Stories from Area 51 Boss Backs Bob Lazar’s Claims of Recovered UFOs and Aliens

UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar’s claim that recovered saucers (and their potentially non-human occupants) were being stored and studied at a facility at Area 51 has received corroboration from the former head of the top-secret facility, revealed through conversations he had with Nevada-based investigative reporter George Knapp in the early 1990s.

Along with co-host Jeremy Corbell on their YouTube webcast Weaponized, Knapp discussed the revelations made by the former General Manager of the top secret Groom Lake test facility in the Nevada desert, also known by its supposed Atomic Energy Commission cartographic designation, Area 51, Alfred O’Donnell.

Alfred J. O’Donnell Jr. got his start in secretive government projects during World War II working with professor Harold Edgerton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), developing high-speed photography techniques used to image implosion tests that were key to the success of the Manhattan Project; these techniques would also prove to be instrumental in developing the triggers used to detonate nuclear weapons.

Two years after the war, Edgerton, along with graduate students Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert E. Grier, incorporated their group into Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier—later shortened to EG&G—a company that would become a major contractor involved in nuclear weapons testing at the behest of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

Shortly after the test facility’s founding in 1955, O’Donnell was put in charge of the company’s Nevada operations at Groom Lake; as General Manager of EG&G’s Nevada office, he had a security clearance that allowed him access to all areas of the facility, meaning that if Groom Lake and its facilities—including the S-4 facility that Bob Lazar said he worked at—housed recovered saucer technology and its occupants, O’Donnell would know about it.

In episode #6 of Weaponized, “Crashed Saucer Overseer”, Knapp details his discovery of Alfred O’Donnell through O’Donnell’s son, “an elected official” involved in Nevada politics, while looking for sources beyond Bob Lazar who could corroborate what was going on at Area 51; in the early 1990s Knapp located O’Donnell and struck up a friendship with the former EG&G employee, and in the process learned a great deal more about the secretive facility over the course of their two-year relationship.

O’Donnell told Knapp that they had received a “flying saucer that had been recovered from New Mexico;” although O’Donnell didn’t say whether or not this particular craft was recovered from the Roswell crash in 1947, some of the details O’Donnell revealed about the object led Knapp to believe that this may have been the wreckage recovered from the Brazel ranch that summer.

Knapp was told that the saucer was previously held at Indian Springs Air Force Base (now called Creech AFB), just 45 miles to the south, prior to its arrival at a facility adjacent to Groom Lake, presumably the facility designated S-4. The company’s efforts were focused on reverse-engineering the craft’s technology, but that it was “a very closed program, very small,” with only five personnel aware of the craft, “at least in the early stages that they were working on this project,” according to Knapp. “It was very hush-hush; they didn’t share it with anybody else in the company or anybody else in the area, or the military. They just kept it themselves.”

Knapp recalls that in another meeting, O’Donnell told him that they “were worried ‘it’ would get out”; when Knapp asked what “it” was, O’Donnell said that they had a live non-human being at the facility; when Knapp asked if this being was an alien, O’Donnell replied “to tell you the truth, we didn’t know what it was.” In the beginning, the researchers were unable to communicate with the entity: “we didn’t know what it was, we didn’t know where it was from, and we didn’t know what to do with it.”

Despite the nigh-ubiquity of the classic Gray-like entity being attached to UFO crash/retrieval stories, O’Donnell instead likened the being’s appearance to that of then-presidential candidate Ross Perot. “a little skinny guy with big ears and a tiny head,” Knapp recounts. “Not a classic Grey-looking alien, but a very odd-looking creature with really big ears that looked like Ross Perot.”

Knapp stresses that O’Donnell didn’t simply spill the beans when it came to divulging the secrets he held; rather, he drew the information out over the course of their relationship. “This is not information he was giving up willingly, I really had to dig and coax and arm-twist to get him to cough things up, and it was very slow going over about a two-year period, maybe a little bit longer.”

Knapp also says that he never got the sense that O’Donnell was being anything but forthright with him; he was also able to verify the seriousness of the stories he was told because O’Donnell’s family members were able to confirm to Knapp that he had already recounted the same stories to them over the years.

Part of O’Donnell’s conditions for telling Knapp these secrets was that he wasn’t allowed to record their conversations or take notes, prompting Knapp to furiously scribble down what he was told after their meetings. Knapp also asked O’Donnell if he would make his own private recording of his recollections of his experiences at Groom Lake, to be passed on to Knapp after he died, as O’Donnell was still bound by the constraints of his security clearance. Although Knapp was told that O’Donnell did indeed make such a recording, he believes that he will never be able to obtain that recording after O’Donnell abruptly broke off contact with him.

After two years of meetings O’Donnell ended his relationship with Knapp saying that “he’d been told not to talk to me anymore,” according to Knapp. “He said he’d been given a warning that it was not a good idea for him to talk to me anymore about anything, not just that topic, but anything.” O’Donnell didn’t indicate who had instructed him to do this, but Knapp was still concerned about being surveilled by covert organizations, a problem he had faced for years while investigating the government’s involvement with recovered UFO technology.

Knapp’s recollections are not the first time Al O’Donnell has been implicated as a whistleblower regarding the Roswell crash: In her 2011 book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, Annie Jacobsen included a chapter about a story from an anonymous EG&G employee that said that the Roswell incident was a Soviet hoax, orchestrated by Joseph Stalin to attempt to invoke panic amongst the American public in the same way that the 1938 Mercury Theater radio play adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds had supposedly caused nine years prior.

Jacobsen’s anonymous EG&G contact turned out to be none other than Al O’Donnell; at some point between breaking contact with Knapp and being interviewed by Jacobsen O’Donnell had been told to offer an alternate story regarding the Roswell crash, where the craft was built by German aerospace engineers Walter and Reimar Horten using antigravity technology developed for the Nazi Luftwaffe, and its occupants unwilling children that had been surgically altered by Josef Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death” who was infamous for conducting illegal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This new spin on the Roswell incident was soundly debunked shortly after the publication of Jacobsen’s book, and one that directly contradicted what Knapp himself learned through his study of historical Soviet documents on the incident.

The Weaponized webcast, featuring Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, can be viewed on Corbell’s YouTube channel; Knapp discusses his recollections of O’Donnell in episode #6, “Crashed Saucer Overseer”.