Hayakawa showed the footage to the magazine’s bosses in Japan, who were thrilled. The TV station had paid Lazar a little over five thousand dollars for a two-hour segment about his experience at Area 51. Part of the deal was that Lazar was going to fly to Tokyo with Norio Hayakawa to do a fifteen-minute interview there. Instead, just a few days before the show, Lazar called the director of Nippon TV and said federal agents were preventing him from leaving the country. Lazar agreed to appear on the show via telephone and answered questions from telephone callers instead. “The program aired in Japan’s golden hour,” Hayakawa says, “prime time.” Thirty million Japanese viewers tuned in. “The program introduced Japan to Area 51.”
As Lazar’s Area 51 story became known around the world, Bob Lazar the person was scrutinized by a voracious press. Every detail of his flawed background was aired as dirty laundry for the public to dissect. It appeared he’d lied about where he went to school. Lazar said he had a degree from MIT, but the university says it had no record of him. In Las Vegas, Lazar was arrested on a pandering charge. It didn’t take long for him to disappear from the public eye. But Bob Lazar never changed his story about what he saw at Area 51’s S-4. Had Lazar witnessed evidence of aliens and alien technology? Was his discrediting part of a government plot to silence him? Or was he a fabricator, a loose cannon who perceived what he saw as an opportunity for money and fame? He sold the film rights to his story, to New Line Cinema, in 1993. Lazar took two lie detector tests, and both gave inconclusive results. The person administrating the test said it appeared that Lazar believed what he was saying was true.
“The odd part,” says Norio Hayakawa, “is how in the years after Lazar, the story of Area 51 merged with the story of Roswell. If you stop anyone on the street and you ask them what they know about Area 51 they say aliens.”
Or they say Roswell.
To the tens of millions of Americans who believe UFOs come from other planets, Roswell is the holy grail. But Roswell has not always been considered the pinnacle of UFO events. It too had a hidden history for many years.
“What you need to remember is that in 1978, the Roswell crash registered a point-zero-one on the scale in terms of important UFO crashes,” explains Stanton Friedman, a septuagenarian nuclear-physicist-turned-ufologist often referred to by Larry King and others as America’s leading expert on UFOs. “Until the 1980s, the most important book about UFOs was called Flying Saucers—Serious Business, written by newsman Frank Edwards,” Friedman says. “In the book, thousands of UFO sightings are discussed and yet Roswell is mentioned for maybe half a paragraph. That is not very much compared to now.”
Until Stanton Friedman’s exposé on the Roswell incident, which he began in 1978, the story was limited to a few publicly known facts. During the first week of July 1947, in the middle of a powerful lightning storm, something crashed onto a rancher’s property outside Roswell, New Mexico. The rancher, named W. W. Brazel, had been a famous cowboy in his earlier days. Brazel loaded the strange pieces of debris that had come down from the sky into his pickup truck and drove them to the local sheriff’s office in Roswell. From there, Sheriff George Wilcox reported Brazel’s findings to the Roswell Army Air Field down the road. The commander of the 509th Bomb Group at the base assigned two individuals to the W. W. Brazel case: an intelligence officer named Major Jesse Marcel and a press officer named Walter Haut.
Later that same day, Frank Joyce, a young stringer for United Press International and a radio announcer at KGFL in Roswell, received a telephone call from the Roswell Army Air Field. It was press officer Walter Haut saying that he was bringing over a very important press release to be read on the air. Haut arrived at KGFL and handed Frank Joyce the original Roswell statement, which was printed in the paper later that afternoon, July 8, 1947, and in the San Francisco Chronicle the following day.
The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the Sheriff’s Office of Chaves County.
The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the Sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.
Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.