On April 13, 2019 there was a screening of Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers at the Detroit Institute of Arts Theater as part of the annual Detroit Free Press Film Fest. After the film, there was a special panel where Bob Lazar, his wife Joy White (in her first stage appearance), film director Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, and investigative reporter George Knapp were asked questions by Detroit Free Press reporter Jim Schaefer. After Schaefer’s questions, the audience asked some questions of the panel.

For those who are not aware, Bob Lazar is a physicist who conducted a series of interviews with George Knapp in 1989. During these interview, Lazar spoke about Area 51, a location that until 1989 was a government secret with no public knowledge. Lazar claimed that his job at Area 51 was to reverse engineer the propulsion drives of UFOs that were located there. At that time, Lazar stated that there were nine UFOs on location and the propulsion drives utilized gravity displacement and stabilized element 115, an element that was not discovered in a lab many years later in 2003, was key to the craft’s propulsion. Currently, element 115, now known as Moscovium, is a rather unstable element with a half life of .8 seconds.

Lazar’s academic record is missing. His employment records at Los Alamos and Area 51 do not exist. Subsequent documentation has been found by George Knapp that supports Lazar’s employment record at Los Alamos, but his academic record is still in question. Due to these inconsistencies, Lazar is seen as a controversial figure in the field of ufology. Many in the field believe him, others do not. This is one of the reasons why Corbell made a film about Lazar (also now available on Netflix); his hope is to inform people so they can make up their own minds once they have an insider perspective as told by Lazar.

The Panel Discussion

The following is a full transcript of the panel discussion following the screening of Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers on April 13, 2019. The interviewer Jim Schaefer will be referenced as FREEP and audience questions will be labeled as AUDIENCE. The transcript of the panel is complete, but edited for reading clarity (example, vocal pauses like “um” are removed). Near the end, with audience questions, unimportant dialogue from FREEP (such as calling on an audience member) was omitted. There may be misspellings or misheard words in this transcript, we will continue to work to refine it over time. The audience questions in the video might be amplified for clarity’s sake as there was no microphone in the theater.

Bob Lazar, George Knapp, Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell in a panel discussion in Detroit, MI on 13 April 2019

FREEP: Mr. Lazar, you are extremely well-known in this community, yet you’ve made very few appearances at talks over the years. I would just like to ask you upfront, why. Why you don’t do more? I understand you’ve had some trouble with harassment and things over the years. Thank you for coming out tonight by the way, we really appreciate it. Could you tell us a little bit more about why?

LAZAR: I’m just really not, this isn’t about making money and selling tapes or anything along those lines. It’s just that the only reason that I allowed Jeremy to make this movie was because there was so much disinformation spread around the internet; I mean there’s plenty of people on Facebook pretending to be me, answering questions.

FREEP: There’s impostors?

LAZAR: Oh,plenty of them. I got to the point that…you know every time you take an inaccuracy off of Wikipedia somebody else writes something silly on there. There’s just so much false information that I just wanted to get something down on record that, you know, was reality. But I’m not interested in doing a bunch of lectures or running around the country, the tape should do that itself.

FREEP: Excuse my ignorance, but you’ve never written a book either?

LAZAR: There is a book…I haven’t written a book, no. But I have helped a writer get an autobiography together so what’s going to happen with that in the future remains to be seen.

FREEP: It hasn’t been published yet?

LAZAR: No.

FREEP: So, you’ve never profited off of your story?

LAZAR: No, I think that people who profit off of it are the ones to me you inherently can’t trust. So, yeah taking money for any of this isn’t acceptable. I don’t make money off of the film, I don’t sell anything. The idea is to get the information out, it’s not to turn this into a business venture.

FREEP: Just another quick one I’ve got to get off of the top of my head. You talked about insurance as what made you come forward in the first place. But also you mentioned the withholding of this technology that you thought could transform the world basically, even more so almost than the knowledge that there’s another form of life out there, the technology struck you. What made you get to that point? What was it about your job that you just couldn’t keep quiet?

LAZAR: That is really a long story. It wasn’t that I just couldn’t keep anything quiet and decided to say something. There’s a whole chain of events that occurred and brought me to that point and that’s really too lengthy to get into now.

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FREEP: Okay. I take that it was some of the harassment and things that were treatment on the job, the yelling and things that were referenced.

LAZAR: Right, I mean, you know…

FREEP: You mentioned that there were threats to your family.

LAZAR: I mean, in a nutshell to obtain a high security clearance you have to have not just no connections to foreign governments, you also have to have a stable home life. And at the time I was going back and forth to the secret location at Groom Lake, late at night at weird hours whenever they called if they decided to do some work out there. Now I kept with the program. I kept things quiet even to my wife. Well, as time went on, my began to think I was having an affair. I had given permission to have my phone monitored so my wife began to have an affair. They were the first to know about this, so they began to worry that there’s going to be some turbulence in this guy’s life and we don’t know how stable he’s going to be. Again, it’s a long involved story but that’s what started it.

FREEP: That helps, it sheds some light on the situation. As a journalist I also have to ask you and I’m Jeremy and George have both discussed with you…how many other people worked where you worked?

LAZAR: Twenty two.

FREEP: That’s it?

LAZAR: That’s it.

FREEP: Why are there no other Bob Lazars? Where are they?

LAZAR: I don’t know. I didn’t set a good example coming out.

FREEP: But you know their names I presume? Did you ever ask them to back me up? Come on.

LAZAR: Yeah, at one time I think I knew them all but I do know the names, yeah.

FREEP: But they never came forward, you’re the only one.

LAZAR: No, I really tried to find some of them. I mean, it’s been a long time now.

FREEP: Jeremy, can you explain how you got this man to talk when so many others failed.

CORBELL: Well there’s nothing like a good challenge and as you saw in the film it was…My films are exactly like you see them. I’m not making anything up I’m showing you how I experiences it through my eyes. You saw in the first real scene, George Knapp challenge me. He says ‘You know, look. You gotta talk to Bob Lazar. I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. But basically you’ve got to be the luckiest guy in the world and maybe he’ll talk to you.’ So I accepted the challenge. And you know, it’s kind like each life runs together, we were in each others’ orbits in a way. And you know they had what, a twenty, twenty-five year relationship at that point. So I got to meet Bob and he let me turn on the camera which you know, was amazing so the world got three more minutes of Bob Lazar. And as a fan of wanting to know the story, wanting to know the truth. That was the cool moment. I got him to talk, its a pure communication. You run a camera for two hours and he’ll tell you something. It just blows your mind. And we have to wait because Bob, this isn’t where he’s comfortable. He doesn’t like doing this. He told his story, he set the record straight. (unintelligible) Starting with George, thirty years ago, but clearly the public wants to know more. That’s why we’re here.

FREEP: Jeremy, were you…the FBI raid was spectacular for your film. Were you worried that it might derail your film? Did Bob express serious concern that what you guys were doing was dredging up things that got him in trouble so many years ago?

CORBELL: And I had felt so bad. I never have thought the FBI raid was spooky and good for my film. I’d literally never thought that. My mom thought that. I was worried about Bob and then you’re like it’s so funny you see something on the screen, or you hear it, your mind says “Oh, do I believe these people didn’t believe that FBI raid happened” and I like literally post more photos of it. No, I was terrified for Bob. George told me something like that was gong to happen. I don’t think I was hardly a wreck you know by filming him. It fucking sucked. Whatever happened, it upturned Bob’s life again. And don’t pin it on me, I’m just saying. It happened and there’s a lot to that, but no, it’s just a real story. This is Joy’s life. This is Bob’s life. This shit happened and whatever you believe about it, sure it gets dramatic, that’s great. Put an exclamation point on the fact that it happened. Great. Because now we will kind of start to see in a world, in the weird world that has surrounded Bob and his life, and George and his life, because of Bob. You get to see that as it really happened. That’s the only thing I can say. It’s an unfortunate thing. If you want to know more about it, try and get the warrant for what happened. We are trying to understand more.

Paranormal Study Note: Four days after this panel, the warrant was published online by Tim McMillan in a post on his site Coyote’s Tail. You can read this warrant in the article entitled Exclusive – Documents from FBI Raid of Bob Lazar.

FREEP: How much time did you spend with them shooting?

CORBELL: When he told me he was sending that first shot with George in two thousand, what was it the twenty-fifth anniversary, two thousand twelve first shot. It was over all that time that I hung out, we’d correspond. Look, to know the truth you’ve got to spend time to make a movie like this. I’d go live with him for six, seven days at a time. It was awesome. I got to see who they are, that’s what I wanted to show you. That’s what I wanted to show all of you, was who Bob is. Whether you believe him or not, that it’s almost irrelevant. But it was how you’d have the information that shows you who he is. It picks up the story. Remember, George did put his neck on the line as a journalist to tell the story. It wasn’t because he didn’t try to grill Bob and find out the truth. he did that and Bob has every polygraph test. He put him in front of the people who worked there, he knew everything. So, Bob has been vetted. George doesn’t care, I don’t care anymore. Bob has never cared. People believe him. That’s not why he came forward, he’s reporting this story to you, take it or leave it. And as Bob would tell ya, if you don’t believe him, pass it up. It makes his life better. But I think that George is better to answer that than me because George has been doing this you know when I was not even, not even on the camera.

FREEP: Perfect segue. I was going to ask George: You broke the story thirty years ago. You’re still a working journalist. You’ve done many important investigations over the years. You’ve won a Peabody Award, a Murrow Award, these are the biggest TV journalist awards you can win. Yet, you staked your reputation on an investigative story into UFOs. Why?

KNAPP: Well, we knew going in, my news director Bob Stodal and I, after that Dennis (note: Dennis is pseudonym given by a blacked-out Lazar in the first KLAS interview from May, 1989) interview, and the phone was ringing off the hook, we knew that touched the pulse of the public in a way that had really not occurred to us before. We knew two things. One, we knew it was risky, risky for my reputation because of the wackiness of UFOs. The fact that its a tabloid topic, it’s not taken seriously by mainstream journalists, at least it hadn’t been for a long time. We knew it was risky not only to my reputation but to the reputation to the TV station. This could leave a scar if it blew up in our face. It could leave a scar that could affect the public’s perception of KLAS forever. But we also knew a second thing and that was that it was important. That if it turned out to be true, it was the biggest story ever. My news director Bob and I walked out of our first meeting with Bob. We’d had a put him through his paces; grilled him, asking where he went to school, about his experiences, about his credit, everything. And we walked out, looked at each other and go “this is true.” This is a helluva story. It’s the biggest story. It changes everything. If it’s true, it changes everything. Our perception of ourselves. Our human history. The economic aspects that Bob talks about in Jeremy’s film. Where we are in the pecking order. Our place in the universe. Our place in the food chain. So we knew it was risky, but we knew it was important and we figured it was worth taking the risk.

FREEP: What kind of grief did you get from fellow journalists over the years?

KNAPP: It’s never stopped. There’s two groups of people that hated it. The Puba’s of ufology for whom this story, it sidetracked them, it went around them. They are the arbiters of what is truth in the UFO world which is hilarious when you think about it, because ninety-five of UFO sightings to begin with are mis-identifications, honest mistakes, it’s the other five percent that are important. But, the crazy stories that come out in the UFO world that are arbitrated by certain self-appointed people, they decide which stories are credible and which ones are not in a world that is basically made up to begin with. They hate it, and my fellow journalists get me even more; and they pillorate me, the radio DJ’s – they would run out of belch and fart jokes then tee off on me in the morning, they’d make up songs and poems. Newspaper columnists would have a pretty good time poking fun at my expense. There was three editorial cartoons in the state’s largest newspaper. Me with a butterfly net chasing a flying saucer. There was another one, “The Marshmallow Head Chronicles” of an alien head that had come to earth to shoot me. And then there was a column about a series about alien abductions and it was the headline “Kidnapped By Aliens” and they dubbed me a Grand Mullah in the Church of Cosmic Proctology. There was another one where the TV writer said that people were up at home at night to see my TV stories about UFOs not because they cared about aliens but because they wanted to be there when I went old news loopy on the air. That thing did take me years I have Emmy story I do where I come up against somebody on any issue they remind me of folks not in the UFO report. I don’t care. I’m not about to lose skin about it. But, it occurred to me about people making those jokes it’s a lot easier to joke about it than to go out there and do the work to look into Bob’s background, to sit out there in the desert night after night to see flying saucers, to dodge the security guards, to dig into dusty old records and archives. It’s hard work. It’s a lot easier to make fun of it.

FREEP: I was entranced by the documents that you found to oppose the official lines from the institutions where he either went to school or worked. I thought that was pretty compelling evidence.

KNAPP: One other thing that did not make the film was during the time that Bob was in court, I think a congressman was helping us, Senator Reid by the way was also helping us at the time. Congressman Bilbray had requested records before bond. The FBI actually responded, which they always told me they nothing on him and all the other agencies did as well. I knew they were lying. The FBI told the congressman “you don’t have a need to know.” They didn’t say there are no records, they said you, as a member of Congress, don’t have a need to know what we have on Bob Lazar.

FREEP: Wow. Jeremy go ahead.

CORBELL: Alright, I just want to say one last thing about this. You know it’s so typical when you hear something that’s outside of your scope of reality to separate yourself from it immediately and make a judgment to say it’s true or it’s not true. Well, you know you always have to, you don’t have enough information to make that decision. That’s the honest information, you don’t even have that met. It’s a matter of faith ultimately. Belief is not credible. There’s belief based on information that you have that’s correct, and belief that you have on information that’s incorrect but you’ll believe it the same no matter what. So I think a movie like this, the hope is that we untangle some of the mess that’s been created by other people over all these years. Then it’s up to you, it’s up to you to deal with it. Bob is just telling his story. Okay he doesn’t need everybody else here supporting him. He’ll tell you his story if you ask him. This is a way to reach people. This is one way to reach people. I think it succeeded in that way. Hopefully it was beautiful and it was fun and a little bit funny. I mean, did you get the bonus materials? There’s like two and a half hours of bonus materials by the way. If you get that, you get to see Bob shoot me with a laser gun. It’s funny! You get to see actual real-life stuff. This is real-life, this is going on so I just want to say that I guess my thing sitting here is you’ve just watched a film about people that I care about. Being rushing to judge, either yes or no, take time. Decide for yourself. React. Otherwise someone else is going to decide for you.

FREEP: Speaking of the deleted scenes, I was able to see some of them. Thank you. He didn’t actually shoot you, right? He shot the wall.

CORBELL: You didn’t see that.

FREEP: Oh, you didn’t show me that one, OK. He’s got a laser though and starts a wall on fire. But I also saw a nice clip of you, Joy, talking about Bob, for five straight minutes while you were both apparently making margaritas or el ceviche, alright. I would just like to know what it’s like. You’ve been married seventeen years? Almost twenty. What’s it been like living with this legend and at the same time, pain in the ass.

WHITE: It’s been a challenge, but I don’t look at him as a legend. And that’s all he’s ever been. When I met him I had no idea who he was. He was just a nice man who is interested in what I have to say, and polite and seemed very genuine and honest.

FREEP: When did he breakout the UFO story on you?

WHITE: People around me. A mutual friend who introduced us after months of begging us to meet each other. I finally gave in. He said ‘Oh he’s a scientist.’ I said “I don’t care what he is as long as he’s a nice man, you know? I want to meet him.’ So we did. It was quite embarrassing, his car had broken down that day and it was hot in Vegas. He was all sweaty (unintelligible). He was like ‘I want to know you or not.’ We just kind of hit it off. We kind of gradually went from there. We went to dinner. He met my horses which was the second big thing about him. He hated Vegas, he loved horses. And he was nice, so he had a third chance.

FREEP: So you knew the UFO story when you met him? I got to know when he told you.

WHITE: I had no idea.

FREEP: First date? Second Date? Anniversary?

WHITE: No. We just never sat around and talked about UFOs. I mean…

FREEP: OK

WHITE: We just don’t. I’ve had experiences in northern Michigan when I was young. So I’ve always felt there’s a chance that there’s life source out there. So to me it like ‘OK. He did this. No big deal because everybody does something for a living.’ That is kind of what it is.

FREEP: Why are you two in Michigan?

WHITE: Family.

FREEP: Oh. OK. Great. Well we’re glad you’re here. Who wants to answer questions from the audience? Is there a microphone out there? Anybody see it? You may just have to shout.

AUDIENCE: There’s been so much reverse engineering of the fiber optics and other stuff. What’s kept the propulsion from being used because there are so many advantages in terms of defense, flight, travel and (unintelligible) of all sides, the downside is the technology is so advanced that we haven’t…

LAZAR: Yeah. Technology is so advanced…I don’t really even know how to give you a reasonable analogy. I guess it would be like giving an iPhone to a chimpanzee which is what I think Jeremy mentioned earlier today. But, we can’t duplicate anything. I mean if there, all the components of the craft – there’s no wiring, no connection between them. You can take half of them out and it still operates. It’s, it really is amazing the way the thing works. It’s borderline magic. Now, take an iPhone back to Victorian times and of course that looks like magic too – and they can’t even make the plastic case that surrounds it much less understand what all the tiny chips do inside which would just look like pieces of slate to them. But that’s exactly where we are. We can kind of observe and document how some of the things work and how they change if we do certain things. As of when I was in the project in the late 80’s and early 90’s, we hadn’t a chance or duplicating anything. So that’s where it stood. I don’t know what’s happened in the thirty years since then, but there’s have to be some monumental discovery of some kind just to move forward at all.

AUDIENCE: Two parts. First, how long did you work at S4 and secondly and most importantly, how did it end and why on earth would you ever quit a job like that?

LAZAR: April of ’88, that’s when I started. Let me see, ’89, March of ’89 something like that. I didn’t quit, again it had to do with…they began to question my clearance and then they stopped calling me out there. After that I started having agents show up at my house. They’d just park outside and watch. In fact, one of the guys that you saw, my friend Mario in the film, used to drive around for me, and we were followed everywhere. Every time we stopped, the car would be searched. It got to a point where now I became afraid. They gave me all this information and they were beginning to doubt whether I was safe with it. So I began to be concerned that I might just disappear. So I took my closest friends and that’s when I went out into the desert. I had all this time to prep so I took friends out with me and I said we need to go out here and show you what I’m working on. We hid out in the desert, I allowed them to see what was going on. You know and if anything ever happened, this is what I was doing. Things kind of progressed from there and one of the people I knew said ‘Look, you should probably talk to this guy George Knapp.’ That’s pretty much in a nutshell how it all started.

FREEP: Are your friends still around?

LAZAR: Yeah.

FREEP: Did they not want to be interviewed Jeremy?

CORBELL: I’ve talked with so many people that would’ve been in the film, but there was a limited time we have in an hour and a half to make the film. There are also people who couldn’t be in the film. They wanted to, I found the guy that George exposed which Bob told me of…this guy with the security clearance. You know he was on the job, he couldn’t talk to George back then. He was eating his steak, saw it on the news and dropped his fork. He told me this story. I found him after thirty years. He couldn’t go on camera. It was yes, no, yes, no. You know, look, there are so many people who testified to Bob telling you the truth. All, there’s not a single friend of his. From all of that time, from all of that, there’s not a single person has come forward and said ‘I was there. I knew Bob.” And yeah, not a single person. In fact it’s the opposite. So is my movie about trying to prove to you that Bob’s telling the truth? No. My movie is to weaponize your curiosity so you decide for yourself. I can sit here and give you an hour long lecture on how did Bob help and I’ll go through the points. How did he know about the test flights our in Papoose Lake. It’s not even in Area 51. How did he know there was a Site 4? George verified right after because the base told him ‘yes there is but I can’t tell you anything about it, it’s top secret.’ How did Bob know a hundred things? I could do that. I could probably convince you if that’s what you want. I don’t want that. I want you to come to your own conclusions based upon your own curiosity. So, that’s a long answer to your short question.

KNAPP: By the way I did interview the other people who were out there with Bob on those tests when he went out. He videotaped that one flight and we showed it on the air. The other people who made each of the three trips out into the desert we did an interview originally.

CORBELL: They don’t all get along or agree anymore, but they agree on one thing which is Bob told the truth and that in itself that’s awesome.

AUDIENCE (audio amplified, still muddled): First let me say, Bob, I’m happy personally with this film.

LAZAR: Thank you.

AUDIENCE (audio amplified, still muddled): Now my question is this, all the (unintelligible). You are a highly, highly, highly trained scientist. First thing, as a scientist. (rest unintelligible, the gist is a scientist who wanted to go public would’ve kept something from the craft)

LAZAR: Right. Well, you’re going with the…Right well you’re making a…Sure. First of all, you’re making a wrong conclusion. I, when I was working on the project, I had no intention of releasing this to the public. I have, I was absolutely going into the program work at the time. I didn’t tell my closest friends. I didn’t tell my wife even where I was going at night. So, I was playing along. In fact when I was given the information and I was really into it in the early days there, you feel kind of privileged. And I said, you know what, everyone else doesn’t need to know. I mean we’re the cool guys who get to know this. So I was with the program. It was only as time went on it began to burden me. And when a problem began to arise with my clearance and there began to be a question of whether or not, you know, I should continue working there. That’s the only time it began to enter my mind about telling this to anybody. As far as obtaining something…I’ll tell you its very difficult to get anything in and out of secure location location like that. It’d be virtually impossible.

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FREEP: Well, the movie strongly insinuates that at least element 115 made it out in some fashion. You want to address that?

LAZAR: Well the element 115 was machined offsite at Los Alamos, and that’s about all I’ll say about that.

FREEP: Jeremy you did not use the encypted interview, right? That’s what we sped through fast forward that was all garbled. Was that about element 115?

CORBELL: That was for us. It wasn’t even going to go in the film. It one respect that whole garbled, kind of not part of the film was because the raid happened. And I wanted to show people, I did show people the impetus for that raid and that was very clear. So, no, that’s encrypted information and it’s taken care of and that’s because it needed to be said. You know, thank you for, anyway…It is clear. Bob said it in 1989. He got a piece of element 115 out of Los Alamos where they machined it. He said he did a cloud chamber test. George was one of the many people that were there and saw the test. Element 115, if as Bob describes it, understands it, bends light. They saw that. But it was a story to me. They told me that. And then they told me they filmed it, but the can’t find the film. And it was like it took this digging through this stuff of Bobs to finally find this one little chunk. They did the test. He believed it was element 115 with the properties he described. his friends all saw it. It had the properties he described to them. Now their not looking to prove that to anybody. That’s the one thing I think that was the most sensitive that Bob told me from the very beginning. I get it why. So all that is documented, it’s encrypted, but you got a sneak little peek there because there was a frickin raid. And you needed to know why that was a big part of the movie.

FREEP: And that’s the conversation the agents repeated the next day?

CORBELL: Yeah their…

FREEP: OK. Whose got just just a couple more here guys. I known there’s a million people who want to talk, go ahead.

AUDIENCE (amplified): I’m (unintelligible) I just got back from South America and Antarctica. I’m a longtime listener to Coast to Coast AM, I really love you guys. (unintelligible) I did some research in Antarctica to find evidence of UFOs perhaps buried under the ice according to some witnesses. Well, there was a UFO sighting. Well we went to six different bases, they did not bear any corroborative evidence of that. Next week I’ll be in your not so humble hometown Las Vegas, Nevada for 5D Events and I be on a panel about the secret space program. My (unintelligible) is regarding the black budget, the US black budget, and trillions of dollars gone missing from the Pentagon, and I wonder if you think there’s something going on with black budgets and the research in which you were involved.

LAZAR: I read, well, I wouldn’t know much about that at all. I wouldn’t…it’s clear that the project was highly classified, but how it was paid for and by what faction of the government is really cloudy. My paycheck said the Department of Naval Intelligence. And what would the Navy be doing analyzing flying saucers? Or is it done that way because that’s where there were funds to draw from? I think that’s such a convoluted mess, the chain where the money comes from. That’s just beyond what I know.

CORBELL: I just want to say we are living in a world now where in December of 2017 through the New York Times, you were told that our government is currently studying the propulsion systems of UFOs. They’re observing it through AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It’s a UFO program that your tax dollars are paying for through the Department of Defense that is admitted to it. It didn’t end in 1969 with Project Blue Book. That was bullshit. You were lied to. So now we’re living in a world where we know the United States government is highly interested in these unknowns from no government here on earth. That made me look at Bob’s story differently. And the guy who broke most of that information was actually George Knapp so we should ask George about that question of black budgets and UFOs in the modern world.

KNAPP: Well just in a nutshell, you have the perception that Washington leaks like a sieve and secrets cannot be kept. Secrets are kept. Big secrets are kept. And this revelation from the New York Times in December of 2017 is an example of it. There was a program going on for at least ten to twelve years right under our nose. Millions and millions of dollars to study UFOs. And it didn’t go public until a guy named Lue Elizondo left the government and hooked up with a guy name Tom DeLonge for whatever reason. They came forward, met with the New York Times and talked them into doing this story, and I think the New York Times is getting ready to do another story. And because of the Times’ reputation, other journalism organizations also covered the issue in the last fourteen, fifteen months. There have been stories on CNN and multiple stories and interviews on FOX, Washington Post and other major news organizations. The media environment has changed. I think it helps give a sort of fresh prism to look at the Bob Lazar story because of it.

AUDIENCE: One quick question. In your experience with this was there a unique metallurgy to the structure of the spacecraft? Something that was different?

LAZAR: Each part of the program is compartmentalized. Everything works in what they call a buddy system. You’re really with one other specialist and what you worked on is very specific. We didn’t work on the metallurgy of the craft. There was a separate group that did that. We did the power and propulsion system of the craft. There are people that handled every aspect of it. Now as far as the metallurgy itself, initially I wasn’t even allowed to touch the craft. The first time they showed it to me, I walked by with a guard and slid my hand on it which I was reprimanded for immediately. But it felt cold, like metal. That’s about all I can say. But whether it was a type of metal, or a type of ceramic I couldn’t tell you and we had no information on it at all. One time I was allowed to look inside and the only reason I was was to see if the placement of the system I was working on had any importance. But there were no fasteners, there were no welds, there were no right angles anywhere. The analogy I’ve always given is if the craft was carved out of wax then allowed to melt a little bit. Everything had a radius of curvature on it. At the time I couldn’t image how anything like that could be fabricated. But, these days, with 3D printers, I guess it’s something along those lines, like created with whatever material that was with metal or ceramic and assemble it layer by layer. But I know so little about the metallurgy of the craft itself.

AUDIENCE: Can I ask what size was the spacecraft?

LAZAR: It was a little over 50 feet. Now I don’t know for sure, we determined this afterwards, but I think about 52.5 feet is the best guess.

FREEP: Just to be clear you never got to ride in it.

LAZAR: Never got to ride in it.

FREEP: Who got that job?

LAZAR: I don’t know. I did get to see it fly once at a close up range. I don’t know what was in it.

AUDIENCE: Thank you for doing this tonight. I just want to thank Joy, and Bob, Jeremy and George you’ve been very nice to meet. Thank you for blessing us with this information. My question tonight is for George actually. (unintelligible) George based upon your extensive studies at Skinwalker Ranch, do you think the phenomenon that Bob worked on and witnessed is all correlated or similar to what you worked on at Skinwalker Ranch? Is there any correlation whatsoever?

KNAPP: So the question is whether Bob’s account has any correlation to Skinwalker Ranch and I’d say no. I mean Skinwalker is its own bag of tricks. It’s a Disneyland of the paranormal. It’s every kind of weird, paranormal, supernatural phenomenon that you can imagine all in one place, and including flying saucers. It doesn’t make any sense and no one who studied it, including the US Government, have been able to figure it out. I’ve been going there for twenty something years and I sure as heck don’t know what it is but thanks for the question.

AUDIENCE: Where is that at?

KNAPP: It’s in Utah. Uintah Basin, Utah. It’s just a really weird place though. Robert Bigelow, a billionaire from Las Vegas, created an organization called NIDS. In the mid 1990’s he bought it and had a team of scientists on there and he kept the property for about twenty years. They studied it and encountered all kinds of really strange phenomena. The phenomena goes back at least 250 years, as long as humans have lived in that part of the west and it continues to this day. The US Government funded a study. Bigelow created a company that…I mentioned a moment ago, Jeremy mentioned AATIP, the Pentagon’ secret study of UFOs. Another program called AUSAP was created in 2007-8 and it continued for almost four years. It used Skinwalker Ranch as a living lab with the government scientists out there. They encountered some really weird stuff. It scared the hell out of them but they still have no idea what did it.

CORBELL: So I was just going to say George and I made a whole movie called “Hunt for the Skinwalker.” It was the one right before this. He rushed me and almost broke me trying to make. It’s out there for you to enjoy. My last question I want to take is from me to Bob because he loves this when we do it. What is the most, the absolute most important thing of your life experience that you want this audience right here to know? Like what is it? We showed a movie, you know, what is it you want people to know really simply.

LAZAR: We, well, it’s already been said in the movie. It’s exactly, exactly what I said in the movie. It’s just that time, in the late 80’s, that the government was in possession of this technology, technology that was off-world technology, and they were actively analyzing it and I was part of it. That’s the most important thing.

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