(NewsNation) — A July 2023 bombshell congressional hearing made waves across the world but one investigative journalist has been sounding the alarm on UFO secrets for decades.
For the first time, NewsNation is bringing you unprecedented access to the files of legendary television reporter George Knapp.
“I have secret stashes of files and things all over the station,” said Knapp. “Mountains of evidence compiled from the government’s own files.”
It took a long time to be able to sit down with Knapp. He says he gets multiple interview requests per day. It’s at his office at NewsNation affiliate KLAS where he’s worked for decades that we begin.
“So this has been my office. Amazingly, they’ve let me keep it all these years,” he said. “I have secret stashes and files and things all over the station because I am a pack rat. I keep everything. This is where a lot of the lot of the stories that we did were created. We were the unofficial UFO research capital of the world. All these things that have come out over the last couple of years started right here.”
What ended up bringing Knapp to Vegas decades ago actually came down to chance.
“I flipped a coin,” he said. “I was living in Northern California. I had been the debate coach at UC Berkeley and I was tired of being broke. I knew I had to do something. And I met these crazy bartenders from Las Vegas. And they told me about the town. They said, ‘Hey, you can write, you’re a speaker. We know a guy in television, you can get a job there. So I moved here.”
He’d never even heard of Area 51 before he moved to the desert.
“We’ve done so many stories. You know, when I moved to Las Vegas, I didn’t know there was an Area 51; I didn’t know there was a Nevada Test Site, the most nuked place in the world. This is the center, the heart of the nuclear testing.”
But before he got his shot at reporting, he drove a cab while working as a part-time production assistant at the local PBS affiliate at night.
“I was the worst cab driver in the history of the world,” said Knapp. “I didn’t know where anything was. And during the same time, KLVX hired me as a part-time production assistant. I would toil there, do whatever jobs they asked. About two months later, their anchorman quit. And they had open auditions to be the anchor of their newscast. I applied and I got it and suddenly, less than a year in Las Vegas, I’m anchoring to newscasts.”
You can watch part two of “Inside the Files of UFO Reporter George Knapp” here.
Within a year he was hired by KLAS, where he’s been ever since.
But before UFOs, Knapp’s beat was the mob.
“Like it or not, organized crime is part of our city’s heritage. Mob money and mafia muscle put Las Vegas on the map. There was so much going on every day: A bust or a Gaming Control Board hearing, a trial. There was always something going on because it was the start of the push to get rid of it.”
Where did the UFO interest come from?
“It was really a quirk Ned Day and Bob Stoldal had broken a really big national story,” said Knapp. “They had information about a secret plane out in the Nevada desert and it was invisible to radar. That’s what our sources had said.”
That tipster turned out to be a man named John Lear.
He was a famed aviator and the son of the founder of Learjet, and soon to be an influential player in the UFO conversation.
“His father had to develop the Learjet and he had a passion for secret planes,” said Knapp. “So he and a group of people, they call them The Interceptors, would go out into the Nevada desert and would sit outside of Area 51, the Nevada Test Site, to see what was flying around in the sky.”
“And one day, John Lear walks into the news station, this is in 1987, with a stack of documents — UFO documents — and he plops him on Ned Day’s desk. And he says ‘Ned, this is the biggest story you will ever cover in your life. It’s about a cover-up of massive proportions. You’re going to become famous, you got to do this story.’ And he pushes the documents over and Ned starts reading them and he pushes the pile back and he tells Lear This can’t be true. If this was true, this UFO cover-up, I’d already know about it.”
Knapp said he was eavesdropping at the time, as he’s admittedly known to do before he said.
“Mr. Lear, let me take a look at that stuff.”
There’s a standing joke in UFO circles, according to Knapp: “For every 200 UFO sightings, the Air Force can explain away 201 of them.”
“The possibility that our government might withhold or distort information about UFOs might seem far-fetched until you read the mountains of evidence compiled from the government’s own files, evidence that strongly suggests a cover-up.
Knapp read through files. He was also producing a half-hour public affairs talk show at the time, “On The Record.”
“It would air on Saturday or Sunday morning at six or seven o’clock. And I said, ‘John (Lear), you wanted to do this show. And I put him on. And I just let him go.”
Knapp said Lear’s revelations blew him, and the audience, away.
“I didn’t know what to make of it really, and looking back on the tape of that show, I can see the expressions on my face. Is this for real? This guy making this stuff up. He’s nuts.”
Lear’s talk of flying saucers and alien bodies being at Area 51 made global headlines.
“As soon as that aired I started getting calls and it didn’t stop,” said Knapp. “‘What was the deal with that guy? Is that for real? Do you have any more information? Are you going to do that again?’ I realized this topic touches the pulse of the public in a way that I did not understand and did not appreciate at the time. I had him (Lear) back on again the following year. And in between I started reading about UFOs, just trying to separate wheat from chaff. It’s a gigantic learning curve and figuring out what makes sense and what’s real is really hard. So I tried to educate myself and get ready for that next Lear appearance and the response from the public was even bigger.”
“April 25, 1964, was the first official communication between our government and the aliens. Three saucers landed there by prearranged agreement. It was filmed by five high-speed cameras, 68,000 feet of film,” Lear said on Knapp’s show.
This would be the catalyst for Knapp’s journey to the test site.
“We’re in the spring of 1989. I’m anchoring the five o’clock news and we would have a five-minute nightly interview segment, a live interview with somebody on the set,” said Knapp. “Our guest on this particular day canceled at the last minute. I’m thinking, ‘Who could we get to fill this?’ I called up John Lear and said, ‘You said you had a guy who was going to work out there and maybe work on flying saucers in the desert. Can we talk to him?’”
“I didn’t even know his name,” said Knapp. “We created a silhouette for the interview. He used a pseudonym and out the story comes.”
His guest, Bob Lazar, claimed that there were nine flying saucers of extraterrestrial design at Area 51 and that he was working to reverse engineer the technology of the objects.
“He tells me the story and the phones go crazy,” said Knapp. “I get pulled off the set and pulled into the news director’s office. The general manager comes back, ‘What the hell was that? Is this for real? What did you just do?’ I said, ‘Look, I don’t know if it’s real. I have no idea. We just wanted to do an interview. But I’m going to find out.’”
After Lazar’s story, Area 51 changed forever, according to Knapp.
Area 51
It was then that the little-known military base became synonymous with UFOs.
But it’s still shrouded in mystery to this day, with the exception of what George Knapp uncovered there.
It’s not exactly an easy place to find. You can’t just Google “Area 51” and figure out where the entrances are. You have to know what to look for.
Trip after trip through the Nevada desert, Knapp broadcasted the closest photos the world has ever seen of Area 51.
Knapp says there’s a little community, a town where people will stay for a short time. But aside from that, it’s extremely remote.
Knapp first revealed the lengths the government appeared to be taking to keep Area 51 a guarded secret when he profiled a citizen whistleblower who was on a mission to expose it.
His name is Chuck Clark, an amateur astronomer.
Clark discovered a buried surveillance network surrounding the base.
“After those stories, Area 51 was changed forever,” said Knapp. “It created so many headaches for the camo dudes and the people that patrol Area 51 and try to keep the public out.”
“Since those stories 10s of 1,000s of people have beaten a path out there to look around in the sky and see whatever is lying around UFOs or secret planes,” said Knapp. “Every major news organization in the world has beaten a path to Area 51. A lot of them made fun of me and fun of the whole alien scenario. But they’ve all been out there. And it still attracts a lot of media attention all these years later.”
RETALIATION AGAINST WHISTLEBLOWER
The live interview with Lazar who went by “Dennis” at the time and had his face hidden drew international attention. His claims that he worked at “S-4”, a subsidiary facility he claimed exists near Area 51, and worked on projects that involved reengineering alien aircraft captivated the imagination.
“The news director and I arranged to meet this guy (Lazar), we went up to Lear’s house,” said Knapp. “It was sort of an uncomfortable situation in the beginning because Lear wanted to control the whole thing. He wouldn’t tell us the guy’s name. But the guy had signed a guestbook at the entrance to Lear’s home. Sorry, I saw his name. I knew what it was.
His real name is Robert Lazar.
“We go in there and we start talking to the guy it turned out to be Bob Lazar,” said Knapp. “He told us his life story, where he’d gone to school, where he’d worked before and some of what he had seen out there.”
Lazar’s claims that the alleged alien technology was beyond human capabilities was a jaw-dropper, even if they were only claims.
“After three or four hours of grilling, we look at each other go ‘Holy crap. What if this is real? What if this is true, this would be the biggest story in history.’ But it’s also perilous for us. If we go after it, and it blows up in our faces, it could destroy not only my reputation and his but that of KLAS as well,” said Knapp.
Checking out Lazar’s credentials proved to be a difficult task for KLAS. He says he earned degrees in physics and electronics, but the schools the station contacted said they’d never heard of him.
Lazar also said he worked as a physicist at Los Alamos National Lab, where he experimented with one of the world’s largest particle beam accelerators capable of generating 700 million volts. Those Alamos officials told KLAS they had no records of a Robert Lazar ever working there.
According to KLAS, however, they were either mistaken or were lying. A 1982 phonebook from the lab lists Lazar among the other scientists and technicians. A 1982 clipping from the Los Alamos newspaper profiled Lazar and his interest in jet cars. It also mentioned his employment at the lab as a physicist.
“I don’t think there’s any secret flying saucers that are at Area 51,” said Knapp. “I suspect that there was something like that out there at one point because of people that I know have seen it.”
Knapp believes they were either moved further out into the Nevada test site.
“If you’re out there at night, you will see these pockets of light that pop up in the darkness at places that do not exist. Something’s out there.”