LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Thirty years ago, on May 15, KLAS-TV’s 5 p.m. newscast aired a live interview with an anonymous man who made some extraordinary claims. Bob Lazar, who was being called “Dennis” at the time to protect his identity, alleged that the U.S. military was secretly studying alien technology out in the Nevada desert near a base that is now well known all over the world as Area 51.

(Photo: Area 51)

In the 1989 interview that started a whole new conversation, the claims sounded like Hollywood Sci-Fi. Months later, when his identity was revealed, Bob Lazar said he worked at a secret facility near groom lake, where alien technology was being reverse-engineered, meaning taken apart to figure out how it worked and whether the Pentagon could duplicate it.

Below is a simple drawing he made at the time.

The premise seems less absurd now. In a new documentary about Lazar, he describes in detail the spacecraft he worked on 30 years ago.

“The craft that I worked on, that when it’s going to travel a long distance, that is how it operates. It puts its belly to the target and then brings all of the amplifiers to power, and you know it shoots off in that direction It doesn’t fly as it would in a science-fiction movie. It flies with the belly, the bottom, forward,” Lazar said.

If that description of a spacecraft tilting sounds familiar, take a look at the so-called Gimbal UFO. The Pentagon released a video in 2017. Naval pilots encountered a fleet of the unknown craft off the coast of Florida in 2015, and have since had dozens of similar encounters

The spike in UFO incidents prompted a recent policy change by the Navy, which announced it wants to encourage its pilots to report future incidents.

Pentagon officials reluctantly admitted to the New York Times 17 months ago that the military had secretly studied UFO incidents, in part so it might figure out the technology.

“In the Gimbal video, there’s a mechanistic turn against the wind without deceleration, and so we have a craft without rotors, without heat signatures, without plums, without tail fins, and certainly no tail number, moving in a way that is counterintuitive to our aeronautics,” said Jeremy Corbell, the director of the “Bob Lazar, Area 51, and Flying Saucers” documentary. “When Bob saw it, he said it has to be a gravity propelled craft. That it does mimic the propulsion system, Bob Lazar described.”

Along with directing the Lazar documentary, Corbell also broke the story about another now-famous UFO incident: The 2004 Tic Tac encounter.

The navy pilot who engaged the Tic Tac, Black Aces Commander Dave Fravor has said he doesn’t believe the astonishing craft was made on earth, and that the propulsion might be anti-gravity.

When Lazar was shown the Tic Tac video for the first time, it immediately reminded him of the sport mode, which was his name for the craft stashed in the desert.

“No question in my mind, that’s the way the craft operated,” Lazar said. “It’s the exact same propulsion system.”

Former Pentagon Intelligence Officer Lue Elizondo was in charge of ATIP, the secret Pentagon study. He told the I-Team one goal of the project was to determine the physics of UFOs; how they can achieve the seemingly impossible.

The military came to believe the craft relied on special meta-materials; stuff that can’t be made with known technology. Lazar made similar claims decades ago and was ridiculed. Now the Pentagon is on the same page.

“The study of UFOs did not end in 1969 with Project Blue Book. That was a lie, and it was an admitted lie by our own Pentagon,” Corbell said. “We are living in a world where it is understood that there are craft technologically advanced from an unknown origin that are performing maneuvers that far exceed human technology. It’s been going on a long time, and our government has been studying it.”

SIDENOTE: George Knapp’s name also appears in the credits of the Bob Lazar documentary because he was interviewed for the film