Today I want to talk about Dreamland by Bob Lazar. This is one of the best books I've read in terms of just loving it and wanting to hear every moment of it and go through it as fast as possible. It's the story and autobiography of the physicist, one of the physicists, that one branch of the U.S. military hired, possibly the Navy, to reverse engineer alien spacecraft at Area 51.
I realize that is a tall ask up front for some of you, and that's okay. George Knapp, who originally put Bob Lazar's story on the air, a reporter in Las Vegas, was very skeptical of this, and he did his homework. He investigated thoroughly to make sure Bob Lazar was telling the truth and could be validated beyond any reasonable doubt. The foreword is by George Knapp, the reporter on the story, and in it he talks about all of the effort he put into validating Bob Lazar's background.
Why I find his story more believable than any denial
What this book is really good for is opening your mind. I find Bob Lazar's story much more believable than any government denial that says, "Oh, we don't have anything." That's not even believable to me. I figure there is some good stuff out there. To me, that's where a lot of this technology came from, and that's where these things were being used. It's pretty obvious to me, at least, especially when you look into lots of other books on the same subject of extraterrestrials and aliens. Put it all together and Bob Lazar's story becomes extremely compelling.
For example, I recently did a video about The Day After Roswell by Philip Corso, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Army responsible for getting some of the technology found at Roswell assimilated into the companies that would then get that technology developed and distributed. If you enjoyed that book, or if you have any curiosity or openness to learning about the extraterrestrial impact on our planet, this one belongs right next to it.
The craft that wasn't even damaged
What's cool is that Bob Lazar says he actually worked on a craft that didn't even appear to be damaged. He said that at this facility they had nine of these craft, some of which had been damaged, others that were found, as he was told in the briefing documents, in an archaeological dig, and that one was almost in perfect shape.
Bob Lazar has an incredible description of the technology, the anti-gravity technology he says he worked with. He said this technology changes absolutely everything. You're talking flying cars. You're talking force fields. You're talking about the things we're seeing in science fiction. As he put it, "I have my hands on the technology that makes that a reality," and yet we're looking at this and we have no idea how it works. His comparison is that if you dropped off a portable nuclear reactor several hundred years ago and left it there, the people might be able to figure out some basic stuff, but it would take a long time before they could understand how it actually worked.
How I read it, and what I wished it had more of
I listened to this book while I was putting together my son's dresser, and I listened to it after I heard the interview Bob Lazar did on the Joe Rogan Experience. That interview is outstanding as well, and it covers some of what is in the book, but the book goes into much more detail. So if you've already listened to the podcast where Joe Rogan interviewed Bob Lazar, or you've watched the documentary that was done with him, this book will deepen a lot of the things you heard.
I was hoping to get more of Bob Lazar's life from afterward, more about the future. He pretty much stuck to the period right before and during when he was actually at S4 near Area 51, with some references to what happened afterward. He also went back and explained exactly how he got there and how he got hired.
My dream of being the ambassador for Earth
This got me very curious about how I could help out with the whole question of alien spacecraft and our relationship to it. I have a vision that I will be the ambassador for Earth someday, and that's kind of what I'm working on. This book really got me fired up. I had a dream where I was the ambassador for Earth, and I took some kind of advanced spacecraft to another planet to represent Earth to some kind of galactic council. I was hoping I could share that Earth was coming along well enough, that we were truly making some progress here. And in the dream, I was asking: could we have a little more time? Let's not wipe this planet out and start from scratch. Let's have some more time here.
So many cool things Bob Lazar said in the book still stick with me, and it helps me have an open mind. To me, the key thing is to be open to what's possible, to realize I don't know for sure if there's alien spacecraft in the desert right now in Nevada where Bob Lazar said they were 30 years ago. I imagine that wherever Bob Lazar said things were 30 years ago, I hope things have come along pretty well since then.
How ineffective the reverse-engineering teams sounded
What was shocking was hearing how ineffective the teams were that Bob Lazar describes working with on reverse engineering this alien technology. My hope is that the people in the world who are aware of all this, who take it for granted and understand these things are a fact, will see the value in having more active, human cooperation to do things like reverse engineering.
Bob talked about how the environment they were working in was the opposite of what you'd want in normal science. In a normal scientific inquiry, you'd want people talking and sharing and asking about what everyone else is learning. He said that when he was there working on the craft, it was basically him, his lab partner, and his boss, and they were able to do almost nothing with hardly anybody else who worked there. Scientifically, that is incredibly inefficient.
I look at how fast we solve things like zombie Easter eggs in video games, where collaborations of tens of thousands of people live-streaming put these complicated puzzles together, usually in just a day or a few. Tens of thousands of people work together to figure out these Easter eggs. I'd love to see something like that with this alien technology, where we could actively work together, all pitch in theories, and help rapidly advance it. This is the kind of conversation I love having with the people inside the Jerry Banfield Family, where we can openly explore ideas like this together.
Instead, I figure it must still be conducted in pretty high secrecy today, because you'd think 30 years after what Bob Lazar describes, we hopefully have figured out how to build these kinds of craft for ourselves. And if not, I hope we can more actively cooperate as a human race to get to this level of technology, because there's a big implication here.
The Cold War implication when you put two books together
Whoever is flying this craft has a very high level of technology. It appears, if you put Bob Lazar's book together with Philip Corso's book that I did a video about a few days ago, that the U.S. military and the Russians in the Cold War were, as much as they were building armies against each other, also building up nuclear weapons, aircraft, arsenals, and weapon capabilities that could fight or at least deter extraterrestrials with this kind of really high technology from forcing their will upon our planet.
I would love to see more active discussion, and to have this awareness become commonplace, instead of only a small number of people in our country being aware that, in the view of these authors, there are extraterrestrials coming and going regularly on this planet, living among us, who have crashed spacecraft that have been found.
"There's no evidence for aliens" — and my alcoholism
You see comments from people like, "There's no evidence for aliens." Yeah, well, it's like when I was an active alcoholic. All the evidence for my alcoholism got stuffed somewhere in my brain where I would conveniently forget it, and then I would drink again. What I found is that when I got out all the evidence from all those places I'd buried it, there was a hell of a lot of evidence for me being an alcoholic. (I've written more about that whole process in my honest look at AA, the 12 steps, and getting sober.) I feel it's the same with aliens: there's a hell of a lot of evidence, a lot of it publicly available, and literally Bob's book is part of it. Whatever government agency is in control of that hangar and those craft now, and whatever has happened since, could, as Bob said, make a single video that would settle it absolutely beyond question.
It was interesting. I liked Bob's reaction when he talks about reading the documents. When he first applied and was sitting down doing the initial paperwork after they'd accepted him, they gave him a box of documents that started talking about extraterrestrials and the craft he'd be working on. He didn't even know whether to take it seriously. Is this some kind of test? Are they messing with me to see what I'll do? And then he gets the technology in his hands, and he's like, "Wow, this is real. This is nuts." His stories are so good.
This book is one of the best reads I've had in a long time, which is why this teaching space on YouTube is valuable to me, and why I dedicated an entire conversation to this book. To me, this is a life-changing book. You get a peek into secret government projects going on 30 years ago, and it just leaves me excited to learn what's going on now. And maybe I can help. Maybe I don't want to help, though. From what Bob describes, it sounds like he was both very excited to be working on this project and terrified of the implications of it.
How it all fell apart for Bob Lazar
The downfall of his employment, and the reason we're even reading this book, is that his wife was having an affair, and they were tapping his phone line for his security clearance. The agency he was working for, which is probably the Navy according to his description, the Navy intelligence people monitoring his phone lines and doing his security check, decided he shouldn't be going into this super secret facility, because his wife's affair meant he might have an unstable household.
He then gets frustrated because they're not telling him this, they're just not calling him in to work. They'd call him in at crazy hours. He said they'd call him to work at night, and then he'd be in there all night. His wife said she thought he was having an affair because he was out all night at these random times.
Because they're not calling him back, and he's sitting on all this information, having seen these extraterrestrial craft, he decides to share it with some of his closest friends and take them out to see the test flights. They were taking these craft out and flying them around in the desert; they're still obviously operational. He takes his friends out to see it, and the third time, they get caught, and then he gets let go. That's why he shared his story, out of survival, feeling like, "I need to go public with this, or they're just going to kill me, because I've seen the most secret of government secrets." That's why we're getting this whole story.
He says in the book, too, that if he had to go back, he probably wouldn't share this information, because it really ruined a lot of aspects of his life and of other people's lives who were impacted. I'm so glad he did share it, though, because according to what I read in The Day After Roswell, the basic plan was secrecy around this whole topic, because the public was not seen as ready to receive this kind of information without fear or panic.
The plan to reveal it when the public is ready
The plan, as that book describes it, was to reveal this information to the public, about aliens and extraterrestrials and our place in the galaxy and this technology, when the public is open to receiving it. Not when you're looking at riots or people going crazy, but when people are actually positive, like, "Cool, this is awesome, I'm so excited."
We've had all these movies, things like Star Wars and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. We've had all these UFO sightings over the years. (I even wrote up the day I caught one myself in my diary entry about tennis, my kids, and a UFO.) I watched something on Ancient Aliens that suggested the public, which used to be hostile and scared of the idea of extraterrestrials, is now actually very open and very friendly toward it.
There was recently a UFO report released and declassified to the public that stated there are aerial phenomena that are unidentified and confirmed, that the military agencies do not know exactly what these craft are. That's an official disclosure, and there's been footage released by the Navy showing their pilots tracking these unidentified flying objects. I'm getting excited for the future. I see that disclosure is already happening.
It's understandable that the government and its agencies, after this Roswell crash, decided to keep it secret, not just because of the Russians but because of the public reaction, and to develop the technology. And I'm seeing the possibility, in our lifetime, that we're being prepared slowly for bigger and bigger disclosures. The current level of disclosure is: yes, we're seeing these aerial phenomena, yes, we don't know what they are, and we're going to research them. It's no longer being debunked. It's no longer the heavy debunking strategy where they say, "Oh, you're just crazy, this isn't happening, that's stupid." We're getting a kind of low-level acceptance, like, yes, these things are happening, we don't exactly know what they are.
I imagine this position will keep advancing in my lifetime, maybe even to where we'll be like Men in Black or Star Trek, where we've got extraterrestrials living among us and we take that for granted, where we know there are other systems out there that have life, and we have representatives, maybe like me, who will go represent us to those other alien races. We'll actively collaborate in advancing our technology, the technology that Bob Lazar describes working on with one lab partner in a room, just the two of them, when really this is the kind of stuff the whole human race should be working on at once on behalf of all of us. Don't you think we as a human race might want to do everything we can to understand these kinds of technologies?
The disclosures that seemed crazy and later checked out
Bob Lazar made a bunch of disclosures that, at the time, seemed crazy, and since then there's been support for them. For example, he said the craft was powered by element 115, which in 1989 did not exist on the periodic table. Now, according to our current public science, element 115 does exist, and it's starting to look plausible that, if a stable version were found, you could make a reactor or something like it out of it.
I appreciate you reading along as I talk through Dreamland by Bob Lazar. I listened to the audiobook on Audible, which was great. I listened to his interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. I originally discovered Bob Lazar on Ancient Aliens, and then on my livestreams on Facebook Gaming, people consistently brought up Bob Lazar and said I should look more into his story. So I'm so glad I heard it. If you enjoy these kinds of book conversations, you can watch my newest videos in my Life playlist, and I'd love to keep exploring books like this with you.