USA, Nevada, Las Vegas

George Knapp is a journalist associated with KLAS-TV, a television station in Las Vegas.¹ Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology company, in Las Vegas in 1998.² Knapp has said that from 1989 he began hearing accounts of crashed saucers, strange materials and secret reverse-engineering programmes carried out in the Nevada desert by intelligence operatives and defence contractors.³

That same year, Bob Lazar appeared in an interview with Knapp on KLAS-TV — the 1989 Bob Lazar KLAS interview — asserting anonymously at first that he had worked on a recovered extra-terrestrial flying saucer at a facility he called Site 4 (S-4).⁴ David Fruehauf worked at USA, Nevada, Area 51 for six years, from 1979 to 1985, commuting daily from Las Vegas on a private charter flight named Janet Airlines.⁵ According to Lazar, John Lear said that over a billion aliens were living in the mountains outside Las Vegas.⁶ A film crew making Project Gravator, including Motivo and Art My Crew, filmed Lazar with a DeLorean time machine prop in the desert near the city; Luigi Venditelli, a crew member, said they stayed together in a rented Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas during the shoot.⁷

Working with Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) produced documents describing sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion.⁸ The related Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) database included reports from civilian organisations and foreign governments, as well as new investigations conducted by boots-on-the-ground teams dispatched from Las Vegas by the programme’s manager, Colm Kelleher.⁹ One condition of Bigelow’s contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was that the Bigelow Aerospace plant in Las Vegas be engineered to accept, store and study certain exotic materials.¹⁰ According to New York Times reporting, Bigelow Aerospace modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Luis Elizondo and AATIP contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.¹¹ An alien logo is painted on the exterior of the Bigelow Aerospace building in the city.¹² Harold E. Puthoff told a Las Vegas conference in 2018 that the bismuth/magnesium samples turned out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high-frequency electromagnetic radiation at terahertz frequencies.¹³ A separate plan for Bigelow Aerospace to build facilities in Las Vegas to house materials from Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company never materialised.¹⁴

In October 2002, Las Vegas was the setting for a disputed meeting between Eric Davis and Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, the recently retired Director of the DIA. Wilson said that Rich and Doug told him that the newly formed Las Vegas chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) needed guest speakers for chapter or public venue events to raise money and membership.¹⁵ AFIO and its Washington, D.C. members now living in Las Vegas vouched for Davis.¹⁶ The Admiral Wilson Memo purports to detail what Wilson admitted to Davis in a private meeting in Las Vegas in 2002.¹⁷ In his own memo, Davis wrote that he met Wilson on 2002-10-16 in a car parked in the car park of a corporate office building in the city — an encounter recorded as the 2002 Eric Davis-Tom Wilson Las Vegas meeting.¹⁸ In June 2020, Wilson denied visiting Las Vegas in 2002 and denied ever meeting Davis.¹⁹ He said the only time he had been in Las Vegas was for a Carrier Air Wing Three deployment to Nellis Air Force Base in 1979 or 1980.²⁰