The basic, flawed premise behind the Area 51 mythology can be boiled down to this: The government won't reveal what's going on there, so it must be something ultra-super-amazingly secret. Suspicions no longer fester only within the UFO community have spread through the public at large to leave scarcely any visible line between perceptions of literal fact and 'X-Files' plots.' As Thomas Bullard, author of 'The Myth and Mystery of UFOs' notes, 'After trust between government and public eroded with Vietnam and Watergate, Roswell and Area 51 entered the popular vocabulary as bywords for official double-dealing. (Image credit: Public domain)Īrea 51 is now firmly entrenched in the public discourse about government conspiracy and UFOs. Where a secret creates an information vacuum, wild speculation often fills the void.Īn aerial view of Area 51 and Groom Lake in Nevada. Or time machines, or whatever you can think of. Like the party you're not invited to, what goes on there is interesting beyond your wildest imagination: crashed spacecraft, or extraterrestrial bodies, or super-secret military aircraft, or cutting-edge laser weapons, or weather-controlling devices. Still, Lazar's lies propelled Area 51 into the public's consciousness, and a few others (perhaps seeking attention or book deals) later followed in his footsteps making similar 'insider' claims about an extraterrestrial presence there.

He was found to have fabricated not only his employment at Nellis but indeed his entire background almost nothing of what he said was true. Predictably, it caused quite a stir among the UFO believers for many months however, Lazar's claims were later disproven (by UFO skeptics and believers alike). The UFO claims surrounding Area 51 emerged most prominently in the late 1980s, when a man named Robert Lazar told a television station that he worked at Nellis as a physicist helping other scientists studying crashed flying saucers on top-secret projects.

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