Bob Lazar & Luigi Vendittelli: Bob Lazar is the physicist who in 1989 claimed to have reverse-engineered an alien craft at Area S4 near Area 51, becoming the most prominent figure in UFO lore. Luigi Vendittelli is the filmmaker who spent over five years building a handmade CGI recreation of S4 and the craft for the documentary 'S4: The Bob Lazar Story.'
What this episode covers
Joe Rogan hosts Bob Lazar and director Luigi Vendittelli to discuss their new documentary that recreates Lazar's Area S4 experiences using 90% handmade Blender CGI and de-aging. Lazar recounts the craft's anti-gravity reactor, element 115, the same-material seamless construction, and the secrecy and compartmentalization that he says stalled the program for decades. The conversation broadens into speculation about human evolution, endocrine disruptors, autism, sentient AI, the Grays as humanity's possible future, and ancient megalithic technology in Egypt and Peru. Vendittelli details forensic 'proofs' he found while building the recreation, including the craft absorbing light to stay dark inside, the visibility of the reversed flag at Lazar's height, hidden hangar doors in aerial photos, an obscured box on Google Earth, and a 1941 map showing a road into the S4 mountain. The episode closes with Lazar insisting he made no money from his story and drives a $18,000 used electric car.
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Joseph Sargent
“This is Colossus. You ever seen the movie Colossus? I got to watch it. Well that That's a merit against you.”— Joe Rogan
Ex Machina
Alex Garland
“we're going to willingly go with it because we're going to get like mates like Ex Machina. We're going to just something to take care of us.”— Joe Rogan
Star Trek
Gene Roddenberry
“we all want it to be like Star Trek. You go out there, you fly to another planet. You meet the people there”— Bob Lazar
Blender
Blender Foundation
“there's about 10% AI in the film, but there's 90% Blender. And that's actually handmade CGI.”— Luigi Vendittelli
DaVinci Resolve
Blackmagic Design
“the easiest software we used to get that detail out was DaVinci Resolve. And with DaVinci, it's a faster process than if you're messing around with Photoshop”— Luigi Vendittelli
Blackmagic 6K camera
Blackmagic Design
“the whole film was was done with the Blackmagic 6K cams. So, we would bring our Blackmagics in the 3D environment.”— Luigi Vendittelli
iPhone 17
Apple
“I have a iPhone 16 here. It's not as good as the iPhone 17. iPhone 17's better. Why don't you get an iPhone 17?”— Joe Rogan
Claude (AI)
Anthropic
“with Claude, I mean, they think that the Claude AI the engineers, they we think it's sentient already.”— Luigi Vendittelli
ChatGPT
OpenAI
“imagine when you have AI able to generate better versions of itself, which is what's happening with ChatGPT 5.”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- Lazar says Barry talked about moving the whole project to the South Pacific (Kwajalein) but the expense was too great.
- Lazar admits he increasingly thinks he made a mistake going public and maybe the technology should be kept quiet.
- Lazar says he was briefed two weeks ago on an issue that 'would have set the earth' and unglued the country.
- Vendittelli claims engineers think Claude AI is already sentient, just without a body.
- Rogan describes a 40-meter unknown metallic object detected ~100m underground in an Egyptian labyrinth at Hawara.
- Vendittelli's strongest 'proof': the recreated craft interior absorbed light and stayed dark exactly as Lazar described, requiring 20x light intensity to film.
- Vendittelli reveals a publicly-available 1941 Dept. of Interior map showing a road running straight into the mountain where Lazar says S4 is, removed from later maps.
- Lazar insists he never made millions, got no money from prior films, and drives a $18,000 2018 Chevy Bolt.
Worth remembering
- The documentary is ~90% handmade Blender CGI and only ~10% AI; Lazar's face was scanned and de-aged.
- Lazar says there were only 22 people total working at S4, including himself.
- Rogan claims autism is now diagnosed in 1 of 12 boys in California versus 1 in 10,000 decades ago.
- Rogan claims AIs in simulated war games choose nuclear weapons 98% of the time.
- Alleged extraterrestrial metal: 26 alternating layers of bismuth and silver-magnesium-zinc alloy, said to be unmakeable in the 1940s.
- Betty Hill's hypnosis-drawn star map matched the Zeta Reticuli system, the same origin Lazar's source 'Barry' named.
- Element 115 came as cut wedge discs and powered an anti-gravity reactor that physically repelled the craft from the ground.
- Google Earth added a yellow filter box over Papoose Lake dated June 22, 2024 that obscures terrain but accidentally accentuated tracks on the lake bed.
- Per the film trailer, starting the reactor requires 223 grams of element 115 machined into a wedge.
- Element 115 was only synthesized in a Large Hadron Collider experiment in the 2000s and existed for mere milliseconds.