The Area 51 UFO story began with a hidden-face TV interview

Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers was made in 2018 by director Jeremy Corbell, and it is a documentary built around one man's claim, first told on a Las Vegas TV station in 1989 with his face hidden, that he worked on flying saucers at a secret site near Area 51. Vice described it as Lazar's first major interview about extraterrestrial technology in nearly 30 years.

Lazar is a physicist by his own account. He broke the story of Area 51 and the US government's work on alien spacecraft, then went silent for years. The film mixes archive footage with new interviews and lets him tell it himself. George Knapp, the reporter who first interviewed him, is a producer. It runs 97 minutes.

How did a hidden-face interview become Bob Lazar's story?

In May 1989, a man with his face hidden sat down with Knapp, a reporter at KLAS in Las Vegas. He gave his name as Dennis and said he had worked on flying saucers held at a secret site near Area 51.

The anonymity did not last. In a broadcast on December 9, 1989, the man appeared under his own name, Bob Lazar. Knapp's interviews drew international attention to Area 51, and the film returns to that footage.

What does Lazar say he did at the site?

Lazar said he was hired as a physicist at a site called S-4, for what he was told was the United States Navy. He put it about 10 to 15 miles south of Groom Lake.

In his account, the military held nine flying saucers of extraterrestrial origin, and the craft ran on a stable form of element 115. That is his own account, and no evidence for it has been produced.

At the time, element 115 had never been made. It was first produced in a lab in Russia in 2003 and later named moscovium. The lab-made versions last only a fraction of a second.

Can any of it be checked?

Parts have been looked at, and the results are in dispute. Lazar says he holds master's degrees from MIT and Caltech. Skeptics, including the ufologist Stanton Friedman, found no record of him at either school. Lazar says the government erased the records.

He said his hiring went through a contractor, EG&G, though he described the job as unrelated to it. EG&G has said it has no records on him.

Area 51 itself has moved from rumor to record. In August 2013 the CIA released a history of its U-2 spy plane program that named Area 51 and placed it on a map beside the dry Groom Lake bed. The documents contain no mention of UFOs or aliens.

The film is for viewers curious how the Area 51 story started and who first told it, and who want Lazar's version in his own words, alongside the disputes it has drawn.

Documentary