Education Lazar claims to have obtained master's degrees in physics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in electronics from the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech). However, both universities show no record of him. Scientists
Stanton T. Friedman and
Donald R. Prothero have stated that nobody with Lazar's high school performance record would be accepted by either institution. Lazar is unable to supply the names of any lecturers or fellow students from his alleged tenures at MIT and Caltech; one supposed Caltech professor, William Duxler, was in fact located at
Pierce Junior College and had never taught at Caltech. Friedman asserted, "Quite obviously, if one can go to MIT, one doesn't go to Pierce. Lazar was at Pierce at the very same time he was supposedly at MIT more than 2,500 miles away." This assertion was echoed by local journalist Terry England, who interviewed Lazar about his interest in
jet-powered cars in 1982; some media outlets have since dubbed him a "physicist". Asked about the article in 2021, however, England admitted that he took Lazar's claims at face value and did not
fact-check his credentials as a physicist. Inquiry into Lazar's position at Los Alamos revealed his role to have been a technician for a contractor, and that he worked neither as a physicist or for the lab directly. As such, the facility retains no records on Lazar, whom Prothero states was "in short, rather a minor player". Lazar said that his job was to help with the
reverse engineering of one of nine
flying saucers, which he alleged were extraterrestrial in origin. He claims one of the flying saucers, the one he coined the "Sport Model", was manufactured out of a metallic substance similar in appearance and touch to liquid titanium. In a subsequent interview that November, Lazar appeared unmasked and under his own name, where he claimed that his job interview for work at the facility was with contractor
EG&G and that his employer was the
United States Navy. EG&G stated it had no records on him. His supposed employment at a Nellis Air Force Base subsidiary has also been discredited by skeptics, as well as by the United States Air Force. E115 was first synthesized in 2003 and later named
moscovium. Lazar said that the propulsion system relied on a
stable isotope of E115. In 2003, scientists successfully synthesized an element with 115 protons, which they named "Moscovium". Contrary to Lazar's claim, isotopes of element 115 are highly unstable, decaying in a few hundred milliseconds. gate Lazar alleges that his employment and education records have been erased, an allegation that Friedman, Prothero and author Timothy D. Callahan consider implausible. Lazar owns and operates United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, a company that sells a variety of materials and chemicals. In 2017, Lazar's workplace was raided by the FBI and local police. The raid was reported as part of a murder investigation (in which Lazar is not listed as a suspect) to determine if United Nuclear sold
thallium to a murder suspect in Michigan. ==Public appearances and media==