Beyond Area 51 Read online

  Nor did he ever encounter any extraterrestrial beings while he was at S4.

  The Tale of J-Rod 52

  This was not the case for a man named Dan Burisch.

  According to his own story, which came out a few years after Lazar’s revelations, Burisch was a microbiologist who worked for both Naval Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1991 to 1996. He claimed he served at Nellis Air Force Base—the massive military installation located right next to the famous Las Vegas Strip—and that at some point he went to work at Area 51 / Groom Lake and then at S4.

  While working at S4, Burisch said he was able to do something Lazar had not: meet an actual alien. In fact, Burisch was asked to take tissue samples from an ET being kept at S4 named “J-Rod 52.” Described as a typical “Gray” extraterrestrial (those familiar smallish aliens with large, bald heads, sickly skin and giant eyes), J-Rod 52, Burisch said, was one of two extraterrestrials that survived a UFO crash in Kingman, Arizona, in the early 1950s.

  Burisch said that J-Rod 52 was under the weather when he first met him. Over the next two years, though, the two became close as Burisch continued, it is assumed, taking tissue samples from his alien friend.

  During this time, J-Rod 52 revealed to Burisch that his alien race had actually inhabited Earth many thousands of years ago, before being forced to leave. The reasons for their mass departure were many. They included a great global catastrophe caused by massive solar flares, a violent shift in Earth’s poles, and extensive crumbling of the planet’s crust. This evacuation forced J-Rod’s kind to wander among the stars. But now they were back to retrieve what Burisch said J-Rod called a “lost genetic factor” from the human race, and presumably make friends when possible.

  Burisch’s intergalactic bromance came to an end, though, when an American “satellite government” decided J-Rod 52 might be more useful if he helped them better communicate with his home planet.

  To this end, J-Rod 52 was taken to a “natural star gate” in Abydos, Egypt. Once there, Burisch himself pushed his alien friend through the star gate, where he disappeared, never to be seen again.

  Illuminating the Illuminati

  How S4 became connected to the New World Order requires an even further leap of faith.

  Rumors of the “Illuminati” secretly controlling world events go back centuries. No surprise then that some conspiracy enthusiasts (author and filmmaker Anthony Hilder, for one) think these enlightened boogeymen—who are just pouring out of places like Harvard, Oxford and Yale these days—have a hand in what goes on at S4.

  One scenario posits that the strange discs located at S4 might actually be of earthly manufacture, and that there are a lot more of them than just the nine Bob Lazar saw. The UFOs’ raison d’être is they will take part in a massive Illuminati-orchestrated plot to stage a fake but realistic reenactment of Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Why? Because, so the theory goes, when people around the world see hundreds of the S4-manufactured UFOs zooming overhead, they will be convinced Earth is being attacked by extraterrestrials and panic will set in, just as it did during the Welles radio broadcast. This will lead the masses to urge their individual governments to give up sovereignty and join the rest of the people of Earth in fighting off the outer space menace.

  Of course, when every country’s sovereignty is gone, the ruse will be revealed. But it will be too late.

  The Illuminati will have their dream of a “One World Government,” and we will enter the era of the New World Order.

  “It Should Be Wet”

  With all this drama surrounding S4, one has to wonder what kind of people are guarding the place.

  The Area 51 / Groom Lake facility is itself guarded not by the military but by employees of the Wackenhut Corporation, also known as G4S Secure Solutions. These no-nonsense heavily armed guards continuously patrol the borders of Dreamland, operating behind signs that threaten the use of deadly force should any unauthorized persons try to enter the base.

  But apparently when it comes to S4 itself, some claim nothing less than highly trained, cold-blooded SEAL assassins in the employ of the CIA serve as sentries.

  According to controversial scholar and Exopolitics author Michael Salla in two articles he wrote for Examiner.com, whoever is running S4—the U.S. government, a shadow government or the Illuminati—is brutally selective about who protects its secrets as well as its elevators.

  According to Salla’s articles, one such sentry was a man named O’Ryan or O’Hennessy (take your pick), who joined the Navy (or the Marines—again, the story varies), then the SEALs, and was then recruited by the CIA to become a so-called Black SEAL. This landed “O’Hennessy” in a top-secret and highly illegal assassination squad overseen by ex–Vice President Dick Cheney. This assassin squad targeted not only the usual enemies of the United States but also allegedly “disloyal” U.S. citizens as well.

  Back in the 1960s, CIA assassination operatives supposedly used the phrase “it should be wet” as a code for troublesome people who had to be terminated. Apparently that was O’Hennessy’s job. He claimed to have whacked eighteen people for God and country, at least one of them an American citizen, for reasons unknown. But because it’s illegal for the CIA to assassinate anybody these days (drone strikes notwithstanding), once the death squad’s button men got too hot, so the story goes, they were reassigned to guard the elevators at S4.

  According to Salla, O’Hennessy worked on the second level of the S4 complex, which at the time was reportedly made up of four descending levels in total. While O’Hennessy was one of about six dozen people assigned to level two, his previous assassination work didn’t carry enough juice to get him clearance to visit the lower levels of three and four, reportedly where all the really secret items were located.

  O’Hennessy did get a chance to look around the upper part of S4, though, and in some respects his story differs from that of Bob Lazar. The former Black SEAL described level two as a hangar-type space with seven retrieved flying saucers resting in individual bays, with three bays being empty.

  The guard claimed one or more of the flying saucers was flight-worthy and would occasionally be raised to the surface for a flight test, or maybe just a joyride. But the people running S4 were careful not to allow this to happen when Russian or other countries’ spy satellites were passing overhead.

  Again, according to Salla, O’Hennessy got to see his alleged boss, Dick Cheney, on at least one occasion, as he claims the then secretary of defense visited S4 in 1991 and that O’Hennessy was on duty that day.

  People who were later in touch with O’Hennessy claim he showed them photos of what appeared to be extraterrestrial vehicles and extraterrestrial bodies in glass tubes plus a picture of Dick Cheney standing on a balcony looking down on them all.

  But why would a super-SEAL like O’Ryan/O’Hennessy, someone who would have required a mountain of high-level security clearances, come forward to spill his story to the world? Supposedly it happened after he discovered he’d contracted a serious disease while on duty, something he felt was intentionally given to him by the people running S4.

  Salla says that after providing a number of interviews, some of which can be found on YouTube, the mysterious Black SEAL simply disappeared.

  The UFO VP?

  How credible is O’Ryan/O’Hennessy’s rather incredible story?

  As it turns out, it’s not totally unsubstantiated. As reported in the New York Times in July 2009, there was a secret CIA death squad in existence in the years after 9/1l, its aim being to illegally assassinate people overseas. Then Vice President Dick Cheney, if not actually running it, was at least aware of the hit team and sought to keep knowledge of it from Congress.

  Cheney also has an interesting history with UFOs. On April 11, 2001, he was asked on the Diane Rehm PBS radio program if he’d ever been briefed about UFOs. Cheney’s Spook-talk reply surprised a lot of people.

  He said, “If I had been brief
ed on it, I’m sure it was probably classified and I couldn’t talk about it.”

  Going Full Circle

  Which brings us back to Bob Lazar.

  Who was he really?

  Bespectacled, with a bookish air about him, he certainly looked the part of the physicist done wrong by his country, say most people who met him.

  But was he even a physicist at all?

  According to Lazar, he attended both MIT and Caltech, receiving a master’s degree from MIT. He claimed to have studied physics at Caltech and said he later worked as a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

  However, investigators checking with both MIT and Caltech could find no record of Lazar’s attendance. But Lazar’s supporters argue that this was simply the result of the government’s plot to alter his records and discredit him.

  Lazar claimed he abruptly left his job at S4 after he discovered his birth certificate had disappeared as well. He said government operatives had expunged his hospital birth records along with his college transcripts and other employment records.

  This began his fear, he said, that the U.S. government was going to, in effect, make him disappear—sanitize his identity and perhaps even kill him because he’d served their purpose. Lazar further claimed he’d had his life threatened and was shot at.

  It was for this reason that he went public with the television broadcasts and, later on, with many interviews and personal appearances as well.

  A Weird House in Vegas

  Norio Hayakawa is a noted UFO researcher and author. Not only has he written extensively about Area 51 and S4 but he also had personal dealings with Bob Lazar.

  “He was an enigmatic person,” Hayakawa told this writer in an interview. “And very mysterious.”

  To illustrate his statement, Hayakawa relayed the following anecdote.

  Hayakawa went to a place where Lazar said he lived, a house in the Las Vegas area. The occasion was for yet another interview, but no matter where Lazar went in the house, he always had two strange men with him, even sitting on either side of the couch with him while he and Hayakawa talked.

  “When Lazar would get up to go to the bathroom, these two guys would go with him,” Hayakawa said. “That was strange.”

  The house was strange, too, Hayakawa said. It didn’t look like it was being lived in on a daily basis.

  At one point, Hayakawa managed to get a look at Lazar’s W-2 tax form. Lazar had previously claimed he’d worked at S4 for several months. Yet according to Hayakawa, his W-2 indicated only about $985 in return for five days’ work for the government. That comes out to be about twenty-five dollars an hour—not bad for the late eighties but certainly not the paycheck of a top-level, high-security-clearance physicist.

  Hayakawa also investigated the Social Security number on Lazar’s tax form and discovered it was not his but actually belonged to Lazar’s former wife.

  Which leads to what might be the most intriguing question of all: Could a simple romance gone wrong have been behind Lazar’s S4 saga?

  The Real Story?

  Bill Birnes is a well-known UFO researcher and star of the TV show UFO Hunters.

  Regarding Bob Lazar, Birnes told this writer bluntly: “The real Lazar story is so weird you couldn’t make it up.”

  Birnes said that Lazar did indeed work at Area 51, but his wife became suspicious that he was away from home so much and couldn’t tell her what he was doing during that time. She suspected he was cheating on her and that the story of doing secret work for the government was just a cover. So she confronted him with it.

  Hoping to save his marriage, Lazar felt he had to prove to his bride that he was working at Area 51. So he took her out to a certain place in the Nevada desert on a certain night, and once there, just when he said it would happen, she saw something very strange in the sky, something she took to be a UFO. Understandably, she was astonished. This seemed to be proof positive of what Lazar had been telling her. If not, how would he have known when one of Area 51’s “UFOs” was going to take flight?

  But then Lazar started bringing other witnesses to this same spot and showing them whatever it was flying around out there, and eventually he got caught. The security people at Area 51 pulled his clearance and told him he was in deep trouble. They fired him and indeed sanitized his records.

  In retaliation, Lazar ran to the media and told the S4 story, and it blew up from there.

  Disinformation, Please…

  According to Hayakawa, Lazar doesn’t do interviews anymore.

  But that doesn’t mean life has calmed down for him since leaving the public eye. Hayakawa revealed, for instance, that in 2006 Lazar’s house was raided by DEA and FBI agents who accused him of selling material that could be made into weapons. The case was later dropped.

  Hayakawa says Lazar eventually moved to Michigan. “He was selling scientific equipment,” Hayakawa said. “Items that you can’t get easily. His specialty was dealing with defense contractors.”

  Dealing with defense contractors? Doesn’t that sound like someone who’s “connected” in some way?

  Which leads to another question that’s been asked before: Was Lazar a disinformation agent all along, someone working for the government?

  After all, it’s been reported that before he first appeared on TV, Russian satellites would routinely photograph Area 51 about three times a month. But after Lazar talked about the crashed discs and so on, the Russians began photographing the Papoose Lake region and S4 almost daily.

  So was Lazar’s ultimate role to misdirect the Russians into wasting their time and resources photographing nothing more than an ordinary mountain in the middle of Nevada?

  Could it be as simple as that?

  “He had a significant personality,” Hayakawa said. “But whether that personality was created by someone else? I don’t know.”

  But whatever Lazar was up to, he never wavered from it.

  “He never changed his story from day one,” Hayakawa concluded. “That doesn’t mean that what he said was true. But he stuck with it.”

  Shooting Holes in S4

  Government plant or not, there are fundamental problems with Lazar’s story, aside from missing birth certificates and nonexistent college degrees.

  For instance, Lazar said he was bused from Area 51 to S4. Yet, as many investigators have pointed out, there are no visible roads that go from Groom Lake to Papoose Lake.

  Then, there’s the basic question about the rumored S4 itself. How does one build a place like that? Coring out a mountain, turning it into a facility that would have to be ultra-high-tech, if indeed it was a repository for something as earth-shattering as crashed UFOs? And do it all in total secret?

  To construct such a facility would take thousands of workers and tons of earthmoving equipment. The project would require massive amounts of power, generators and hydraulic tools and fuel to run them. And wouldn’t you do the work at night, so those pesky Russian satellites wouldn’t see you from one hundred miles up? If so, think of the massive amount of lighting that would be needed to create something on the scale of S4.

  Then there’s the problem of the dirt. Where does one put the hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt and debris that would result from digging into the side of a mountain to create such a huge cavern within?

  This debris could be loaded onto trucks and hauled away, but where would they haul it to? And on what roads, if there are none stretching between Area 51 / Groom Lake and the supposed site of S4?

  The whole idea of a vast underground base, costing billions, built in secret, by tens of thousands of workers, with no visible signs or evidence of its construction, all to hold crashed UFOs or whatever other exotic government secrets there are… it seems a bit far-fetched.

  Until you learn about a place called Mount Yamantau.

  “We Don’t Have a Clue….”

  On April 16, 1996, the New York Times reported that a mysterious underground complex was being built by the Russians in the
Ural Mountains. The project was so big, tens of thousands of workers were involved and an entire highway and new railroad extension had to be built in order to service it.

  U.S. intelligence sources believe the Russian government has pumped more than $6 billion into the Mount Yamantau complex, a cavern that spans some four hundred square miles. One theory suggests that in the event of a nuclear war, the Russian leadership would head for Yamantau, a place where they could survive until the aftereffects of such an apocalyptic conflict settled down.

  But there might be more to it than that—especially considering, as we will see, other unusual UFO-related events going on inside Russia.

  Could Yamantau be another Area 51 located deep inside a mountain? A “Russian S4”?

  No one really knows.

  But back in 1998, in a rare public comment, then commander of the U.S. Strategic Command General Eugene Habiger said these chilling words about Mount Yamantau:

  “It’s a very large complex that we estimate has millions of square feet available for underground facilities. [But] we don’t have a clue as to what the Russians are doing in there.”

  A hollowed-out mountain in the middle of nowhere? Built by tens of thousands of workers in relative secrecy? Millions of square feet for underground facilities, their true purpose secret and unknown?

  It begs the question: If the Russians did it, why wouldn’t we?

  4

  The San Luis Valley

  Tales from Mysterious Highways

  On October 16, 1996, around ten p.m., a man driving his pickup through Colorado’s San Luis Valley stopped at the side of the road to relieve himself.

  Two female relatives were traveling with him; they were on their way to a wedding the next day.

  But when the man got out of his truck, something strange happened. He noticed his shadow on the ground. This wasn’t right; the sun had long since set and it was a moonless night.