Bob Lazar's Radio Show

By Glenn Campbell

I think UFO Line is one of the most interesting UFO radio talk shows ever to hit the airwaves. It is not for the guests or content that I adore it so. Both have been nothing new and--at least in tonight's case--have been no different than the crapola put out every week by Art Bell. What makes this show stand out is the refreshing attitude of the boys who host it, Gene Huff and Bob Lazar, who just don't give a damn.

Tonight's guest was a surprise, and although he has always been one of the principal characters in the Lazar story, he was not on my list of potential guests in my last report (12/15). He is John Lear, the ufological wolfman who, in the words of one reviewer, "never met a UFO story he did not like and wholeheartedly endorse." Lear is the butt of many jokes, including those of Bob and Gene, so to have him on the show was a stroke of inspiration. Had Lear been on Art Bell it would have been boring to those who have heard him before, but with our boys interviewing him it was a luscious and thoroughly riveting hour.

Because Bob and Gene don't give a damn, they speak their mind, and when they think Lear is full of crapola, they say so. If they do not say it directly, then it is in their eyes and in their tone, which reeks of sarcasm. What gives this show life is its sarcastic and skeptical edge, coupled with solid technical knowledge and the implied possibility that some claims might even be true. Although Bob has his own UFO story--which he does not discuss unless asked--he clearly believes that most of the UFO lore is ridiculous. People like this don't normally host UFO talk shows, which are usually dominated by true believers, so when one does it is an event to be cherished.

As is the usual case, The Bob has apparently been dragged onto the show by Gene, and he says at the beginning, "This is the last place I want to be tonight." Of course, Bob never wants to be anywhere except playing with his high-tech toys and has to be dragged kicking and screaming into almost any social interaction-- but that's why he has Gene. It is a peculiar marriage: the loudmouth Huff and passive-aggressive Lazar, two men who seem to have nothing whatsoever in common but who together form a balanced, functional whole at least for the duration of the show. Once Bob is on-line, he is totally engaged, and what shines through is his absolute intellectual integrity. That's right: absolute intellectual integrity. When it comes to technical matters, Lazar accepts no compromises, and his good sense about wild claims is what makes the show work.

(Note, however, that I did not say "absolute personal integrity," which could use some work, chiefly as a result of this passive- aggressive complex--i.e. a frequent emotional absence. I'm also not passing judgment on his "S-4" flying saucer claims, although when he discusses them it is with the absolute internal consistency I expect. If Bob built some physical contraption-- even a spaceship to the stars--and told me it would work, and if the object was real enough for me to step into, then I would probably trust my life to it.)

The Fantastic Claims Of John Lear

Claim #1: The driver of the limousine shot Kennedy. (Lear: "I'm still not convinced he didn't do it.")

Claim #2: There is a five-mile-square roof over Area 51. (Lear no longer believes this.)

Claim #3: There are two billion aliens living inside the mountains along US-93. (Lear: "That was pretty far fetched.")

Claim #4: There is an underground tunnel from Boulder [Hoover] Dam to Area 51, as well as a tunnel network between military bases all over the country. (Lear: "There are underground tunnels all over the place... No doubt about it in my mind." Lear says there are mag-lev trains running through the tunnels.)

Claim #5: Humans are being used as food for the aliens. (Lear: "I'll have to stick by that.")

Claim #6: UFO abductees have been given implants that can be controlled by a small device that looks like a TV remote control. (Lear: "I'll stick by that one, too.")

Claim #7: The Stealth fighter is equipped on top and bottom with liquid crystals that make it look like the sky from below and like the ground from above. (Lear: "They did not use that on the stealth fighter but it may have been used on another aircraft.")

Claim #8: There are 70 species of aliens visiting earth. (Wrong, says Lear. There are 80 species of aliens visiting earth, based on the different drawings he has seen.)

Claim #9: There is a special top secret jail somewhere on the Nellis Range for UFO researchers. (Lear: "If I said that, I was a little off base there." Lazar: "But not off base with those other things?" Lear: "No.")

Claim #10: There is a race of "Reptilians" at the Test Site. (Lear still agrees. He says some security guards have been shown photos of them so they won't be alarmed if they encounter them.)

Claim #11: Venus is a nice place to live, a lot like earth's atmosphere in places. (Lear says there is "probably" life on Venus, and the surface temperature is "probably" like earth's. He suggests government data on Venus has been faked.)

Claim #12: There is atmosphere and water on the moon. ("At certain places there is," Lear says. There is also a six-mile- high tower in the middle of the front side of the moon, as shown on a Richard Hoagland tape, "The Moon-Mars Connection.")

Claim #13: There is an underground alien base at Dulce, NM. ("Beyond a shadow of a doubt," says Lear. Lear says that Jim Dilletoso [sp?] spent six weeks at Dulce using very sensitive "recording monitors" and found "all sorts of stuff.")

Other Claims

• Lear described how he got into ufology when he heard about the Bentwaters [England] incident from an airman who was stationed there at the time. Prior to that, his father, the Learjet founder, was interested in UFOs, but John himself was not.

• Lear says his UFO beliefs have cost him two good jobs: One as a pilot at American Trans Air, a charter airline, and the other at Orbital Sciences, where the government would not grant him a security clearance.

• The U.S. Navy, not the Air Force, is in charge of the UFO cover-up.

• The government deliberately drew attention to Area 51 by the recent land grab to keep the public from looking at more secret areas.

• The government is very efficient at erasing people's memories. In support of this, Lear tells the story of a woman who claims to have lost her memory while working at the Tonopah Test Range. [Apparently, this is "Athena," who I described in my previous report.]

• Regarding the government UFO cover-up: "I don't think we are ever going to know the truth.... I don't think it is in the cards--ever."

• Lear believes the alien autopsy is not real. "No particular reason," he says.

• Lear said he was turned off to Stanton Friedman when Friedman was in Las Vegas and did not make any attempt to talk to Bob Lazar directly.

• Lazar asked Lear about John Grace, aka "Vladimir Valerian," and what he was up to. Lear said he was in Oregon and had a successful business [apparently selling his expensive self- published newsletters and documents, Matrix I, II, III, etc.] Lear said that Grace was a tech sergeant at Nellis when he met him and that they cooperated on the naming of a UFO document that Grace had written. They decided to attribute it to "O.H. Krill," a name they made up. Bill Cooper later claimed, on a TV show in Lear's presence, that he had read the same O.H. Krill document years before while in the Navy--an impossibility. Lear says the "O.H." meant nothing, but Cooper later claimed it meant "Original Hostage."

• Lear described how Cooper's claims about what he read as a Navy petty officer seems to be continuously revised to support whatever Lear claimed. In the beginning, Lear said Cooper could personally vouch for "50%" of what Lear claimed, but within about a month it became "150%." Gene Huff added: "Obviously, no matter what you think of Cooper, Cooper does have a great mind, and he has the capability to take everyone's information and spin it into a giant story that he read about when he was in the Navy." Nonetheless, Lear still believes Cooper's original story, before he started embellishing it.

• Near the end of the program, Lear "showed" a picture of the Area 51 base taken in 1965 which was sent to him by "Spy Two" [probably Jim Goodall]. ("Hold it up for the viewers," said Lazar.) Lear described the facilities in the picture and discussed the A-12 program and YF-12. A caller expressed the theory that the YF-12A was equipped with nuclear-tipped missiles specifically to shoot down UFOs.

• Lear says he has recently met a 70-year-old man in Las Vegas who claims to have been a oil worker near Aztec, NM, in 1948 and who witnessed the UFO crash there. The saucer, which crashed in Hart Canyon, was 100 feet in diameter. The man and his co-workers saw it come down, and they remained in the vicinity of it for 4-5 hours before being rounded up by the military and sworn to secrecy. Lear said the worker had not seen the Bill Steinman book on the crash [UFO Crash at Aztec], so Lear showed him a copy, and the man pointed out what was right and wrong about it. The man said one thing that was wrong in the book was the size of the rod that was poked through a hole in the window to open the door latch in the saucer. The man said it was thinner and was actually a welding tie rod from one of their trucks. The man had never talked about the experience before until he ran into John. [Note: I am skeptical that the oil workers who saw a 100 foot spacecraft land would be foolish enough to try to poke a rod into it before the military arrived--or that they would still be at the site when the military decided to do the same.]

Lear's Area 51 Report

"First of all, up at Groom, we have two new proof-of-concepts ready to fly. One will fly next week and the other around March, and both are very, very fast.

"And do you remember that helicopter we built about ten years ago that could carry around 250 troops? Now we have one that can carry 600 fully armed combat ready troops.

 "And over at Sandia--You remember Sandia is that new base they built over there at Pahute Mesa.--they have a new computer that is a billion times faster than the fastest in commercial use today. Hey, do you know who invented the internet? It was DARPA--the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--and they did it in 1967. What they foresaw was the exponential use of the personal computer and saw the internet as a direct way into homes, hearts and minds of the public. This computer up at Sandia can track what anybody ever wrote or said or wherever anybody ever went on the internet with their PC. And not only that, whether your PC is on or not, they can access your hard drive any time they want.

"And, hey, what's going on a Tonopah? We have the new counter- insurgency airplane that's being used out at Aviano in the Bosnian conflict. The security is so tight up at TTR that now they have three fences instead of one, and the entire support team, which consists of about 350 people, are [unintelligible] right out the flight line instead of back down at the gate like when the F-117 came out.

"And speaking of the 117A, what ever happened to the F-19? The F- 19 went down the Skunk Works assembly line right next to the 117, used the same engines, 404s, but was a Navy bird and was a bat- wing type aircraft. They made about 60 of them. It turns out that the F-117A was just a cover for this other high-techer.

"And--Whoa!--what's flying out of the Northern Nevada secret facility? It's black, and it's fast. All you can see at night is a contrail which looks like a green neon tube about a mile long. They've been doing some low-altitude work around Idaho between midnight and 4 am. That dude really gets along at about 4 or 5 thousand miles an hour at low altitude.

"And flying saucers? Apparently the aliens can't fly any better now than they could in 1947, because we recovered two of them in the past year right here in Nevada. One came down between the [Hoover] Dam and Kingman about a month or so ago, and one in Northern Nevada last year. [Note: The land between the Dam and Kingman is in Arizona, not Nevada.]

"And that's it for the Test Site update for Friday, Dec. 22, 1995. This is John Lear and Bob Lazar wishing all of you at DET 1--and hey, don't want to forget all you guys over at Station 9--a very Merry Christmas." [Note: "DET 1" is a name for Area 51 or some military detachment there. I do not know what "Station 9" is.]

Lazar: "I got to jump on the computer thing... 'They can access your hard drive in a PC whether or not your computer is on.'"

Lear: "Yeah. Hard to believe, huh?"

Lazar: "About as hard as you can get. Exactly how would they manage a feat like that?... Aside from them coming over and turning it on."

Lear: "All I'm telling you is what I heard."

Lazar: "From where did you hear that?"

Huff: "Bill Cooper?" [Laughter.]

Lear: "Good old Bill, he takes a lot of flak, but we named the disease that Bill Cooper got that many of us got, that was called the UFO disease. The UFO disease is when you start out in this business and you hear and see some stuff that really happens, really real, but you start adding onto it, and like Bill, he just got too far out."

Conclusion

There wasn't much talk about Lazar's claims, but Lazar did mention in passing that a former Apollo astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, had visited Lazar to talk about Lazar's UFO information. Mitchell said nothing about a NASA cover-up.

There was only time in the hour for about 3 or 4 callers, and there was no advertising--even for the products Huff and Lazar sell. At the conclusion of the program, Huff invited Lear to come back to the show at a later date, and told the audience, "We'll see you next time," but Lazar's last words were, "We will?"

Although it is unclear whether there will be a next time or how long the show will run, I hope the boys can keep it up. What they need now is to broaden their scope beyond Las Vegas by including call-in guests from outside their usual play list. Lazar probably has enough clout in the UFO community to draw in a dozen well- known names. It doesn't matter if the guests are loons or are skeptical of Lazar's own claims; such guests, in fact, would probably be the most entertaining. However, I think that are also some respectable scientists outside the UFO field who think enough of Lazar to join the show.

The station probably cannot be heard outside Las Vegas--but I think that's good. This is a connoisseur's show. You have to know the characters to fully appreciate it. No doubt, tapes of the show will be circulating for years in the UFO underground, so there isn't any need for worldwide broadcast. Any radio environment that was more structured or commercial would steal the show's charm. Here, the boys are paying for their hour and can do anything they want with it. It is a perfect opportunity for natural conversation and unexpected creativity. If they stay on the air, I think it will make fascinating series.

[George Knapp tells me he thinks Bob and Gene bought the show for a four-week trial run, mostly for their own amusement. The first show featured Knapp as guest (12/8), making this the third, while next week (12/30) could be the last show unless the boys renew it. This is my second report, since I have not yet heard the first show.]

-- GC, posted to alt.conspiracy.area51, 12/27/95