← Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes
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- [00:01]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi, everyone. It's Vanessa. Big news. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is now on YouTube. Every Saturday, I'll be dropping a full video episode going deep on the real people and dark truths behind the world's most infamous conspiracies. Same show, same depth, same commitment to the dark truth. Now you can watch it. Subscribe to Conspiracy Theories, Cults and crimes on YouTube to catch a new video episode every Saturday. This is crime house. On the morning of July 19, 2017, the FBI raided a small warehouse in the town of Langsburg, Michigan. The man who owned the warehouse was named Bob Lazar. Agents told him they were looking for evidence in a criminal investigation. Bob Lazar cooperated during the raid, but he suspected there was more to this law enforcement operation than met the eye, because this was no ordinary warehouse. Bob Lazar was the owner of a company called United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, which sold rare chemicals and advanced laboratory equipment to schools and universities. And Bob Lazar was no ordinary business owner. Back in 1989, he'd become an international celebrity when he went on TV and claimed the US government was keeping a big secret. According to Lazar, scientists at an underground lab called Area 51 had spent years studying alien technology and hiding it from the public. This wasn't just secondhand information. Lazar said. He was one of those scientists and had seen everything with his own eyes. It was in the decades since his interview. He claimed the government had retaliated by destroying his life and his reputation. But the raid on his warehouse in 2017 wasn't just harassment. Lazar insisted the FBI was looking for something because before he quit his top secret job to become a whistleblower, he took a little souvenir with him. A high tech alien artifact. And now the government wanted it back. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And remember, those Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for conspiracy theories, cults and crimes and be sure to like and subscribe. These cases are wild and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Let's leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And for ad free access to all three episodes, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts Today I'm talking about one of the most important figures in the world of conspiracy theories and UFOs, Bob Lazar. In 1989, he gave a bombshell interview to a local TV station in Las Vegas, Nevada. The broadcast brought millions of new people into the world of government conspiracies and put the top secret military base at Area 51 on the map for the first time. But according to the many critics out there, Lazar is nothing more than a liar. So what's the truth? Did he blow the lid off the biggest cover up in human history? Or was he just a fraud trying to extend his 15 minutes of fame? All that and more coming up.
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- [05:16]
Vanessa Richardson
When it comes to Bob Lazar, everything about him is controversial, including his own background. We'll get into that later, but for now, let's start with Lazar's version of his life story. It began on January 26, 1959, when Lazar was born in Coral Gables, Florida. His biological parents put him up for adoption when he was just an infant boy. Lazar was taken in by a family from Westbury, Long Island, a tiny suburb of New York City. According to Lazar, he didn't care much about school as a kid, with one exception, science. Starting at an early age, Lazar was reading magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. The topics spoke to him in a way other subjects didn't. He especially loved the real world applications. Lazar spent his spare time replicating the experiments and machines that he read about in his magazines. He As a child, he rigged up a light outside his bedroom that he could switch from green, which meant his family could come in, to red, which meant stay out. When he got older, he built a homemade Tesla coil, which is a high voltage transformer that generates colorful electrical discharges. And he spent hours building model rockets, designing efficient engines, brewing homemade rocket fuel and launching them with his friends from the neighborhood. By the time he graduated high school in 1976, Lazar wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew it would involve science and technology. It wasn't long before he landed a job as a circuit board technician at a California based company called Fairchild Electronics. So at the age of 17, Lazar moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth to start his career. Lazar said he worked part time at Fairchild while also taking physics classes at Caltech. He received his bachelor's degree degree in physics and electronic technology just two years later, in 1978. At the same time, Lazar's skills were making waves at work. By the age of 23, he'd been promoted to electrical engineer and was designing high tech circuit boards and computer memory systems. During this time, he started dating a fellow engineer named Carol Strong. The two hit it off and were married in 1980. Not long after, Lazar decided he wanted to work on something more prestigious than circuit boards. So in 1982, he took his scientific career to a whole new level and got a job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos is operated by the U.S. department of Energy and is one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world. It's where scientists from the Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s. In the decades since, the facility has continued to lead the way in nuclear technology, space exploration, supercomputers, and advanced medicine. It was the perfect place for a science whiz like Bob Lazar, and he fit right in. According to Lazar, by day, he worked on highly advanced research projects like particle accelerators and laser weapon systems. By night, he continued his childhood love of tinkering. Not long after he was hired, Lazar made local headlines when he successfully built and attached a jet engine to his 1979 Honda Civic hatchback. He and Carroll went around New Mexico and showed it off at drag racing events. Lazar claimed that his work inside and outside of the lab impressed his superiors so much that Los Alamos eventually paid for him to get a master's degree at mit. More importantly, it caught the Attention of a theoretical physicist named Edward Teller, A veteran veteran of the Manhattan Project, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Lazar said Teller invited him to a brief meeting in his office at Los Alamos and that once Lazar left for mit, they stayed in touch. This relationship would go on to change the course of Lazar's life. After getting his master's at mit, Lazar returned to his job at Los alamos in the mid-1980s. But now he had a side hustle too. He and his wife Carol had started a photo developing business together. While Lazar worked long hours at the lab, Carol ran the photo business. Their lives were so busy at this point that he didn't realize she was keeping a devastating secret. Carol had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and had chosen not to seek treatment. In June of 1985, the Lazars bought a home in Las Vegas. This might have been part of Carol's plan for hiding the diagnosis from her husband because she spent most of her time there while he remained in Los Alamos for work. That is until April 21, 1986, when Carol died by suicide at their Vegas home. After a day of not being able to reach Carol by phone, Lazar drove to Las Vegas and discovered Carol's body in the garage. After this horrible loss, Lazar found it difficult to continue his work at Los Alamos. So he quit his job and moved to Las Vegas full time, where he spent the next couple of years managing his photo business while trying to put his life back together. Eventually, he found love again and married one of his employees, Tracy Merck. And as he came out of his grief, Lazar decided he was ready to get back into the scientific community. In 1988, 29 year old Lazar reached out to his old contact Edward Teller to see if he knew of any opportunities. By then, Teller was working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Teller was apologetic. With the cold war winding down, there weren't many openings at the national laboratories anymore. But he knew of another job that would be perfect for somebody with Lazar's qualifications. Teller told Lazar that a major defense contractor named E, G and G was hiring physicists with security clearances to work on a top secret project in Nevada. Teller had no idea what they were working on. Nobody did. But he could set up an interview if Lazar was interested. Lazar was curious and excited. He said yes. Over the next few weeks, Lazar allegedly had multiple interviews with E, G and G, where he signed numerous non disclosure agreements. He was also given an Extensive background check to qualify for what was called a majestic level security clearance. This was the highest possible clearance in the government. Then, a few days after his last interview, he got a phone call telling him to report to an EG&G office at Las Vegas McCarran Airport as soon as possible. When Lazar arrived, an EG&G employee escorted him onto an empty unmarked 737 plane which took off and flew flew into the desert northwest of the city. After a short flight, the plane landed at a military airfield in the middle of a dry lake bed. Lazar would soon learn that this was a top secret military base called Area 51. According to Lazar, he was then escorted onto a bus with blacked out windows which drove him to a facility 40 minutes away from the main base. And this facility, named S4, was an underground complex built into the side of a mountain. To access it, Lazar and his escort had to confirm their identity by placing their hands on a high tech scanner. Inside, medical staff tested Lazar for allergies. They said some people had strange reactions to the materials being studied for this project. He was then given an unusual substance to drink, which he said smelled like pine soldiers. After that, it was finally time to learn what he'd be working on. Lazar says he was led to a massive underground hangar where he was shown nine flying saucers. His handlers explained that the advanced spacecraft had been built and flown to Earth by an alien race from the Zeta Reticuli star system, roughly 39 million light years away. Lazar had been hired to figure out how they worked. But figuring out where the government got the UFOs and what they wanted to use them for would become an even bigger mystery.
- [14:02]
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- [14:32]
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- [15:04]
Vanessa Richardson
MIT physicist Bob Lazar had made an impressive career for himself at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But in late 1988, the 29 year old changed jobs. After an extensive interview process, he was allegedly granted a top secret security clearance for a gig with defense contractor E G and G. On his first day of work, Lazar was flown to the secret military base area 51, where he learned that he'd been hired to help study nine UFOs stored in an underground hangar. Lazar was shocked to see firsthand evidence of alien life, and he naturally had a lot of questions. But the project was so secretive that he was kept in the dark about nearly everything. Lazar didn't know what the other research teams at the facility were working on. He didn't know what the government wanted to do with the alien technology. He didn't even know how the government got the UFOs in the first place. So he started asking around. According to his co workers, some of the ships had come from the alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. That was when a farmer found what he believed was the wreckage of an alien spacecraft in one of his fields. The government later collected the strange metallic material from the property, claiming it was the remains of a crashed weather balloon. But conspiracy theorists had long believed this was a cover up. According to them, the spacecraft and the bodies of its alien pilots had been taken to a secret government lab to be studied. Lazar didn't buy that explanation. After examining the ships, he didn't see how such advanced spacecraft could travel millions of light years just to crash in a farmer's backyard. Lazar eventually came to believe that the government had either stolen these UFOs or or been given them as a gift. But Lazar didn't have much time to sit around speculating. There was lots of work to be done. Lazar's colleagues were other physicists and engineers, and some of them had been working on this project for quite some time. According to files Lazar saw, the government had been trying to reverse engineer the technology in these UFOs for decades. But tinkering with alien machinery was risky. Lazar learned that before he'd been hired, one of the UFO engines exploded when a group of scientists tried to take it apart. Allegedly, several staff members were killed in the Blast. After that, the government changed its approach. Rather than trying to reverse engineer the alien ships, they just wanted to understand how their anti gravity propulsion systems worked. So they took one of the saucers for a test drive. Lazar says that he and his team were allowed to power up the smallest flying saucer of the bunch. He nicknamed it the sport model because it reminded him of a sports car. This UFO was unlike any piece of machinery he'd ever seen before. It was built out of an extremely durable, lightweight metal and was completely seamless. He couldn't find any rivets or welding marks anywhere near. It was like the UFO hadn't been assembled, but molded out of one solid piece of material. This was impressive enough, but the saucer had even more surprises in store once they turned it on. Once the engine was running, the sport model began to hover, casting a blue glow on the ground. Lazar and his team reportedly discovered that the source of this power was a small semi spherical reactor which generated created an anti gravity field. This reactor seemed to operate with perfect efficiency, generating no waste, no heat, and no sound. While it was running, light seemed to bend around it. And the anti gravity field it generated was so strong that when Lazar reached out to touch the sphere, his hand was pushed away. Clearly, this reactor ran on extremely advanced technology. But through their research, Lazar and his team discovered that the real secret ingredient was the fuel inside the reactor. All the flying saucers at the S IV facility were powered by small triangle shaped copper colored disks. Each one was about the size of a half dollar and a quarter of an inch thick. Lazar called this mysterious fuel source element115. At the time, there were only 114 elements on the periodic table. And he thought element 115 was unlike anything else on Earth. Lazar says the government had roughly 500 pounds of element 115, which had reportedly been recovered from one of the saucers. Over the course of several experiments and tests, Lazar and his team discovered that element 115 emitted an anti gravity field when bombarded with radio radioactive energy. This element could be revolutionary for energy and transportation technology. The ability to create a small anti gravity field could make flying cars a reality. Or spin turbines at super high speeds to generate electricity with no waste. But there was a problem. According to Lazar, it was impossible to create element 115 on Earth due to its chemical makeup. It could only be synthesized in deep space. Lazar had a lot of questions about how element115 was produced. And during his time working for EG&G he could tell the government knew more about it than they were letting on. Before long, Lazar seemed to get confirmation. Because it turned out the government didn't just have alien technology at the S4 facility, they had actual aliens there too. Although Lazar was assigned to the propulsion team at S4, he knew other teams were studying different aspects of the alien craft. During his time there, he says he saw files from a biology team which included some shocking images. In the files, Lazar saw black and white printouts of autopsies being conducted on alien creatures. The aliens were humanoids with gray white skin. They were small, roughly the height of a six year old human child. But their biology was very different from ours. Some of the autopsy photos showed the inside of the alien's open body cavities. Based on those, they had no internal organs, just a mass of gray tissue. And that wasn't all. Lazar claimed that on at least one occasion, he was walking down a hallway when he glanced into a nearby lab and saw two scientists standing next to a live alien like the ones from the photos. When Lazar tried to get a better look, the guards escorting him shoved him down the hall. To this day, Lazar's not fully sure what he saw in the lab or what it meant. Initially, he believed live aliens were being held captive as test subjects at S4. But later, he heard rumors from co workers that the truth was was more complicated. Some fellow researchers told him the aliens were there willingly. Supposedly the government had forged an alliance with them. The aliens had given the government the UFOs in exchange for a separate wing of S4 where they were allowed to conduct their own research on humans. Lazar never got a chance to dig deeper because he was about to make a decision that would put an end to his time at S4. As Lazar learned more about the alien secrets at S4, he began to notice suspicious changes in his personal life. The government seemed to be keeping a very close eye on him. He says Men in unmarked cars began parking on the street outside his house and following him when he ran errands. He started to suspect his phone was being tapped and his car was broken into multiple times, but nothing was stolen from it. Lazar was worried the government thought he knew too much. He was concerned that they were going to kill him to keep their secrets. And he was angry that this was how he was being repaid for all his hard work. So Lazar decided to give himself an insurance policy. He started sharing what he'd heard about aliens and UFOs with his wife. And some of his closest friends. That way, if he wound up dead, at least his secrets wouldn't die with him. There was just one problem. His stories from the S4 base at Area 51 were so incredible that nobody believed him. So to prove that he was telling the truth, he took his friends out to the desert so they could see the alien technology for themselves. Lazar knew the pilots at S4 took the Sport model UFO out for testing flights on Wednesday nights. So on three Wednesdays in March of 1989, Lazar drove his wife Tracy and two of their friends, Gene Huff and John Lear, out to the desert near the Perimeter of Area 51. On each of those visits, Lazar and his companions saw lights in the sky over the base performing impossible aerial maneuvers. They were flying at incredible speeds, stopping in midair, changing direction on a dime. No human aircraft could do anything like that. This was enough to convince Lazar's friends that he was telling the truth. On one of their visits, he even brought a camcorder and managed to get video footage of the test flights. But on their third visit, they were stopped by a local sheriff's deputy who questioned them about what they were doing so close to a military base. Eventually, the cop let them go. But he did include their names in his police report, which would have massive consequences for Bob Lazar's career. It didn't take long for Lazar's superiors at EG&G to learn that he'd been caught at the edge of a base with a bunch of civilians. Two days after his run in with the police, government agents arrived at Lazar's home and took him to an Air Force base on the outskirts of Las Vegas. There, Lazar says, he was interrogated by multiple high ranking government officials. They were furious and demanded to know if a foreign government had put him up to this. They also forced him to hand over the names and contact information of everyone he'd told about the test flights. And finally, they told him his security clearance was being revoked. This was effectively the end of his career at EG&G. He would never return to Area 51 or the S4 facility again. But before letting him go, Lazar's interrogators gave him one last piece of shocking news. They had been listening in on phone calls at his house. And based on those wiretaps, the government had learned that Lazar's wife was cheating on him. After that, the meeting was over. Lazar's professional and personal life were in shambles, and he still wasn't sure if he was Going to be killed for what he'd seen. Lazar felt more isolated than ever. He confronted his wife about her affair and they were getting a divorce. On top of that, he was worried that the friends he'd taken to see the test flights might be in danger now too. The best way to protect himself and the people around him was to blow the whistle on everything he'd seen. If he made himself a public figure, the government couldn't kill him. It would look too suspicious. So in May 1989, 30 year old Lazar sat down for an interview with George Knapp, an investigative journalist with a local Las Vegas news station. Lazar talked at length about everything he'd seen. The secret base, the flying saucers, the massive government cover up. He even drew diagrams of the sport model ufo. It all sounded unbelievable. But Knapp found Lazar to be a much more credible source than the stereotypical UFO conspiracy theorist. Lazar was clean cut and professional and clearly knew a lot about physics. And when Knapp talked to Lazar's friends about the test flights, they confirmed everything he'd said. Lazar's interview aired on the 5 o' clock news on May 15, 1989. The segment was the most viewed broadcast in the station's history. His story generated so much interest that journalists traveled from as far away as Japan to interview him. Almost overnight, Bob Lazar had become a celebrity, which was exactly what he'd wanted. Now it didn't matter what the government thought about him. He was too big to silence. Part of the reason Lazar's story broke through in a way that other UFO accounts didn't was because some of his claims could actually be verified. The initial broadcast included clips from the video his friends had recorded of the UFO test flights in the desert. But the biggest revelation was about the government's top secret military base, Area 51. It's hard to believe now, but at that time nobody had ever heard of Area 51. When skeptics went out into the desert to fact check Lazar's claims about a secret hidden base, they were shocked to find guard posts and no trespassing signs. Whether or not you thought Bob Lazar's story about a secret government cover up was plausible, he'd revealed that the government was covering up the existence of a secret base, which. Which begged the question, what else were they hiding? But as reporters dug deeper into this courageous whistleblower's past, they made a surprising discovery. Almost everything Lazar had said about his life turned out to be a lie. At that point, a new question emerged. Who was more trustworthy? Bob Lazar or the US Government?
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [29:58]
Bad Women Podcast Narrator
23 year old Elizabeth Plunkett heads off for a night away with friends. It's the summer of 1976.
- [30:04]
Vanessa Richardson
The best summer we've had for years.
- [30:07]
Bad Women Podcast Narrator
Just hours later, she is kidnapped by two men in British Bay.
- [30:10]
Vanessa Richardson
These are two career criminals wanted for rape in Britain.
- [30:13]
Bad Women Podcast Narrator
They are Ireland's first serial killers. While both men confess to Elizabeth's murder, no one is ever convicted. How could this happen? We're being denied any sort of justice. Listen to Bad Women presents Stolen Sister Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:31]
Vanessa Richardson
In 1989, 30 year old Bob Lazar shocked the world when he gave a TV interview about his time working on secret UFOs at Area 51. His story seemed unbelievable, but Lazar presented himself as a reliable source. He he was an expert physicist who'd studied at Caltech and MIT and had worked at Los Alamos for years before moving on to Area 51. For many people, Lazar's resume added to his credibility. Why would such a gifted government scientist torpedo his entire career unless he thought he was in real danger? But in the aftermath of that explosive interview, journalists took a closer look at Lazar's life. And they found more than a few details that didn't line up. One thing we know for certain is that Bob Lazar graduated from W. Tresper Clark High school in Westbury, New York in 1976. Researchers have found his name in the school's academic records for that year. The same records show that Lazar graduated in the bottom third of his class. With such poor grades, it's impressive that he was able to attend prestigious universities like Caltech and mit. By Lazar's own admission, he was never a great student, but he was a science prodigy who spent his childhood thinking up experiments in his bedroom. So it's possible that his science skills were so impressive that admissions staff gave him a pass on his bad grades in high school. Except it's also tough to nail down when exactly he was attending which college. In his autobiography, Lazar says he took classes at Caltech in the late 1970s, then went to MIT in the mid-1980s, paid for by his employers at Los Alamos. But in other interviews, Lazar says he completed his master's at MIT before he was hired at Los Alamos in 1982. It seems strange that Lazar would be so fuzzy on such major details of his academic career, but investigative journalists have an explanation for that. He never attended any of these schools in the first place. Journalists have reviewed academic records, transcripts and yearbooks from Caltech between 1977 and 1982, and found no mention of Bob Lazar. In one interview, Lazar mentioned taking a class from a professor, William Drexler at Caltech. Researchers couldn't find anybody by that name who worked at Caltech during that time period, or although they did find a William Drexler who taught at Pierce Junior College, a community college in the Los Angeles area. Investigators also reviewed student directories, alumni lists, and administrative records from mit, and they found no evidence that anyone named Bob or Robert Lazar attended the university at any time between 1978 and 1990. In fact, there's only one college we know he did definitely attended. In a 1990 court filing, Lazar claimed he received a bachelor's degree in physics and electronic technology from Pacifica University in 1978. Pacifica University was a correspondence school where students completed their studies by mail, and it's lucky that he graduated when he did. Shortly after Lazar received his diploma, Pacifica University was shut down for selling degrees. With such inconsistent academic credentials, it's surprising that Lazar was able to get a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But as you may have guessed by now, it's not clear whether Lazar actually worked there. Still, there are a few pieces of evidence that support his claims. Lazar was featured in a June 1982 article from the Los Alamos Monitor about his jet powered Honda Civic. The article included multiple pictures of Lazar with his souped up jet car and identified him as, quote, a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson physics facility. Researchers also found Lazar's name in a copy of the Los Alamos phone directory from 1982. This indicates that he was employed at Los Alamos at the time. But following Lazar's name are the letters KM KM stands for Kirk Mayer, which is the name of a recruiting company that provided technicians and support staff to Los Alamos. Everyone in the phone book with KM after their name was a Kirk Meyer employee. So while it's true that Lazar worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, that's Very different than working for Los Alamos. It's not clear what Lazar was actually doing at Los Alamos, but based on the kind of jobs Kirk Mayer was filling for them, it was most likely low level technical support work. And it's important to mention that the Los Alamos National Laboratory has stated they have no record of Bob Lazar working there as an official employee. We're also not sure how long he even worked for Kirk Mayer, but it seems like he'd moved on by the mid-1980s, because in 1986, Lazar filed for bankruptcy. In the paperwork, Lazar didn't mention Los Alamos. He said he was a self employed photo processor. It's hard to believe that a self employed photo processor with a bachelor's degree from a discredited correspondence school could get a top level security clearance to work at Area 51. But Lazar has an explanation for that. Lazar claims that his name doesn't show up in the records at Caltech, MIT or Los Alamos because of government retaliation. After he went public about aliens and Area 51, the government couldn't assassinate him, so instead they assassinated his character. According to Lazar, the government deleted all records of his time at Caltech, MIT and Los Alamos. They also bribed or threatened everyone there into saying they didn't know him. Lazar says they did this to create inconsistencies in his life story and make him look like a less trustworthy figure. It's impossible to know whether this is true. If it really is a cover up, then dozens, if not hundreds of people were involved, and they've all held up the government story for decades. But those aren't the only troubling details about Lazar. Because it turns out his career isn't the only thing that's up for debate. So is his personal life. Lazar said that his first wife, Carol, died by suicide after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, which she hid from him. He said that after her death, he married one of the employees at his photo processing company, Tracy Merck. It is true that Carol took her own life. A death certificate from the medical examiner in Las Vegas showed that she died of carbon monoxide poisoning on April 21, 1986. And in public records, her cause of death was listed as suicide. However, no autopsy was performed, so we don't know whether Carol actually had pancreatic cancer at the time of her death. And another public record complicates Lazar's timeline. According to county documents, Lazar married Tracy Merk on April 19, 1986 to two days before his first wife died. Neither Lazar nor Tracy has ever explained why he was briefly married to two women at the same time. To be clear, there is no evidence to suggest that Lazar had anything to do with Carol's death. But this double marriage is another unexplained detail that raises serious questions about Lazar's reliability and but there's one other fact that has led people to doubt Bob Lazar's story. He has a criminal record for helping run a prostitution ring. In 1990, about a year after Lazar's blockbuster interview about Area 51, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to a charge of felony pandering. Pandering is the legal term for recruiting people to perform sex work or providing support for a sex work operation. According to prosecutors, Lazar had partnered with a Las Vegas area sex worker named Tony Bullock to help modernize her operation in exchange for 50% of her profits. Together, they rented two rooms in a local apartment complex where Bullock and the other women could work. Lazar set up a computer system to keep track of Bullock's client information, and he secretly photographed Bullock's clients and their license plates as they entered and left the apartment complex. Lazar insisted that these pictures weren't intended to be used as blackmail, but it's still pretty sketchy behavior. Lazar was later sentenced to six months of probation and ordered to go to psychotherapy and stay away from brothels. In the nearly 40 years since his interview, Bob Lazar has moved in and out of the spotlight. Sometimes it seems like he wants to go back to something resembling a normal Life. It's In 1998, he and his third wife, Joy, opened a company that sells laboratory products and chemicals, United Nuclear Scientific equipment and supplies, which they still run today in Michigan. At the same time, he's clearly not ready to give up his role as America's best known alien conspiracy whistleblower. Lazar is a regular guest at UFO conferences, sells Area 51 merchandise on the United Nuclear website, and and has participated in multiple documentaries about his experiences. He was filming one of these documentaries in 2017 when the FBI raided his warehouse. Following the raid, Lazar claimed the government had come after him because they believed he'd stolen a sample of element 115. In interviews afterwards, Lazar was coy about whether he was actually in possession of element 115 at the time. In response, the FBI, local law enforcement, and even some of Lazar's own employees tried to set the record straight. They insisted the raid didn't have anything to do with alien conspiracies. The FBI was conducting a murder investigation into a man who'd killed his wife by poisoning her with a chemical called thallium, which he'd bought from Lazar's company. They weren't looking for element 115. They were looking for sales records to help secure a conviction. That explanation got lost in the excitement. And it wasn't long before Lazar's claims generated a new wave of interest in his story. It all culminated in Lazar being invited onto Joe Rogan's podcast to talk about his experiences. This introduced a new generation of listeners to Lazar's story. It also inspired a viral Facebook Facebook event where millions of people threatened to storm Area 51 and, quote, see them aliens. To his credit, Lazar issued a public statement urging people not to try to enter the base. He speculated that any alien research had probably been moved to a different, more secretive facility years ago. In the end, the raid didn't happen. But Lazar's interview remains the most popular Joe Rogan episode of all time. Even after all these years, Bob Lazar continues to generate controversy even within the UFO community. Many conspiracy theorists hate him. They think he's an attention seeking con man whose lies about his career have discredited their entire movement. Even Lazar's ex wife, Tracy, who he took to see UFO test flights in the Nevada desert, later told an interviewer that Lazar had a habit of telling big lies. However, she's never come out and said the test flights didn't happen. That seems to lend some credence to Lazar's claims. And despite all the pushback, lots of people in the UFO community aren't so sure he's a phony. They're willing to overlook Lazar's personal failings and the parts of his story that don't make sense. Because if you write Lazar off as a fraud, that leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what he's told us. If Lazar was nothing more than a Las Vegas photo developer with an active imagination, how did he know about Area 51 when nobody else did? Plus, the friends who Bob took to see the UFO test flights in the desert have provided proof of the lights they saw in the sky in 1989. If Lazar never worked at the base, how did he know the exact schedule of the test flights? As for the government cover up, George Knapp, the journalist who interviewed him on tv, reported that men in unmarked cars shadowed him for weeks after the report aired. Why would they have done that? Unless they were worried about Lazar exposing them. I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'm interested to hear what you think. Was Lazar the real deal or was he just looking for his 15 minutes of fame? Let us know what you think in the comments. At the end of the day, the only person who knows the truth about what Bob Lazar saw is Bob Lazar, and even his most passionate supporters can agree that his relationship with the truth can be a little shame. Shaky. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll decode the episode together and hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Facts Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free. We'll be back on Friday. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Truman Capps, Leah Roche, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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thanks for listening to today's episode. Not sure what to listen to next. Check out America's Most Infamous Crimes hosted by Katie Ring. From serial killers to unsolved mysteries and game changing investigations, each week Katie takes on a notorious criminal case in American history, listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes. Now, wherever you listen to podcasts,