Area 51, Bob Lazar, and the Argument from Ignorance
Here's what I think really happened.
Employed at a low-level position in Los Alamos, Bob Lazar applied for a job with the government hoping to work on alien spacecraft and didn't get the position either lacking education or work experience and was denied entry in Area 51. Perhaps he was psychologically screened out, or he flubbed the interview--I am only speculating. Instead of just returning to his other job or doing something else, he decided to make up a story about working there and is now famous for that. The general story that Lazar will eventually tell is nothing new. He repeats the same stories that UFO enthusiasts have been saying for years. There are two important innovations from Lazar.
The first is that he identifies a location for the UFO research. Lazar didn't invent Area 51 as the location of the UFO research sites, but he made it famous. The second is that his entire claim hinges on element 115 and this is very important, and we'll get to it later.
As of this writing the petition to storm Area 51 is still going. The idea behind this gambit is that they'll be too many people for the military to...do something with and we'll finally have the leverage to find out what they've been hiding all of these years. The trouble is that we kind of know what they've been hiding at Area 51. For example, top secret Air Force projects that eventually developed into the U2, F-117, F-22, and B-2 all came out of Area 51. The military also liked to store the planes they "acquired" from hostile foreign governments there as well. The secrecy of the base is explained by this. The fact that the average person can't walk into it under pain of arrest? Well, let's see the average person try and walk into the Niagara Falls Airforce base (the nearest military facility to me), which is not a secret, without the right permission. As far as military bases are concerned, Area 51 is definitely on the more secure side but it's a military base.
So let's get into the documentary here.
First off, the entire Area 51 thing would be unknown if Las Vegas reporter George Knapp was a bit more incredulous. Lazar's story is that he's a whistleblower in that he feels that the US government should not be allowed to keep extra-terrestrial life a secret from the American public. Assuming that the aliens exist I question whether or not this is illegal or even immoral. Knapp should have asked that question first, then asked if Lazar could prove he worked at the facility. Of course, he cannot, aside from repeating his claims of the various things that he saw and worked on. That however isn't proof, and I have a feeling that Knapp and his news channel were originally filling time on a slow news day. However, Knapp is a believer, and that makes it worse because he essentially mainstreamed a conspiracy theory that only a small number of people believed in (remember this was pre-internet 1989, the story would not go anywhere without this coverage).
In his second interview he claims that he's coming forward (no longer anonymously) as insurance. Making this story public is security against...something, I don't know really and Lazar only implies that it's for his life. He claims that he's had a tire shot out while he was driving his car, but then--nothing else. If the story is something that the government would kill for then I ask the same question I would pose to Alex Jones, David Icke, and their ilk: why haven't they killed you yet? What gets lost in this claim is that they have a worldview in which the US government murders citizens to keep secrets except the biggest secrets of all. There's only Lazar as an individual that claims publicly he worked at Area 51 and S4, so did the US government just figure back in Reagan and Bush's America that Lazar wasn't worth rushing the hit job? The issue here is Lazar's credibility, and I may surprise you, but he comes across well. He doesn't sound like the stereotypical nut, he's not claiming the aliens are controlling his brain, if he was telling the truth he's the very worst case scenario for the ones that want the secret kept. Lazar is calm, speaking in a very matter of fact voice, if it weren't for the claims being made I would have no reason to think that he's not being honest.
He isn't however, being honest. There are few claims being made that are patently false and that the documentary just ignores. Lazar's most tangible claim concerns the power source for the UFO element 115. At the time of his initial interviews and fame he claimed that 115 powered the gravity engine (or gravitic engine according to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy). This element, was impossible to create on Earth and thus proved to him that UFO was alien in origin. In 1984 Hassium was synthesized on Earth, and that had been it for seven years, this was element-108. Lazar is obviously smart and 115 was so far in the future that I believe he didn't think it was ever going to happen. It's a smart play rather than claiming zero-point energy or some other magic bullshit because it sounds legitimate. The alien technology would be far greater than ours, thus they would have the ability to harness a fuel source that is based on our science but far beyond it. The only trouble is that element-115 was synthesized in a lab in 2003 by a group of American and Russian scientists. The element has a half-life of .6 seconds which is an eternity for some of the synthetics but not long enough to really do anything with. It exists and as far as the accusation that he stole some from the S4 lab, no. Moscovium (element-115's name) suffers alpha decay, which is extremely toxic to human beings and DNA based life. Now he could have kept in a special case to protect himself and others, but without revealing the one piece of evidence that would exonerate his claims everyone can only speculate. The documentary takes the tack of believing him and endorsing the idea that he stole Moscovium from S4. Lazar never claims this, but there's an elaborate set up to an FBI raid which the movie claims is related to the theft that never occurred.
The raid is central to the movie serving as a subplot. The documentary begins with text messages from Lazar to the filmmaker as the raid is allegedly happening. Then the movie goes forward talking about his work at S4 but mainly serving as an extended commercial for the business that Lazar runs. Here's why I doubt the raid story: there are no pictures of it. The movie was filmed within the last five years and a giant FBI raid on a small business in Michigan would certainly have made the news. Especially given the involvement of the infamous Lazar. No footage exists, no raid story in the newspaper, nothing. In 2003 Lazar's home was raided by the CPSC for selling chemicals that were restricted from being shipped across state lines. In an article in Wired, they talk about the law and how restrictive/unnecessary it is, but nothing comes up about the "real" reason they were raided which the documentary strongly implies. Lazar's business is run out of a strip mall, and there's plenty of foot traffic, a bank is across the street, but no one saw anything that day when so many people raided the business that Lazar lost count of them.
My conclusion: I said it earlier, he's made up this story and to some extent he may even believe it, but he needs to offer some proof of these claims rather than just affirming the suspicions of UFO conspiracy theorists.
Secondly, as a documentary this thing is terrible. The B-roll is random to say the least, and for some reason played backwards. I don't know what effect this was trying to achieve but it's distracting. I suppose there choice of using science-y things was an attempt to lend credibility to the story the filmmaker believes but that's another supposition. The Mickey Rourke narration was silly and it comes across like they just recorded him drunk on scotch rambling poetically about nothing whatsoever.
The whole thing is an argument from ignorance. We don't know what happens at 51 so we can just make it up. Why not claim the aliens are there? It's not like a reporter can just walk in and snap pictures. Not knowing is not proof of anything or everything, it's proof that we don't know and that's not a conspiracy.
Employed at a low-level position in Los Alamos, Bob Lazar applied for a job with the government hoping to work on alien spacecraft and didn't get the position either lacking education or work experience and was denied entry in Area 51. Perhaps he was psychologically screened out, or he flubbed the interview--I am only speculating. Instead of just returning to his other job or doing something else, he decided to make up a story about working there and is now famous for that. The general story that Lazar will eventually tell is nothing new. He repeats the same stories that UFO enthusiasts have been saying for years. There are two important innovations from Lazar.
The first is that he identifies a location for the UFO research. Lazar didn't invent Area 51 as the location of the UFO research sites, but he made it famous. The second is that his entire claim hinges on element 115 and this is very important, and we'll get to it later.
As of this writing the petition to storm Area 51 is still going. The idea behind this gambit is that they'll be too many people for the military to...do something with and we'll finally have the leverage to find out what they've been hiding all of these years. The trouble is that we kind of know what they've been hiding at Area 51. For example, top secret Air Force projects that eventually developed into the U2, F-117, F-22, and B-2 all came out of Area 51. The military also liked to store the planes they "acquired" from hostile foreign governments there as well. The secrecy of the base is explained by this. The fact that the average person can't walk into it under pain of arrest? Well, let's see the average person try and walk into the Niagara Falls Airforce base (the nearest military facility to me), which is not a secret, without the right permission. As far as military bases are concerned, Area 51 is definitely on the more secure side but it's a military base.
So let's get into the documentary here.
First off, the entire Area 51 thing would be unknown if Las Vegas reporter George Knapp was a bit more incredulous. Lazar's story is that he's a whistleblower in that he feels that the US government should not be allowed to keep extra-terrestrial life a secret from the American public. Assuming that the aliens exist I question whether or not this is illegal or even immoral. Knapp should have asked that question first, then asked if Lazar could prove he worked at the facility. Of course, he cannot, aside from repeating his claims of the various things that he saw and worked on. That however isn't proof, and I have a feeling that Knapp and his news channel were originally filling time on a slow news day. However, Knapp is a believer, and that makes it worse because he essentially mainstreamed a conspiracy theory that only a small number of people believed in (remember this was pre-internet 1989, the story would not go anywhere without this coverage).
In his second interview he claims that he's coming forward (no longer anonymously) as insurance. Making this story public is security against...something, I don't know really and Lazar only implies that it's for his life. He claims that he's had a tire shot out while he was driving his car, but then--nothing else. If the story is something that the government would kill for then I ask the same question I would pose to Alex Jones, David Icke, and their ilk: why haven't they killed you yet? What gets lost in this claim is that they have a worldview in which the US government murders citizens to keep secrets except the biggest secrets of all. There's only Lazar as an individual that claims publicly he worked at Area 51 and S4, so did the US government just figure back in Reagan and Bush's America that Lazar wasn't worth rushing the hit job? The issue here is Lazar's credibility, and I may surprise you, but he comes across well. He doesn't sound like the stereotypical nut, he's not claiming the aliens are controlling his brain, if he was telling the truth he's the very worst case scenario for the ones that want the secret kept. Lazar is calm, speaking in a very matter of fact voice, if it weren't for the claims being made I would have no reason to think that he's not being honest.
He isn't however, being honest. There are few claims being made that are patently false and that the documentary just ignores. Lazar's most tangible claim concerns the power source for the UFO element 115. At the time of his initial interviews and fame he claimed that 115 powered the gravity engine (or gravitic engine according to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy). This element, was impossible to create on Earth and thus proved to him that UFO was alien in origin. In 1984 Hassium was synthesized on Earth, and that had been it for seven years, this was element-108. Lazar is obviously smart and 115 was so far in the future that I believe he didn't think it was ever going to happen. It's a smart play rather than claiming zero-point energy or some other magic bullshit because it sounds legitimate. The alien technology would be far greater than ours, thus they would have the ability to harness a fuel source that is based on our science but far beyond it. The only trouble is that element-115 was synthesized in a lab in 2003 by a group of American and Russian scientists. The element has a half-life of .6 seconds which is an eternity for some of the synthetics but not long enough to really do anything with. It exists and as far as the accusation that he stole some from the S4 lab, no. Moscovium (element-115's name) suffers alpha decay, which is extremely toxic to human beings and DNA based life. Now he could have kept in a special case to protect himself and others, but without revealing the one piece of evidence that would exonerate his claims everyone can only speculate. The documentary takes the tack of believing him and endorsing the idea that he stole Moscovium from S4. Lazar never claims this, but there's an elaborate set up to an FBI raid which the movie claims is related to the theft that never occurred.
The raid is central to the movie serving as a subplot. The documentary begins with text messages from Lazar to the filmmaker as the raid is allegedly happening. Then the movie goes forward talking about his work at S4 but mainly serving as an extended commercial for the business that Lazar runs. Here's why I doubt the raid story: there are no pictures of it. The movie was filmed within the last five years and a giant FBI raid on a small business in Michigan would certainly have made the news. Especially given the involvement of the infamous Lazar. No footage exists, no raid story in the newspaper, nothing. In 2003 Lazar's home was raided by the CPSC for selling chemicals that were restricted from being shipped across state lines. In an article in Wired, they talk about the law and how restrictive/unnecessary it is, but nothing comes up about the "real" reason they were raided which the documentary strongly implies. Lazar's business is run out of a strip mall, and there's plenty of foot traffic, a bank is across the street, but no one saw anything that day when so many people raided the business that Lazar lost count of them.
My conclusion: I said it earlier, he's made up this story and to some extent he may even believe it, but he needs to offer some proof of these claims rather than just affirming the suspicions of UFO conspiracy theorists.
Secondly, as a documentary this thing is terrible. The B-roll is random to say the least, and for some reason played backwards. I don't know what effect this was trying to achieve but it's distracting. I suppose there choice of using science-y things was an attempt to lend credibility to the story the filmmaker believes but that's another supposition. The Mickey Rourke narration was silly and it comes across like they just recorded him drunk on scotch rambling poetically about nothing whatsoever.
The whole thing is an argument from ignorance. We don't know what happens at 51 so we can just make it up. Why not claim the aliens are there? It's not like a reporter can just walk in and snap pictures. Not knowing is not proof of anything or everything, it's proof that we don't know and that's not a conspiracy.
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