Bob Lazar

Robert Lazar became the best-known name in the subject in 1989, when the Las Vegas reporter George Knapp broadcast his account on KLAS-TV, at first in silhouette and then under his own name. Lazar said he had been hired through the contractor EG&G to work at a site he called S-4, south of Groom Lake near Papoose Lake, where he was shown nine disc-shaped craft and asked to study the propulsion of one of them. He described a reactor fuelled by a stable isotope of element 115 and a gravity-amplifier arrangement, and he said he had been briefed that the craft were not of human manufacture.

No institution has confirmed the parts of his biography that would settle the matter. Neither MIT nor Caltech has a record of the degrees he says he holds, and Los Alamos National Laboratory has said he was not on its staff, although a 1982 laboratory telephone directory listing his name and a Los Alamos newspaper article about a jet car he built place him at the laboratory as a contractor. Element 115 was synthesised in 2004 and every isotope made so far decays in under a second. Lazar's account of hand-scanner security at S-4 matched a device later shown in a 1990s documentary, which supporters treat as corroboration and critics as coincidence.

The corpus mentions Lazar more often than any other person, in roughly forty of its transcripts. The host spent a weekend with him for two episodes, and other guests measure their own claims against his: Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp defend him, physicists such as Eric Weinstein test the propulsion account, and several witnesses say their own stories echo his. The knowledge base records his testimony as fact about what he has said since 1989 and treats the existence of S-4 and its craft as contested.