By Glenn Campbell
I got a call from a friend (Jarod 2!) that Bob Lazar would be on the radio tonight, so I tuned in. It was on KLAV (1230 AM), a local Las Vegas talk/rant station where anyone can buy a late- night program and babble on about whatever they want. (J-2 heard about it because Oliver North is on the same station during the day, and there had been a promo.) Gene Huff and Lazar had apparently purchased the 11pm-midnight Friday night slot and dubbed it UFO Line. They had done the show at least the week before, and they said they'd be back next week, too. I guess this shatters the curmudgeon theory which says Lazar is playing hard- to-get. Now he's there on your AM dial every week, ready to take YOUR phone calls.
"UFO Line" was a delightful time warp, a throwback to the Billy Goodman era when The Bob first came forward with his claim of working on alien craft at "Area S-4" just south of Area 51. It's nice to know that in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours, some things never change. Tonight, Bob and Gene's guest was (pick one) (A) newsman George Knapp, who brought Lazar out of the closet, or (B) professional hyponotherapist Layne Keck, who helped Lazar remember (or shall we say, "reconstruct") the details of some of his experiences at that secret saucer base, or (C) Testors model designer John Andrews who produced the Lazar spacecraft model based on Bob's report. The correct answer was (B), Layne Keck, although Knapp also called in at the end. Bob was the same Bob we know and love, sticking exactly to his story as first told six years ago. Huff, for his part, showed admirable restraint in letting slip over the airways only a single swear word: "Horseshit." Those who know Gene only through various flame wars on the newsgroups would be surprised at the high level of intelligence and courtesy he can display at times (reverting, I'm sure, to the more colorful and earthy Gene after the program).
For those who are familiar with the Lazar story and have heard other radio interviews with him, nothing new was revealed, but it is always interesting to hear the story from a slightly different perspective. Huff started out by interviewing Keck about his hypnosis work in general. I was the first caller and asked the obvious question about what Keck thought of his sessions with Lazar. (Okay, so I could have asked tougher questions, but this was my first experience at the other end of the call-in line, and I was nervous at the possibilities of all that power--my word broadcast to literally dozens of people all over the Vegas Valley.) Keck then went through the story of how Bob and Gene had come to him (before the story was widely known); how he found them to be sincere and had regressed Bob to help him try to retrieve some of the technical details of his saucer work, like schematics, that he could not remember consciously. Keck said that hypnosis involves the removing of blocks, and I asked what those blocks were in Bob's case. Keck said it mostly involved the overt threats and intimidation that had been used against Bob by the security dudes. Both he and Bob seemed to firmly reject the notion that Bob had been subconsciously "programmed" by the government in any way.
One tidbit I found interesting was Keck's statement that Bob and Gene had wanted to know, in the beginning, whether Bob had been deliberately given the saucer information, as though he were expected to leak it. If they had asked that question back then, then it would seem to remain an open one now. This would allow a scenario in which Bob was deliberately exposed to the saucers so that he would maybe run back and tell John Lear--as he indeed did. Lear, in my view, is an essential element in the Lazar story no matter how you slice it. (Long before Bob came forward, Lear had made some extreme UFO claims--aliens eating humans in a fine pate at a vast underground base at Groom Lake--and he happened to meet Bob shortly before his alleged S-4 employment. Lazar's experiences brought Lear back to earth, relatively speaking, and Lear now pretty much recites the Lazar gospel--with added color of course.) On the show, Bob and Gene seemed unabashed in their Lear barbs, letting loose with two or three during the show. When a caller said, "John Lear says..." you could hear their eyes roll upward and the tinge of wry sarcasm enter their voices: "So what did John Lear say?"
One of the responses from Bob that Keck took as genuine was when Bob recounted under hypnosis how a golf ball thrown at an active reactor ricocheted off its gravity field and chipped a ceiling tile. Keck said Lazar recounted the tale several times and each time the emotional reaction was the same and appropriate to the situation. I asked if it was possible for this reaction to be faked, and Keck said it probably was, but it was also very difficult to get all the cues right. (This is also the factor that I feel is the strongest in Bob's favor: always displaying the right emotional responses for his descriptions of his experiences.)
Keck said that prior to being approached by Bob, he had no interaction with any UFO abductees, but that since then they have become a significant part of his business. As a result of the publicity, he has since dealt with about 80 people who believed they had been abducted. He said he regarded a small but significant percentage of these as genuine events. Although P. Klass will no doubt regard Keck's growing abduction business as proof of his deceit, Keck also seemed to display the right emotion cues for his claims. His talk was plain and informative, with no Morton-esque B.S. factor and no obvious exhortations to come on down to his office. (Huff mentioned Keck's office, though: Serenus Clinical Hypnosis. The phone book says it is at 1833 W. Charleston Blvd., phone 702-384-4420.)
Lazar spoke of his movie as though it were an active project. He said he had talked to a special effects person on "my movie" about what the person thought of the (Santilli) alien autopsy film. (I suppose "my movie" could refer to his long promised Lazar Tape remake, but that seems the wrong choice of words for someone as precise as Lazar.) The special effects guy said the autopsy body could easily be reproduced, and Lazar said he personally thought the film was a fake. One of the reasons Lazar gave for thinking so was one I had not heard before but that would be obvious to someone in his line of work: Where were the still photographers? Any event this big would be chronicled not just by film cameras, but also by still cameras for better detail, and these would have required flash bulbs (given the slow film speeds of the day). No flashes and no other cameramen are seen in the Santilli film, which to Lazar seemed highly unlikely.
[BTW: We know a woman in Vegas who knew Bob professionally when he was a photographer in Vegas, before the S-4 affair. She regarded him as a very nice young man--so there you have it. Why would a fellow like him lie?]
Although no one asked it directly, Lazar seems to be sticking with his "missing records" claim. One caller said, "They erased you from society...." to which Lazar replied, "For the most part." This leaves open the question of what records are actually missing. (As far as I know, only the MIT and Cal-Tech records haven't turned up.)
Where did the aliens come from? one of the callers asked. Lazar said that he was told only that the CRAFT came from the Zeta Reticuli star system, but he was not told about the occupants. He was told that all nine of the craft had the same propulsion system. He said that he seen a single autopsy photo in the briefing papers he read--a torso shot--and it was not the same as the alien in the Santilli film.
Lazar's assessment of the government agency operating S-4 was surprisingly harsh: "They don't care about anyone," he said without caveat, and that disturbed me. (I find that his statements should not be taken lightly--at least in this imaginary world--because they usually have a basis.)
Two callers told similar stories which seemed to momentarily interest our boys. One caller spoke of a person--gender not specified--who had reported for work at the Tonopah Test Range and then forgotten their six months of being stationed there. The last thing this person supposedly remembered was being in a clinic and a doctor or nurse inserting a needle in their neck. The second caller recounted a story of a woman who got on a Janet flight to Tonopah and then could not remember anything of her day there until returning in the evening.
Although not mentioned on the show, I know the source of at least the first story, a Las Vegas woman whose identity is known to me but who I shall call "Athena" (at her request). Athena was a radar operator for the Air Force in the 80s, manning the threat radars (simulating enemy radar for war games) on the Nellis Range at the Tonopah Test Range (TTR) and later at Tolicha Peak. (This was in the days before these radar facilities were manned by contractors. My casual questioning of her suggests to me that she does know the job, albeit in that military way of knowing only her own job and nothing much about the bigger picture.). A few years after working at Tonopah, someone happened to ask her about her time there, and she was alarmed to find should could hardly remember anything about her assignment. This lead her to a hypnotist (a prominent ufologist, unfortunately, thus introducing the possibility of suggestion), and a single session with him filled in some details: While at Tonopah, she was called up for a special nighttime assignment with a crew of other technicians she had not worked with before. She was working, as usual, in a closed trailer operating some part of the radar equipment. They were told to seek an airborne target, but they couldn't get a lock on anything. Then were then told to leave the trailer while the superiors conferred inside. It was then that she and some others got a "visual lock" on the target. It was a saucer (stealth version, evidently). All she remembers next is being in a clinic- -she thinks at Area 51--where she gets the needle in the neck and remembers nothing more.
A "brain drain" serum? I would not call it impossible, as long as they got to her before she went to sleep. I have read of studies somewhere (seen in Science News I think) indicating that long term memories are "fixed" in the brain at night and that if you inhibit sleep in some way, you can interfere in the preservation of memories. This opens the possibility of drug induced amnesia without completely scrambling the rest of a person's brain. Anyway, Athena has been searching every since for her "missing time" and has been fairly open about discussing it. (BTW: The prominent ufologist seemed to have shown no further interest when no obvious abduction was found.) According to the laws of folklore and their subsequent distortions, this same source story might account for the apparently different tales told by the two callers.
Athena's claims remind me of the "Nellis UFO" shown recently on Hard Copy and Sightings. Our best analysis suggests that this radar-tracked UFO was recorded in the vicinity of Tolicha Peak in a threat-radar trailer similar to what Athena would have worked in. However, her claims to us pre-date the first broadcast of the "Nellis UFO."
The one hour UFO Line show was sponsored by Tri-Dot Productions, Huff and Lazar's company, which was also given as "Tri-Dot Aeronautical Productions" at the end of the show. Tri-Dot is a cousin of "Procrastination Unlimited," a more accurate name which appears at the bottom of the Lazar saucer poster. There was only one advertisement: for the Parma Restaurant on Rainbow Ave. in Las Vegas. Lazar and Huff didn't even plug their own merchandise!
KLAV is probably receivable only in the Las Vegas area. (The signal seemed weak even here in town.) The Bob is waiting to take your phone calls, and his appearance on the air implies that he is willing to take the tough questions, too. Next show is apparently Friday, Dec. 22, 1995 at 11pm, AM-1230 in Las Vegas.
[The above is from memory. Although I did tape the show, I haven't compared the above to the tape.]
-- GC, posted to alt.conspiracy.area51, 12/16/95
Html: 2/20/96