Lazar: The Man Behind Area 51,” Eyewitness News Investigates,
http://area51.eyewitnessnews8.com/.
3. veiled threats of incarceration: A common note among most Area 51 employees interviewed, certainly among the Air Force enlisted men, was the “threat of Leavenworth,” meaning incarceration at the largest federal security prison in the United States at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
4. Dr. Edward Teller: Teller, who died in 2003 at the age of ninetyfive, never confirmed or denied that he referred Lazar to EG&G for work at Area 51.
*contaminated with plutonium: Interviews with Richard Mingus; see notes for chapter 6.
5. for a lecture Teller was giving: The subject of Teller’s lecture was the nuclear freeze movement under way in a post-Three Mile Island world.
6. a page-1 story featuring Bob Lazar: Los Alamos Monitor, June 27, 1982, identifies Lazar as “a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.”
7. Lazar’s life had reached an unexpected low: The most comprehensive information on Lazar is available at the Area 51 research Web site Dreamlandresort.com, created by Joerg H. Arnu in
1999. In “The Bob Lazar Corner” one can find a time line of Lazar’s story as well as a compilation of public records, letters, and commentary about Lazar by his critics and his friends, as researched by Tom Mahood, whom I interviewed.
8. Tracy Murk: According to the wedding certificate researched by Tom Mahood. Also according to Mahood’s research, Tracy Ann Murk and Lazar married for a second time, on October 12, 1986 (the first wedding was April 19, 1986), with Murk inexplicably using the name Jackie Diane Evans.
9. committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide: Ibid. Death certificate #001423-86, Clark County Health District, Las Vegas, NV; cause of death: “inhalation of motor vehicle exhaust.” Sourced by Tom Mahood.
10. Fly to Area 51: Descriptions based on multiple eyewitness interviews; see Primary Interviews.
11. designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals: Interview with T. D. Barnes.
12. The miner kept the secrecy oath: Interview with Colonel Slater. 13. access point Gate 385: Interview with Richard Mingus.
14. trucks from the Atomic Energy Commission motor pool: Interview with Ernie Williams. A farm boy from Nebraska, Williams’s father was a “water witch,” and Williams inherited some water-locating charm. In this manner, he is the man credited by many Roadrunners as having officially found Area 51’s first water well.
15. men dressed in HAZMAT suits: R. Kinnison and R. Gilbert, “Estimates of Soil Removal for Cleanup of Transuranics at NAEG Offsite Safety Shot Sites,” FY 1981, 1984, 1986-91.
16. would have gone through security there: Interview with anonymous EG&G employee who worked for the airline. 17. tennis matches: Interview with Dr. Wheelon.
18. jumping into the pool: Interview with Ken Collins. 19. Area 51 bar, called Sam’s Place: Interview with Colonel Pizzo.
20. According to Lazar: Lazar’s original interviews with George Knapp are available on YouTube in six parts.
21. He glanced sideways, through a small nine-by-nine-inch window: Lazar’s interview with George Knapp, part two of six, minutes 4:10-5:05. Knapp: “In an earlier interview, you had mentioned you saw what you thought may be an alien. Was it an alien? What did you see?” Lazar: “What I had said and all that occurred was that I was walking by a door, ah, a door that had a small, nine-by-nine window in it, little wires running through it. And glanced in there, and there were two… ah, either technicians, scientists, or whoever they were, looking down at something. And what that something was caught my eye and I never really did see what it was. A lot of people have asserted, well, there was an alien, they’re aliens working around there and so on and so forth, I mean, I don’t think that was the case. But, ah, who knows. I was. You know. You’re seeing all these fantastic things and your mind gets going and you know you catch something out of the corner of your eye, who knows what your mind is going to come up with so I certainly wouldn’t stand on that as fact by any means.” See http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=XAfVZcAsTxk.
22. what was maybe an alien: Lazar’s interview with George Knapp, part two of six, minutes 2:33-3:30. Lazar says he was told the UFO he was assigned to work on originated from another planet. He says he was shown autopsy photographs of the craft’s alien pilots, which he described to Knapp in their interview: “One or two autopsy photographs I saw ah, dealt with just a small photograph, a bust shot essentially, just head, shoulders, and chest of an alien where the ah, ah, chest was cut open in a ‘T’ fashion and one single organ was removed. The organ itself in the other picture was cut and vivisectioned essentially the, ah, showing the different chambers in there. This was totally unrelated to anything I was doing but from that photograph it looked like what you see in UFO lore as the typical ‘gray’ [slang for alien] so how tall it was from what I could see, I couldn’t tell,
’cause I only saw a portion of the photograph but if everything else you see is correct, I would imagine it was three and a half or four feet tall. But ah, there again, you know all I had to see was a photograph. And you know, I didn’t have much to go on.” See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfVZcAsTxk&feature=related.
23. The group made a trip: Tom Mahood, “The Robert Lazar Timeline, as assembled from Public Records and Statements,” July 1994, updated July 1997, from dreamlandresort.com. In this time line Lazar and various friends made a total of three trips into the mountains behind Groom Lake. It was on the third trip that his group was stopped by guards.
24. transcripts of his wife’s telephone conversations: Ibid. 25. Norio Hayakawa: Interview with Norio Hayakawa.
26. He had bodyguards: In the interview with Knapp, Lazar said he was shot at while driving on the freeway (YouTube interview five of six, minute 6:00) and that during his debrief at Indian Springs a gun was pointed at him (ibid., minute 8:00).
27. Lie detector tests: WSVN-7 News reporter Dan Hausle’s interview with former policeman Terry Cavernetti, accessed on December 21, 2010, YouTube, “Bob Lazar Passes the Lie Detector on UFOs.”
28. Stanton Friedman: Interview with Stanton Friedman. Friedman was employed for fourteen years as a nuclear physicist and worked on many advanced nuclear and space travel systems for companies like General Motors, General Electric, and Westinghouse. He has published eighty UFO papers, written six books, and appears in many UFO documentaries.
29. Stanton Friedman’s exposй on the Roswell incident: Recollections of Roswell, Testimony from 27 Witnesses Connected with Recovery of 2 Crashed Flying Saucers in New Mexico in July 1947, DVD, 105 minutes.
30. a book based on Friedman and Moore’s research was published: Berlitz and Moore, Roswell Incident. Friedman said it was a group decision to give Berlitz author credit instead of him, as Berlitz was from the Berlitz Language School family and had the credibility necessary to sell the publisher on the book’s controversial subject matter. Charles Berlitz spoke twenty-five languages and is often listed as one of the most important linguists of the twentieth century. His 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle, sold an estimated ten million copies.
Interviews: Colonel Richard S. Leghorn, Ralph “Jim” Freedman, Alfred “Al” O’Donnell, Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman, Colonel Slater, David Myhra
1. became convinced that Martians were attacking Earth: Trenton Evening Times, October 31, 1938. Many documents relating to The War of the Worlds radio play are available at http://www.war- oftheworlds.co.uk/documents.htm.
2. Switchboards jammed: Ibid., “Log from Jersey Police, Port Norris Station.”
3. the FCC’s role: Associated Press, “Mars Monsters Broadcast Will Not Be Repeated. Perpetrators of the Innovation Regret Causing of Public Alarm,” November 1, 1938.
4. Adolf Hitler took note as well: Hand, Terror on the Air! 7. 5. Joseph Stalin had also been: Author interview with EG&G
engineer.
6. Vannevar Bush, observed the effects: Correspondence between Vannevar Bush and W. C. Forbes, June 8, 1939; Vannevar Bush, A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
7. “Science Discovers Real Frankenstein”: Winthrop, “Science Discovers.”
