Around the world but most vividly in the indigenous culture of the American Southwest, the trickster wreaks havoc for good or ill or just for the hell of it, right here in our everyday world. The trickster isn’t condemned to rule an underworld, because the trickster is an equal among gods. A lot of credible people have looked at Lazar’s story and rationally concluded that he made it up, as he claimed to have fanciful academic credentials — simultaneous masters degrees from MIT and Caltech, of which no trace can be found. He was convicted of felony pandering in Nevada, the year following his wild claims about working on alien saucers. And since childhood he has courted local publicity, first for his rocket-powered bicycle. Yet for 30 years, he has mostly stuck to the details of his flying saucer story....
...That tale was mostly forgotten outside of the small and graying contingent of late 20th-century UFO researchers — and they had mostly dismissed it. Jeremy Corbell, an independent filmmaker who lives part-time near Pioneertown in the California desert, is fascinated by Lazar. Corbell has made a trio of feature-length documentaries about the UFO world, but the Lazar movie blasted right out of the flying-saucer cult and became a full-on pop culture phenomenon. "Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers" spent much of the summer as the No. 1 documentary on Netflix, right there on the home screen for millions of subscribers worldwide. It was already doing well when the monstrously popular podcaster Joe Rogan brought Corbell and Lazar to his show.
