Speaker 1: So fast forward to the fifties, the weird lights start
appearing over Groom Lake. The government denies everything or just
stays silent, and.
Speaker 2: The public immediately falls back on what we can call
the roswell president. They just assume it's another cover up.
Speaker 1: And the incredible irony is that it was a cover up.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's what's so wild. It was a cover up.
It was just a cover up of Cold War spy technology,
not little green men. But from the outside, the behavior,
the secrecy that denials it looks exactly the same.
Speaker 1: So this creates the perfect curtle soil. The distrust is there,
the mystery is there, the box is sealed tight, and
then decades later, someone finally walks out of that box
and decides to light a match.
Speaker 2: May fifteenth, nineteen eighty nine. This is the beginning of
what we could call the Lazarian era.
Speaker 1: Bob Lazar the physicist. This is the man who single
handedly transformed the public perception of Area fifty one. Before him,
it was a secret base. Maybe they built spyplanes there.
After him, it was the place they keep the alien spaceships.
Speaker 2: It is truly difficult to over see date the impact
of his story. He goes on local Las Vegas news,
a station called KLAS TV, interviewed by a journalist named George.
Speaker 1: Knapp, and at first he's in shadow, right, he's using
a fake.
Speaker 2: Name, right, he used the pseudonym Dennis. But eventually he
comes forward reveals his real name, Bob Lazar. And his
claim is so incredibly specific and audacious. He didn't just
say I saw some weird lights.
Speaker 1: No, he said I worked there. I punched a clock.
Speaker 2: He made it sound like a nine to five job,
which made it so much more believable to some people.
And he claimed he didn't work at the main Area
fifty one facility, but at a separate, even more secret base.
Speaker 1: Nearby, a place he called S four Sector.
Speaker 2: Four or S four. He claimed those located south of
Groom Lake, built directly into the side of the Papoose
Mountain Range. He described these hangar doors that were camouflaged
to sand and rock to perfectly match the mountain side
so they'd be invisible to spy satellites.
Speaker 1: And his job title. What was his job description? According
to the source, his job.
Speaker 2: He claimed, was to reverse engine your alien anti gravity
propulsion system.
Speaker 1: Just another day at the office.
Speaker 2: You know, pretty standard stuff.
Speaker 1: I love the specificity of the inventory he describes. He
doesn't just say we had, you know, a crashed saucer.
He claims the United States Navy was in possession of
nine distinct alien spacecraft.
Speaker 2: Nine that's not a single crash retrieval. That implies a fleet.
It implies some kind of ongoing program, maybe an archaeological discovery,
maybe a trade. He said he didn't know where they
came from, only that they were there, and he.
Speaker 1: Was assigned to work on one particular.
Speaker 2: Craft, the one he called the sport model.
Speaker 1: The sport Model, It sounds like he's describing a car like, Yeah,
I was working on the eighty nine Sport Model saucer.
Tell us what he said it looked like.
Speaker 2: He described it as looking exactly like your stereotypical flying saucer,
and the source has this great quote from him where
he says, it looks like anything you'd see in a cartoon.
Speaker 1: So smooth, metallic disc shaped exactly, but with no seams,
no rivets, no bolts.
Speaker 2: He said, it looked like it had been injection molded
or grown from a single piece of wax. There were
no sharp edges. Everything was smoothly rounded.
Speaker 1: Now this is where it gets interesting for me, because
a skeptic would hear that and say, of course, it
looks like a cartoon. He's just making it up based
on fifties B movies, right. But a believer would say, well,
maybe the cartoons and the movies look like that, because
that's what people have been genuinely seeing for decades, and
that's what they've been drawing.
Speaker 2: It's the classic chicken or the egg of saucer design.
But Lazarre goes much deeper than just the shape. He
gets into the technology. He talks about the propulsion.
Speaker 1: System, the anti matter reactor, the.
Speaker 2: Antimatter reactor, which in nineteen eighty nine sounds like pure
star trek.
Speaker 1: It still does, really it does, but.
Speaker 2: He tries to ground it in physics. He talks about
a fuel source, a super heavy stable element element one fifteen,
and back.
Speaker 1: In eighty nine, element one fifteen was just.
Speaker 2: Theoretical, completely theoretical. I hadn't been synthesized in a lab,
it hadn't even been officially named yet. But Lazar was
describing it. He said, this element was a fuel. Bombard
it with protons. It transmutes into element one sixteen, which
immediately decays, releasing antimatter.
Speaker 1: And that reaction creates a gravity wave.
Speaker 2: That's his claim, a gravity wave that could be amplified
and focused. He claimed the craft didn't fly using aerodynamics
like a plane with wings or vectored thrust like a rocket.
It flew by creating its own gravitational.
Speaker 1: Field, so it would essentially fall in the direction it
wanted to go.
Speaker 2: It would bend space time in front of it and
just ride the wave.
Speaker 1: Like putting a bowling ball on a trampoline.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy. The reactor is the bowling ball,
and it creates a distortion in the fabric of space,
and the craft just slides down into that distortion.
Speaker 1: And what about the pilots. You can't have this high
tech car without a driver.
Speaker 2: He said he never saw one in person, but he
described being given these briefing documents to read as part
of his job, and he claimed these manuals contained information
and even images of the aliens.
Speaker 1: Themselves, your original pilots.
Speaker 2: He also mentioned that the craft he worked on, the
Sport model, had these three very small seats inside child
size too small for a typical human adult. And he
was very very clear on one point, and the source
highlights it. He said human hands did not put this together.
Speaker 1: He claimed the tech was operational, it worked, but the
science behind it was a total mystery to us.
Speaker 2: We were like monkeys trying to figure out how microwave works.
That was his analogy.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate reverse engineering problem. Like handing an iPhone
to a blacksmith in the Middle Ages. He might figure
out that if he pushes the glass, it lights up,
but he'll have no concept of electricity or microchips or
lithium ion batteries.
Speaker 2: And Lazar's claim is that he was that blacksmith. He
was there to try and figure out the physics, the metallurgy,
the power source.
Speaker 1: So how on Earth does a person get a job
like that it's not something you see posted on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2: No alien technology. Reverse engineer must be willing to relocate
to desolate secret base. Benefits include lifetime secrecy.
Speaker 1: Right, So what's his story? How did he get the door?
Speaker 2: According to Lazar's account in the source material, his journey
starts at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He claims he was
working there as a physicist.
Speaker 1: A very prestigious government lab.
Speaker 2: One of the most important in the country. He says
he attended a lecture there given by doctor Edward Teller.
Speaker 1: And for anyone who might not know that name, Edward
Teller is a very big deal.
Speaker 2: He is a titan of twentieth century physics. He's known
as the father of the hydrogen bomb, a hugely influential
and controversial figure.
Speaker 1: And Lazarre claims he just met him at a lecture.
Speaker 2: Had a brief interaction, saw his name on a list
of staff scientists, and then later when he was looking
for a new job, he says he just wrote a
letter to Teller.
Speaker 1: That's a bold move, dear father of the h bomb,
got any openings, and.
Speaker 2: Apparently it worked. Teller supposedly called him back and recommended
him for a position, but He wasn't hired directly by
the Air Force or the Navy. He was hired by
a private defense.
Speaker 1: Contractor, a company called EGNG.
Speaker 2: EGNG, and the source calls him the the most important
defense contractor you've never heard.
Speaker 1: Of, And that seems accurate.
Speaker 2: It's chillingly accurate. EG and G, which stands for Edgerton,
Jermyshausen and Greer. They've been involved in this secret world
since the fifties. They were instrumental in the nuclear testing program.
They handle logistics, security, technical support, and staffing for these
black sites.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who run the Janet Airline, right.
Speaker 2: They are those unmarked white seven thirty sevens with the
red stripe that fly workers into Area fifty one from
a private terminal at the Las Vegas Airport every single day.
They are the ultimate shadow company.
Speaker 1: So by bringing EG and G into the story, Lazarre
adds this layer of bureaucratic realism.
Speaker 2: Yes, it grounds it. He wasn't hired by some mysterious
men in black. He was hired by a defense contractor.
He had to fill out paperwork. He had a W two.
Speaker 1: It feels real because it feels corporate.
Speaker 2: It grounds the fantastical claims in the boring, mundane reality
of the military industrial complex.
Speaker 1: So okay, he gets the job, goes to S four,
He sees the sport model, he sees the anti matter reactor.
He describes seeing a candle flame, bend and freeze because
of the gravity field. He's blown away, as the Source puts.
Speaker 2: It, completely overwhelmed by what he's seeing.
Speaker 1: But then he cracks.
Speaker 2: The burden of the secret becomes too much. The source
says he could no longer keep it a secret. I mean,
can you imagine you know the answer to the single
biggest question in all of human history and you can't
tell a soul?
Speaker 1: And his personal life is a mess. He thinks his
phone is being tapped, he thinks his wife is cheating
on him. He's spiraling, so he breaks the most important rule.
He breaks his NDA.
Speaker 2: He tells his wife Tracy, and he tells his friend
Gene Huff.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story shifts gears again. It
goes from being a science fiction story to a spy thriller.
Speaker 2: Because he doesn't just tell him about it. He decides
he needs to show them.
Speaker 1: This is the part of the story that always just
blows my mind. The audacity of it. He knows the
test schedule for the saucers.
Speaker 2: He claims they tested them on Wednesday nights because base
trap was at its lowest. So he packs up his wife,
his friend Jean, and another friend named John Lear into
his car with a video camera, a video camera, and
a telescope. They drive out into the middle of the
desert off the main highway and hike up a dirt
road to get a vantage point overlooking the airspace.
Speaker 1: Can you just imagine that car ride. You're driving into
the pitch black desert, your friend is telling you you're
about to see a flying saucer, and you have to
be thinking this guy's finally lost.
Speaker 2: It, absolutely until, according to their testimony, the skylights up.
Speaker 1: They see it.
Speaker 2: They see a glowing disc of light performing impossible maneuvers
in the night sky. They even capture some of it
on videotape for Lazarre.
Speaker 1: That must have been the ultimate vindication. See I'm not crazy,
there it is.
Speaker 2: It must have been. But then they got cocky. They
went back a second time, and then a third time.
Speaker 1: And on the third trip security was waiting for them.
Speaker 2: They were caught stop by the Lincoln County Sheriff on
the highway near the perimeter. But then Lazarre claims the
real heavy hitters showed up base security.
Speaker 1: And he's fired.
Speaker 2: Oh instantly, his security clearance is revoked, he's interrogated, and
he's told in no uncertain terms never to come back.
And this is what kicks off this period of intense
paranoia for him.
Speaker 1: The source mentions his tires were slashed.
Speaker 2: Slash tires. He felt he was being followed constantly, he
received threats. He genuinely believed that they were going to
kill him to.
Speaker 1: Keep him silent, and this, according to his story, is
his motivation for finally going on camera with George Now exactly.
Speaker 2: He claimed he didn't do it for fame or money.
He did it as an insurance.
Speaker 1: Policy, a safety measure.
Speaker 2: His logic was, if I'm a public figure, if my
face and my story are all over the news, it's
much harder for them to make me disappear quietly. If
I die in a car accident, everyone will know why.
Speaker 1: If you kill me, you just confirm everything I said.
Speaker 2: It's safety and visibility.
Speaker 1: But the government has other ways of making people disappear,
maybe not physically, but professionally. And this brings us to
the credibility.
Speaker 2: The great erasure, because.
Speaker 1: As soon as the Lazar story is out there, journalists
and skeptics start digging into his background and what they find,
or rather what they don't find, is deeply troubling.
Speaker 2: This is the central pillar of the case against Bob Lazar.
The reporters start verifying his credentials. He claimed to have
advanced degrees from two of the most prestigious science universities
in the world, MIT and Celtech.
Speaker 1: So a reporter picks up the phone calls the registrar's
office at MIT HI, can I get a verification of
attendance for a Robert Scott Lazar.
Speaker 2: And Mike comes back and says, we have absolutely no
record of this person, not as a student, not as
a graduate, nothing. They call Kalpec, same answer.
Speaker 1: That's a huge red flag, a massive one.
Speaker 2: Then they check his employment history. He claimed to have
been a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Speaker 1: So they call Los Alamos and the.
Speaker 2: Official response from the lab is Bob who never heard
of him? No record of him ever working here.
Speaker 1: They call EG and G the contractor.
Speaker 2: No record. At every turn, it's a dead end. It
looks like he's a complete fraud. It looked like he
just made the entire story up.
Speaker 1: And this is the skeptics position, right, and it's a
very strong, very logical position.
Speaker 2: It is, if a person is verifiably lying about their education,
something that is so fundamental and so easy to check,
why on earth should anyone believe his much more extraordinary
claims about alien spaceships.
Speaker 1: It paints him as a con man, maybe a smart guy,
good storyteller who read some physics books and some sci
fi and decided to seek attention.
Speaker 2: And for a long time, that's where the story stalled.
But there's a twist. There's always a twist with this story.
Speaker 1: This is the thrilling thread we've been looking for.
Speaker 2: The reporters, specifically George Knapp. They didn't just accept the
official denials as the final word. He kept digging. He
went looking for physical evidence.
Speaker 1: And he found a phone book.
Speaker 2: It's so beautifully low tech. In our digital world, we
forget how permanent paper can be a digital database entry
that can be deleted with a single keystroke, poof gone.
Speaker 1: But a physical printed phone book from the nineteen eighties
sitting in a dusty archive somewhere that.
Speaker 2: Is much much harder to scrub from existence.
Speaker 1: And inside that old Los Alamos National Laboratory internal phone directory.
Speaker 2: Listed right there among the other scientists and technicians.
Speaker 1: With the name Bob Lazar Boob. It is the absolute
smoking gun for the believers. It proves, at a minimum
that Los Alamos officially lied when they said he never
worked there.
Speaker 2: It creates a huge crack in the dam of denial
because now you have to ask, if they were willing
to lie about his employment, what else were they lying about.
Speaker 1: Did they have the power to delete his university records?
Could they scrub his birth certificate? Could they systematically erase
a person's entire pass just to discredit them?
Speaker 2: That is the truly chilling question because if the government
has the capability and the willingness to do that, to
retroactively delete your education, your job history, your entire identity
just to make you look like a crazy.
Speaker 1: Person, that's almost scarier than the aliens.
Speaker 2: It suggests a level of power, a level of orwelly
in control over reality itself that is terrifying.
Speaker 1: So now the battle lines are drawn. You have two
distinct camps.
Speaker 2: Can't believer says this is proof he is a courageous whistleblower.
And the deep State is trying to erase him from
history to protect their biggest secret.
Speaker 1: And camp skeptic says, okay, fine, he worked at Los Alamos,
but maybe he was just a low level of technician,
not a physicist. He found his name in the phone
book and used that one single kernel of truth to
build this elaborate, fantastical lie around it.
Speaker 2: And for decades it was basically a stalemate between those
two positions, or it was until twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: Because for a long long time, Bobozar was the only voice.
He was the lone wolf howling in the desert.
Speaker 2: But then we get another crucial thread, and it comes
from a very credible source, an investigative journalist named Annie Jacobson.
Speaker 1: She's a heavyweight. She wrote what many consider to be
the definitive book on the base called Area fifty one,
Non Censored History of America's top secret military base.
Speaker 2: And she's not AFO hunter. She's a serious journalist. She
interviewed dozens and dozens of former base workers, engineers, pilots,
people who were.
Speaker 1: Actually there, and in her book she found someone else
she did.
Speaker 2: She interviewed an unnamed source, an engineer. He was one
of five engineers who had been contracted to work at
the base by guess who it has to be eg EGNG.
His engineer was sent out to Area fifty one in
the late seventies, and the story he tells, the job
he describes corroborates Bob Lazar's story in some truly startling ways.
Speaker 1: And this is twenty two years after Lazar went public.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is in twenty eleven, two decades later, this
anonymous engineer describes his duties at the base to try
and figure out the propulsion system of a captured foreign
aircraft reverse.
Speaker 1: Engineering, And did he give a name for the facility
where he worked.
Speaker 2: He referred to the location as Sigma four or S four.
Speaker 1: That sounds of shiver down my spine, It really does.
Speaker 2: It should, Yeah, Because even if you doubt Bob Lazar's credentials,
even if you're convinced he lied about MIT, which he
very well might have, the fact that you have a
completely independent source twenty two years.
Speaker 1: Later from a credible journalistic investigation describing the exact same
secret facility S four, run by the exact same secret
contractor EGNG, with the exact same top secret mission profile
of reverse engineering and advanced propulsion system. Wow.
Speaker 2: Well, statistically that is incredibly significant.
Speaker 1: It means either they both happen to read the same
obscure sci fi novel or they both experienced the same reality.
Speaker 2: It shifts the conversation. It moves it from being one
man's potentially crazy story to being a pattern of corroborating testimony.
It adds serious weight to the idea that S four
is a real place and that egg was doing something
extremely exotic there.
Speaker 1: It does.
Speaker 2: So let's try and pull all these threads together. Now,
let's look at the picture that's been painted. Okay, we
have a base born out of Cold War secrecy, built
in the most desolate place imaginable.
Speaker 1: The secrecy around its first mission, testing high altitude spyplanes
accidentally fuels a generation of alien conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: It creates a vacuum, and then years later a man
steps out of that vacuum and says, guess what you
were right all along? It is aliens. And the government's
response isn't just a denyant, but to actively try and
erase him from existence, while at the same time fortifying
the base to a level that implies they are hiding
something of unimaginable value.
Speaker 1: It's just the perfect storm of mystery. If they really
are hiding alien technology, the extreme secrecy makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2: But if they are just hiding, say the next generation
of stealth aircraft or hypersonic drones, the secrecy also makes
perfect sense.
Speaker 1: And that's the genius or the curse of Area fifty one.
It's a roar shock test for our society.
Speaker 2: You see in it what you're predisposed to see. If
you fear government overreach, you see a black site that
erases its own citizens. If you hope for contact with
other worlds, you see an alien embassy hidden in the desert.
Speaker 1: But no matter what is actually inside those camouflaged hangars,
the one thing that is absolutely undeniably true is that
the United States, everment, is willing to go to unbelievable
lengths to keep us out.
Speaker 2: Deadly force, lifetime NDAs, seismic sensors, and constant surveillance. This
isn't just another military base.
Speaker 1: No, it's a reminder that there are places in this
country where the normal rules don't apply, where the constitution
seems to just stop at the fence line, and the
need to know takes over. Well said, and that brings
us to the end of this particular thread. But we
can't just leave it there. We have to leave you,
the listener, with something to think about.
Speaker 2: We've looked at the evidence, the conflicting stories, the mysterious
phone book, yeah, the corroborating testimony from two decades later,
the strange physics of element one p fifteen, which, by
the way, has since been synthesized in labs. It has
it has They named it moscovium, but it was highly
unstable and decayed in a fraction of a second, unlike
the stable version Lazaar described as a fuel source.
Speaker 1: So here is the question we want to leave with
you as you're listening right now. Do you believe Bob
Lazar was systematically erased by the government to hide a
world changing truth. Is he a martyr for disclosure or is.
Speaker 2: He just the world's luckiest or smartest guesser, a fraud
who somehow managed to predict the existence of a secret
facility called s four twenty years before anyone else ever
mentioned it.
Speaker 1: And maybe there's a bigger question here. Let's just say
for a moment it's all true. If they do have
this technology, anti gravity, anti matter reactors, things that could
solve the energy crisis, cure diseases, take us to the stars.
Why are they keeping it locked away in a dry
lake bed in Nevada?
Speaker 2: Is it for our own protection because humanity just isn't
ready for that kind of revelation, or is it for
their own power to maintain a technological advantage.
Speaker 1: That's the one that keeps me up at night. We
want to know where you stand. Tell us what you think.
Are you hashtag team Lazar or are you hashtag team
in Skeptic? Do you trust physicist or do you trust
the silence?
Speaker 2: Just you know, maybe don't try and storm the gates
to find the answer for yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's definitely avoid the deadly force. We can keep
the Naruto running to the Anime conventions. Thank you for
joining us on thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Until next time.