by Phil Patton
The flip side of Lazar’s unwillingness to speculate is that the big issues raised by saucer lore are ignored: How did we get the saucers? Do the aliens run the base? Was there really a link to Roswell or to MJ-12? Unanswered questions lie heavily over the Lazar story and provide much of its fascinating quality, but the gaps in the tale could also be designed to make it easier for true believers to link it to their own wider conclusions.
Another dreamy effect is the strange alien book Lazar says he saw at S-4. Its pages were translucent, like a series of acetate layers, so that you could see into a house, X-ray style, from shingles to framing to chimney inside. He was allowed to read the book, which combined a history of the earth and a history of a planet in the star system Reticulum 4, where the saucers originated. Human beings are referred to as “containers”—for souls or for genes or whatever is unclear. (The term “containers” caught the imagination of UFO buffs; the Heaven’s Gate cult would use it in their teachings.) Some sixty-five “genetic interventions” beginning in the epoch when men were still apes were described. “Intervention” seemed to Lazar to mean manipulation of DNA, and appeared designed to make humans a breeding species for the aliens—a kind of grafting stock for a race that had lost its ability to reproduce.
The book serves as a means to introduce much more information than would have come to Lazar’s attention directly, but it seems a clumsy plot device, worthy of a computer adventure game or a wavy transition in a film from an opening book to real action.
Unlike many UFO sources, Lazar had begun as a skeptic; he had gone on record as deriding the youfers. A convincing detail is Lazar’s statement that when he first caught sight of the saucers, he thought they were terrestrial military craft. “Well, there’s the explanation for UFOs,” he thought. We must have made them. But when he learned they were not from Earth, he had a strange reaction. That night, he said, he lay in bed, giggling, unable to sleep. Lazar had a charming reluctance to overstate. “I hate to mention this,” he’d begin. “I don’t want to get too deeply into that,” he would say in answer to a question, or “I don’t like to talk about this.” He was almost coyly casual about his one sighting of an actual alien. It could have been a mannequin, he says, or a mock-up. “It could have been a million things.”
But Lazar’s story has the useful feature, too, of suggesting associations with the rest of the Lore, like the round tabs of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The very vagueness and limits of his knowledge inspires listeners to make their own links. He’s not sure where the saucers he saw came from—could it have been Roswell, or the storage site at Hangar 18 at Wright-Pat? He hears rumors of a shoot-out with aliens—perhaps it was at S-4, or Area 51, or at Dulce, as the Lore tends to have it?
A recurrent theme in Lazar’s story was his feeling that his employers at S-4 were “trying to make him disappear” by removing records. This happened even before he left the job. He claimed it was this sense that he was being made invisible that led him to go public. He couldn’t find records of his own life, he said. “They’re trying to make me look nonexistent,” or, in an oddly dislocated locution, he felt “that someone was going to disappear.”
Worse, he was forgetting things. Had they done something to his mind? Had he been given something to drink, as the Lore held they often did to interlopers (it was supposed to smell like Pine-Sol)?
His memories were disappearing, too. By September 1990 he was complaining he had forgotten the name of the two modes of travel of the saucers—one low speed, the other high, intergalactic speed—and resorted to calling them alpha and beta. Nor could he any longer remember an important coefficient for one of the processes or certain frequencies of the gravity wave and other details he was convinced he had once known. “I’ve developed a mental block,” he said. “It really bugs me.” He went to a hypnotherapist to help him remember, but it was not very successful.
Lear noticed that Lazar had begun to forget things. “Don’t you remember that night you came over to my house all excited?” Lear asked him. Lazar had completely forgotten.
One night in December 1988, or January 1989, Lear recalls, Lazar came by his house in a state of high excitement. It was bitter cold, “but we talked outside because it made him more comfortable. He was in shirtsleeves. He told me about seeing the alien. He was very excited. Now, he can’t remember it.”
“I saw a disc,” Lear says Lazar told him.
“Ours or theirs?”
“Theirs. I just got back from the test site.”
“Oh my God. What are you doing here? You should continue to work up there for a while. Don’t jeopardize your security clearance.”
“But, John,” Lazar replied, “you’ve taken so much flak about this stuff that I’m going to tell you.”
“And for the next three hours and forty-seven minutes he proceeded to tell me all of it. He told me we did have secret bases on the moon and Mars. He told me things, some of which were so unbelievable [that] had I not known Bob I would have been very suspicious.”
Once Lazar was asked, “Don’t you feel—no pun intended—alienated? In fact aren’t you kind of connected with them, and removed from the rest of society that doesn’t accept that?”
“Absolutely,” he answered. “I feel like I really know what’s going on, and everyone’s an idiot. I really feel that way. Alienated is the perfect word for it.” He was, you might say, a classically alienated type. But the S-4 experience had given order to his life.
The saucers, he said, “made it all make sense. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It takes a lot of the confusion out of things. A lot more knits together …”
Still, as PsychoSpy had urged in his essay “Lazar as Fictional Character,” consider Lazar’s story as story. He implies that if Lazar did not exist, the youfers would find it necessary to invent him. That they may have invented him, or that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) or some other government organization may have invented him, or that he invented himself—all are possibilities that hang in the air like the lights over Dreamland. But who would invent Lazar, and why? Was he a government disinformation agent? Why? As cover for secret programs? To make sure that people believe the lights they see moving above the Jumbled Hills are flying saucers instead of manned terrestrial aircraft or, more likely, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)? The Stealth fighter was revealed in the autumn of 1988 just as Lazar went to work at S-4. Was there a connection? (Indeed, the first images of the Stealth fighter, heavily airbrushed, were released about the time Lazar surfaced.) But Lazar’s story would only draw more curious viewers to the perimeter, where they might see real aircraft while looking for Lazar’s saucers.
Did Lazar create Lazar? For money or for fame? There was a film deal with New Line Pictures, although the amount of Lazar’s income from the rights was unclear. The film languished in production. Originally due in 1994, it went through many scripts and suffered from troubles at New Line. He had been paid to serve as consultant for a plastic kit of the saucer “Sport Model” for the Testor company. Packed with each kit was a poster, just as Lazar had described, bearing the words “They’re here!” Was his goal to become a legend in his own mind, to feel comfortable and real there in front of the blackboard in the pose of Teller or Oppenheimer, to become at last a real authority?
Lazar’s story hovers about the Ridge. Chewed over, tugged at, poked, prodded, and twisted, it quickly became a modern legend, obsessing viewers who came to the Black Mailbox to see if they could see Lazar’s saucers.
4. Aurora
It was cold, Chuck Clark told me, sitting across the table at the Little A“Le”Inn, twenty below, when he saw the Aurora. “But I served in Korea where it was colder than that all the time. I’d been waiting for hours and only saw it for a few seconds, silhouetted against the light when they pulled the hangar door open. It rolled out and the door closed and it took off.” What shape was it? He was vague. “But many times I’ve seen the blue flame of the methane engines on the test stand behi
nd the hangar”—the big hangar, the one the youfers called Hangar 18. “It exists.”
Aurora, the most mythical of the planes above Dreamland, was believed to be the successor to the Blackbirds, a mother-daughter ship arrangement, flying at Mach 8, perhaps the craft that leaves the little putt-putt doughnut-on-a-rope contrail.
In the 1890s, strange reports began to surface of mysterious airships drifting over the Midwest and West. They were heard in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Harrisburg, Arkansas, but Texas had the largest number of reports. Some of the crews talked to people on the ground. One group asked for food. Another was said to have sung “Nearer My God to Thee.” There was even a cattle mutilation report: A steer had been lassoed, pulled into the airship, roasted, and eaten, with only the skin and bones dropped back overboard.
The reports resembled those of the post–World War II flying-saucer era, except that the speeds cited were tens or hundreds of miles per hour, rather than hundreds or thousands, and the materials described were no more exotic than aluminum.
The mid-1890s were a period of economic depression, political instability, and general cultural unease. The first dirigibles—“airships”—had flown in Europe, and Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution flew his crude aircraft from a houseboat on the Potomac River in May 1896 and garnered widespread publicity. The invention of the airplane seemed imminent.
The height of the craze came in April 1897. One report, in the Dallas Morning Times, on April 19, came from the small town of Aurora, Texas. Aurora was then a dusty little town, and having an airship sighting meant being up to date; an account of another sighting in Denton, Texas, had suggested to the local newspaper editor proof that Denton “was not behind” other towns. The Morning Times told of a craft crashing into a windmill, of wreckage and a pilot’s log. There was speculation that it was from Mars and even word that one of the crewmen was killed in the crash and buried in Aurora.
The Dallas newspaper’s report made startling claims:
About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing throughout the country. It was travelling due north, and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour, and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed over the public square and when it reached the north part of town [it] collided with the tower of judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden. The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.
Mr. T. J. Weems, the U.S. [Army] Signal Service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he [the pilot] was a native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person—evidently the records of his travels—are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and cannot be deciphered. This ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons. The town today is full of people who are viewing the wreckage and gathering specimens of strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon tomorrow.
Signed: E. E. Haydon.
No one at the Morning News picked up on the dispatch’s dramatic suggestions. None of the strange metal ever showed up; the “papers” were not shown. And no one inquired about the pilot’s grave. But the account was a foreshadowing of a Roswell-style crash—the hieroglyphics, the widely scattered debris, the strange materials, the recovered body, were all standard elements of twentieth-century saucer crashes.
The story was not taken up again until 1967, in an account in a British UFO publication by Jacques Vallee and Donald B. Hanlon called “Airships over Texas.” After that story appeared, a UFO investigator visited Aurora. He found that the Proctor farm where the crash had been reported was now a gas station run by a man named Brawley Oates. Oates referred the investigator to another man, Oscar Lowry, who had been eleven at the time of the incident.
Lowry and other surviving witnesses strongly suggested that the whole thing had been a hoax. There was no Army Signal officer in the town—T. J. Weems was the town blacksmith. Proctor’s farm didn’t even have a windmill.
E. E. Haydon, the stringer for the Dallas paper who wrote the story, was the local cotton buyer. He had noted the decline of Aurora since a new railroad had bypassed the town. The story was almost certainly a prank, in the spirit of Rachel’s efforts to cash in on local UFOs.
In 1973, with the country sitting through the Watergate hearings and, perhaps not incidentally, finding itself in the grip of one of its periodic waves of UFO sightings, reporters from U.P.I. picked up on the old Aurora tale. A report that appeared in many newspapers on May 24, 1973, quoted Hayden Hewes, director of an organization called the International UFO Bureau, who had gone to Aurora to investigate. Hewes claimed to have discovered the spaceman’s grave and threatened to go to court to have it opened. He found a strange rock marked with an arrow and three circles in the cemetery and reported that the spaceman had been buried under it.
Reuters and the Associated Press joined the chase. The A.P. reported that samples of strange metal had been found near the gas station. When analyzed, they turned out to be mundanely terrestrial pot metal. Reuters interviewed a ninety-one-year-old woman who claimed to recall that the pilot had been buried in the cemetery, which was run by the local Masonic order and an organization called the Aurora Cemetery Association. But the association’s map of the cemetery plots revealed no sign of the spaceman’s grave or of any unidentified graves. The group blocked attempts to dig up the place, and on the night of June 14, 1973, the strange rock disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.
The name Aurora returned in the 1980s linked to the most mysterious of mystery airplanes. What the Lazar story was for UFO watchers, Aurora was for black-plane buffs. In the late eighties and early nineties, Aurora became the focus of speculation among the watchers—the pinup goddess of the Interceptors. The name evoked high-flying associations: Aurora, goddess of the dawn, or aurora borealis, the northern lights that sometimes so enraptured pilots they would fly toward them to their deaths.
The word Aurora entered the lore of black aircraft when it popped up in a P-1, or procurement budget document, near line items for the U-2 and the SR-71, and attached to the phrase “air-breathing reconnaissance.” Its inclusion appeared to be a mistake, but the stealthies and Skunkers noticed it. And they noticed the next year when the size of the requested appropriation for Aurora for fiscal 1987 rose from $8 million in fiscal 1986 to $2.3 billion. The next year the item vanished. They assumed it was a successor to the Blackbird and the legendary U-2. The Skunk Works must be at it again.
The first reports came in the aviation press. And in 1988 The New York Times ran a story on the plane that claimed it could fly as fast as Mach 6.
In 1989 an oil-drilling engineer named Chris Gibson spotted what may have been Aurora refueling with two F-111s. Gibson, perhaps a bit too conveniently, skeptics noted, was a member of the Royal Observer Corps, trained in recognizing aircraft. In August 1989, Gibson told me, he was working on a petroleum drilling rig called the Galveston Key in the Indefatigable oil field in the North Sea. He was below decks when his coworker Graeme Winton came down and told him to hurry above.
“Have a look at this,” Winton said, pointing out a group of planes flying overhead: a large one, two smaller ones, and a strange triangular one.
After a while, Gibson explained to Winton, aircraft observers count on an almost subliminal feel for the shape or gestalt of an aircraft, called the “sit,” similar to what bird-watchers refer to as “jizz.” But no “sit” seemed right for
the triangle.
“The big one is a KC-135 Stratotanker,” he told Winton. “The two on the left are F-111s, and I don’t know what the fourth is.”
“I thought you were an expert,” Winton commented.
“I am.”
“Some expert.”
At first Gibson thought the triangle might be another F-111, but there were no gaps in its wings and it was too long. The F-117 had just been made public, but the triangle was too big for one of those. Nor was it a French Mirage IV fighter. Gibson was stumped.
Back in his quarters, Gibson consulted the aircraft recognition manual that he considered the best in the world: the Flykendingsbog, published by the Danish civilian spotter group, the Luftmelderkorpset. But no plane in the book looked anything like what he had seen.
Gibson then made a drawing of the triangular craft and sent it to several aviation journalists, including the highly respected Bill Sweetman, who much later presented the sighting, in Jane’s, the aviation publication, in December 1992, as one of the linchpins of a pro-Aurora argument. The plane, Sweetman concluded, could fly at Mach 8, reaching anywhere on Earth within three hours. It had first taken to the skies, he believed, in 1985, at Groom Lake, and likely flew in and out of Machrihanish, the Scottish special forces base that had also hosted the SR-71.
In 1990, after a ceremonial flyover above the Lockheed Skunk Works, which the ailing genius Kelly Johnson viewed from his car, the SR-71 was retired, lending strength to the Aurora stories. The Air Force or CIA wouldn’t have retired the Blackbird, the reasoning went, if they didn’t have something else ready to replace it. Why had the Air Force not fought harder to keep the SR-71?
Complex politics swirled about the SR-71. While the Blackbird lacked powerful patrons within the Pentagon, its legend attracted many in Congress, which several times had restored the Blackbird to the budget after the Air Force had removed it. Aurora seemed the logical next project for the Skunk Works, a plane that flew higher and faster than any then known, kept under wraps as long as possible.
