One of the most secret labs in America said it had no record of Bob Lazar. Its own phone book had his name in it, with two letters printed right after.
This is the paper trail behind the Bob Lazar story, followed from Los Alamos to the desert near Area 51. The lab's answer, the front page with the jet car, the guards who greeted him by name, a letter about the clearance his job needed, a congressman stonewalled by several agencies, a tax form from a naval office, and a company that said it had his file and then said it never did.
Every time someone went looking for that file, it was one door away.
0:00 The Man the Laboratory Denies 1:06 From the Jet Car to the Father of the Bomb 2:40 The Official Denial on Letterhead 6:20 Inside the Desert Facility 7:42 Decoding the Two Letters
One of the most secret laboratories in America
is telling a reporter it has no record whatsoever
of a man. The man has just gone on TV
in Las Vegas saying the government had him working on
flying saucers near Area 51.
On the reporter's desk is a phone book the lab printed itself.
His finger runs down the L's,
past its scientists and technicians, and stops. Lazar. Robert.
Right after the name, the lab printed two more letters.
Why would a lab put a man in its own phone book,
then say it has nothing on him?
The reporter takes the page to the lab.
The man on it says he worked there
as a physicist on classified projects.
They look at it and still say no.
He puts that page on television for the whole city to see,
and the lab doesn't move.
This is the lab that built the bomb,
and when it shuts a door, that's usually the end of it.
From then on, he collects everything else that says this man was there,
and every time he brings something in, he gets the same answer.
The next thing he finds is a front page.
Lazar had only moved to town that spring,
and the town's paper already had him on page one,
posing beside a little Honda with a jet engine bolted into the back.
Out on a dry lakebed, that car went past 200 miles an hour,
a hatchback with fire roaring out the back of it.
The paper called him a physicist at the lab.
The next day, Lazar says,
the most famous scientist in town was standing outside his
own lecture with that paper in his hands.
Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb,
reading about the young man with the jet car.
Lazar walked up to him, and they talked.
With the front page next to the phone book,
the reporter went back to the lab.
It's still denied having any records. Two printed pages from that town,
one from the lab and one from the paper,
and both of them put him inside the lab.
Lazar takes the reporter on a tour of the lab himself.
He walks him right up to the gate,
where the men in the booth have one job, knowing who belongs there.
The guards see him coming.
Hey, Bob, you're back.
They know his name before he says a word.
This is the lab whose press office has nothing on this man,
and its own guards are greeting him like one of their own.
The reporter also tracked down four people
who knew Lazar from his time at the lab,
working on classified projects, and talked to every one of them.
That's four people, the guards, the phone book, and a front page,
all putting him in the same place.
The lab's answer didn't change.
Eventually, the reporter put his questions to the lab in a letter.
Less than two weeks later, the answer came on the lab's own letterhead,
with a name at the bottom.
We have no personnel records on him, it said.
Picture calling the place you worked,
the place that printed your name in its own phone book
and hearing they don't have a single page on
you. That's where this man was standing.
If a lab can do that to a name it printed itself,
it can do it to anyone who ever walked through its gate.
The same letter said every technician
in the job Lazar would have held needed clearance
for the rooms where America's nuclear secrets are
kept. Nobody gets that clearance until somebody has gone through
their whole life and written it
all down whether anyone was actually given one
is sensitive information according to the lab's
security people they don't give it out to anyone
but the person who got it for proof the letter
pointed the reporter back to Lazar himself
who might still have documents about his clearance
somewhere there should be a record of what Bob Lazar
was cleared for when he walked past those
guards and the lab says it isn't the one holding it
a letter wasn't going to settle it so the
reporter went higher he asked a congressman
from Nevada to do one simple thing for him
and track down Bob Lazar's employment records
a congressman's office asks government agencies
for things every day it should have
been the easiest request on the desk his people came
back empty-handed they'd been stonewalled
and not by one agency by several the people in that office
said they had never seen anything like it now
the refusals were coming from government agencies
aimed at a sitting congressman over the work history
of one technician through all of it
the answer was sitting in that phone book two letters after his name
so where is that file
that file could still be in a drawer somewhere
the day it comes out we'll know what Bob Lazar
was cleared to touch and whether somebody told
the people holding it to stop talking
subscribe now and you'll be in on it
when that happens it isn't with Lazar whatever the letter
said his own paper was going to his accountant moved away
and left no forwarding address too
years of Lazar's records went with him along
with fifteen thousand dollars and it's all there in
Lazar's own bankruptcy filing later after
the desert Lazar says somebody was getting into his
life he'd come out to find his car doors open
and the trunk open things went missing from his house
he started worrying about a bomb under his car
the first time he talked on TV he sat in shadow
and called himself Dennis months later he came out with his own face
and his own name the way
he tells it staying alive was half the reason
if enough people had seen his face nobody could just
make him disappear for a man in that spot paper
is the only thing standing between him and vanishing
a pay stub a badge record a folder with his name
on the tab all of it was going somewhere he
couldn't reach even his way into the desert started
with a piece of paper and it went through
Teller the way Lazar tells it he mailed Teller
his resume years after that morning outside the lecture
and Teller pointed him to a defense contractor
the outfit that flew men out to the Nevada test ranges
when a camera caught up with Teller
and asked him about Lazar he wouldn't talk about him getting the
job took two interviews he says
and the second was almost all about what he did in his spare time
he flew in with a badge clip to him
and laid his hand flat on a scanner before anything would open
inside by his account they put him in front of a flying saucer
and gave him two orders
copy it at any cost then find a way to switch one off from a distance
the only paper he's ever shown from the desert
is the same tax form you get from whoever pays you
Lazar's is for less than a thousand dollars where
the employer's name goes there's no base and no
company you could drive to it says department
of naval intelligence this year in front of a
podcast audience in the millions he said it again
the navy paid me every piece of paper with his
name on it points one step away from where it should
the very first one did it years before
anyone was looking. Back to that desk
and the reporter's finger on the page. Anyone who grew
up with a phone book next to the telephone knows you can't argue
with one. Somebody at the lab
typed Lazar's line, years before anyone cared who he was.
Lazar. Robert. After it come the two
letters, a K and an M, with a little slash between them.
The lab spelled out what those two letters
meant, in the very same letter that turned the reporter away.
We only archive records of Los
Alamos employees. All personnel records
of Mr. Lazar would be held by the contractor,
in this case, Kirk Mayer. K. M. Kirk Mayer.
Bob Lazar was never on the lab's own books.
An outside company put him there,
a firm that supplied people to the lab, the kind the reporter
called a headhunting company.
Its two letters went next to his name, and his file went into
its cabinet instead of the lab's.
So when the lab said it had no record whatsoever of him,
that was true, in the narrowest way a sentence can be true.
It was a company the reporter had
called too. They said yes.
They'd hired Bob Lazar to work at the lab, and they'd send the
reporter copies of his records.
The whole story was one envelope away. The envelope never came.
Inside would have been his start date,
the job he was given, and who signed off on him.
He called again, and nobody called back.
He wrote, and nobody wrote back.
Then the company took the last step it had left.
It said it had never told him it had the records at all.
This time, the no came from the people holding the file.
Who did that company hear from,
between promising a reporter that file and denying it ever had it?
Kirk Mayer wasn't the only door like it.
At the lab, he came in through it, so the lab never had to hold him.
In the desert, he came in through a defense contractor.
When he got paid, the form came from a naval office.
He did work for the lab for a while,
said a man who knew him back in that town.
His name kept out of the interview.
He was a contractor.
Asked about Kirk Mayer, his answer was,
That kind of rings a bell.
Every time anyone goes after the file on this man,
it's sitting one company away.
Ask any one of those doors about him, and it can say no.
What if that was the whole idea?
And a young man who might one day be shown something extraordinary
was walked in through a side door every time, on purpose.
Not one person inside would ever have to lie,
because the lab really doesn't keep his file,
and the company that does answers to no reporter.
The company at the lab could have
been the bottom rung of the same ladder
that ended with a naval intelligence office paying him in the desert.
It might go back further than the desert too.
The man holding his picture the day after the jet car made the paper
is the man who later sent him to the desert,
and the people hiring for that job
spent most of an interview asking about his spare time.
Was somebody already watching the young man with the jet car?
Only one piece of paper got away from all of it.
The phone book was printed long before anybody knew his name,
before the desert and before the television studio.
It went out across the whole lab,
and once it was sitting on all those desks,
nobody could call it back.
It's been sitting in plain sight ever since.
The three biggest interviews Bob Lazar gave
this year add up to more than 8 hours of him talking
and over 13 million views.
One of them has him saying it himself, in passing.
He left the lab, started a business of his own,
and started contracting with the lab.
Nobody stopped him to ask what that meant.
That page has been on TV since the reporter first put it there,
and in all those hours, nobody asked about
the two letters on it either.
In another, he talked about the man he replaced out in the desert,
killed doing the job Lazar walked into.
There's no record of who this person was.