Bob Lazar: Shadows
This is the third in a series of articles resulting from over fifty interviews conducted with people who either know or knew Bob Lazar, have had a role in his story or claims, or would have knowledge relevant to Bob’s story or claims if they are true.
This article mainly explores the period prior to May 1982, when Bob and his then wife Carol moved to Los Alamos, NM. Through interviews with friends, coworkers, and Carol’s family members, it aims to shed light on heretofore unknown aspects of Lazar‘s past, including Carol’s criminal history.
Childhood Friends
In “Dreamland”, his autobiography, Bob recalls the process of completing paperwork for the “Majestic” security clearance he claims was needed to work at S4. This included the task of recalling the names of individuals he had not been in contact with for years. Notably, Bob asserts that he listed on the forms his close childhood friend, Allan Rothberg, among those individuals.
Reference contacts on a security clearance application are people who can speak to the applicant’s character and suitability for a sensitive job. Investigators contact them to verify information and gather additional insights.
On July 16, 2022, Allan Rothberg was interviewed about his experiences and memories of Bob. Two additional follow-up interviews were conducted. The following are passages from the interviews.
Author: Do you know about how old you were when you met him?
Allan Rothberg: I don’t know, five, seven or something. Some preteen year.
I mean, it’s from 50 years old, who the hell knows. Yeah. We were young, we were in — got to think if we were in grade school or only in high school and junior high together, I got to think, no, I got to think we were in grade school together as well. There was an association, there was all the neighborhood kids, and back then it was the baby boom. So we had probably a dozen, if not more kids, all of similar ages. Their parents were all World War II veterans. They’d all moved out to Nassau County to have babies and buy houses and stuff. So we had a big pile of kids that were all about the same age. So we all knew each other at that time. And I believe that, I don’t believe he came in later in, I believe he was there pretty much from the get-go. So probably that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Let’s say 10 years old or younger.
Author: I’m curious what Bob was like.
Allan: I haven’t spoken to Bob in probably 10 years or more, but I’ve run into him a couple of times over the last years before that. He was fairly much the same as he was then, I guess. He tended to be I wouldn’t say a loner, that’s not a dependent, but when he delved into something, he delved deep into it. Way, way back in the day, basically, when transistors were pretty much first at morphing into what would become computers, he basically picked up a book on transistor to transistor logic and resistor a transistor logic and basically read it cover to cover and taught himself how to do all that crap.
Other than that, he was not one for standard educational goals. He wasn’t into math or sciences or English, but when he found something he was interested in, he became interested in it and he dug all the way into it.
Author: In his book, he spends a little bit of it talking about his high school days, and he said that your dad had, he was a teacher at the community college in chemistry.
Allan: Oh yeah. We were — Bob, myself, and another friend, all were junior lunatics and we would do all sorts of weird chemical experiments and we made our own fireworks, for example, things such as that, just because we could. Back then we’d go to the library, get a book, this is how you do this stuff. We got the chemicals and said “Oh look, cool! We can make a bottle rocket” or whatever the hell we would want, decide to make.
Also, later in life, at some point in his life, later on, he became a professional fireworks demonstrator. He worked for townships or villages or whatever the hell, when they did their fireworks displays, he would be their technician and he was licensed by the counties or states or whoever does these licensing things.
Author: You talked about how he worked for, or had some involvement in a fireworks manufacturer and that’s how he got on that track.
Allan: Sure. Again, it’s something he got interested in. When he gets interested in something, he goes 114% into it.
Author: Did he ever tell you about his time out in California?
Allan: I went and visited him a couple of times out there. I didn’t know much about what was going on there, but I went to one of his weddings. We just kind of, once when I was about, I dunno, 20 something like that, and we went out and stayed with him for a couple of days like that and just had some fun there.
Author: Bob has talked about working on music videos, things of that nature.
Allan: Oh yeah, he was into video production, so CGI and anything associated with video production, I guess he was dabbling in that stuff.
There was little question in my mind, at the time, that he was involved in video production. I’d see a commercial with an animated camel going, “Buy our chocolate milk. It’s the best!” I’m like, “yep, Bob did that commercial. I know that one.”
Author: So he would show you his own copy of it?
Allan: No.
Author: He would just say “I did that”?
Allan: Exactly. Which of course means — now, of course, I question whether he actually had anything to do with it at all. He did make claims that, for example, he needed to get high speed computers — or I should say he needed to get powerful computers. I don’t want to say high speed. And at that time, the computing world was not as advanced as it is now, and that meant lots of circuitry, lots of heat. And he said that he had to get special cooling equipment, and they’re approved by the local fire department just to install the stuff in the house just so he could do the video work.
Author: In Los Angeles, did he tell you he was working on films or music videos?
Allan: Yeah, I think he told me he had filmed the music video, he told me he’d shot videos of Blondie. And told me the horrible story “Well, she was shooting up heroin in the back of the film studio or in the lot or set.” That was about it.
Author: Did he mention any other artists?
Allan: None by the name, actually. None. Just that he did that photo shoot. And I, of course, extrapolated means he’s done other photo shoots.
Author: Did Bob seem like he was hanging out with Hollywood people?
Allan: Not to me. No. Not at all.
Actually, I take that back. There was one piece of evidence to the contrary. His sister was — you remember the show Battlestar Galactica? The original one?
His sister was actually engaged to one of the lead stars on that show and I had actually met him. So that’s verifiable.
Author: What was his name?
Allan: Richard… Like Richard Gear, but that’s not the guy’s name.
Author: Richard Hatch?
Allan: Yeah, I think it was Hatch. Yeah. That’s the one, now that I can picture their faces. It was Hatch.
On Bob’s education:
Allan: I’m going to say after high school, I would say it’s pretty much self taught, as far as I know, I don’t believe he ever got any formal education. I don’t know if he ever went to a college. I don’t know that he’s gotten any degrees, or — he probably has certificates because, for example, to be a fireworks demonstrator, you need a probably, I believe the fire department gives you a certificate that you’ve taken their training course or some crap like that. But to my understanding, he doesn’t have a ton of formal education. He’s mostly self-taught.
Author: When you had visited him he wasn’t going to school or anything like that?
Allan: No, the topic never came up. It was never something I thought to ask about. And he certainly wasn’t like, “I got to go to class. See you later,” disappear for a three hour class session. I didn’t even know he’d gone to any college ever.
On Bob’s claim of being a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory:
So I don’t believe Bob ever, again, this is going back to formal training. I doubt significantly Bob — I mean, Bob was, as far as I know, was dyslexic. I shouldn’t say dyslexic. He was a year younger than me, I believe. And so he got the phonetic spelling education that I didn’t get. I got regular training for education for spelling. So his reading skills were not, he had problems with it that I understood, and I never thought he ever went in for formal education for almost anything. Again, the CalTech story’s a bit surprising to me, but physics — I doubt he ever got a degree in physics. To me, that involves far more abstract math. Bob’s research was almost entirely practical application when I knew him. He did stuff like, “I can make this happen, so this is what I’m going to get into.” But matrix manipulation for math, higher level math or theoretical? Not a chance. I shouldn’t say not a chance. I do not see it. I think that’s something that would be not of interest to him, because it’s got no real life correlate. You can’t do something with it. They’d say, oh look, now my videos are twice as, twice as dense, or whatever the heck the use is. But again, who knows what happened after we parted ways.
Author: And that’s my understanding as well, that Bob was pretty talented at the practical application.
Allan: Oh, no, he was good at that. Do not kid yourself. He was building, back in the day when Pong was the first computer game, if you will, or video game, not even a computer game out there. Bob was already delving into building computer circuits. Admittedly not complicated because the hardware simply did not exist at that point, and you couldn’t, but he was already playing around with stuff like that. And so when it became something that was of interesting, something he could do something with, he would do it and he would do it very well. I do not doubt he was gifted in terms of practical applications. I don’t want to shoot down, but it’s just, I don’t see — to me, I mean, we’re talking something that 30 years ago where I was not in close contact, though I might be dead wrong, but to me that does not, that’s not the Bob I knew. I did not see him sitting down and reading an abstract text on physics and going, “yep, I got this,” and learning the math, taking three years of calculus and a year of linear algebra, all the background material, just to be able to comprehend the stuff that’s in the modern physics text. I don’t see it. Doesn’t mean he didn’t do it, but to me it’s just like, that would be outside my ken. But in 30 years, anything could happen.
On Bob’s jet engine powered bike and car:
Allan: He’s done that a couple of times. He’d built a rocket bike, he’d put a propane jet engine on the back of one of his cars. Absolutely. He was big into that. He really liked that. I believe he actually raced those things. I don’t know if professionally, but he certainly raced. His jet bike I’ve seen. The jet car I’ve only seen a picture of, but oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But we’re not talking special science stuff. The stuff that you basically could literally, he quite literally got this out of the back of a Mechanix Illustrated magazine. He may have enhanced it, but that’s what he basically did. He said, “Oh, cool. Jet engine,” got the stuff, welded it to his bike and there you go. But it was not something he developed. Theoretically, it’s something he basically found a practical application for. He may have made it better, but no, this is stuff that was out there back in the eighties, I guess it wouldn’t be seventies — no, even seventies, I would say.
Author: Was that the same kind of engine that he had put into his Honda?
Allan: My expectation is it was probably a larger, more refined version, but probably a similar basis. I would suspect propane was the way he was going. I don’t know what other fuel he could really use that was legally attainable besides propane. Yeah, he certainly wouldn’t do a gas or diesel. It just doesn’t have the energy potential to do it. So propane would probably be it. That would be my assumption from the picture. So I did see one video at some point. God knows when or where, and it certainly looked like a propane fueled engine to me from what I saw from the exhaust.
It’s possible he refined existing designs and patented or claimed as his own the refined designs. That certainly wouldn’t be surprising, but I believe his first introduction to this was again just getting the kit from the back of a Mechanix Illustrated magazine and that was it. Again, he may have taken it further. I couldn’t say at that point.
Bob Lazar appears to have the Gluhareff jet engine designs available for purchase on the United Nuclear website, including the art from the Mechanix Illustrated cover. In the copy, he asserts that the plans include his own modifications.
The original engine & designs were produced by a close friend of Bob Lazar’s, Eugene Gulhareff [sic]. Until his death, Eugene built & sold his engine for decades and met Bob in the late 1970s. Bob occasionally worked with Eugene building engines and also sold plans with some minor modifications he incorporated for Go-Kart & small vehicle use at car shows and race events.
These plans incorporate the performance changes Bob made back then and the engines actually put out about 15% more thrust than advertised. (UnitedNuclear.com)
On Lazar’s Los Alamos photo shop:
Author: I know that he lived in Los Alamos for a certain period of time, and he had ran a photo shop there.
Allan: Really? A photo… you mean literally a place that develops pictures?
That seems awfully, way way too mundane for something for him to do. But if he did, he did. That to me is the most striking statement you’ve made in the entire conversation. That to me is just so utterly mundane and something that I would think would have no appeal for him whatsoever. But he did. Okay. That to me is startling. Okay.
On any contact by investigators working on Bob’s “Majestic” security clearance:
Author: For the security clearance process, they’ll have you provide a list of contacts.
Allan: Kind of like a job reference and it, except it’s now on security classifications, et cetera.
Author: Yes, so my question would be —
Allan: No is the answer before you even asked it. Nobody ever contacted me for clearance for Bob. Not that I ever remember.
Fairchild/Xincom
In 1976, Bob Lazar relocated with his parents to California and enrolled at Pierce Junior College, a public community college located in Woodland Hills. Around the same time, he began working at Fairchild/Xincom, a manufacturer of equipment used to test “bubble memory” devices, a new kind of computer memory that was being developed at the time.
Two of Bob’s former co-workers were interviewed about their recollections of him. Gary Fosburg, and another who asked to be identified only by his first name and last initial, Peter G.
Interview with former Fairchild employee, Gary Fosburg:
Author: You were a coworker of his [Bob Lazar] at Fairchild. Is that right?
Gary Fosburg: Correct. The, the company originally was Xincom and then it got bought up by Fairchild.
Some of the stories are he’d bring his little Honda car to the parking lot, and at lunchtime we’d get him to fire up this little submarine looking power device that could power up and shoot out a beam out of the pull a lever. And his license plate would open up and out. This beam would shoot out the back end, this flame. The thing only weighed like 60 pounds and pumped out like 6,000 pounds of thrust.
So then he was still there, and then from there he went to Los Alamos and we stayed in touch. And that’s where he took that his car, little Honda car. And he got sponsorship from the shock absorber company, a big shock absorber company, so that he could go 200 miles an hour in this jet car. So back in Simi Valley, when we were at Fairchild, he would test track this freeway that hadn’t opened yet and his buddy would drive Bob’s hydrogen powered TransAm, and then follow him and take videos of it as he’s trying to go faster and faster this little Honda jet car.
Yeah, so then he went to Los Alamos and from there he was working on laser technology at the time, but he got the clearance from President Reagan to go to Los Alamos.
Author: Did you work directly with Bob?
Gary: No, my wife did.
Because again, she was the secretary for the department as a manufacturing engineer. He had brought a transcript. He brought a transcript from Nikola Tesla at that point, because his engine, he sold to Borg Warner so that they could launch drones and shoot ’em down because of the amount of thrust that this little baby rocket would put out.
Author: Did Bob ever talk about going to Pierce College?
Gary: Which I went to also.
Author: Did you hear about that?
Gary: No, that was a little junior college in the San Fernando Valley.
I went to that also. But yeah, I went, yeah. I’m sure he went, cause he was studying lots of stuff. He brought a [unintelligble] manuscript from Nikola Tesla. I mean that’s how advanced he was in his thinking process. I mean he’s 15 years old and put a little jet, little jet engine on his old stingray bicycle. And that’s pretty impressive.
Author: Do you know how Bob ended up out at Los Alamos? Did they seek him out? What the hiring process was like? Or did he tell you at all about how he ended up there?
Gary: Well, I don’t know how they got a word about his abilities, but it must have been through his when he sold the rights to his jet car, jet engine to Borg Warner so that they could test drones. Because now these drones could go a lot farther and faster with his technology because they were so much lighter weight compared to the ones they had been using.
So from that, again, to get the Reagan Z clearance, I think it was called, they hired him to take over the rechargeable laser for defense purposes.
Author: One thing that I’ve heard a lot of people mention is that Bob had been working on music videos for various artists when he was in Los Angeles.
Gary: Yeah. That’s when him and his best friend would forge a press pass and throw a bunch of cameras around their neck and then they would crash the concerts.
Author: Did he tell you at all about working on a music video for Blondie or had some kind of role on it?
Gary: I don’t remember a music video. I don’t remember it. But if he said it, it’s true.
Bob was very, he had nothing to hide, and he talked from his heart and everything he said was true. Cause then I’d see all this stuff on TV and it’s like, “yeah right.” They didn’t know him, and that’s why he had come out because he was afraid for his life. So he had to come out because the bad guys were after him. To discredit him.
The Feds and their secrecy and stuff like that just created situations where it was safer for him to come out and say this stuff where he knew that most of the people wouldn’t believe them, but he just had to do that so that the feds would back off as far as trying to [unintelligible] him out.
A follow up interview was conducted some time later:
Author: Do you remember the time period? I know you had said this was around 1981, but my understanding is Bob started working at Fairchild in 1976 and then left in 1982.
Gary: Yeah, I started there in ‘78 and left in like ‘84.
Author: Okay. Was he working there when you started working there?
Gary: Yeah.
Author: And is there a story around the sale of the jet technology to Borg Warner or how did you end up hearing about that?
Gary: I think it was from him, during lunchtime. That he had sold that technology, it was to be able to launch drones.
Yeah. That we would shoot down. So that was probably — well, we moved from one building to the next around ‘81 to another building and he was still there at that time.
And then he left after that when he got clearance from Ronald Reagan, Z Clearance, I think it was. Top secret clearance to go to Los Alamos.
Author: And did you hear about that at the time that he was moving out there?
Gary: Just before.
Author: I want to be sure the time period. There was his work at Los Alamos, and there was the work at S4, and you are referring to Los Alamos. So when he left California and moved to Los Alamos.
Gary: That’s when he got his clearance, cause he was going to be working on some high tech stuff.
Author: So this was when he was moving to Los Alamos?
Gary: Correct.
Author: Did he tell you what type of project he was going to be working on out there?
Gary: Well, I don’t know if I should say what that was.
Author: Is there maybe a general description you could give?
Gary: Yeah, it was laser technology.
Interview with former Fairchild employee, Peter G.:
Peter G: So it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit hazy, but ‘81, ‘82ish. Fairchild used to be in Canoga Park. I left the company before they moved to Simi Valley, about six months before they moved to Simi Valley. I only worked for Fairchild a little bit over a year.
On Carol and Bob, and the jet car:
Author: Do you know how they met by any chance?
Peter: Here’s the deal. At the time — Okay, I’m 65 now. You work the math. He was younger than I, I believe, and everyone thought it was really weird that he was with a woman that appeared to be in her mid forties.
There’s just, everyone was like, “What?” But they were very quiet, onto themselves. They always arrived to work, you know, they rode to work together. And Bob was never a social guy. I mean, he might have been on the spectrum, who knows, but you kind of stayed away from him. It’s like, you know, if we get into rudimentary chit chat, that’s about as far as you’re gonna go, okay?
They used to ride to work together in the brown camaro that said on the side it ran on hydrogen. Never had any proof it did or not. That’s what it said on side of the car.
One day he did show up with a little, I thought it was yellow, like a smaller size Japanese car, kind of a hatchback in which he had the jet engine, I mean the rocket engine. And I saw that being demoed in the parking lot. Alright? And just like Batman, the rear license plate was cut in half. It was springloaded on hinges, and that would pop open. There was a nozzle and that thing was so goddamn loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. Okay? He fired it off once during a lunch break in the parking lot at work. Alright? Now he told me, so I have no reason to, I haven’t verified this, that if he was running — he used to run it on the Simi Freeway, the 118, which is absolutely stupid because that’s where they put all the rookie CHP, California highway patrols that were kind of like ticket happy. Right? And he told me that at night he would run it when there’s hardly any people out there, and if he was going speed limit with gas engine and he popped that thing in, within a second he was going 120. I don’t, I never verified that. Okay? All I know is I did see it. He said he built it and I did see it running.
On Bob’s work at Fairchild and his education:
He was a test technician. I was a senior quality assurance engineer. My whole shtick was incoming parts as they came into the factory, as was Fosburg. Okay? Bob was a technician. We were engineers. So there was like, we would deal with the test engineers more than the technicians. Alright? His girlfriend, his wife was a rework person. So here’s the deal. You are building this board.
It’s a, you know, print circuit board with parts in it. They take the test, well, it fails, it goes to Lazar. He looks at it and goes “Oh yeah, well that part’s in backwards.” He flags all this shit. Carol would get it, change the parts so they were right. Alright? You don’t need to know what I was doing, it’s totally irrelevant to the story. Okay? And he was taking night classes at Pierce College at the time. I remember him talking about that.
So now I have two things for you to think about. One, would it be possible for a person to go from night classes at Pierce College, which was, in the food chain of community colleges in LA, it is the lowest row. Okay? I mean, they used to call it high school with asterisks. Alright? I mean, there’s other schools in the area. Santa Monica College, Los Angeles City College. These are really good schools. Okay? Pierce was not a good school as far as academics.
Would it be possible for him to get a Caltech and MIT or Stanford, whatever he says, to two degrees in that period of time? I would say no. That’s impossible. Okay? So the bottom line, I believe he’s lying about his education.
I will ask you to think about one more thing, that I have an absolutely uninformed opinion on. I would assume that if we had captured technology from another planet, would it be fair to say that that would be the highest level top secret there is?
Why would they let a contract employee even anywhere near there? It makes no sense. I would assume at that level you’d have to have bars and stars on your lapel to get anywhere near that shit. Okay? I mean, our government doesn’t work that way. Alright? I mean, listen, I was a job shopper before I took full-time jobs and there was a thing called Q clearance, but, it wasn’t looking at alien technology. It was, are you able to look at blueprints that go in missiles. Okay? It just doesn’t — I don’t know, man. But that’s speculation, and I reserve the right to be completely wrong.
Aliases
Bob Lazar and his first wife Carol married on July 27th, 1980. According to Carol’s family, they met while working together at Fairchild.
Strong
The name of the bride given on Bob and Carol’s 1980 marriage certificate was Carol Nadine Strong.
Aside from the marriage certificate, no additional public records could be located for a Carol Nadine Strong, birthdate March 21, 1946.
Asher
After Carol’s death on April 21st 1986, the Certificate of Death was issued and listed a different birthdate for Carol — March 21, 1942 — as well as a different surname for her father — Harold Asher.
A record matching this information was located in the California Birth Index.
A copy of Carol’s birth certificate was later provided by her family.
No additional public records were located.
Eslinger
The presentence investigation report provided to the Clark County District Court during the course of Bob Lazar’s 1990 pandering case listed a third surname for Carol.
A presentence investigation report is a document that provides judges with information about a defendant’s background, character, and circumstances in order to inform their sentencing decisions. The report is typically compiled by probation officers and includes information such as the defendant’s criminal history, education, employment history, and family background. The goal of the report is to provide the judge with a comprehensive understanding of the defendant’s life to ensure that the sentence imposed is fair.
During the presentence investigation, Bob was interviewed and questioned about his marital history. He provided the investigator with the name Carol Eslinger.
The sole public record located under this name is a 1970 San Jose, California City Directory listing for Fred and Carol Eslinger.
Carol’s daughter explained the origin of the Eslinger name:
She did have a boyfriend named Freddy Bangert. Freddy Bangert and Carol Asher both used aliases. The Eslinger name came from Freddy’s aunt, and so they both used that name for a while.
An extensive search of archived newspaper articles revealed more information about Carol’s past, and a likely reason for the use of an alias and false birthdate on the 1980 marriage certificate.
A Troubled Life
On June 12th, 1974, Carol Nadine Eslinger and two associates — Gary Burkett, a member of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and his wife Victoria — entered the home of Dennis Passaro.
Mr. Passaro and Mrs. Burkett had allegedly gotten into a violent argument weeks prior.
According to testimony presented in court, the three individuals — armed with pistols— entered the house. Carol held a guest of Passaro’s, Eugene Day, at gunpoint in an adjacent room while the other two stabbed and shot Mr. Passaro to death. Day heard the sound of gunfire and saw blood spatter. After Passaro had been killed, the attackers handcuffed Day to a shelf bracket and handed him a syringe, which he was told contained a solution that would incapacitate him. The attackers ordered Day to inject himself with the solution so they could escape. Day, however, managed to inject only a small amount, squirting the rest of the solution onto the floor. The arm that was injected later required surgery to repair the damage the “caustic” solution had caused.
At some point, Day was able throw a wall plaque at Carol and escape to a neighbor’s house, where he contacted authorities.
The Yuba City Incident
On the evening of June 13th, 1974 — the day after Passaro’s murder — a routine tow truck call led to Carol’s second arrest. Carol and a 15-year-old boy had become stuck in riverbed mud in her car and required a tow truck to pull them out. A tow truck arrived, and the car was towed to a nearby shop for repairs.
However, when the tow truck driver arrived at the shop, Carol and the boy had fallen asleep in the truck. Suspecting that something was amiss, the truck driver called the police.
Upon their arrival, the police officers awakened Carol and the boy and conducted a search of the car. During the search, they discovered amphetamine powder and tablets, as well as stolen goods. Both were promptly arrested and charged with possession of dangerous drugs and possession of property with altered serial numbers.
Sentencing
On July 18, 1974, Carol was arrested for her involvement in Passaro’s death, and was charged with second-degree murder, conspiracy, and false imprisonment.
After an initial not guilty plea, she eventually plead guilty to the second degree murder charge.
On March 12th, 1975, Carol was sentenced to prison at Frontera, a women’s correctional institution located in Chino, California.
The length of Carol’s sentence was not reported. At the time, the minimum sentence for second-degree murder in California was set at five years. Garry Burkett, who also pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, received an indeterminate prison sentence ranging from five to fifteen years with an additional enhancement.
How much of the likely five year sentence Carol actually served remains uncertain. Per California law, she would have been required to serve a minimum of two-thirds of her sentence before becoming eligible for release. Based on this requirement and accounting for time served, the earliest date for her potential release would have been November 1977.
Carol’s life was shaped by a variety of challenges, including early exposure to drugs and crime, a lifelong addiction to amphetamines, and several pregnancies, all of which she put up for adoption. Three of her family members were interviewed about her life and her marriage to Bob Lazar: Susan Haack, one of Carol’s adopted-out daughters; Don Lenihan, Carol’s cousin; and Renee Wakefield, another cousin.
Susan Haack
Interview with Susan Haack, Carol’s second adopted out child:
Author: Walk me through the process of finding Carol.
Susan Haack: So I went in search of my natural mother when I was 38, which was about 32 years ago. So 1992ish is when I started and I hired an adoption search group and they couldn’t come up with all the information. They could only come up with the fact that she was deceased, but they did have her mother’s phone number. So I called her mother and after I explained who I was, the phone call was very unpleasant and that was the end of it. But not too long after that, Carol’s cousin, Donald Lenihan called me and said that he had gotten the information from Carol’s mother and he was very nice and we talked at length. He kept telling me that I needed to speak with Dean because Carol and Dean were supposedly very close. He also gave me a phone number to a Renee Wakefield, who was Carol’s cousin.
So Don would not give me Dean’s phone number saying he was very private, but he agreed to pass mine along, but said, don’t expect him to call you because he’s very private. Well, he called me a couple hours later and he told me all about who Carol was and he knew she was deceased, but he did not know much. He said none of the family knew anything, that Bob Lazar had called some of the family or one person in the family like three or four days after she died, but didn’t give any details. I really wanted to know how she died and what went on so I dug in deeper. I dug in deeper and eventually obtained her birth certificate, her death certificate, and made contact with Bob Lazar.
Bob Lazar didn’t tell me much other than that she had killed herself. He made mention of the fact that him and I were the same age and he sent me a video tape of Carol and him and sent me some pictures. I left out the part about how I found Bob Lazar. I knew that Carol died in Las Vegas, and I’d watched a news report where a reporter from Las Vegas was talking about something. So I made note of his name, George Knapp was his name, and I found him by leaving messages at different TV stations, and he eventually called me and when I explained to him who I was and that I was looking for Bob Lazar he said, “Well, I knew your mother, Carol. She was a nice lady. I can’t give you Bob’s information because everybody’s looking for him due to the UFO stuff.” But he said, “I’ll give him your number.” And Bob called me. And that was the conversation where he told me Carol had killed herself.
So he did send me a lot of pictures, and I had a lot of pictures of Carol. I still didn’t feel like I had a complete story. So now I knew where I came from and I knew her name and I knew that she was dead and that she’d been married to this guy named Bob Lazar, who seemed pretty strange to me. So I started doing research, my own research on the whole thing and found why Bob Lazar was semi-famous. I think we had one or two conversations after that. He was surprised that I had came looking because he didn’t think Carol had any kids. She told him she didn’t have any kids. I started looking for siblings before Ancestry came along, but my resources were limited. Eventually Ancestry came along and at that point I found four other siblings, and I also found out that Carol had had six kids and all between 1959 and 1968.
Author: Walk me through how you learned about Carol’s background.
Susan: So I learned about Carol’s life. I actually had a great picture painted to me by her cousin, Dean. Dean and Carol were very close and Dean knew her whole life story. And so a couple phone calls with Dean and he invited me to his house in North Carolina where we looked at pictures. Dean and I ended up being very close and I was thankful for that because it was my only connection to where I came from. After a couple conversations, or maybe after our meeting in person, he shared a lot of things with me and he shared that Carol had gone to prison, and I thought it was for accessory to murder, but I might be a mistaken. Apparently, she went in the home with the person that pulled the trigger. She did not pull the trigger, but she went in the home with the person, so she was charged with it.
Carol had one older brother named Jimmy. And Carol, Jimmy, and Dean all ran around together. Dean was part of a motorcycle gang, a rather notorious one. And so Carol had many boyfriends that were friends of Dean’s. Her brother Jimmy tried to integrate himself, but he was kind of not allowed into things. He was seen as somebody that just couldn’t run with them. But Carol and Dean ran around together through their teenage years up until she married Bob Lazar. Dean didn’t know anything about Carol past Bob Lazar, except for one time she came to visit with Bob Lazar. Dean recollected that the visit was strange. But Carol, according to what Dean told me, was pregnant many times. She used drugs through most of her pregnancies.
I was the second child she gave up for adoption. Dean couldn’t remember exactly who my father was because Carol had quite a few boyfriends. But she seemed to me from Dean, from the picture Dean painted, as a pretty happy go-lucky person without any responsibilities. As I learned more about her, and as Dean came clean about more things, I realized that she had a rather sad childhood. Not a lot of parental guidance. And because of the way her mother was, I felt that’s the reason she turned out the way she was. Not motherly material and not somebody that wanted to be bound by responsibility.
I eventually made contact with the other person, Renee Wakefield, after I got to know Dean a little bit. And Renee told me that when she was younger, all the women — the parents, as in Carol’s mother, her name was Verda, they called her Scotty, and there was three other sisters — that all of them used benzedrine pills — those were, that’s what a doctor prescribed, was Benzedrine pills. They called them mini whites in those days — That all the older generation women used them. So she wasn’t surprised when Carol started using them. From the things I learned, I would say Carol’s drug history started before 1959 because I was born in 1959, and from my own walk of life, I feel I was probably born addicted to amphetamine. From what my adoptive mother tells me about my temperamental, about how I was as a baby. I eventually, knowing my own, knowing things myself about substance abuse, I felt like I had probably been born addicted.
And then learning from Dean and Renee about the rampant methamphetamine use confirmed that to me. So I think she started using it before 1959, and I think that she probably used methamphetamine, which is really the same thing as benzedrine. Benzedrine is something that a doctor prescribes as a pill — that’s mini whites. But somewhere along the line, some backyard chemists learned to make this stuff and that’s what they called crank. Now the motorcycle group that I was speaking of is notorious for using crank. They control the crank in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles — where I was from — in Oakland where the motorcycle gang originated. It’s a big thing amongst that group. And from the people that I talked to, and at one point I also talked to the ex-wife of Jimmy Asher, and I can’t remember her name, but she told me that they were all addicted to crank.
And that one time she went with Jimmy over to Carol’s house. Carol lived with a biker, and Jimmy and his wife scored some crank from them. She recollected that Carol answered the door in her underwear with a blanket sort of wrapped around herself, let them in, gave them a powdered substance in a baggie, and they left. She recollected that Carol was mean and no niceties were exchanged. She just basically let them in, grumbled a little bit, and handed them something, the baggie. So going back to, I believe she started before 1959, I don’t know if that carried on when she was with Bob Lazar or not. I know that it carried on all through her closeness with Dean. But once again, Dean and Carol kind of went their separate ways when she married Bob Lazar.
Author: Did Dean tell you anything about his recollections of Bob?
Susan: Yes, Dean said that when Carol showed up with Bob, he was surprised because Bob was not Carol’s usual type. He had already told me that she hung around with and had friends and boyfriends that were bikers. And he said when she showed up with Bob Lazar, he was surprised. And I believe Bob Lazar was sort of the butt of family jokes because he was thought of as a geek.
Author: Did he have any specific memories about meeting Bob or any experiences with Bob that he thought were notable or did he share any?
Susan: He just said that he felt the guy overstepped, that he felt like he was asked too many questions and was too inquisitive. He said that he was uncomfortable with him.
Author: Could you talk a little bit more about, or walk me through your conversation with George Knapp, and trying to find Bob and in as much detail as possible, your conversations with Bob and your efforts to learn more from him.
Susan: Yes. The first time that I talked to George, like I said, I left a message at, either I knew what TV station he was at or I just left a message at a few. Maybe I inquired if they knew him and left a message. And he did call me back and he was very nice. And when I told him who I was, Carol Nadine Asher’s daughter that was adopted out, and that I was trying to find Bob Lazar and he said, “Well, good luck. Everybody’s trying to find Bob Lazar.” And I said, “Well, but you know him, right?” I’m not sure how I knew he knew him, but I knew that he did. And he said, “Yeah, I know him. He’s a friend of mine and I can take a message and pass it to him and maybe he’ll call you.” And he said, “By the way, I knew your mother. She was a nice lady, but I didn’t know her well.” So, Bob Lazar did call me. He called me back rather quickly.
I found him to be talkative and almost jovial. He said at one point, once he knew the date I was born, he said, “Oh, isn’t that funny? I was born the same date as you, and technically I’m your stepfather. Hahaha.” I thought it was weird that he was making light of this, and I wanted details. And he didn’t give me any details other than to say that she asphyxiated herself in the race car that he had built her. He did talk about the race car, he talked about them racing cars. I think it was, I don’t know exactly where it was, maybe Utah, somewhere where they would race the cars and that he got some notoriety from the car that he built.
He built it to run on jet fuel so that it could go very fast, that the police were always harassing him. So they would go somewhere out in the desert to race the car. He said Carol had wanted the car, and because he had the knowledge of how to build it, he had turned her old Honda into a race car. So he shared that with me. He said that he had the video of her and some pictures. He also said he had some print books that she liked Salvador Dali, and had art books by him. And so he offered to send those things to me, and I was very receptive to that. And I gave him my address, and we ended the phone call. I did get the things in the mail. I got a videotape that I later converted to disc, and I got quite a few pictures from him, one of the race car with Carol behind it. I had more questions after we hung up weeks or months later, because he was the last person that had contact with my mom and I just didn’t feel like I knew everything. So I called him back and wasn’t able to reach him. So I called George Knapp back and George Knapp said, “I have nothing more to talk about with you, and I’ll give Bob a message.” And Bob never called.
George Knapp, I should add here. George Knapp seemed a lot different in this conversation than he had in the initial. In the initial conversation he was more welcoming. In the second conversation, he seemed very guarded.
Author: Did you ever get any information or get any sense for how long Carol had been in prison for?
Susan: I can’t remember if I got a definitive answer on that. I knew that it had been years, but I don’t know if it was two or three or seven or eight. No, I don’t know the amount of time if I did learn it, it doesn’t come to mind now.
Author: Could you tell me your understanding of Carol’s use of the last name Eslinger and then the last name Strong?
Susan: I knew the last name Strong because of my own research. Carol’s mother Verda was married to a strong, Robert Strong. So that was my first, okay, maybe she was going by that name for whatever reason, she was close to her stepfather, whatever. But as Maryanne and I moved closer, I asked her about the last name Eslinger, and why Carol was going by the last name of Strong. And she said both Freddy and Carol used Aliases and she wasn’t sure why. She just knew that they used aliases. And she said Eslinger was actually her sister’s husband’s last name. So one of Freddy’s aunts was an Eslinger, and he chose to use that last name.
Don Lenihan
Interview with Carol’s cousin, Don Lenihan:
Author: How were you related to Carol?
Don Lenihan: My cousin. My first cousin.
Author: And were you guys close or how much did you know each other?
Don: Pretty close. Yeah. There was not a lot of time that we ever lived far from each other. Maybe like a year once in a while without seeing each other, but never more than a year, usually four or five times a year. And we always kept in touch, partied a lot.
Author: Do you know when she would’ve started working at Fairchild? It was an electronics manufacturer.
Don: She was working in electronic plants. Oh, God. Thinking of the timing by how old I was. And I’m thinking I was 18, and I’m 70 now. I was 18. She worked at, I’m thinking IBM. But now that Fairchild — Fairchild is ringing a bell, so I’m thinking maybe that was it.
Author: Did you have any understanding of their relationship? I think Bob was about 20 at the time. She would’ve been 17 years older than him, which is — it’s an age gap. That’s a little it’s a bit more than usual. So I’ve been trying to figure out how they met, what their relationship was like, what they bonded over.
Don: Okay. I remember Bob — they came to Clear Lake. I don’t know how long they stayed, and that’s when I met Bob. But we got along really well. First thing. Yeah, first thing she came in the house and she says, “Alright, Donnie, promise me you won’t laugh.” Cause I knew they were married, they had got married. Maybe they hadn’t got married yet, but they were together anyway. And she told me, “Donnie, promise me you won’t laugh now.” “I ain’t going to laugh at nobody,” I said, “maybe I might be snickering behind your back”. She said, “I know that.” And then I met him, and I really liked the guy! I thought he was pretty cool. And they were telling me that, he was telling me about, he had a Firebird, nice looking car, I mean hotter than not. And he took me for a ride. And he could run it on hydrogen gas, liquid hydrogen, or gasoline. And he had a still that he made his hydrogen gas in his garage. He didn’t have to pay for or get regular gas, regular fuel. To me, that was just too cool. Well, we seen them then and talked to ’em and then — oh, okay, okay, look, just coming back — I went to their wedding in Woodland Hills, now Los Angeles, in the Los Angeles area at his family’s house. And they were pretty well to do. They had the guy that starred in Star Wars, I can’t think of his name. I wasn’t never a Star Wars fan, but he was at their wedding. And the whole theme was the theme to Star Wars.
Author: Would it have been Battlestar Galactica?
Don: Yeah, you’re right. You’re exactly right. Exactly.
Author: So I think it was probably Richard Hatch you’re talking about, right?
Don: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s when she told me not to laugh. That’s when I met Bob.
Author: And why was she telling you not to laugh? Because he was so young?
Don: Nerd looking, a nerd looking guy. I expected her with somebody riding a Harley. I mean, we were all into motorcycles. I was a little late in the ass. I didn’t do the riding and stuff like my brother, but I wasn’t 6'4", I’m 5'7". And back in the days I’d fight a rattlesnake. And now after I did some time in CYA fire camp, I got out. That wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I changed. I got out of the riding. But anyway, that, that’s when I met Bob was at the wedding though, and then he came up to Clear Lake. Kelseyville.
On Carol’s drug use:
Don: It was just that drugs were just common. Just common. It was not most normal suburban families, you know, stay away from drugs and you just stay away from those people. But it was just, they were there. I mean, well, it was our life.
Author: She was on these amphetamines or these tablets even during the time she was with Bob?
Don: Oh yeah. I’m sure of that, yeah.
Renee Wakefield
Interview with Renee Wakefield, Carol’s cousin:
[Renee’s recollection below is that Carol used heroin, however the rest of the family — who were older and closer to Carol — have stated unequivocally that Carol did not use heroin.]
Renee Wakefield: I was never close to Carol. I was very close to her mom, my Aunt Scotty and everybody. I grew up with the aunts and my grandparents in Clear Lake. But like I said, Carol was more my mom’s age. And I know that I, I remember some of the drama that my grandparents went through when she got rid of all those children. But other than that, I don’t know much about Carol. Carol went to prison, and my grandparents supported her, and they were always behind their family. And my grandfather was a patriarch, so he stood behind everybody at all times.
Author: Do you know how long she was in prison for?
Renee: So I don’t for sure, but I’m going to say she got a college education while she was in prison. I know that. So I’m going to say between I’m, I’m thinking it’s close to eight years, but it could be less, but it’s no more.
Author: One of the questions I’ve had is how her and Bob met.
Renee: What was he, I mean, here’s this guy. I remember when we went to his house in 80 it was actually in March of ‘80, and they had built this laser, laser cyber optic thing in their living room. And it seemed so odd to me that someone like him would be with Carol. Carol’s a freaking heroin addict, nasty, mean ass woman. Yeah, I’m sorry. But she was not nice. And maybe she never had anything to be nice about. I don’t know. And her mother, my Aunt Scotty, was a mean son of a bitch. And that’s mom, grandmother and Carol too. They’re mean. So they’re cut from the same cloth. Most definitely. But I don’t know why. I always wondered why and how they hooked up, but I don’t know.
Author: Did you get a sense for how long they had been together?
Renee: I felt like it was right around 1980. I never heard of him before until I needed help in the Bay Area. We had car trouble and we were stuck, and were just kids. And I called home and my grandparents called Aunt Scotty and they got Carol’s address and had us get a cab to Carol’s to get some help with the car and have a place to stay. And they made it clear we weren’t welcome and it didn’t work out so good. But that was in March of 1980. That’s the first time I ever met Bob, was in 1980. And I never heard of him before. And I think that had to be close to the time Carol got out of prison, because I never heard anything about Carol until then.
Author: And were they married at that point?
Renee: I’m going to say yeah. They had, yeah, I’m going to say they were. So I remember we were there for about 30 minutes and they were working — what they told us, and they had this big video screen going — that Bob was working on a video with Blondie, Debbie Harry. And that he was doing that, and they were living together. And as far as I know, yes, I’m pretty sure they were married.
Author: Do you remember any other details?
Renee: That’s the only thing. What they told me was that they had just left doing a video for Blondie, and they had it playing up on a big screen in their living room that was up on the wall.
Author: Both of them were saying this?
Renee: They were both in the living room. Carol’s the one who was talking about it. I don’t remember Bob saying much of anything.
The Blondie thing, I don’t know if that was true or not. That maybe just, you know. Carol seemed pretty — I remember thinking, this is the oddest thing ever. What the hell? Here’s Carol in this big beautiful house with this guy who can build fiber optics and doing videos of Blondie. How the hell did this happen? I remember going away from there, shaking my head. What the hell?
Author: Was it hard to imagine Bob being with Carol and not being somebody who uses himself?
Renee: Makes no sense whatsoever. Carol’s insane. I mean, just the epitome of heroin her whole life. Carol is the epitome of the end of the fifties, beginning of the sixties beatniks. And now they call them goth, but she was a beatnik, the black makeup, the black hair, the black look. And you could tell she was a heroin addict. I remember going to her apartment in Redwood City and my grandparents rescuing her, I don’t know how many times. And we were just kids. Now I know that she was getting rid of babies. I thought she was sick, but she was getting rid of babies. And I just don’t understand how, if he’s such a good guy, what the hell? What kind of transition did she do in prison? Because it would had to be huge to make her any kind of asset to society whatsoever.
Maybe he was impressed. Maybe was impressed with her. So the one thing that I can say is through my Uncle Dean, there was a lot of connections in the underworld, I guess you would call it the underworld — access to the Chicken Ranch [Later corrected to the Mustang Ranch]. And exciting things that the Hells Angels were doing at that time, which not everybody sees as exciting, but I mean, I was enamored by my uncles. I had trouble in school once and my grandparents called the Hells Angels. They came up, took me to school. I never had trouble in school again. I mean, maybe it was a youngster looking at that Hells Angels thing, because I was enamored by it at that age. My uncle was one of the good — or I call him my uncle cause I grew up with him like an uncle. But he is my cousin, Dean. And I mean, he was a good guy. And the Hells Angels were pretty good people. My grandma cooked for them. I think maybe it was just enamored, because the age difference and everything, little boy maybe. I don’t know. That’s all I can think.
Security Clearances
Carol and Bob began work at Los Alamos National Laboratory as contract technicians after moving to Los Alamos in May of 1982. Several former Los Alamos National Laboratory employees confirmed that contractors were allowed to begin work at the lab in unclassified/non-sensitive areas before their background investigation was complete and security clearance granted.
When determining suitability for a high-level security clearance, personal relationships and associations can play a crucial role. Marrying someone with a criminal record, a background of drug abuse, and ties to a notorious criminal organization such as the Hells Angels would likely raise serious concerns during a security clearance investigation.
The government places a premium on judgment, character, and insusceptibility to influence or coercion, all of which can be called into question when an individual chooses to marry someone with a history of drug abuse and violent crime. Furthermore, any ties to criminal organizations such as the Hells Angels could be seen as evidence of potential loyalty conflicts, and could raise concerns about an individual’s susceptibility to blackmail.
It’s uncertain whether the issues in this particular case would have disqualified Bob Lazar from receiving a security clearance. Ultimately, the agency seeking the clearance — here, the Department of Energy — is charged with considering all of the information and making a determination.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has previously given an official statement that addresses the matter:
Bob Lazar was affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory through his work as a subcontractor. He was never employed by the University of California, which held the management and operating contract for Los Alamos at the time of his affiliation, and there is no record that he held a security clearance at Los Alamos.
Additional material, such as full newspapers articles and photos, will be published on Twitter: @SignalsIntelUFO
