Lazar's Education III. Missing Records

While there is sufficient evidence to prove that Lazar intended to earn a university degree, there is none that proves he ever got one. We can safely assume that Lazar was taking transfer classes in 1978-79 at Pierce College so that he could continue his education at a more advanced school, but that alone is not proof that he did. It is also not proof that he did not.

What we can safely suggest is that Bob Lazar had the intent and the opportunity to join Caltech to get a master's degree in electrical engineering and M.I.T. to obtain a physics degree. As previously discussed, the timeline of these degrees would have been:

• 1981 - 1982 Caltech, Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering
• 1983 - 1985 MIT, Master's Degree in Physics

No documents have surfaced providing adequate proof that Bob Lazar obtained either of these degrees. However, there is eyewitness testimony that suggests that Lazar at least went to Caltech some time in the past.

Michael Hesemann in the book Beyond Roswell mentions that Lazar's friend Jim Tagliani said that he:

“worked with Lazar at Fairchild Industries in Los Angeles in 1981” and stated that he “had no doubts at all about Lazar having studied at Caltech.” (Source: Link)

George Knapp claimed that he interviewed multiple people who remembered Lazar going to Caltech:

I certainly had trouble with Bob's claimed credentials at schools. He claimed to have degrees from MIT and Caltech. I've talked to people who saw him at Caltech, but there's no records there. (Source: Link)

John Lear claims to have seen both of Lazar's master's degrees.

But wouldn't you say, the argument being and you John maybe you can tackle this, gosh you have to had degrees you have to be a really smart guy and they only pick the best scientist. I guess we've covered this partly before, but It's gotta bother you as well. You know Bob real well. Do you harbour questions about whether he went to those schools or not? No I don't, because when he came over with Gene he had a resume with him and there was copies both of his degrees from MIT and Caltech. (Source: Link)

One might argue that these claims cannot be trusted since they come from Lazar's friends and acquaintances, but who else would be able and willing to vouch for Lazar with their own testimony, if not the people who at the time were there with him?

That being said how come there are no documents available that prove Lazar's attendance at Caltech or MIT and, last but not least, Cal State Northridge? Stanton Friedman who was not a friend of Lazar attempted to find Lazar's records at Northridge:

The only school Friedman was able to find evidence of Lazar’s attendance at was Pierce College. Friedman stated to me he drew a blank on Lazar at Cal State Northridge. (Source: Link)

Does this mean that Lazar did not attend Cal State Northridge? Far from it. You see Northridge unlike Pierce is not willing to share anyone's directory information. Thus, when Stanton Friedman inquired about Lazar, they probably refused to give him any records and that is why he "drew a blank on Lazar at Cal State Northridge".

If Lazar had finished a Bachelor's degree at Northridge, he should have been included in their yearbook. However, he never claimed to have earned any degrees from Northridge. Lazar only stated that he went to Northridge for a few classes, and if that is true we can't expect to find his picture in any of the school's yearbooks.

The California Institute of Technology used to share the list of students who finished their graduate program in their course catalog. Unfortunately they have stopped doing that only a few years before 1982 when Lazar should have obtained his degree. Since the master’s program at Caltech did not require a thesis, we cannot say that any are missing. Given that the only other publicly available and verifiable document was the yearbook of Caltech (the Big T), and since graduates weren’t included in it, there are no reliable sources that could prove or deny the existence of Lazar's degree. It is, of course, always possible that there is some list of students that was circulated between institutions, however not much effort went into finding these things at Caltech, and it would be quite difficult to obtain any of them after all the time that has gone by.

The administration at Caltech should have the records if Lazar was a student at their institute; however, they have repeatedly denied that they ever heard of the man. This could mean that Lazar never attended Caltech or that something happened to his records. A common FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) restriction would not be sufficient to hide Bob Lazar's records as someone like George Knapp would have had written permission from Lazar to obtain them, so we can throw away that possibility.

It is not impossible that Lazar's records were physically removed, but a far more simpler solution would have been to classify them as state secret. The University already has to restrict access to a large amount of data because of FERPA so it wouldn't be surprising if Caltech had the means to separate Lazar's records from the rest completely. Given the timeframe the law that may have been used to classify Lazar's student records was most likely Executive Order 12356.

Executive Order 12356 Sec. 1.3 Classification Categories.

(10) other categories of information that are related to the national security and that require protection against unauthorized disclosure as determined by the President or by agency heads or other officials who have been delegated original classification authority by the President. Any determination made under this subsection shall be reported promptly to the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office. (Link)

Essentially what section 1.3 point 10 says is that anything and everything can be classified by a few select individuals as long as they report the act to the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office. There may be other reasons why Lazar's records are missing, however classification was the most feasible scenario that I could find.

Most records at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could have been classified just as easily as any other record the government considered a risk. On the other hand there were significantly more public data from MIT circulating in various places compared to what has been discovered at Caltech. Glenn Campbell in particular has spent much time trying to find Lazar's name in the records of MIT. He concluded:

There is no "Lazar, Robert S." listed in any MIT student directory between 1978 and 1990.

There is no "Lazar, Robert S" listed in any MIT faculty/staff telephone directory between 1978 and 1990.

No "Lazar, Robert S" has been found in the MIT Degree List between 1979 and 1990.

"Lazar, Robert S" is not listed in the 1989 MIT Alumni/ae Register. (Source: Link)

Some of these items should contain Lazar's name as they were published before he allegedly began work at S-4, meaning the government would have had no reason or opportunity to erase Lazar's name from them. Does this mean that Lazar did not receive a master's degree from MIT? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

In 2021 Joe Rogan interviewed Christopher Mellon and he during their conversation Joe shared some of the information Lazar told him in the past:

He Did falsify his education records, and he's been involved in some other things. It just doesn't...

Are You talking about the MIT records? - Yeah. - Yeah he explained that to me. He said that he was working on something for the government at ?? and they sent him to MIT to learn something and he. I can't say too much. I'll tell you off air because he told me not to talk about it, but it makes more sense when you hear his description of it, that essentially it wasn't documented that he was studying there because what he was doing was really a terrible thing. A terrible experiment they were working on. (Source: Link)

This is something Lazar never stated before; however, it would fill in a lot of blanks in his story if it were true.

If Lazar worked on a weapons project at Los Alamos Labs that required him to be sent to MIT, that project could easily have been used to classify all of Lazar's records from MIT, LANL, and Caltech. An off-the-record black project at a secret location near an undisclosed military base would have been far less practical for such a purpose.

In his biography Lazar stated that:

I’d taken what I thought was a step in the right direction, was grateful to the folks at Meson for sending me to MIT to further my education... (Source: Link)

In a much earlier letter sent to Los Alamos Labs in 1990, Lazar claimed:

I was employed as a physicist at the Los Alamos National Lab, Meson facility in 1982. My group conducted experiments utilizing the medium energy linear particle accelerator, concentrating on polarized proton scattering experiments.

At another time, I was employed in the Weapons Division, where my work centered on high energy particle beam accelerators for use in space. (Source: Link)

So while the claim that his records at MIT were being cleared as soon as he got there is new, the assertion that Lazar worked on weapons at Los Alamos Labs is not new. One curiosity regarding his above comment is that he claims he was employed as a physicist in 1982, yet we know from multiple sources, including LANL, that he began working at the lab as a technician in the summer of 1982. It would be quite an upgrade to go from technician to physicist in no more than seven months.

In his biography Lazar states that:

I wanted more, so in the summer of 1982, I sent a cover letter and resume to Los Alamos National Laboratory. I spent an anxious few weeks waiting to hear back from them. I’d almost given up hope, but I received a cal one day in September inviting me down for an interview. (Source: Link)

So Lazar allegedly had an interview for a job at the lab in October of 1982 even though he was already a technician at the place he was being interviewed at. According to Los Alamos Labs, Bob Lazar's security number was issued on May 18th 1982 (Link) so he was definitely there long before October of the same year. In the phone directory of Los Alamos Labs of October 21, 1982 Lazar is designated as a subcontractor employed through Kirk Meyer in other words as a technician and not a physicist.

In the February 11, 1983 phone directory (Link) that was obtained through a FOIA request his name is already missing so if he got a job as a physicist it would have been some time between October 21 and February 11, which makes late 1982 a plausible timeframe for the switch. However, if Lazar had taken on another role at LANL, his name should still have appeared in the phonebook, however since only the redacted version obtained through FOIA is available and not the original phonebook it should not come as a surprise that Lazar's name is missing.

Assuming that Lazar was indeed employed as a physicist by the end of 1982 and working in the weapons division by early 1983 he was probably sent to MIT in August 83 and stayed there until 1985. If so Lazar's name would have been no longer included for those years in the Lab phonebooks. After all, the phone listings were based on lab location, and there would have been no reason to assign a number to someone living and studying in Massachusetts.

An interesting detail comes from ex-NASA contractor Bob Oechsler, who claimed Lazar's tax records were also missing for 1983 and later:

Finally, the Social Security Administration office in Baltimore, Maryland, told Oechsler that it had no records in Lazar’s account from 1983 onward, but they were able to validate the payments he claims to have received for the 1982-83 period (while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory), though when trying to access the name of the contractor, a “Security Violation” notice came up on the computer records, for reasons of national security, indicating that Lazar had been employed in sensitive work at the lab. (Sources: Link 1, Link 2)

If this is true then the missing records from 1983 further corroborate the possibility that Lazar went to MIT in 1983 to partake in developing a secret weapon which as a side effect also erased his records from that point onwards. Furthermore the classification of Lazar's records at MIT due to national security reasons would explain why Lazar was evasive in supplying the date for his graduation at MIT.

If Lazar was not at liberty to disclose his graduation date, lying might have seemed like the simplest solution. I believe he simply switched the graduation dates for MIT and Caltech so that later on if the truth came out he could say, that it was an honest mistake or that the officer of the court who wrote the report simply misheard him. Either way it was the minimal amount of lies Lazar could safely assume he would be able to get away with.

It may seem strange that Lazar would keep his oath related to whatever terrible thing he developed at MIT, while in the mean time blowing the whistle on UFOs, but the former was probably a legitimate secret project with possible congressional oversight so pushing it into the limelight could have had more drastic consequences for Lazar. Such an act would have made him a traitor which would not have helped his situation or the sharing and spreading of his message in any way.

In 2019 Joe Rogan interviewed Bob Lazar and asked him about his inability to provide sufficient proof for his education record:

Rogan - There is your education record that was also like, what happened with that?

Lazar - Well that disappeared also. That I've, I've never gone, I've never gone anywhere for education. I've never gone, I've never attended any classes at Caltech, I never attended anything at MIT.

Rogan - You did attend classes in those places.

Lazar - I did attend classes in those places.

Rogan - Do you know anybody that you went to school with.

Lazar - Yes I do.

Rogan - And have they verified that they went to school with you?

Lazar - Well I gave Jeremy some names, but people, yeah I. The reason I don't say these names publicly is because every single time I mention a name somebody gets in trouble.

Corbell - They don't want to be...

Rogan - Of course. (Source: Link)

Here we hear the reason why Lazar is unwilling to give out the names of his former classmates and teachers, for example for Caltech, and once again we get a confirmation that after George Knapp someone else, namely Jeremy Corbell was able to find and contact Lazar's former classmates. Unfortunately it seems that they are unwilling to come forward due to fear of retribution, or at least that is what is being suggested.

After carefully reviewing the circumstantial evidence provided above, there is only one question that we have not asked: Was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology willing to accept Bob Lazar as a student knowing that all of his records will be censored and his thesis never be released to academia?

I have spoken to former students of Stanford University who took issue with the possibility that someone's master's thesis might be blocked from being released to the public ad infinitum. They were right. This would not have happened at Stanford. At Stanford, every student agrees to rules ensuring their thesis is publicly accessible

Unfortunately the rules at MIT were and still are different:

MIT, Office of The Dean For Graduate Education: Government restrictions

The Committee on Graduate Programs recognizes that certain government agencies which sponsor research may require that theses be submitted for security review before they can be placed in the MIT Libraries or published. In the event that the agency does not permit immediate public disclosure of a thesis, this does not preclude its acceptance, but the Dean for Graduate Education will appoint a special subcommittee of the Committee on Graduate Programs to determine what steps can be taken to ensure eventual publication. A student should not embark on such a thesis without prior approval. (Source: Link)

What this means is that a student can work on a thesis even if they know that it will be classified by the government, but a "special subcommittee" determines whether and how the thesis might eventually be published. It doesn't really have to be published, they are only there to give a recommendation and even if the committee determines that the thesis cannot be published, it does not impact the student's degree.

Since MIT is willing to accept students whose thesis will be classified from from the outset indefinitely, it is reasonable to infer if they were willing to omit Lazar's name from the institute's student directory, staff telephone directory, degree list and alumni register.

Ultimately what we can conclude is this: Bob Lazar had the intent, the capability and the opportunity to go the the institutes he claims to have attended in the past. This does not mean that we have undeniable proof that Lazar did in fact attend MIT and/or Caltech, but it does mean that nobody will ever be able to prove that he didn't and that anyone making any conclusions based on lack of evidence is only sharing their opinion, nothing more, nothing less.

Therefore my personal opinion is that Bob Lazar will be vindicated.