Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Bob Lazar and Area 51 By Nikki Kimbark


People are always curious about the unknown; small secrets, such as whether a celebrity has had surgery on their face, or big secrets, for instance, if Elvis Presley really died. It’s natural to want to know the truth. Conspiracy theories exist to fill in the missing holes of the information given to us about strange happenings.
            A young couple is driving home after a long day with family, their small children sleeping peacefully in the back. It’s dark and they’re the only people on the road. A strange, yellow light appears beside the driver. It maintains the speed of the car and the couple, baffled by its appearance, stares at it. After a few minutes of hovering beside them, it flies away at lightning speed.  The man claims to have seen a cigar-shaped object that he thinks was a spaceship, while the woman only saw the lights. The couple who experienced this strange event describes it as an encounter with an extra-terrestrial.
            Another woman, while working the night shift at the clinic in her hometown, also claimed to have seen cigar-shaped objects in the sky. She said they would hover in the sky for a moment before zooming away. These encounters have one thing in common: they happened a long time ago. This brings up the question on whether the objects seen in the sky were tests the government were doing or an alien life simply trying to say hello to the human people.
            Many people have claimed to have encounters with extra-terrestrial life, even now; aliens have communicated with them in some way, they say, by creating crop circles in their backyard or abducting them for one wild, crazy night. Bob Lazar was a young physicist, who went public about his experiences on Area 51. Lazar claimed the area was used to conduct experiences on alien-lifeforms and that humans were in contact with other life. The only question is whether he was telling the truth. Do aliens exist and, if so, are they here living among us on earth? 
 Character
The question isn’t whether aliens exist or not; the real query is whether Lazar is a valid source to back his statements up. There were no articles that indicated Lazar showed any signs of mental illness. In fact, Lazar seems pretty normal. Since the alien scandal, he and his wife have created a scientific business. He was interviewed again in 2014 and he still stands by his statement all those years ago, and doesn’t care who believes him:
Look, I’m not out there giving UFO lectures, producing tapes. This is not a business of mine. I am trying to run a scientific business, and if I’m the UFO guy, it makes it really difficult, it is to my benefit that people don’t believe the story. (McClellan)
Lazar claims he was educated at Caltech and MIT but a source says it would have been impossible. “Lazar was registered [in one of his Caltech courses] at the same time Lazar was supposedly at MIT! Nobody who can go to MIT goes to Pierce JC, not to mention the rather long commute between LA and Cambridge, Mass” (Friedman). The source goes deeper into this conspiracy and researches Lazar’s high school records. Lazar ranked 231 out of almost 400, making it nearly impossible for him to have been accepted in to either school.
However, another source claims Lazar was “fired for sharing information about his top secret job, and his records of his employment of working as a scientist, as well as his education records were erased” (Rojas). Lazar claims to have seen papers and analysis of alien cadavers, but his purpose was to reverse engineer flying saucers. The flying saucers he would have been working on, he claims, were very small, 9-12 m, almost as if it were made for children.
Lazar worked at the S-4 base, a restricted area near Area 51 grounds. A journalist named George Knapp was intrigued by Lazar’s story and went down to Area 51 to investigate, but unfortunately it is an extremely restricted area that only the government can enter. Nevertheless, Knapp continued to investigate:
For me the key issue is whether or not Lazar really did work at Los Alamos National Lab. If he worked there in a scientific or technical position, if he had security clearances, then, I think, that could justify the idea that he would be hired to work at a place like Area 51. So that was always a central question… [Los Alamos] denied he had records. This went back and forth for a couple of years. I know he was there. We’ve interviewed people he worked with before, none of them would come forward. We found his name in a [Los Alamos] phone book. We found a newspaper article with him on the front page and a picture of him saying he is a physicist out there. We know he was there. (Rojas)
Still, many seem skeptical. Many claim “the phone book mentioned does not list the capacity in which lazar worked at Los Alamos, and newspapers are easily fooled” (Rojas). Also, the fact that Lazar’s coworkers haven’t spoken out publicly about the conspiracy has made many doubt his credibility.
Description Main Idea
The belief in alien life forms is a complicated subject to understand because there is no right answer yet. When asked whether they believed in aliens in a survey, the list was split into two, where half the people said they believed in alien life and the other half claimed aliens do not exist, although more adults seemed to favor alien life while the majority of the younger audience didn’t believe in the conspiracy.
The first conspiracy is the existence of aliens. They are real and the government is hiding it from the American people. It’s quite plausible for this to be true, considering the government is notorious for keeping secrets, including failing to confess listening in on individual’s Internet and phone conversations. In fact, as of February 2014, only “twenty four percent of the American people say they trust the government” (PewResearchCenter).
If the government is aware of extraterrestrial life and is studying their technology, including their spaceships, then it is possible the government is more advanced than the American people know, or they are becoming more advanced. If this is so, it could be possible that the inventions of the iPhone and the Internet are involved in this alien conspiracy. However, this is unlikely, due to the fact that if the government was using technological advances, the world would probably have hover-boards and flying cars by now, based on Lazar’s claim that they were already studying the aliens’ spaceships by the late 1980s.
Another theory is that aliens don’t actually exist and was created only for a topic of conversation, and humans have never communicated with other life. In the Bob Lazar case, there are many holes in the information presented. He has no records of ever being educated in the places he claimed to have studied at, and his high school scores are too low to have been accepted into those schools.
Many people believe in this theory simply because aliens are seen as fiction in today’s society. Movies like ET and Alien make the existence of alien life almost seem laughable. When asked a follow question to those who said aliens did not exist, individuals used their knowledge of NASA’s space technology, or rather NASA’s lack of space technology, as an excuse, claiming human’s technology is not yet advanced to make contact with other life. Though this brings up the question on whether the extra-terrestrial is the one using the advanced technology and communicating with us.
Again, this is a very complicated conspiracy where there is no right answer, and there will be no right answer until the government, if they are truly hiding aliens from the people, speaks honestly about it or a flying saucer lands on the roof of the White House and the aliens present themselves to the people.
            The existence of aliens may never be proven, even if aliens reveal themselves, because people will still think it’s fake. Aliens could exist and take the president to their home world, take pictures of their home and come back with souvenirs, and someone will still think it’s fake. Again, very few of the American people believe in the government, and if the President told them aliens existed, similar to when they put man on the moon, there would be some skepticism. Because this conspiracy is so controversial, it’s up for the person to decide what he or she believes.

          



                                                        Works Cited
McClellan, Jason.  “Bob Lazar Still Defends Area 51 UFO info 25 years later.” May 14, 2014.  http://www.openminds.tv/bob-lazar-still-defends-area-51-ufo-info-25-years-later/27560. Oct. 6, 2015.

Friedman, Stanton T. “THE BOB LAZAR FRAUD.”  Stanton Friedman. Jan. 2011. http://www.stantonfriedman.com/index.php?ptp=articles&fdt=2011.01.07. Oct. 1, 2015.

PewResearchCenter. Public Trust in Government: 1958-2014. Feb. 2014. http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/13/public-trust-in-government/.  Nov. 19, 2015


 Rojas, Alejandro. “Physicist Claims Bob Lazar did work at Los Alamos.” June 30, 2015. http://www.openminds.tv/physicist-claims-bob-lazar-did-work-at-los-alamos/34156. Oct. 1, 2015. 

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