Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers directed by  Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Beliefs are mercurial things”

So begins the narration by Mickey Rourke about a strange conspiracy from the late 1980s. A man named Bob Lazar comes forward on a news broadcast to talk about his time working for some secretive organization in the government. It has all the trappings of UFO conspiracy, and just enough of it is true that it all might be true.

He alleges that he was hired to work in a place called S4 north of Las Vegas, Nevada. Up to this point, he had been working on jet engines. When he arrived at this covert operation, he says he worked to reverse engineer technology that he had never seen before, tech that he believed were from aliens. He divulged this information anonymously at first, but later revealed it as himself.

His background is complicated. He alleges that he went to MIT and CalTech, but they have no record of him. He also says he woeked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but they have no record of him, either. Yet, they do have him listed as a contact in the Lab’s directory during his alleged time working there. He has gotten in trouble with the law and been raided a few times, which is all used as evidence to substantiate all of his claims. If they were untrue, why would he be targeted so much?

The film was a bit chaotic. The music was ominous, and there were these flashes of random images – some including aliens, but others that didn’t seem connected. The flashes left me a little motion sick, which made it hard to focus on the information on the film, but maybe that’s what they wanted.

Overall, I don’t have a strong need to know whether or not there are aliens that have visited our planet. It was interesting in how information can be bent when processed to fit into our own confirmation bias. If we choose to believe him, then everything will match up. If we don’t, then we see the flaws in his argument. I felt it more fascinating to watch the filmmaker trying to make sense of everything going on. It was an okay film, but I could have done without the flashing images and ominous music, instead letting the information speak for itself.

There is profanity in the film. No sexual content or really any violent content unless you count the images of distorted aliens or skulls.