Bob Lazar: There’s More to the Story
This is the first 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.
All of the interviews in this article are transcribed from recorded audio. They have been edited for readability as they were conversational in nature—the answers are verbatim.
Bob Lazar’s Work at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Bob has long claimed that he was hired as a physicist at Los Alamos in May of 1982.
Lazar: I worked at Los Alamos National Lab.
Knapp: As a physicist?
Lazar: As a physicist
As evidence of his employment as a phycisist, Bob Lazar, George Knapp and others who have credited his story have pointed to a Los Alamos Monitor article published on June 27, 1982.
The author of the article, Terry England, wrote the following:
To Lazar, a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, the important thing is the jet engine. It’s something he’s been working on for years.
Whether or not England had made any efforts to verify that Lazar was, in fact, a physicist at Los Alamos has been debated ever since.
In July of 2020 during Joe Rogan’s podcast with Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, Corbell said he had spoken with Terry England and asked him the question directly:
Corbell: I finally got an interview with the guy that wrote that article two weeks ago, so the guy — Terry English [sic] — right. Finally, after all this time, he called me back — three years late you know [unintelligble] put him in the movie — and I said “Look here’s the point, you said Bob Lazar was a physicist at Los Alamos. So how did you base that? You’re writing a paper…” and he goes “yeah,” — and it got picked up by AP news — he goes “if I had misrepresented that he was a physicist at Los Alamos I would have been blackballed by everybody at Los Alamos. They take that very seriously. He was a physicist. I reported it. AP News picked it up, they repeated it. Not word one from anybody saying he wasn’t a physicist at Los Alamos.” (Joe Rogan Experience #1510)
I spoke with Terry England in August of 2021 to confirm the account that Jeremy Corbell gave of their conversation. England did not recall making the statements attributed to him by Corbell.
Author: Did you ever follow up to actually verify his claim that he was a physicist, or did you just take that at face value?
Terry England: I kind of took it at face value. I talked to a lot of guys up there at Los Alamos who were nuclear physicists and I pretty much accepted what they said.
Author: Did you speak to some people to ask if he was a physicist?
England: No. Maybe I should have, but I had no reason to doubt him at the time.
Author: In Jeremy Corbell’s recent documentary, he said that he talked to you and you told him that you had confirmed he was physicist.
England: I don’t remember saying that. It’s possible, but I don’t remember saying that. Because I don’t remember doing it.
Author: He said that you told him if you hadn’t have looked into that you would have been “blackballed” in the community.
England: He said I said that?
Author: Yeah.
England: I don’t think so.
In addition to England’s recollection that he did not try to verify Bob Lazar’s role at Los Alamos, Lazar himself gave an interview on the radio show The Billy Goodman Happening on December 20th, 1989 where he gives more detail about the timeline and nature of his role at Los Alamos:
I have two masters degrees; one’s in physics; one’s in electronics. I wrote my thesis on MHD, which is magnetohydrodynamics. I worked at Los Alamos for a few years as a technician and then as a physicist in the Polarized Proton Section, dealing with the accelerator there. (Billy Goodman Happening 12–20–89)
In this interview — a month after Knapp‘s first report identifying him— Bob claims that he was hired as a technician and remained in that role “for a few years” before becoming a physicist.
However, Bob confirms in the Los Alamos Monitor article that he had only just moved to Los Alamos the month before. Separately, Los Alamos has verified that he began work at the lab on May 18th, 1982.
If he had only begun work at the lab little more than a month before his interview with Terry England for the Monitor article, and was a technician at the lab “for a few years”, he could not have been a physicist at the time the Los Alamos Monitor article was published.
I am not aware of any lab employees who have made public statements regarding Bob’s work at Los Alamos. George Knapp has claimed that he has spoken with former employees who worked with Bob and verified that he was a physicist, however these claims were made informally and off the record. Knapp has said that those employees were friends of Lazar’s and has only specifically named Joe Vaninetti as being one who confirmed it.
However, Vaninetti has never said anything publicly regarding Lazar’s role at the lab.
There is substantial evidence Vaninetti had a signficiant interest in UFOs and was involved in UFO research with Bob both before and after Bob claims to have worked at S4. For example, Bob Lazar and Joe Vaninetti had visited the vicinity of Groom Lake(Area 51) in the months before Bob claimed to have worked at the site. Vaninetti later attended media interviews with Bob, and even plays a minor role in Bob’s story wherein he accompanies Bob to a Las Vegas casino for a clandestine meeting with Bob’s former supervisor at S4, Dennis Mariani.
The following are the first published interviews with former Los Alamos National Laboratory employees who knew or worked with Bob Lazar at the lab.
The Physicist
I was able to identify two former lab employees who worked directly with Bob and were able to speak to what he did at Los Alamos and the circumstances of his departure.
The first former lab employee is the physicist who ran the lab Bob claimed he worked in as a physicist, the Polarized Proton section. This physicist’s name is John Jarmer.
Jarmer worked at the lab for over two decades in the Polarized Proton section.
John Jarmer, Bob Lazar, and Joe Vaninetti’s Lab Directory Entries:
Bob’s friend and colleague Joe Vaninetti — who worked in the lab as a technician with him — is listed as an author on multiple original research papers alongside John Jarmer:
I have confirmed with multiple former lab employees and lab documentation that Jarmer worked in the Polarized Proton section as Bob Lazar’s direct supervisor.
The following are excerpts from an interview of physicist John Jarmer conducted in July of 2021:
Author: Does [the name Bob Lazar] ring a bell?
John Jarmer: Yes, it does.
Author: I was just trying to to verify that he actually was a physicist working on that [Polarized Proton] project.
John: No. He’s not a physicist — to the best of my knowledge.
Author: Could you tell me what role you remember him having?
John: Well, when I was at Los Alamos at the lab working, he did some electrical technician work that I’m aware of. There was no reference to him ever having a background in physics. If he does, he should be able to put forth his degree credentials, wherever they’re from.
Author: Could you tell me a little bit about what kind of work he would have done?
John: Possibly some electronics associated with the project that he was working in support of. I mean, it could be — I’m not saying this is anything related to what he’s claiming or what he may have done — but as an example of what a support electrical tech would do would be if you were setting up an experiment and you needed to have an interface module to go betwen the detectors that were being used, interfacing into the computer and putting that system together and the cabling. That would be an example. Not what he may have done, but what a support tech could do.
Author: Was the lab closed to the public, would you have had to go through security to get in there?
John: Yes, you had to have a clearance and a badge to be able to get into the site where I worked.
Author: So he would have had a clearance?
John: I don’t know the status of any of the clearance he would have had, but you did have to show your ID badge to have access to the site.
Author: Did you have any experience with him? What was your read on him?
John: He was there for a limited period of time, and he didn’t overly impress me as being the sharpest knife in the drawer or anything like that. That’s what I’ll leave it at.
Author: You were there for the whole time that he was there?
John: I retired in 2006, so that span that I was there would have covered the time he was there.
Author: I have heard that the reason Bob lost his job was that he was using government property to work on personal projects.
John: I don’t have a comment relative to that.
A brief follow-up was conducted in January of 2022:
John: When he worked for my section, I can’t even remember the length of time but it wasn’t too long, but I can’t make any comment on what happened after he wasn’t working with us. When I say us, I mean myself and the technicians that were working with me.
Author: But he worked as an electrical technician in his capacity in your lab?
John: Yeah, that’s correct.
Author: Would you have any reason to believe that he moved into a higher role?
John: No. As I said, when he stopped working with us he was, I’ll use the term a “temporary” guy that was working with us. After he stopped working with us, I didn’t follow him any way, form, or fashion. I got on with the detailed work that our section was involved in and moved on from that point. If he worked at the lab after he worked for us in the polarized target section then he would be able to give the name of the group or individuals that he worked with.
Author: Do you happen to remember the name of the other technician that worked with Bob? I believe Joe Vaninetti was one of them, but my understanding was there were three.
John: Joe Vaninetti was one, for sure — I would have to think about that for a while before I would say what the other technicians are.
The Administrator
The second former lab employee I identified who had worked with Bob had multiple roles at the lab but had engaged with Bob in an administrative role. I am not able to mention what role specifically as he did not want to be identified. I will refer to him as “Fred”.
The following are excerpts of an interview conducted in January of 2022.
Author: Does the name Bob Lazar ring any bells?
Fred: Yeah.
Author: It does?
Fred: It does.
Author: I spoke to John Jarmer, he did remember Bob and was able to tell me a little bit about his recollection, but I was hoping you might be able to tell me a little more.
Fred: I am really reluctant to get into that. I was [describes role in relation to John’s laboratory]. So yes, I know the person in question, but I really don’t want to get involved in anything having to do with him.
Author: I’m really trying to get a sense for who Bob was and the kind of role that he had there. And even if you were to tell me that completely off the record, I would be very curious to hear about that. And I do understand the hesistance.
Fred: OK. The really short part of the answer is Bob is very smart. But a crooked, bent person. I don’t believe he had — I don’t even know that he finished high school. He certainly had no college education, and he never worked for Los Alamos Laboratory. OK. He was employed by Butler [Fred later clarified he meant Kirk-Mayer], who supplied contract technicians to the laboratory. And beyond that, you know, I’ve heard and seen some of the stuff that’s been published, and most of it is fantasy. He worked at the laboratory for a short time, got crosswise with the management because he was misusing the laboratory telephones. And so they let him go, which was easy because he didn’t work for the lab.
Back in the late 70s, early 80s, there was a. U.S. government supported thing called the WATS — wide area telephone service. And if you had an access number you could get on and call pretty much anywhere in the country without any charge. And so he was running some kind of business using the telephone system.
Author: Just to be clear, he was not a physicist at the lab?
Fred: No.
Author: Do you know how long he worked there for?
Fred: A matter of a few months. And, then again, it’s been 40 years… It was less than a year.
Author: Bob’s wife also worked at the lab, her name was Carol Lazar.
Fred: Yep. Again, as a contract technician.
Author: I was told that she had the contract to fix the alpha probes. Do you have an awareness of that?
Fred: To fix what?
Author: I guess they had the contract to fix the alpha radiation probes?
Fred: Yes, the detectors, they basically had a thin foil window, which was easily damaged. And they had set up to replace those busted windows.
Author: Do you have any recollection of anything that happened after he left the lab.
Fred: Well he did run the one hour photo processing business. At some point he shut that down and left.
When asked who else worked with Bob and would be worth speaking to, Fred referred me to Joe Vaninetti as he was one of the other two technicians in Jarmer’s lab at the time Bob worked there.
I identified and interviewed one more former lab employee who worked in a scientific role in the Meson Physics facility and knew of Bob Lazar, though only because he had worked closely with John Jarmer and had heard about Bob through him and other colleagues in a “water cooler” setting. He did not want to be identified due to the nature of the conversation. I will refer to him as “Henry”.
The following are excerpts of an interview conducted in January of 2022:
Author: Do you recognize the name Bob Lazar?
Henry: Is he possibly the guy that was out at Las Vegas?
Author: That’s right, that would be the one.
Henry: I’ve heard the name. Heard a few things about him.
Author: I’ve talked to a couple of people at the lab who do remember him, I was wondering if you have any recollection of the time that he was there or what he might have done?
Henry: You know, I, I was there from what, ’72 to I guess 2008. Well, but most of the time, I was always out at the linear accelerator and mostly to do in the engineering department. I heard his name, you know, bandied about a few times, but I really didn’t know anything about him there.
Author: Do you remember anything you heard about him while he was working for the lab?
Henry: Well, unfortunately, one guy I know that worked with him for awhile was Joe King, he got killed in a motorcycle wreck.
Author: Was he [Joe King] a technician?
Henry: Yes.
Author: I know there were three technicians, Joe Vaninetti, Bob, and one more.
Henry: Yeah, I knew Vaninetti. Another tech that worked there for a long time was Joe [King], but Joe, he got killed in a motorcycle wreck, God, I don’t know, 20 years ago, I guess, or more up here somewhere.
I told Henry about my conversation with John Jarmer, and asked him if John had ever shared anything about Bob.
Henry: Yeah. I had heard John mention him because I worked with John for a long, long time.
Author: I know John didn’t seem to have a high opinion of Bob.
Henry: Yes. I think that I would probably say that. I’d believe that that would be John’s opinion.
Author: Did he tell you anything specific or just Bob’s general work?
Henry: No, no. Just the only thing he ever said mostly was the work ethic, which apparently he didn’t think was very high, and John believed in — John was out there many hours every day. He believed in working.
Author: Bob wrote a book a couple of years ago, and he talked about pulling, I guess, pranks at the lab. Which would be, I think, would be frowned upon.
Henry: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff out there that didn’t go over real well with those… There were some fairly serious people. And, you know, doing some fairly serious work. So that sort of thing was frowned upon pretty highly.
Author: From what I understand, he worked out there for less than a year.
Henry: Yeah, it was a very short, pretty short span. I heard a few things, but that was, you know, the old lab grapevine.
Author: Would you be able to share with me anything you heard? Even things that were just water cooler talk?
Henry: The only thing that I remember ever really hearing was, you know, the guy didn’t… He didn’t do anything while he was there, apparently. And I know that that was what John thought, that he was a complete waste of time.
Author: I spoke to another man who had worked around Bob, what he told me was that at some point Bob had been making long distance calls on the laboratory phones to run a side business, and from what this other gentleman said Bob had been let go after using the phone system for his side business had come to light or come to management’s attention.
Henry: I remember at the lab there were a number of people that left under similar circumstances. They thought that that would be okay, there were people that seemed to think that because the government was paying for it that it was okay.
Author: You know, it’s funny, the lab directory specifically talks about making personal long distance calls. It does seem that they had maybe run into that problem before.
Henry: They definitely did. There were, I remember, places out there where, you know, there would be phones in buildings that had experiments in them before and as long as the system was still operable there would be horrendous bills ran up, you know, everywhere in the world. And I know that kind of thing went on.
Something I heard from many scientists and staff who had worked at Los Alamos during the time Bob was there was that had Bob been a physicist working in the Polarized Proton section, they would have known him. The very fact that they did not know him was near proof, they told me, that Bob was not a physicist there.
Los Alamos Physicist Earl Hoffman had this to say when asked about his memory of Bob Lazar:
My recollection is he was a technician, which would not be a physicist. I’m sure he wasn’t a physicist because if he was, I would have known him well because I was [a physicist]. And let me back up just a little bit. He was at [unintelligible] we called it, that was the accelerator — when I knew about him. And he was off in an adjacent building, which is a little bit separated from the others. I knew he was over there because of his weird name, because when he fired that car up you could hear it all over town — and that’s miles. And I think, I think I never met him. I would put quite a bit of money on whether he was a physicist or not, and I would say no. I think he was a technician of some sort, but I couldn’t even tell you what kind of a technician.
Another physicist who had an especially important reason to know Bob is Richard Evans Mischke, as Mischke worked in management in the Meson Physics facility during the time period Bob worked at the lab and was in charge of the hiring process for physicists.
Mischke holds a PhD in Physics from Princeton University and began his work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1971.
The following is an excerpt of an interview conducted with Mischke in July of 2021:
Mischke: What year was he supposedly working at Los Alamos?
Author: It would have been in 1982 to 1985 at the most. John [Jarmer] told me that he would have been there for more than a couple of months, but less than a year. And there is a phone directory that has his name on it. He was a contractor for Kirk Mayer.
Mischke: Oh, so he wasn’t actually a lab employee, then?
Author: He claims he started as a technician and and became a physicist. The only actual documentation says that he was a contractor for Kirk Mayer. That aligns with what I was told by John.
Mischke: OK. So, yeah, that I can say definitely. I served in management during that period. And if he had been a physicist, I would have hired him. So that is — I can say, definitely, is not credible.
Dr. Robert Krangle
In 2019, Jeremy Corbell released an interview with Dr. Robert Krangle.
Dr. Krangle is an MIT educated scientist who has consulted for Los Alamos National Laboratory at various times since 1980.
In the interview, Corbell and Krangle have the following exchange:
Corbell: What was your first interaction with Lazar?
Krangle: Well it wasn’t much of an interaction, it was one of these things like security meetings. You have to go to that once every week or couple weeks and they give you the usual briefing about “don’t talk about what you’re doing, don’t talk about what you see.”
So, Lazar, if you’ve see him — he kind of stands out. Frankly I think he looks like Hawkins, he has that same British norman facial structure.
We didn’t work together. But cafeteria kind of things, you’d pass him. In some of the Commander’s call meetings, you’d pass him. We didn’t work together.
…
Corbell: Was it your impression that he was a concession stand salesman, or a janitor?
Krangle: He was dressed wrong to be the janitor.
Corbell: So how did you know Bob, and in what capacity was he there working from your knowledge — what was he?
Krangle: Well, he was a physicist, which — I’m a physicist- we kind of recognize each other, you know it’s the classic pocket condom with all of the proper different colored pens. He fit that mold. If nobody would have told me he’s a physicst — one look, he’s a physicist. He’s properly dressed in geekdom.
Corbell: Did people tell you he was a physicist? Was that ever explained to you?
Krangle: In some conversations somebody would be talking about what somebody was doing, and they’d point over “oh yeah and that’s him over there.”
Corbell: What was your impression of what Bob was doing at Los Alamos in the 80’s?
Krangle: At the time I was there, I really didn’t know what specifically Bob was doing. We didn’t work together. We simply crossed paths in glancing view. I didn’t know what he was up to anymore than he knew what I was up to.
Corbell: But you did know that he was a physicist?
Krangle: Yes.
Corbell: And that was very clear to you, that he was a physicist at Los Alamos and not like the janitor?
Krangle: Right.
After speaking with Bob’s former colleagues and other employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I contacted Dr. Krangle to clarify his statements to Corbell regarding Bob.
The following are some excerpts from that conversation:
Krangle: There was a certain pecking order to appearance. Technicians were usually more of the blue collar collar guys, and actually looked that way. The engineers were the typical, particularly here in New Mexico, engineers, you can pick them out, and you can pick them out in New York second. White shirt, pocket condom with a half a dozen pen colors, and a bolo tie. And it was pretty much the same thing between Los Alamos and Sandia Labs. You can always pick out the engineers, you can pick out the technicians, and it was certainly who the janitor was.
…
Author: I’m just curious, given that there are so many people who have said, you know, I would have known if he was a physicist there. In fact, I’ve, you know, mentioned a lot of names to these people. They recognize the names. Is there anything in particular that gives you that level of confidence to say, I would bet my money on him being a physicist?
Krangle: No.
Author: No?
Krangle: No. No, I couldn’t say anything unequivocally “Oh absolutely, he was a physicist” — no.
Author: As far as why you would say that [he was a physicist] is just seeing him there and what he was wearing?
Krangle: Yeah, like I said there was kind of a dress pecking order. And, the white shirt the pocket condom with multiple pens, yeah that’s not the janitor.
…
Author: I did have you on my list to give you a call because you were certain that Bob was a physicist.
Krangle: No, I was certain that Bob was up there. One of the comments I certainly made to him [Corbell] was yes I certainly saw him there, that he definitely wasn’t the janitor.
When asked specifically about the statements he had made to Jeremy Corbell, Dr. Krangle said that he didn’t recall making statements that he was certain Lazar was a physicist.
Krangle: I don’t remember saying that. I do certainly remember saying he certainly wasn’t the janitor. If I said unequivocally that he was a physicist, then I think that would have been wrong.
In the course of conducting interviews, I spoke with dozens of former Los Alamos employees and asked whether it was the case that there was a “pecking order” or typical way that physicists or technicians would dress. Not a single former lab employee confirmed that. On the contrary, I was told by every lab employee I spoke to that the suggestion was completely unfounded and that employees in those roles would dress however they wanted, and it was not possible to differentiate between a technician or a physicist by the way they dressed.
I have not been able to locate any work product or original research papers from Los Alamos National Laboratory listing Bob Lazar as an author, nor any documentation of LAMPF group meeting or workshop attendance by Bob Lazar — I was able to find this kind of documentation for nearly every other physicist I interviewed.
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Los Alamos National Laboratory provided the following statement:
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.
I contacted Investigative Reporter George Knapp to share these interviews with Bob’s former colleagues at Los Alamos and ask for his comment.
Knapp answered the phone, though when told that I had spoken to multiple former colleagues of Bob’s at Los Alamos including his direct superior, he said he had no interest in it, refused to speak about it, and hung up the phone.
I want to give special credit and thanks to reddit user /u/jackfrost71. They were integral in providing key guidance and knowledge that allowed me to develop leads and find many of the sources I interviewed for this article and the articles that will follow. This reporting would not have been possible without their help.
Updated 09/30/22 — Added statement from LANL.
