Recently on another forum, during a discussion of an aspect of the Lazar saga, somebody indicated uncertainty about what George Knapp's thinking has been with respect to the Lazar claims. This was my reply:
It is doubtful if Bob Lazar's tall tales would have ever been more than a short-lived local color story, had it not been for the manner in which George Knapp latched onto Lazar's claims and relentlessly promoted them, especially in multiple hyped-up reports on KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, but by many other means as well.
The relationship quickly became something other than an orthodox journalist-whistleblower arrangement. It was more akin the relationship between a manager and a trouble-prone rock star. When Lazar was arrested in 1990 for running a house of prostitution (with holes cut in the wall for photography), Knapp energetically defended him and even mobilized the local congressman -- to no avail, as Lazar pleaded guilty to one felony, order to avoid prosecution on multiple felonies. The details were far more sordid than the sanitized-to-fictionalized versions later disseminated by Lazar and by Knapp.
Knapp was also heavily involved in an unsuccessful 1996 attempt by Lazar to withdraw his guilty plea -- the court documents in that proceeding make fascinating and sometimes amusing reading. Knapp played a key role in developing, and has never ceased to endorse, the baseless conspiracy theory that agencies of the federal government "erased" Bob Lazar's personal records, including his academic records. Yet Knapp in 2014 confessed that he did not believe that that Lazar had ever attended MIT or Caltech -- a remarkable statement, since Lazar's claim to be a scientist (he's not) rested on his fabricated claims to hold a Master's degree from each of those schools. Lazar has utterly no record as a scientist.
Knapp has promoted the unsubstantiated Lazar claims in venue after venue for over 31 years now. In 2014, Knapp gave a long speech about the Lazar saga, to a UFO conference in Denmark, in which he revealed perhaps more than he intended on some key points, including information about his own role in the affair up to that date.
Knapp has also been a central player in the Lazar reemergence that began in 2018. Knapp is listed as a producer of the sensationalized, fictionalized, but highly profitable pseudo-documentary titled Bob Lazar, Area 51 & Flying Saucers, directed by self-identified Knapp progeny Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell. Knapp also wrote a 24-page introduction for Lazar's 2019 autobiography, Dreamland -- a curious work that contradicts previous Lazar accounts on many matters both major and minor, but which Bob Lazar himself marketed as his authentic true story. Knapp refuses to address these cascades of contradictions.
Finally: Knapp has spent decades playing up Lazar's claim to possess a sample of a "stable isotope" of Element 115 -- a substance not existing in nature and not capable of human manufacture, possessing (in Lazar's accounts) multiple super-properties (antigravity, tremendous energy production, generation of force fields) -- in short, actual physical proof of alien visitation, if the stories were true. Knapp even told the Danes in 2014 that he (Knapp) knows where Lazar has hidden this superpowered, undeniably alien isotope. Knapp regularly calls for disclosure of purported government UFO secrets -- yet he wishes us to believe that his "whistleblower," Bob Lazar, possesses the ultimate physical proof of alien visitation, but for 31 years has chosen not to turn it over (under the media's watchful eye) to multiple independent analysts. So much for science. So much for "journalism."
I could go on...
