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Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

This is Bob Lazar's company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar). What do people think of the plausibility of his UFO claims?

My assessment is this: if the probability that he's telling the truth is fat tailed enough (say roughly above 5%), then that's enough to justify being extremely interested in what he has to say. But the #1 thing that makes me doubt his claims meet this threshold is that he claims the craft he worked on violated the known laws of thermodynamics, which sends this probability to a mere epsilon over 0%.

(Since how often are known laws of physics "changed", as opposed to being merely "extended")?

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Bob Lazar has never produced any evidence that corroborates his story. He has never demonstrated that he has the level of knowledge in physics that he claims he has. He has never produced a copy of his master's thesis. The colleges that he claim to have attended have no records of him graduating and no classmates nor professors have said that they remember him, nor can he provide the names of any of his classmates or professors. His claims are more or less star trek technobabble and they're full of holes. For example, the location he gives for the location of the S-4 base puts it right on the edge of the restricted air space around area 51 which is extremely odd for a top secret project that involves flying alien craft. He claims that a bus took him to this secret base, yet there don't appear to be any roads that are suitable for use by a bus. There's absolutely no evidence for any kind of underground base there. The list could go on and on.

The probability that he is telling the truth is far far smaller than 5%. I would say maybe about 5e-9.

He clearly lied about having degrees from MIT and Caltech and people who are known to have made such a major lie are surely much more likely to be lying about other things.

As for his UFO claims, it's not just that they fly in the face of all accepted theories of physics but that the way he describes them has no connection to our current understanding of physics. In other words to anyone with a real physics background they sound like absolute nonsense. This is why physicists like Stanton Friedman and Eric Davis, though themselves believers in the reality of the UFO phenomenon, were/are convinced he is lying.

From what the wikipedia article described, it sounds like the publicly-known relevant technology simply isn't far enough along to comment intelligently. e.g., the propulsion system was allegedly based on a stable isotope of element 115, but the best we can say is that of the isotopes we've found (and publicly described), we haven't yet found one that's stable.

If (big if) there were aliens on nearby star systems, it's fairly likely they'd follow something similar to the Star Trek 'Prime Directive', which "prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society..." [1]

If that were the case, their actions would match fairly closely the supposed alien sightings that have been reported over the years. To me, that possibility is enough to consider the general nature of his claims not outside the realm of what our species' encounters with aliens would look like. Tech that's a little to far beyond ours for us to analyze intelligently, encounters between our governments and their emmissaries, occasional slip-ups and public sightings, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive

...and apparently, going by a surprisingly sizable volume of the literature of abduction narratives, a whole lot of at best dubiously consensual butt stuff? I mean, forget the whole "aliens would definitely be a lot like Star Trek humans" thing, I want to hear how you explain the butt stuff.

Yes, I'm poking fun, but only a bit - any general exegesis of modern alien visitation on Earth, that attempts to incorporate claims such as Lazar's, really does need to also have a position on the butt stuff. So where do you stand on The Alien Butt Stuff?

I mean, it's a fair point. My stance on the Alien Butt Stuff? Fetishes. Alien butt fetishes. We have bigger butts than they do, and they want to have fun on their spare time.

Or, we could construct an alternate theory based on the Alien movie and facehuggers. Butthuggers?

"Oh, we finished the medical research ages ago, at this point it's all just about - I mean have you seen their asses?" Yeah, no, that checks out! I can only assume the aliens have failed to notice the existence of the Internet. Either that, or they have noticed and now they're staying even more lowkey because it's that or end up buried under a literal mountain of thirsty bottoms. Talk about an Area 51 raid...

(Don't get me started on the Alien aliens. I mean, their reproductive cycle obviously takes strong inspiration from that of spider wasps, but parasitoidism only works reliably when the supply of hosts is unconstrained. Given the creatures' evident intelligence and their capacity for rapid and apparently directed adaptation via horizontal gene transfer from their hosts, and given also the extensive variety of things that humans get horny about, you'd really expect to see a modus vivendi develop pretty quick, you know?)

I can't believe your comment about alien butt stuff got flagkilled and neither of mine got so much as a single downvote.

I vouched yours, of course, but I'm still insulted. I mean, what am I to the HN horny cops? Chopped liver?

I dunno, man. The Anti-Butt Brigade must not be the most consistent bunch.

Re: a modus viviendi, though - I'd rather not see Earth become a sex tourism location for the local star systems. After a few generations of selective breeding, we'd all look like Kim Kardashian.

Eh. I see no reason to imagine that extraterrestrials so similar to humans that they'd find any of us sexy, would also be so different from humans that their tastes in such matters never varied. Or, at the very least, that they wouldn't be interested in the range, the sheer butt-buffet our species has to offer, rather than uniformly focused on some Platonic ideal of the dumptruck.

That's what I'd hope, at least. But you're still right that there's a real risk here. Maybe that explains the weirdly targeted flagkill - not that I don't probably know one or two people who'd be here for that in theory, but from where I sit, it is a frightful prospect.

From memory he's said that the conversion of antimatter in the supposed thermoelectric generator was near 100%. Maybe he waved his hands and said 100%.

On the other hand we've had something like 5 theories of gravity since the dawn of man? We can easily have another one sometime...

I'm certainly no psychologist, but my impression from his Joe Rogan interview is that his story is fiction that he might believe. That possibly it's a story he came to believe about himself as some sort of coping mechanism to protect his ego in some way.

I know some people who watched that video and concluded that he seems genuine, but for me it gave me a strong impression, a gut instinct, that he's been lying to himself for years.

> that his story is fiction that he might believe.

Could also be a psychosis. I had a brilliant friend in college that had a psychosis.

He kept looking normal but the stories he told were completely detached from reality. Over night he had several conspiracy like theories, contact with famous business CEO's, conversations with politicians, and was asked to run secret projects. When I saw Bob at Joe Rogan I immediately had to think of that friend back in the day.

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