American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
I Spent 48 Hours With Bob Lazar: Area51’s UFO Whistleblower
13 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Gary and Mary Ruth, we've been working on this story for a long time, and we'll tell you right up front that it's going to be hard to swallow at first. In 1989, a soft-spoken scientist in Nevada went on local television and said something that would baffle the world for the next three decades. Do you copy over?
He said that he had worked at a secret government facility called S4, just south of Area 51 in the Nevada desert, where his job... His actual job was to reverse engineer the propulsion system of a craft. A craft that was not made by human hands. A flying saucer, 53 feet in diameter. No seams, rivets, panels, buttons, wiring, or controls.
Ladies and gentlemen, today's guest is the white whale of American alchemy guests, the enigmatic and ever-elusive Bob Lazar. Robert Lazar.
Chapter 2: What was Bob Lazar's childhood like?
Robert Lazar.
Bob Lazar.
Lazar. Bob Lazar.
Bob Lazar. Bob Lazar. That Lazar dude freaked me the out, man. Ooh, he's a freak out.
Bob is basically a walking paradox, a human head spinner. He almost feels like an optical illusion of a person. Back then, Area 51 meant nothing. We've now heard a former director of national intelligence who oversaw all American intelligence agencies openly discuss a UFO tracking program housed at Area 51 specifically.
We've also seen past directors of the CIA, congressmen and women, and whistleblowers across agencies endorsing the existence of a decades-long, multigenerational UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. But Bob is an anomaly. He's on an island. He's still the only person to have gone public claiming he worked directly on a craft of non-human origin.
We've speculated about his story for years. Today, we get to talk to him directly. They really wanted to see if they could affect the flow of time. Did they have a stated purpose for...
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Chapter 3: How did Bob Lazar get hired at Los Alamos?
In this interview, we get to ask him our most skeptical questions about his background, his education, his past, how he knows what he knows, and why he hasn't been forced into silence. John Lear was super into UFOs before you got the job. Why do you think it didn't come up in a background check? There are a lot of people out there who say you faked your educational credentials.
Did you ever wonder why they didn't view you as a liability? but we also ask our most awe-inspiring questions. We learn new details about where the craft he worked on was actually retrieved. We discuss the beings that may have occupied it, where they come from, and what they want with humanity. We even learn about Bob's current home laboratory experiments.
He's still investigating the gravity-altering force he encountered while working on a flying saucer in the 80s.
Chapter 4: What experiences did Bob have at Area 51?
You heard me right. Bob is currently working on exotic UFO science in his personal lab. How did the reactor work? Through x-rays, we were able to determine that there's a hollow tube. But this interview gets even crazier than that. I surprised Bob with a scientist at NASA who's doing his own experiments on anti-gravity. What kind of voltage are you using? Right now, about 400 volts.
That's unbelievable. I also had the honor of showing Bob legendary, never-before-seen footage of a UFO at Area 51. People have been trying to get their hands on this specific footage for years. Ready? Yeah. I'm going to the beginning. Here we go. Holy moly. This interview spans multiple days with both Bob and filmmaker Luigi Venditelli, the maker of S4, The Bob Lazar Story.
Luigi has spent four years working closely with Bob to depict exactly what he saw and worked on at S4 in vivid, hyper-realistic detail. We really, really paid attention to what Bob said throughout the entire time. So we didn't invent anything. Without further ado, please welcome this week's American Alchemist, the man who helped reverse engineer a UFO, went public, and lived to tell the tale.
The original UFO whistleblower, Bob Lazar.
Ignition frequency. Their existence cannot longer be denied.
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Chapter 5: What anomalous force does Bob Lazar describe from the UFO's emitter?
When Bob mentioned this anomalous force coming from the craft's emitter, I immediately racked my brain for anyone in conventional aerospace circles who talks about something similar. And then I realized I'd just interviewed the lead electrostatic scientist at NASA, Dr. Charles Buehler, who talks about something very similar. Where the heck is this energy coming from?
Because if I was to stick this in space, it would accelerate with the power off.
That's a problem. You see, there's a long lineage of people studying gravity control or anti-gravity in the United States. Perhaps my favorite example is mid-century inventor Thomas Townsend Brown, who discovered that when you apply a high voltage to certain asymmetric capacitors, they produce thrust.
Chapter 6: How does Dr. Charles Buehler's work relate to anti-gravity propulsion?
That's right, propulsion with no fuel No exhaust, no propellant, just electricity as the input converted directly into motion. A new model for space propulsion that could eliminate crude chemical combustion rockets forever. Now you might think that's insane and defies Newton's laws.
And I'll spare you all of the corroborating research that I've dug up showing that Brown made real breakthroughs in the world of anti-gravity. Dr. Charles Buehler at NASA has taken Brown's experiments to the next level with modern instruments, more rigorous controls.
We see about 0.1 grams. That corresponds to about one millinewton of thrust.
and decades of electrostatics expertise from his work at Kennedy Space Center behind him. He's done over 2,000 of these experiments and controlled for just about every variable you can think of. And he's also getting millinewtons of thrust, basically real propulsion with electricity as the sole input. And you can't really argue with his authority to make these claims.
The man literally runs electrostatics at NASA. He's the incoming president of the American Electrostatic Society, and he's contributed two fundamental principles to the field of electrostatics that are now widely accepted. So this is kind of an interesting moment in history because we have a man who reverse engineered UFOs, and then we have a NASA lead electrostatic scientist.
So I thought I'd just leave it to you guys to kind of nerd out. Yeah, well, first of all, hi, Charles. Hi, Bob. This is a very exciting moment for me. I'm a big fan. Now, the thing about Bob Lazar is he kind of exists on an island. We've never seen him interact with other highly credentialed engineers in aerospace.
And what I've learned after spending time with him is he's actually pretty skeptical when it comes to other scientific anomalies. Man, I'm real interested to hear, you know, your physical experiment setup. Is it a hybrid of your idea and T.T. Brown's or are you just duplicating one of his experiments? I mean, can you explain to me what it looks like? What's your test setup look like?
gosh, 2000 variations. I'll try to do my best. Um, I mean, how, how is this? I'm sure you've seen the lifter ion motors and stuff along those lines. How is it different from those? A few ways. Um, the ion thrusters obviously use ions in there to give them momentum observation. What's interesting about this force, um,
even though it's sort of the same geometry can be used, uh, but at high vacuum, you'll get the thrust, but it's always in the opposite direction of the ion thrust, which is really cool because what happens is you have a sharp electrode in the ground plane. However you do that, you can come up with a million ways to do that in air.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of bismuth in UFO technology?
And then we try to measure the currents and make sure that in many cases there is no current, which is very odd. I would say. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I'd say. Turn the power source off and it keeps going.
Wait, what? Yeah, it is very annoying. In some cases, when we trap the charge in there, that's all that's required. So that really eliminates a lot of things.
So a physically larger one doesn't get you any more thrust, but you can stack them and get increased thrust. Well, a physically large one will, but we won't learn anything from it.
We can do 8 inches or 10 inches each we have. But we're not learning anything from it. We want to learn what is the best geometry shape. We want to optimize. We know area is one of the ways. That will be optimized later once we're in space.
But on ground test particles, we're kind of fixed by the geometry of our chamber.
Once we get some funding here, Drew does have almost a walk-in size chamber in his garage. You can walk in it. When that comes online in a few months, then we can test much larger versions of it. So the thrust does depend on the area. It does depend on the volume. It does depend on the voltages, the typical things you would expect.
But we try to optimize it as much as we can with the chamber that we have actively running right now.
How much are you charging them up to? What kind of voltage are you using? Well, when we started in 2016, it was at the Townsend Brown level, 150,000 volts. Okay. Thank goodness we're not anywhere near that now. I think we're operating right now about 400 volts. You're at 400 volts?
Yeah, so his belief is that it's really Brown thought that the voltage range was, you know, the thing causing the thrust. But Charles' belief is that that's sort of a proxy for electric field strength. And there are obviously other ways to amplify electric field strength that lower voltages. And so he's using 400 volts. Yeah, but I can't. It's shocking. 1.5 millinewtons. That's unbelievable.
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Chapter 8: How does Bob Lazar envision the future of his research and legacy?
Yeah. Man, I want to come over and hang out with you. I can introduce you guys. Put your hands on it, do whatever you like. You're more than welcome. Isn't that exciting? Yeah. I can't believe you're getting these results, and I can't get past the 400 volts either. If you increase the voltage, you don't see any change in thrust? Oh, you'll get more thrust for sure.
We like to stay 400 volts, 500 volts. We like to stay low if we can't. Okay. Yeah. It's a preference. I mean, we all average, we'll test up to 225 volts and start worrying about breakdown when you get, you know, about that. Because these systems are getting much, much smaller. So we don't have access to the higher fields anymore. It's material properties that we have to deal with.
But we like the 2300 volts. It gets rid of other nuances like Corona wind or anything like that. Right, right, yeah. All that stuff gets tossed out. Yeah, you're not even ionizing the air in air at 400 volts. I mean, it's nothing. That's why I was so shocked because all those other effects drop out right as soon as you drop the voltage down that low and you can get some cleaner data then.
Damn, this is really cool. We're converting Bob on Townsend Brown. Yeah. Well, thank you for this. Really appreciate it, man. Good to meet you. Good to meet you, too. Take care, guys. Take care. That's really fascinating. Isn't that wild? Yeah, it's a little more than just wild. I know. Right. It is. I mean, that's, that's significant. I think so. It could really be significant.
I, you know, the thing is the first thing I would, I would point out there's something wrong with your tests, but not in 1500 tests. No. You know, you know, when you've gone through it that many times and have done it for this long, boy, and you've adjusted all the, you know, potential parameters and fallouts to, uh, No, I can't. I know. Yeah, you've got to assume that the thing's working.
But you also mentioned DC voltage in the craft, and that's also a Townsend Brown that has high DC voltage. Yeah, it's not just high DC voltage. I even mentioned it on Joe Rogan that I think the material the craft is made from is an electric. And so it only, just like a... A magnet always has a magnetic field to it. An electric always has an electrostatic field to it.
Interesting.
And I think that's certainly something important. Were there high climb rates to the voltage likely? You know what I mean? Like really high climb, like fast swinging up in voltage. Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. It's so fascinating because it's literally all the Townsend Brown stuff. It's like fast high DC voltage, like fast climb rates. Yeah.
You know, I wonder if that really applies to the craft more than I was giving it credit for. I think it does, especially after your conversation with B-Way.
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