Lazar’s Dreamland

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction, in part because such big things tend to be at stake there. But over the decades as I’ve learned more about the world, the less sense most of it makes. And I enjoy it less. Authors work hard to have their stories make sufficient sense to their median reader or reviewer, but not much beyond that.

Biographies are more realistic. They may not be exactly accurate, but they try harder to seem so. Not as many big things happen there, though I recently enjoyed Chernow’s Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, wherein events are plenty big. I found I liked and admired him; he deserves a better reputation than he has.

Recently, I discovered that stories of probable hoaxes can offer a great compromise, as they try both to have big things happen, and also to seem realistic even to knowledgeable but skeptical investigators. In that spirit, I very much enjoyed physicist Bob Lazar’s Dreamland, the story of his working briefly for the US government in 1989 near Area 51 on alien UFO tech, and then publicizing that fact.

I was born seven months after Lazar, and like him studied physics, worked at secretive west coast US government labs, hung out with relatively colorful characters, and was prone to take more chances than the people around me. I was at NASA ’89-93 and Lockheed ’84-89, were I once had a top secret clearance. Lazar is a type of person I knew, describes a world I knew well, and does so believably.

Someone somewhere complained that Lazar isn’t very deep, which is true, but also realistic. Lazar is a much more hands-on intuitive guy, while I’m more of a theorist. He put a jet engine on his bike and car, and he throws around physics theory concepts in ways that I find sloppy. But that seems realistic for a person like him, and it makes sense that someone might think it would make sense to hire a person of his style to do the task he claims to have been assigned. His sort of person might even be tempted to embellish a few not-central-to-story details when telling his story.

I’ve also watched his documentary and Rogan interview, where Lazar comes across as more trustworthy than the people around him. So I’m inclined to believe him – except for that one fact: his key claims sound batshit crazy. Sorry, this isn’t the sort of thing I can believe on the testimony of one person, no matter how credible.

Reading Lazar’s Dreamland makes me a bit more eager to see a good overall stat analysis of a large dataset of UFO reports, where ideally his case is one datapoint. And more eager to read other probable-hoax biographies; what else ya got?