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mode? REVELATIONS "Most of them aren't. But there's a zone of stability for higher numbers, above 110." Here, again, Lazar was displaying accurate knowledge of atomic physics, a kind of knowledge that would not be casually available to the layman. In fact, an article about super-heavy elements—published, oddly enough, in the May 1989 issue of Scientific American, when stories about Lazar began surfacing in Las Vegas—said that physicists expected higher elements to be relatively stable. But what can stability mean for elements that are so elusive that the largest pieces of scientific equipment known to man have to be used either to smash heavy nucleii together or to tease them in cold fusion The answer is that, when the experimenter is lucky, they last long enough for the products of the decay to be picked up in a blinking instant by extremely fast detectors. One of the products of the decay is an alpha particle, and Lazar, who says that he sells alpha particle detectors to Los Alamos, should know about this. So when he described a piece of element 115, which he had stored in his house—in an empty can of film, as it turned out—we had reached another impasse. With all his sincerity and the honesty of his answers, Robert Lazar was providing no useful leads. There was still one topic, however, on which we were anxious to have an answer. So I asked him the same question I had asked Lear, Cooper, and numerous others: "Have you ever seen an alien?" "No," came the answer. We had been chasing rainbows again. "John Lear came to my house for dinner and said to my face that his informant Dennis had seen an alien. And you're Dennis." Lazar moved uncomfortably around in his chair. "Well, there was this time when a co-worker of mine said, if you really want to see something, walk with me down this corridor and don't stop. I looked through a door with a wire mesh in the glass, and I saw the back of the head of something, with two military types next to it. It could've been anything, it could've been a doll."