Bob Lazar and Moscovium (element 115) | Bullaki Science Podcast Clips with Michael Shermer

Where are Bob Lazar’s MIT and Caltech degree certificates? Did he predict the existence of Moscovium (element 115)? Is he telling the truth? This is part of a longer Bullaki Science Podcast with Michael Shermer:    • Why People Believe Weird Things | Bul...  

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SL. Maybe we can discuss about the US technology later. But now I wanted to discuss about Bob Lazar. Have you seen the podcaster with Joe Rogan?[8] Do you think that guy is lying or do you think he’s telling the truth? What do you think?
MS. I don’t think he’s telling the truth. Maybe it’s his truth, at this point. You have to remember the power of self-deception. Now I can’t get inside somebody’s heart or head or whatever and to any cult leader or whatever do they really believe the stuff they’re saying. Maybe they believe it, but that doesn’t make it true. So whether Bob Lazar is totally deluded or he’s just making stuff up I don’t know, but for sure [there are] people that have fact checked his claims. Don’t take my word for it as a skeptic, take Stan Friedman’s word for it. Stan Friedman is (he just died last year) a really good guy, even though he and I collided on TV many times over UFOs. He’s a total UFO believer: “Absolutely, they’ve come here”.
Now, to his credit, he’s never had any personal experiences, never been abducted, never seen a UFO. He just thinks that the evidence is sufficient to draw that conclusion. So when he heard the Bob Lazar story, he fact-checked it.
So, Lazar said he went to MIT and to Caltech. No he didn’t and in fact he I think he had the equivalent of like a couple physics classes at a community college and that’s it. Stan was able to track that down. But the records at Caltech and MIT show no Bob Lazar. So Lazar’s explanation for that is, well, because it’s top secret and what I was doing was so important and what I found out was so revelatory that they erased the records at those universities. Okay I’m sorry that’s not how it works. No government can go into MIT or Caltech and then tell them “we’d like you to scrape clean the records of this particular student”. Here they’re not going to do it. It’s totally illegal and universities really protect student records. But again, even the argument itself is another one of these hand-waving arguments.

Is Bob Lazar a fraud?
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Some notes:
• Element 115 synthetized in 2003 by Yuri Oganessian et al. (2004). So what? The Higgs Boson was predicted in 1964 and discovered as a new particle in 2012. There are papers on the prediction of Moscovium properties published before Lazars’ story (see Smith et al., 1973).
• Physicists predicted the existence of “islands of stability” (in the Z vs N plot) for super heavy elements, and they did that before Lazars’ interview (see Nilsson et al. 1969).
• The alleged erased light deflection video... you can deflect light by passing it through two materials with different index of refraction.
• The FBI raid was about the sale of thallium.
• The hand scanners he spoke about are from a technology that was patented in 1982 by Stellar Systems (patents.google.com/patent/US4586441A/en)