Robert Scott Lazar is an American conspiracy theorist. In 1989, Lazar claimed to have been part of a classified US government project concerned with the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology; he also purported to have read government briefing documents that described alien involvement in human affairs over the past 10,000 years. A self-proclaimed physicist, Lazar supposedly worked at a secret site near the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51. His story brought additional public attention to the facility and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.
Lazar has provided no evidence of alien life or technology, and his claims about his education and employment history are replete with fabrications. Lazar also has several criminal convictions: he was convicted in 1990 for his involvement in a prostitution ring, and again in 2006 for selling illegal chemicals. As well as being dismissed by skeptics, Lazar has been renounced by some ufologists.
Lazar claims to be a physicist and to have worked in this capacity during his tenure at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. This assertion was echoed by local journalist Terry England, who interviewed Lazar about his interest in jet-powered cars in 1982; some media outlets have since dubbed him a "physicist". Asked about the article in 2021, however, England admitted that he took Lazar's claims at face value and did not fact-check his credentials as a physicist. Inquiry into Lazar's position at Los Alamos revealed his role to have been a technician for a contractor firm, and that he worked neither as a physicist or for the lab directly. As such, the facility retains no records on Lazar, whom Prothero states was "in short, rather a minor player." The Smithsonian, along with various other mainstream news outlets, have stated that his designation as a "physicist" is self-proclaimed.
Since 1989, Lazar has achieved public notoriety as an Area 51 conspiracy theorist. In May of that year, he appeared in an interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS, under the pseudonym "Dennis" and with his face hidden, to discuss his purported employment at "S-4", a subsidiary facility he claimed exists near the Nellis Air Force Base installation known as Area 51. He claims that the said facility was adjacent to Papoose Lake, which is located south of the main Area 51 facility at Groom Lake. He claimed the site consisted of concealed aircraft hangars built into a mountainside. Lazar said that his job was to help with the reverse engineering of one of nine flying saucers, which he alleged were extraterrestrial in origin. He claims one of the flying saucers, the one he coined the "Sport Model", was manufactured out of a metallic substance similar in appearance and touch to liquid titanium. In a subsequent interview that November, Lazar appeared unmasked and under his own name, where he claimed that his job interview for work at the facility was with contractor EG&G and that his employer was the United States Navy. EG&G stated it had no records on him. His supposed employment at a Nellis Air Force Base subsidiary has also been discredited by skeptics, as well as by the United States Air Force.
Lazar has claimed that the propulsion of the studied vehicle ran on an antimatter reactor and was fueled by the chemical element with atomic number 115 (E115), which at the time was provisionally named ununpentium and had not yet been artificially created. (It was first synthesized in 2003 and later named moscovium.) He said that the propulsion system relied on a stable isotope of E115, which allegedly generates a gravity wave that allowed the vehicle to fly and to evade visual detection by bending light around it.
No stable isotopes of moscovium have yet been synthesized. All have proven extremely radioactive, decaying in a few hundred milliseconds. Lazar said the craft was dismantled, and the reactor he studied was topped by a sphere or semi-sphere which emitted a force field capable of repulsing human flesh. He explained that the craft was split into two main levels.
The reactor was positioned at the center of the upper level, with an antenna extending to the top, surrounded by three "gravity amplifiers". These connected to "gravity emitters" on the lower level, which can rotate 180 degrees to output a "gravity beam or anti-gravity wave" and that the craft would then travel "belly first" into this distortion field.
Lazar has claimed that during his joining of the program he read briefing documents describing the historical involvement of Earth for the past 10,000 years with extraterrestrial beings described as grey aliens from a planet orbiting the twin binary star system Zeta Reticuli. As of September 2019, no extrasolar planets have been found in the Zeta Reticuli system. In 1989, Lazar said the seats of the saucer he saw were approximately child-sized and that he had seen alien cadavers of a corresponding size.
He said that while walking down a hallway at S-4, he briefly glanced through a door window and saw what he interpreted as two men in lab coats facing down and talking to "something small with long arms". Three decades later, he said he did not think he saw an alien, but speculated that he saw a doll used as reference for the size of the alleged aliens and that a nickname used for them was "the kids". Lazar's claims about S-4 brought additional public attention to its supposed parent facility, Area 51, and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.
Lazar alleges that his employment and education records have been erased; Friedman, Prothero and author Timothy D. Callahan find this implausible. His story has drawn significant media attention, controversy, supporters, and detractors. Lazar has no evidence of alien life or technology and remains a polarizing figure among ufologists.
In 2017, Lazar's workplace was raided by the FBI and local police, which Lazar theorizes was to recover "element 115", a substance he says he took from a government lab. Records obtained through a freedom of information request show that the raid was part of a murder investigation to determine whether his company sold thallium to a murder suspect in Michigan. Lazar is not listed as a suspect in the investigation.
