Bob Lazar Tells me Everything - DEBRIEFED ep. 83

Bob Lazar says he still thinks about the technology every night. “I want to see it again. I want to know more about everything there.” In this conversation with Chris Ramsay, Lazar revisits his time working at a site called S4 near Area 51, where he says he was assigned to reverse-engineer the propulsion system of an extraterrestrial craft. The interview is built around the release of Project Gravitor, a VR and documentary project that recreates Lazar’s memories in exacting visual detail. Lazar describes the experience of seeing those graphics for the first time: “It looks like it was literally downloaded from my brain.”

The environment and the feeling of the craft

Lazar is emphatic that walking into the hangar and seeing the craft was not exciting. “It’s not excitement. It’s an ominous feeling,” he says. “People say, well, that must have been so cool. No, it was not cool at all. It’s like I actually wanted to go back out.” He describes the interior of the craft as uniformly dark pewter, with every surface sharing the same material, the same radius of curvature, and no superfluous marks. Nothing is stylized. “Everything there has a specific function,” he says. The lighting inside was strange: even when tripod halogen lights were placed inside at full brightness, they did not illuminate the space. “They lit up where they were shining, but it doesn’t refract anywhere,” Laz