Bob Lazar adds detail to the S-4 story

Why this one is useful

The interview is long, and a lot of it circles familiar Lazar territory. The useful parts are the specific ones.

Lazar talks about how he says he reached S-4, what the building looked like, who was attached to him, what the project was called, and what the work was supposed to do.

Project Galileo

Lazar says the propulsion work was called Project Galileo. He describes two goals: reproduce the propulsion effect with available Earth materials, and find a way to disable the system remotely.

That is a different claim from “they had a saucer.” It is a claim about an engineering program.

The route in

He describes EG&G in Las Vegas, Janet flights to Area 51, then a dark blue bus with blacked-out windows. He says the bus went south toward S-4 near Papoose Lake.

The facility he describes is plain: guard, hand scanner, card system, long corridors, painted cinder block, and hangars in the side of a hill. He says there were nine hangars.

He names Dennis Mariani as the person attached to him. He names Barry Castillo, Castillio, or Castile as his lab partner; the spelling is unclear from the transcript.

The craft description

Lazar describes a saucer roughly 50 to 53 feet wide, with no seams, rivets, wiring, buttons, or normal controls. He says the surface looked different up close than it did from farther away.

Inside, he says the usable space was cramped. Three seat-like objects may have been amplifiers. He also describes an archway becoming translucent and showing symbols in space rather than on a flat screen.

During one test flight, he says the craft lifted silently with a glow underneath. When he walked beneath it, he says he could not see it directly above him. He reads that as light bending around the object.

The reactor claims

Lazar says the reactor involved a super-heavy element he associated with element 115. He describes the field around it as feeling like two matching magnetic poles pushing apart.

The odd detail is not just the pushback. He says the reactor did not slide across the table while the field pushed against his hand.

Other claimed tests in the interview: a golf ball bouncing off the field, a candle flame stopping, a dark point appearing at a focal area, and a mechanical watch stopping in a related test mentioned by Luigi Vendittelli.

Details to separate from the legend

• The stated job: reproduce the propulsion effect and disable it remotely.
• The old-looking facility: cinder block, corridors, hillside hangars.
• The claim that the Navy recovered the “sport model” from an archaeological dig in water.
• The seat-like objects possibly being amplifiers.
• The translucent archway and symbols not appearing on a normal screen.

Material around the interview

Luigi Vendittelli discusses satellite imagery, vehicle tracks, aerial-photo work, and map changes near Papoose Lake after Lazar's anonymous TV appearance in May 1989.

The episode also shows old night footage said to be from near Area 51. Lazar and Vendittelli react to an orange object that appears to wobble. It is interesting footage, but the interview does not turn it into proof.

The later material on Charles Buhler, Townsend Brown, bismuth, Ning Li, and element 115 is its own subject. It should probably be handled as a separate note, not folded into the Lazar story.

Sources

• American Alchemy: Bob Lazar interview on YouTube