Hmmmm...Let's see..how can I best put this?? How about:

But how can I possibly think that? On this very web site I state that the evidence I have posted is inconclusive. Quite true, if you consider only what I've posted. But there is other information. But before we get into that, how about a recap of the lies we do know about.

First off, how about those neat Masters degrees of his? Now that's a BIG lie! There is no way he had the time to attend either MIT or Caltech, nor does he have the smarts. The idea of his records being erased is absolutely preposterous. Having gone through the process myself, I know that his having attended either school would be the easiest thing in the world to prove, just a trivial thing. There are the graduate advisors you have to deal with, as well as your sponsor (the professor who oversees your research). As a grad student you get extremely well known. Then there's the thesis review committee, and copies of the thesis itself (supposedly on MHD...Lazar never would say what the actual title was) and the name and author would have been entered into national research databases (which would have been done years before any "erasure" would have taken place on Lazar). Then there is Caltech degree in "Electronic Technology", a degree which the school doesn't offer. I could go on, but with just the schooling, ask yourself this: If someone is obviously lying to you about his educational background (and in a big way), does it make sense to believe him when he starts spinning an alien story?

Continuing on mining the vein of lies, we come to his birth certificate. In early interviews Lazar claimed when he went to get a copy of his birth certificate it was (gasp!) gone! That his existence was being wiped away. Later, in posting to the internet, Huff said the real reason Lazar didn't get his birth certificate right off was that he was adopted, and the process for getting a certificate was much more involved. Yet that's not what Lazar says in interviews, although he's become a little more cagey about it in recent years. In early interviews he would just talk about his vanished birth certificate. Now, when interviewers ask about his vanishing records, specifically mentioning his birth certificate, Lazar smoothly glides over that issue and just talks about his employment records at Los Alamos, at the same time leaving the impression that his birth records were indeed erased. Why is he not interested in clearing up this misapprehension?

But Lazar sounds and talks like a physicist! That's what I thought at one time too. But I came to discover that he talks and sounds like what the general public (and Lazar himself) thinks a physicist sounds like. In reality, they are quite different and can easily be quite obtuse. I have discussed Lazar with a few real physicists (who hadn't heard the story), and they usually just start laughing. But then what do they know...they're just real physicists with real Phds.

"OK, wise guy", you may ask, "what do you know you're not telling?" For me, one of the big sticking points of the story was if Lazar hadn't been there, how did he know about the Wednesday night tests to bring his friends out? (BTW, I think most of Lazar's friends sincerely believe his story and are not involved in any complicity to put it over on the rest of us).

For your consideration: I have it from two separate sources that Lazar had been out to the black mailbox area at least several times prior to his alleged employment at S-4. Now why do suppose he was doing that? Perhaps checking on rumors he heard of dancing lights on Wednesday nights? As a further twist, one of the sources said that on one occasion Lazar went all the way to the gate on Groom Lake Road. If that was indeed the case, then Lazar would have been detained by the guards, and warned he would face arrest should he ever return (In that era a smooth talker with a good story could get away with just a warning). This would explain his running off into the desert when he and his friends were busted by the guards on their last visit out there. It also suggests how he could have known about the Wednesday night tests.

As far as Lazar's knowledge of physics goes, I know of someone who had the chance to quiz Lazar regarding technical matters. This source said that Lazar was definitely no physicist (although he plays one on TV!), that he had only the knowledge base of a technician and was unable to solve simple differential equations.

Another source quizzed Lazar about his knowledge of the Groom facility. After all, he supposedly did spend some time there waiting for his shuttle to S-4. Lazar apparently failed this little "test" miserably with no knowledge of Groom. I find this in sharp contrast to George Knapp's assertion that Lazar was able to describe portions of Groom quite well.

So perhaps it's time for a slight aside regarding Knapp. When I first started looking into this subject I had a very high opinion of Knapp. He seemed to me to be a good no-nonsense investigative journalist. However, over time, I've had occasion to cross investigative paths several times with Knapp on more than one topic. That is, I found myself looking into areas he supposedly already had. I was extremely surprised to find he missed obvious things and generally did very shallow work in the areas I was aware of. I have come to regard his "investigation" of Lazar as highly suspect. They are, after all, friends and associates. Not much arms-length there. Unfortunately, he seems to be the only journalist of any note Lazar has allowed to poke into his background.

I think a most telling occurrence was captured in an interview with Knapp for the Discovery Channel TV series by Martin Belderson, which aired a few months back. In it, Knapp says that the first thing that went though his mind when he found out about Lazar's arrest for pandering was, essentially, "There goes my reputation". Not that Lazar might not be what he claimed and there might not be saucers at Papoose, but Knapp's reputation might be tarnished. Is this the kind of guy you trust to look into Lazar's background? I don't. Not for a minute.

People who have known Lazar in the past (friends and acquaintances) have described him as a real bullshitter, always telling stories. Some of these people, when pressed in private as to whether Lazar is telling the truth, just smile and shrug. Even Huff has said Lazar "blows people off" all the time, telling them only what he feels like.

There are other stories out there, damaging to Lazar and his tales, which I had the privilege of being made privy to. However those stories are not mine to tell and must wait for the decisions of others. I suspect the next year or so will bring forth some interesting things regarding Mr. Lazar.

So for those of you keeping score, where are we so far? He's told some absolute whoppers in the past regarding his education, I've talked with people I find pretty solid that say Lazar doesn't know physics, can't describe Groom, and that he had been out lurking around Area 51 prior to his story surfaced. Finally, some who know him say he is a bullshitter. But wait....There's more.

What there is, is Lazar's "science". Science fiction is a better term, but it's not even very good science fiction. Good science fiction has a basis in fact. The science he spews is checkable by anyone with a little education in physics. It's all so bad, it's tough to know where to begin. Here's a brief sampling of the low points:

• There are such things as gravity waves, but they are not part of the electromagnetic spectrum as Lazar has claimed. They are ripples in spacetime, generated by large masses (orbiting neutron stars, black holes and the like), a much different critter from an EM wave. Real gravity waves pass easily through matter, and aren't likely to be contained in any sort of waveguide. Further, they can have essentially an unlimited frequency range, not the 2.5 GHz range as alluded to by Lazar.
   
• Assuming for a deranged moment that Lazar's version of gravity waves exist, you couldn't hover by emitting a similar wave, out of phase. That would be like going up next to a radio transmitter tower and transmitting your own, out of phase signal. You wouldn't feel a force pushing on your transmitter.
   
• Lazar says the gravity waves from the amplifiers go out millions of miles and "pull" a bit of space towards the craft, then releases it. This implies that his "gravity waves" propagate instantaneously, faster than the speed of light. This is a load of crap.
   
• Any time you have curvature of space due to gravity, the distances increase, not decrease.
   
• Lazar says we "don't understand gravity well". More bullshit. The problem is Lazar doesn't understand gravity well (Uh, gravity well...a joke for those who get it), else he would have come up with a better story. The scientific community understands gravity quite well, although it is a niche field. Does it understand it as well as it would like? Of course not, but the current theories are quite sound and they explain how it all works nicely and why things attract and can't repel. But just because we understand how it works doesn't mean we can duplicate it at high levels...unless you can get a few bazillion kilograms of matter into the lab.
   
• All current atomic theories (and they're pretty damn good) hold that element 114 may be somewhat stable. It remains to be seen how long "somewhat stable" really is. There are certain "magic numbers" of the particles making up atoms that enhance stability, thus giving rise to the inert elements. This may be the case for 114, will all the electron orbitals nicely filled. Not so with 115. It should vanish rather quickly.
   
• If one could convert 100% of the matter in a 223 gram mass to energy (against a similar 223 gram mass of normal matter), you'd get about 5.6 billion kilowatt hours, enough to run a 100 megawatt load (Lazar's low-end claim for the disc's output) for just over 12 years. This is far shorter than his claimed 20-30 year life. But even under Lazar's description you wouldn't get 100%. He claims that after 115 is bombarded by a proton, it becomes 116, then releases a particle of anti-hydrogen (not that there's ever been an example of such a reaction before!). That means over 99% of the mass of the original 115 remains, if only as collections of lower Z number elements. So even if his "process" worked as he claims, there would only be a conversion of well under 1% of the initial mass into various sorts of energy, not out of line with normal fission reactors. Note that this means that instead of 12 years, those 115 guzzling discs would blow through their supply of 115 in about 5 weeks. Of course, your mileage may vary.
   
• Ah, but there's more to this antimatter garbage. Lazar claims the reactor is thermo-ionic (and 100% efficient at that! But he's such an honest guy that he carefully points out this apparent contradiction). He repeatedly refers to its conversion of the heat released in the antimatter reaction to electricity. The problem is that only a very small part of the energy of an antimatter reaction as described by Lazar is actually heat. Most of the energy goes to into the generation of high speed particles and radiation. He never explains what becomes of all this nuclear debris. Perhaps he should have paid more attention at MIT when he was working on his MHD thesis.
   
• Lazar claims in the antimatter reactor the protons are channeled up a tube with a pretty tight radius. The problems of proton confinement to such a path are pretty significant. After the proton hits the 115, the antihydrogen is released "in a vacuum into a tuned tube" (perhaps he's confused with the headers on his Corvette?), then directed down "toward a gaseous target". Neat trick, having a gaseous target in the same tube as a vacuum, but that's slick Zeta Recticulan technology for you!
   
• There's quite a bit more that reeks of Lazar's science. Unfortunately it gets a little more involved technically and requires more space than I want to devote to deal with it. But what I've listed so far would totally blow Lazar out of the water with anyone with technical knowledge. This is crap science fiction folks.

Is he telling the truth about anything? I do think he worked at Los Alamos, but not necessarily in the capacity he's claimed. I believe he worked for one of the lab's subcontractors, in a limited capacity, for a limited amount of time. Also, not as a physicist, but a technician. So maybe there is a kernel of truth in his story, but it's a pretty small kernel, and certainly not reason enough to believe his later saucer stories.

There are quite a few other people who know Lazar is lying. These are the folks who work at "the test facility" (or whatever other euphemism they prefer). Unfortunately for us on the outside of the fence, those who really know aren't allowed to talk about things out there at all. And they don't talk, not even to say something as simple as "He's a liar". They just go about their business, bewildered that the general public could believe such foolishness. But sometimes, just sometimes, in private moments, a few of them will let a little of the truth out. For that I am very thankful.

A parting thought on this subject: The best con men are the most sincere.

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