The Nellis Air Force Base complex covers a vast expanse of desert and scrubland in Nevada, with dozens of locations for testing secret technologies, from nuclear weapons to the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. Rumours of experiments on alien spacecraft have surrounded the Groom Lake site in particular, which houses the infamous Area 51; less well known is Papoose Lake, an area to the south of Groom Lake, where a man has claimed he once worked on flying saucers.
Zeifman snapped some photos of Papoose Lake during a recent flight around the edges of the secretive air base and shared them with The Drive’s The War Zone, giving readers a rare glimpse at a place central to Area 51 lore.
In 1989, a man named Bob Lazar gave a series of shadowy interviews to local Las Vegas television station KLAS-TV in which he claimed to be a former Area 51 employee. Lazar’s wild claims of UFO experiments and information about an alien homeworld orbiting the binary star system Zeta Reticuli helped fuel the imaginations of UFOlogists and elevate Area 51 to its present place at the head of the pantheon of top secret US government sites.
However, it was Lazar’s claims about a base called S-4 near Papoose Lake, a typically dry lake bed south of Groom Lake, that contained the juiciest bits of lore. Lazar described how in a hidden hangar buried inside the mountain, he helped the Air Force reverse engineer a flying saucer.
He even handily drew a sketch of the otherworldly craft:
None of Lazar’s claims have been substantiated, including his CV, which detailed a history of study at both the Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology (MIT and CalTech, respectively), or indeed even his employment by the US Air Force. However, we can at least assume that if the Pentagon did have an alien weapons lab buried in a Nevada mountainside, it wouldn’t admit to having employed someone there.
As The War Zone noted, the aerial photos snapped by Zeifman do little to vindicate Lazar’s story: no access road is visible on the vacant desert landscape, and the lake in front of the mountain is flooded. Of course, that could simply speak to the Pentagon’s talents for keeping things secret, although it has historically not been the greatest at that, either.
However, UFOlogists and true believers fret not, because Zeifman did snap something unexpected in his photographs: that’s right, a real, verifiable shot of a UFO!
Not convinced? Perhaps that’s just what the Men in Black expect will happen.
