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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what people here think of Bob Lazar. On one hand I have a very hard time believing the physics he describes without hard proof, on the other his story has been remarkably consistent, there's bits of tangential evidence and as a whole it AFAIK wasn't falsified for 30 years now. It's certain to me at least that he worked at Los Alamos. I have only two explanations:

1) he was a Los Alamos employee that came up with a scheme to sell books and such, and has a remarkable gift for acting and telling that story consistently for decades. But then why the FBI raids and such, is that invented too?

2) pretty much his entire story is true. But could such a huge project be kept secret?

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From what I understand, records show he worked at Los Alamos, but not his role, so he could have been a janitor for all we know.

We also know he didn't actually go to MIT like he claims, and the way he explains the "alien tech" are not the way a real engineer would talk about these things. So I'd say definitely a crackpot...

How do we know that he didn’t go to MIT? And what does he say that is inconsistent with how a real engineer would talk about something?

There’s a video of him being asked who his professors were at Caltech and MIT. He names two people, one was from a community college and a high school I think.

And he doesn’t explain the science in a detailed or verbose way.

Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. At best they might make the story suspicious, but that doesn’t seem like enough to say we know something.

I mean, the claim that he worked at a secret lab on alien tech should be the suspicious part...

The burden on proof is on him to prove the story is real, not on others to disprove the stuff he makes up.

Sure, but that’s besides the point. Once parent comment asserts a fact about a specific detail, they now have an obligation to cite the evidence for that particular fact. Lazar’s obligation to prove his own claims is a legitimate but separate issue.

He was registered at some vocational school is Los Alamos at the time he said he attended MIT, besides the fact that MIT says they've never heard of him.

He says shit like "the gravity orb was activated by a an electric pressure", which is just nonsense.

Bob is a complete fraud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl2356IOTrY

Thanks! Still watching it, but I gotta say this YouTuber plays it rather fast and loose. One of his first points (that finally comes after a good 20min of pushing his own ego and going through the 'offial' story) is that a small yield 'nucular' explosion would have been detected. Fusion explosions can go down to kilojoule range, fission - undergoing explosive chain reaction accidentally - may be in tens of tons of TNT range. There's some recent paper that describes the first smaller explosion of Chernobyl as such a small yield nuclear explosion.

When someone just claims (s) he is thorough I immediately get suspicious.

That being said, the central thesis might hold up and I still have to watch the rest.

http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange...

I think he is a fraud. He constantly states he hates the media attention but then does a Netflix show and goes on Joe Rogan. Why would you want the maximum possible exposure to yourself when you stated so many times that you don’t like the attention. Don’t mind the fact that he has presented zero proof towards anything of extraterrestrial nature. He makes many claims none of which can be verified. Ok, so you had a biometric device on base you were not aware of, so what? Just because YOU don’t think the tech doesn’t exist, doesn’t make it true.

> He constantly states he hates the media attention but then does a Netflix show a

Money doesn't last forever, and sometimes you need more of it

You might be interested in Annie Jacobsen's interview on the JRE. She argued that the 'flying saucers' were actually just an elaborate Soviet attempt at psychological warfare. I have no idea if it's true or not but it's entertaining at least, so I'll summarize it here.

The theory states that at the end of WWII, Stalin was feeling vulnerable because the US had the atomic bomb but the USSR did not. So he was interested in ways to try to destabilize the US and level the playing field.

So Stalin decided to have his engineers build some flying saucers and fly them into the continental US in order to freak people out. He also had some human cadavers surgically altered to look like aliens and them stuck them in the capsule for good measure.

By flying the saucers into the US mainland, the USSR hoped to put the US government in a bind. If the civilians who would inevitably find the craft were left to believe that it really was an alien ship, the prospect that 'we are not alone' would stir mass social unrest. On the other hand, if the govt identified the vessel as a Soviet aircraft, it would have to admit that the Russians were able to sneak into US airspace without the US military noticing, which would be a scandal in and of itself.

I think that story - as crazy as it is - is more plausible than actual aliens visiting Earth (though its not exactly a high bar). Stalin was certainly psycho enough to consider running such a harebrained scheme. It would also explain why the US govt would cover the whole thing up even if there were no aliens involved.

In any case, I am far more inclined to believe that any UFOs sighting is military-related than any kind of alien encounter.

Annie Jacobsen is incredibly fringe in her theories and I'd take everything she says with a healthy dose of salt.

Case in point: Jacobsen reported in one of her books that "Josef Stalin recruited ex-Nazi Josef Mengele to be part of a scheme where a “UFO with aliens” was created to scare Americans. According to the tale, Mengele — the infamous Nazi “angel of death” who experimented on children at concentration camps — surgically altered a group of youngsters to look like aliens." [1]

1. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jac...

Sure. I wish I had the time to really vet her work.

I will say that in my book a deranged dictator running a insane scheme to try to scare Americans is still FAR more plausible than real extra-terrestrials visiting earth. Or perhaps there was some other secret government project that got covered up. But I am highly skeptical that aliens showed up. (no offense if you disagree)

I figure whatever the truth is we'll probably find out in a couple of decades once more information becomes part of the public domain.

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