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205 THE MYSTERY LINGERS coming out of nowhere over the desert. Strange characters, too, would occasionally show up at Rachel Cafe. And everybody had heard of Robert Lazar. Before we could actually be brought into contact with Lazar, my friends and I had to be screened by George Knapp and by one of Lazar's close associates. They explained that too many UFO enthusiasts had been pestering Lazar with their own theories and calling him everything from a hero to a liar. Robert Lazar clearly felt that he was neither. I was frankly intrigued by Robert Lazar; by his sincerity, his straight- forwardness, and his refreshing way of thinking seriously about our questions before giving an answer. This ability is not shared by most of the people I interviewed for this book. They tended to have all the answers, even before questions were asked! When it came to physics, they used technical terms improperly, getting mass confused with weight and speed with acceleration. Many of them did not even know the difference between the galaxy and the solar system, the speed of light and the speed of sound. Not so with Lazar. He was precise in his technical language. And this fact made his story even more curious. He had two degrees in physics, he said, and he had worked at Cal Tech. He had specialized in building alpha particle detectors, which he was still selling to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. One day, in December 1987, he had been approached for a job under Naval Intelli- gence. He was interviewed at a facility of EG&G, a defense contractor, although there is no implication that the company is involved with the project itself. From then on, Lazar told me, he would be called on an irregular basis and he would report to a certain place where he would be picked up by a bus that had blackened windows. The bus drove him to a facility in the desert where a series of slanted hangars were cut into the moun- tain. Inside these hangars were nine solid, pewter-colored flying saucers. "Did you ever watch them fly?" I asked Lazar. "Once, from a hundred to two hundred feet away. The underside was glowing blue, but otherwise there was no ionization around it." "What kind of work were you doing?" "We were back-engineering the propulsion system. They gave me