History Decoded: The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time

by Meltzer, Brad

  When you deal with BOB LAZAR, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.

  Lazar claims to be a physicist educated at MIT and CalTech, though neither school has records of his attendance. He claims to have invented a jet engine car capable of traveling more than 200 mph. He has a company that markets materials he asserts are based on futuristic technologies far beyond most contemporary abilities.

  But by far his most notorious claim is that he worked in Sector 4 of Area 51 directly with alien spacecraft (which, of course, the government denies).

  In his defense, Lazar says that the government disposed of all his records after he told the media in specific detail about the nine flying disc flights at Area 51. But here’s where it gets even more interesting: Lazar didn’t just claim to see alien saucers. He claims to have seen actual aliens.

  To find the truth, we spoke with one of Bob Lazar’s personal friends—and someone whose background could be far more trusted: John Lear.

  Although quiet and unassuming, John Lear is quite simply one of the most accomplished pilots in U.S. history. He’s flown 150 types of aircraft, he’s the only pilot ever to earn every airman certificate issued by the FAA, he held 18 world flight-speed records, and he flew missions for the CIA. By the way, his dad, Bill Lear, invented something called the Learjet.

  A Gift Of Knowledge

  Some say that the government’s secrecy around Area 51 was created to shield us from the fact that aliens gave us technological information we’re still trying to understand.

  So when it comes to air travel, there are few people on Earth with more knowledge or experience than John Lear. So why is the government keeping its information about UFOs such a secret? Lear has a very simple answer.

  “The aliens give us technology,” Lear said. “And we use that technology.”

  I know. We were just as skeptical. Was this world-class pilot actually saying that the U.S. government was reverse-engineering alien technology for its own benefit?

  “That’s right,” Lear said.

  Did that mean his dad’s company also reverse-engineered technology from the alien crash?

  “Absolutely. Positively,” Lear insisted. “As a matter of fact, the first company he had was Motorola, and then my dad formed his own company, became Lear Incorporated. He was very involved in all of this that was going on and went on to different projects.”

  OK. Time-out. That’s one incredible claim. But. If what John Lear says is true, then we have an actual theory. Why would the government want to deny that aliens exist or that we’ve had contact?

  Because the government itself is actually borrowing from alien technology.

  Think about the historical context. In the years after World War II—and after Roswell—we were in a rapidly escalating Cold War, one that was being fought with espionage, scientific advances, futuristic weapons. At a time like that, you’re going to tell me that we wouldn’t do anything we could to maintain our technological edge over our enemies?

  And before you decide, get this: In July 1947, something landed or crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and was quickly gathered up and secreted away by the military.

  Three months later, Chuck Yeager achieved something many scientists previously believed impossible: He pilots an aircraft through the sound barrier, doing about 771 mph.

  Coincidence? Probably. But the postwar years were a time of astonishing technological advance. But now John Lear is claiming that his dad had contact with aliens and created his first mobile phone in the 1940s. This was before color television, wheels on suitcases, and in an age when doctors still believed cigarettes were good for you.

  In fact, by 1969, Motorola had made a giant leap forward, as in: “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong phoned home using a Motorola, which just happened to work in space.

  Officially, all the government will say about Area 51 is that it’s an “operating location” near Groom Lake, Nevada. But we’ve confirmed that it’s one of the leading sites for testing experimental aircraft and weapons and systems used by both the Air Force and the CIA.

  Images of Area 51 never appear in U.S. government maps, or on aviation or navigation charts.

  To get to Area 51, you travel a road officially known as Route 375—but known to everyone else as the Extraterrestrial Highway.

  Area 51 shares a border with the Yucca Flat region of the Nevada Test Site, where more than 700 nuclear tests occurred. Needless to say, it’s not the best neighborhood.

  At its center lies Groom Lake, the salt-flat remains of an ancient lake about three miles in diameter. To the south of the lake are a series of landing strips, a dormitory, a fire station, even such amenities as a baseball diamond and tennis courts. And, of course, there are surveillance cameras everywhere, always watching.

  One of the most interesting things about the site is that it boasts more hangars than are typical for a military base—presumably to provide more cover against aerial surveillance.

  But even more interesting than that is that Area 51 is built on top of an abandoned silver mine. That gives the place a whole network of underground tunnels and caves. Y’know what that means? You got it: The most sensitive and top-secret stuff may actually be underground.

  Coincidence?

  Just three months after the incident at Roswell, Chuck Yeager piloted an aircraft through the sound barrier, something many scientists previously thought impossible.

  Project Blue Book

  Pathway To The Unknown

  Nevada Route 375 leads to Rachel, Nevada, and Area 51. Along the way, a spray-painted sign says, the truth is out there. Really.

  So beyond Area 51, there’s one other way to find out about UFOs. All you have to do is talk to eyewitnesses who have seen them. And y’know who’s taken the lead on that front? The U.S. government. As former test pilot Allan Palmer told us, “In the Air Force, they had something called Project Blue Book—and every unidentified flying object and report that went in to the Air Force went in this project.”

  He’s right about Project Blue Book.

  Started in 1952 by the Air Force, the project was a way of determining whether UFOs posed a threat to national security. Before they were done, they examined 12,618 reported sightings. Look at Exhibit 2C, a Project Blue Book UFO questionnaire.

  Think on that a moment: 12,618 reported UFO sightings. According to the Air Force, 97 percent of the sightings were easily dismissed as natural phenomena—cloud formations, light effects in the sky—or man-made objects such as weather balloons. That still leaves 3 percent of the sightings as wholly unexplained—and perhaps inexplicable. That doesn’t mean that there are alien spacecraft. But it also doesn’t mean that there aren’t.

  Project Blue Book didn’t make things much easier. Some insiders claim, in fact, that the percentage of unexplained phenomena may have been as high as 22 percent. That’s a far cry from 3 percent—far enough that it makes you wonder about the honesty of the report altogether.

  But here’s the best part: When it came to changing minds in the military, guess whose mind got changed? One of the chief scientific consultants on the project, Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

  Hynek joined the study as an avowed skeptic, but the amount of apathy and incompetence he encountered on the part of military investigators disgusted him to the point that he referred to Project Blue Book as going from the investigation of the unexplained to the “explanation of the uninvestigated.”

  This is not to say that Hynek endorsed the explanation of UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft—only that he insisted that the phenomenon still hasn’t been adequately investigated or explained. What he wanted, and continued to insist upon until his death in 1986, was the need to bring to bear the same level of scientific rigor on UFOs that we apply to biochemistry, gravitation, or any other field of scientific inquiry.


  Today, Hynek is gone—and the rest of us are still waiting for that level of serious scientific investigation into the UFO phenomenon.

  A Serious Scientist

  J. Allen Hynek (here identifying a supposed flying saucer as a chicken feeder in 1966) insisted that UFO research be approached rigorously.

  The White House

  Today, our skies are filled with aircraft at virtually every hour of the day. To control and monitor that air traffic, we have the FAA.

  Which brings us to John Callahan, who’s decided to take a risk, defy an order, and tell his story.

  Back in 1986, Callahan was the branch manager of the FAA’s Tech Center in Atlantic City when a 747 came on the frequency, asking if there was any traffic in his area. The controller saw nothing anomalous on the scope, which was quickly reported to the 747 captain.

  The pilot then reported seeing what he called “white and yellow strobe lights” at 11 or 12 o’clock—lights that indicated a craft far larger than an aircraft.

  Larger than an aircraft? According to Callahan, the pilot was looking at this thinking, “There’s no airplane that big. It’s like four times the size of an aircraft carrier. He’s flying a 747 that has an elevator in it. They have floors. It’s like a two-story building flying in the air, and he’s looking at something that is a massive, massive target out there, and he’s assuming it’s an airplane.”

  Did any passengers see it?

  “All of the crew said the same thing,” Callahan insisted. The crew even drew the same pictures of it. Yet according to Callahan, the unidentified aircraft that approached the 747 was so big, the radar picked it up as a weather front.

  He described the craft as spherical and glowing. But the most astounding thing was the way it moved. The UFO zipped around so quickly that it appeared miles in front of the craft one moment and miles behind it the next.

  Callahan reported the incident to his superiors, who immediately alerted the White House and summoned President Reagan’s special investigative team. (Reagan himself claimed to have seen a UFO above Bakersfield in 1974—a bright white light that followed his airplane briefly, then disappeared straight up into the heavens.)

  Returning to FAA headquarters after the 747 incident, Callahan found himself summoned to a meeting with an admiral who demanded a five-minute briefing on the UFO sighting. Upon hearing the details, the admiral canceled all of his appointments, cleared his schedule, and announced that the report would be taken directly to President Reagan and the president’s scientific study team.

  This was the moment—finally—a sighting that would get the attention and the investigative resources of the highest office in the land.

  But when the scientific research team returned to visit Callahan, they were accompanied by three CIA officers. Their message to Callahan was unmistakable: This event never happened. We were never here. We’re confiscating all data, and you’re all sworn to secrecy.

  Knowing this was his only shot, Callahan asked one of the scientists what he thought the event was.

  “Oh, it’s a UFO,” the scientist told Callahan. He glanced at the other scientists, “This is the first time they’ve ever had more than a few minutes of radar data to look at. . . . They’re just drooling to get their hands on all this data.”

  What they did with the data and—more important—what it may have revealed about UFOs, we may never know. Callahan never heard another word about the incident that included the longest radar track of a UFO ever recorded.

  Naturally, we asked him if he regretted not taking the story to the news media.

  But to Callahan, it’s a problem that can’t be solved. “If you call the newspapers, the newspapers think you’re a quirk because they’ve been brainwashed to believe that if UFOs existed, the government would know and the government would tell you.”

  And that, Callahan believes, is simply not going to happen. “They know what’s good for you,” he added chillingly, “and they know what you should be thinking.”

  The Hynek System

  J. Allen Hynek made an important contribution to the study of UFOs. In his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, Hynek introduced a three-step classification system for UFO sightings:

  Close Encounter of the First Kind: visual sighting of UFO

  Close Encounter of the Second Kind: visual sighting plus physical evidence

  Close Encounter of the Third Kind: visual sighting of UFO occupants or passengers

  Sound familiar? That phrase “close encounter” quickly entered the vocabulary, and gave its name to the Steven Spielberg movie.

  Oh, and next time you see that movie, keep your eyes peeled toward the end, when the aliens are emerging from their spacecraft. You’ll see one of the human observers step forward, a guy with a pipe and goatee. That’s Hynek, finally seeing on a movie set what he always insisted we should search for in earnest in the real world: evidence.

  In the end, our investigation into extraterrestrial life has led us from Roswell, to Area 51, to the White House. But before we could reach a conclusion, there was still one place left—the true final frontier. Outer space.

  Which led us to Story Musgrave.

  Musgrave is among the most experienced astronauts in history—a man who’s left the earth six times. So did he ever see any alien beings when he was in orbit?

  “Nope. But I wanted to,” Musgrave admitted.

  A trained scientist, he understands the inherent risks in looking for something you want to see. And he knows better than to let his wishes get in the way of what his scientist’s eyes and experience show him.

  But as he told us, “Every time you take a timed exposure with the Hubble, you get two thousand galaxies times a hundred billion stars. So within one picture you’re looking at two hundred trillion stars. Aim the Hubble again and you have another hundred trillion stars.” That many stars, at least some of which have planets, and at least some of which are theoretically capable of supporting life, and the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life is—

  “Massive,” Musgrave said. “It’s a certainty.”

  More than that, he feels that there’s little doubt that at least some of the species out there are traveling beyond their own star systems, particularly since many of these species are likely to be far older than us.

  “They’re doing interstellar travel,” he said. “If you have an advanced evolutionary string [that] has been developing technology for a billion years, star travel is happening.”

  He likens the distance between us and the advanced extraterrestrials to the distance between his childhood and his first flight into space.

  “When I was a kid, diesel locomotives [weren’t] here. I was steam locomotive.”

  Indeed, in Musgrave’s life, he went from “steam locomotives to space.” Think of the human race going from an ox-operated drill press to the Internet. Now think what a billion years could accomplish.

  It’s a mind-boggling point. Today, there’s more computing power in a cell phone than there was on Apollo 11, and that brought us to the moon and back. There are dozens of technological advances that every one of us has witnessed. So just try to imagine where we’ll be in a hundred or a thousand years, much less the billion that Musgrave speaks of.

  Of course, none of that definitively answers the question of whether or not aliens have visited us here. But that doesn’t stop Musgrave.

  “You have to look at the statistics. . . . It’s statistical—it’s the power of life. We have four million species here, not just a handful. Life has got the muscle and the ability to survive under a huge number of conditions. Add the massive time scale we’re talking about and you have the possibility that life is everywhere.”

  Is he right? Time will tell, whether we like it or not.

  Julie Shuster

  The direct
or of the International UFO Museum and Research Center says that her father, Lieutenant Walter Haut—who issued the original press release about a UFO—saw something under a tarp. It had large black eyes, slits for a nose, a little slit for a mouth, slits for ears, four long fingers, and longer arms.

  Decoded Team Report

  Buddy: When we went to Roswell and talked with people who had seen inexplicable things, the experience jolted from my memory something that I had kept pretty much to myself for more than 40 years: As a child, I saw a UFO. Images kept coming back to me: the giant glowing orb hovering over the Southern California mall, the pulsing and flickering lights rimming it, the traffic jam of gawkers—my father and sister included, getting out of the car to stare and point and wonder.

  I hadn’t told a lot of people—or maybe any—about my experience. I decided to drop that UFO bomb on Scott and McKinley. I could sense in their faces that very skepticism and disbelief, but I knew what had happened.

  I called my sister Lisa, who is a year older than I am, and asked her to tell me everything she remembered from that night. We had never before spoken about what we had witnessed in the night sky, not once in the 40 years since it happened. Her recollection of the event, and her account, down to the last details, was identical to my memory. She had seen exactly what I had seen.

  Conclusion

  The majority of stars in our universe are more than one thousand light-years away, so that means it would take an alien spacecraft anywhere from a few years to more than a thousand just to get here, since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That’s a mathematical fact—it’s the universal speed limit—and physicists tell us that nothing can go faster than light.

  But physicists also told us it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of sound—until Chuck Yeager proved them wrong in 1947 and broke the sound barrier. People thought it physically impossible for a human being to run a mile in under four minutes, until Roger Bannister did it in 1954.