Element 115 and Bob Lazar: What the Lab Data Show

Two claims, on a local station, in the middle of a UFO story. What is unusual about them is not that they are bold. It is that they can be checked. Almost everything told about S-4 can be neither confirmed nor refuted. These two sentences can. Fourteen years later, in the summer of 2003, in an accelerator hall in Dubna, about 75 miles north of Moscow, the test begins. Later Darmstadt joins in. What comes out is not a simple answer but one of the strangest stories the UFO world and nuclear physics share.

A man called "Dennis": spring 1989

The story begins in half-shadow. On May 15, 1989, KLAS airs an interview with a man whose face stays hidden and who calls himself Dennis. He describes a site called S-4 south of Groom Lake where nine flying saucers are kept; his job, he says, was to reverse-engineer the propulsion of one of them. In November 1989 the same man appears in Knapp's series with his face and name. He later says he was recruited through the contractor EG&G as a physicist for a Navy project, and that S-4 lies 10 to 15 miles south of Groom Lake. That is how the Lazar archive Papoose Lake, which has collected broadcasts and transcripts since 1989, lays it out.

What he says there about propulsion sounds like science fiction, and he knows it. In the broadcast of December 9 he describes a "reactor": a plate about 18 inches across with a sphere on top, into which a piece of element 115 is placed. Under proton bombardment the element releases an antimatter particle, the annihilation supplies energy, and an effect of the element itself creates a gravity wave at the sphere that is channeled into the lower part of the disc and amplified. How exactly it works, Lazar says, nobody knows, not even at S-4.

Eleven days later, on December 20, 1989, he is on Billy Goodman's radio show taking listener calls. One caller asks how much fuel there is. Lazar says he does not know where exactly, but there are 500 pounds on the test site, and each disc needs 223 grams, just under 8 ounces. Remember that number. Knapp repeats it in a 2005 report.

People have argued about all this for 36 years. For this story something else counts: in the flood of detail there are a few that do not depend on belief. Whether there are saucers in Nevada nobody outside can check. Whether element 115 exists, whether it is stable and whether it can be made can be checked in any lab in the world with the means to do it.

What was known about element 115 in 1989

Nothing. The periodic table had an empty box at position 115. That is the core of what Lazar's supporters still point to: he named an element nobody had seen.

But the box was not pulled out of thin air. Since the mid-1960s nuclear physicists had predicted a so-called island of stability. The idea: atomic nuclei are especially tightly bound when certain "magic" numbers of protons and neutrons are reached. Two groups, William Myers and Wladyslaw Swiatecki, and Victor Viola and Glenn Seaborg, predicted independently that beyond the known elements there should be a region of heavy nuclei with much longer lifetimes. That is how Yuri Oganessian and Krzysztof Rykaczewski summarize it in Physics Today in 2015. The next magic proton number is expected between 114 and 126, the next magic neutron number at 184.

Lazar says as much himself in the broadcast: science suspected the elements would become stable again somewhere around 113 to 116, and that is exactly what element 115 is. So his statement is not a prediction out of nowhere but a claim that a known theory had already come true at one point, with a piece of metal he says he saw. He also said the heaviest element made so far was "about element 106." In fact, a team at GSI in Darmstadt had made elements 107, 108 and 109 between 1981 and 1984. That proves nothing either way; it only shows that the city where element 115 would be confirmed two decades later was already pushing the frontier.

Timeline

Date	Event
1966	Two research groups independently predict an "island of stability" of superheavy nuclei.
1981-1984	GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, creates elements 107, 108 and 109.
May 15, 1989	KLAS-TV Las Vegas airs the anonymous interview with "Dennis" about a site called S-4.
Dec. 9, 1989	Bob Lazar calls element 115 stable and impossible to make, on On the Record.
July 14 - Aug. 10, 2003	The first four atoms of element 115 are made at the U400 cyclotron in Dubna, Russia.
August 2013	A team led by Lund University confirms element 115 with 30 decay chains at GSI.
Nov. 28, 2016	IUPAC names element 115 moscovium, symbol Mc.
2022	Dubna's new superheavy element factory finds a fifth isotope, moscovium-286.
Sept. 23, 2024	Darmstadt and Mainz publish the first chemistry of element 115: four atoms in two months.

The question of the physicist

Before we go into the accelerator halls, one question hangs over every Lazar discussion: who is speaking? The answer is less clear-cut than either side would like, so here is only what is documented. Lazar says he earned a master's in physics at MIT and one in electronics at Caltech. The nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, himself one of the best-known UFO researchers in the United States and no skeptic on principle, asked both schools and found no records; Knapp found none either. Lazar says his records were erased.

On the other side is a newspaper story. On June 27, 1982, the Los Alamos Monitor profiled a young man who had built a jet-powered car and called him a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. The lab told Knapp it had no records of Lazar; Knapp found his name in the lab's 1982 phone directory anyway. The Papoose Lake archive documents a later statement from the lab that Lazar received a security badge on May 18, 1982. That fits a man who worked there as a technician for a contractor, as Friedman and other critics write, and it fits a man whose traces are smaller than he describes. The beauty of element 115, though, is that the question decides nothing. An element is stable or it is not, no matter who says so.

Calcium on americium: Dubna, summer 2003

Dubna sits on the Volga, a science town built around the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. The U400 cyclotron stands in its Flerov Laboratory. From July 14 to August 10, 2003, an experiment runs there that a Russian-American team prepared together. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California supplies the target material, americium-243. The Russians supply the beam.

Here is the first point where Lazar's description and reality part ways. In 1989 he explained that heavy elements are made by bombarding a stable element with protons in an accelerator to build them up one by one, and that for element 115 this would take infinite energy and infinite time. That is not how it is done. In Dubna they do not fire protons but whole calcium nuclei with 20 protons each at americium with 95. Twenty plus 95 is 115. When two nuclei fuse at the right moment and shake off a few neutrons, the new element exists in a single step.

The right moment is rare. With a dose of 4.3 quintillion calcium nuclei at 248 MeV, the team records three identical decay chains: five alpha decays in a row, about 20 seconds in total, ending in fission. At a slightly higher energy and the same dose again, a fourth, different chain appears. Four atoms. That is what the paper published on February 1, 2004, in Physical Review C says: two isotopes, 288 and 287, made with cross sections of about three and one picobarn, which means more than a quintillion calcium nuclei fired for every single atom.

Livermore's press release goes out on February 2, 2004. Nobody speaks of stability. The chain ends in dubnium-268, which with a half-life of about 16 hours is the longest-lived link of the whole series. Element 115 itself is gone after fractions of a second. With that, the first of Lazar's two claims is refuted: element 115 can be made, atom by atom. The second is still open, because there is not just one element 115 but many possible isotopes with different numbers of neutrons. Dubna had seen two.

Darmstadt confirms: 30 chains and a name

An element only counts as discovered when an independent committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC, accepts the evidence. That takes replication, ideally somewhere else. It came from Darmstadt. An international team led by nuclear physicist Dirk Rudolph of Lund University used the UNILAC linear accelerator at GSI and the TASCA separator. The method was the same as in Dubna, calcium on americium; the detection was new. The team recorded not only the alpha decays but also X-rays and gamma rays at the same time, a kind of fingerprint of the nucleus. In all, 30 correlated decay chains. The observations, the authors wrote in Physical Review Letters in 2013, agreed with the earlier assignments to element 115.

At the end of December 2015 IUPAC recognized the discovery and credited it to the Dubna-Livermore team. On November 28, 2016, the name was confirmed: moscovium, symbol Mc, for the Moscow region. A footnote that appears in no UFO documentary: the team that made element 117 in Dubna in 2010, in whose decay chains the longest-lived known isotopes of element 115 first appeared, included the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The city where Lazar went on camera in 1989.

The number that matters: 0.65 seconds

Five isotopes of element 115 are known today, with mass numbers 286 to 290. Their half-lives run from about 20 milliseconds for moscovium-286, first seen in Dubna in 2022, to about 0.65 seconds for moscovium-290. Even that value stands on thin ice: according to the nuclide data, moscovium-290 has been observed in a single decay chain. The longest-lived element 115 has been seen exactly once. None of them is stable. None lasts long enough to hold, let alone put into a reactor. That is the sentence most articles about Lazar end with.

The known isotopes of element 115

Isotope	Neutrons	Half-life	Status
Moscovium-286	171	About 20 ms	First seen 2022
Moscovium-287	172	About 38 ms	Measured
Moscovium-288	173	About 0.19 s	Measured, the workhorse isotope
Moscovium-289	174	About 0.25 s	Measured
Moscovium-290	175	About 0.65 s	Seen in a single decay chain
Moscovium-299	184	Unknown	Never made; the predicted magic number

Here the more honest story begins. All known isotopes of element 115 have between 171 and 175 neutrons. The island of stability, if it exists, lies at 184 neutrons according to theory. That would be moscovium-299. Between the heaviest moscovium ever seen and the place where theory expects long lifetimes, nine neutrons are missing. Oganessian and Rykaczewski wrote in 2015 that some models predict half-lives of up to a million years for new superheavy nuclei. The trend is already visible in the data: more neutrons, longer lives, by orders of magnitude.

In other words, what Dubna and Darmstadt measured does not rule out a long-lived element 115 somewhere. It shows that the isotopes you can make are not it, and that today's beam-and-target combinations cannot reach the interesting ones because they simply lack the neutrons. Lazar made that very point in 2005, when Knapp visited him in New Mexico a year after the discovery: researchers would find "a handful" of variants and eventually a stable isotope.

Four atoms in two months: Darmstadt, 2024

On September 23, 2024, Frontiers in Chemistry published a paper on relativistic effects in the chemistry of nihonium and moscovium. Behind the dry title is a record: element 115 became the heaviest element whose chemistry has ever been studied. The team from GSI, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz fired calcium-48 at thin americium foils, separated the moscovium-288 nuclei and flushed them with an inert gas through a narrow detector channel lined with quartz. An atom that sticks to the quartz forms a chemical bond; one that drifts on is inert. Result: moscovium and nihonium are more reactive than flerovium between them, but far less reactive than their lighter relatives bismuth and thallium, an effect of relativity, because electrons in such heavy atoms move at a large fraction of the speed of light.

Now the number that matters for this story. According to the joint press release of November 5, 2024, the whole measurement took two months of round-the-clock beam time. In total, four moscovium atoms were registered. Four atoms. Lazar spoke of 223 grams per disc and 500 pounds on the test site. By our own rough calculation, 223 grams of moscovium-288 would be about 470 sextillion atoms. At four atoms in two months, the Darmstadt facility would need roughly a trillion times the age of the universe. Even a facility a thousand times faster would need more than a billion universe lifetimes, and the material would decay within fractions of a second of being made.

The strange thing: Lazar said exactly that in 1989. Making element 115 this way would take infinite energy and infinite time. Physics has refuted half his statement; single atoms can be made. The other half it confirms, in a way that does not help him. If there were 500 pounds, they did not come from an accelerator. Which leads to the question of where else.

From a star? The question of origin

Lazar answered that in 2005: it must come from somewhere it occurs naturally, a supernova perhaps, so from outside our solar system. That is not an absurd idea, and it deserves a serious answer. The heavy elements in our world, gold, platinum, uranium, really were formed in extreme cosmic events in which nuclei capture many neutrons very quickly. Whether nuclei far beyond uranium, possibly up to the island of stability, form there too is a genuine open research question. People have looked, in thermal waters, rare ores and cosmic rays, as Oganessian and Rykaczewski list. Nothing was found. Every known element beyond uranium was first made artificially.

That puts the supernova origin where it belongs: a possibility physics does not exclude, with not a single find to support it. That is more than most critics concede, and less than most supporters claim.

Area 51 is documented; S-4 is a statement

One thing really has changed since 1989, and it often gets confused with the other. On August 15, 2013, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a less redacted version of the CIA's internal history of the U-2 program from 1954 to 1974. It names and describes the Groom Lake site, known as Area 51, for the first time officially, map included. Since then Area 51 is no longer a claim but a place in a file: a test site for spy planes. A facility called S-4 does not appear in those documents, nor do saucers. That does not mean S-4 does not exist; the history ends in 1974 and the range is still restricted military land. It only means the existence of Area 51 says nothing about Lazar's workplace.

The same confusion happens with element 115, and that may be the real point of this story. "Element 115 exists" gets read online as "Lazar was right." The measurements say something else: the element exists, but not as he described it. It can be made where he said it could not, and it is unstable in every known variant where he said it was stable. What remains is a narrow strip of possibility: an isotope with nine more neutrons that nobody can make and nobody has found.

What Bob Lazar said about element 115, and what became measurable

Claim	Source	Status
There is an element with atomic number 115.	Oganessian et al. 2004; Rudolph et al. 2013; IUPAC 2016	Verified since 2003, confirmed 2013, named 2016
Element 115 cannot be made.	Lazar, KLAS, Dec. 9, 1989	Disproved for single atoms; weighable amounts practically out of reach
Element 115 is stable.	Lazar 1989 and 2005	Not proven: all five known isotopes decay in under a second; Mc-299 never made
Long-lived superheavy nuclei may exist near 184 neutrons.	Myers, Swiatecki; Viola, Seaborg (1966); Oganessian, Rykaczewski (2015)	Theory, supported by a trend in the data, not reached
Element 115 produces a gravity wave that powers a craft.	Lazar, KLAS and radio, Dec. 1989	Not proven: no experiment and no theory supports it
500 pounds of element 115 were stored in Nevada.	Lazar, Billy Goodman show, Dec. 20, 1989	Not proven: worldwide, atoms have been counted, not grams
Area 51 exists as a test site at Groom Lake.	CIA history of the U-2 program, released 2013	Verified; S-4 is not mentioned

Why the story keeps coming back

You might think the naming of moscovium settled it. The opposite happened. Jeremy Corbell's documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers put Lazar in front of a new audience in 2018 and 2019, and long-form podcast and YouTube interviews have kept him there. Why does this story in particular endure? Perhaps because it has one point where it touches the world. Most UFO narratives stay closed: witnesses, lights, files you can believe or not. Lazar's has a door to reality, a number on the periodic table. Since 2003 that door has not slammed shut; it has stayed open a crack, because "the element exists" looks like a hit if you stop reading there.

The open question

At the end stands a sentence from 1989, and today half of it is answered. Making element 115 is not impossible; in Dubna and Darmstadt atoms have been counted since 2003, one by one, most recently four in two months. None of them is stable. But whether a long-lived element 115 exists anywhere in the universe, with nine more neutrons than anything a detector has seen, is not settled. It has only moved to where it belongs: the edge of what nuclear physics can reach. We are not inventing an answer here. We are showing you where the mystery really begins: not in a hangar in Nevada that nobody may enter, but in a gap of nine neutrons that researchers in Darmstadt, Dubna and Berkeley work on every day. Whether they will one day find something Bob Lazar described in 1989, nobody knows today. Not even he does.

Frequently asked questions

What is element 115?

Since 2016 it has been called moscovium, symbol Mc. It is a synthetic superheavy element first made in 2003 in Dubna by a Russian-American team that bombarded americium with calcium nuclei, and confirmed in 2013 at GSI in Darmstadt. Five isotopes are known; the longest-lived has a half-life of about 0.65 seconds.

What did Bob Lazar say about element 115?

In 1989, on Las Vegas station KLAS and on the radio, Lazar said he had worked at a secret site called S-4 in Nevada on the propulsion of alien craft, fueled by a stable element 115 that produced a gravity wave, could not be made on Earth, and was stored on the test site in a 500-pound supply. In 2005 he said researchers would eventually find a stable isotope. These are his statements, not established facts.

Was Bob Lazar right about element 115?

Partly no, partly open. The element exists, but contrary to his claim it can be made, atom by atom, and every known isotope is unstable. A long-lived isotope with 184 neutrons, moscovium-299, is theoretically conceivable but has never been made or found. There is no evidence for gravity-wave propulsion.

What is the island of stability?

A region of superheavy nuclei predicted since 1966 that should live much longer than their neighbors thanks to magic numbers of protons and neutrons. The next magic neutron number is expected at 184. Measurements since 2003 show lifetimes rising with neutron number; the island itself has not been reached.

Does element 115 exist in nature?

Not that anyone has shown. Researchers have searched thermal waters, rare ores and cosmic rays for superheavy elements and found nothing; every element beyond uranium was first made artificially. Whether stellar explosions or neutron-star mergers can make long-lived superheavy nuclei is an open question.

Is Area 51 real?

Yes. A CIA history of the U-2 program, released in less redacted form on August 15, 2013, names and maps the Groom Lake site. It does not mention a facility called S-4, and the documents end in 1974.

Sources and further reading

• Bob Lazar and George Knapp, On the Record, KLAS-TV, December 9, 1989; transcript at the Papoose Lake Lazar archive.
• Bob Lazar on the Billy Goodman radio show, December 20, 1989; transcript at Papoose Lake.
• George Knapp, I-Team, "Bob Lazar: The Man Behind Element 115," KLAS/8 News Now, 2005.
• Yu. Ts. Oganessian et al., "Experiments on the synthesis of element 115 in the reaction 243Am(48Ca,xn)291-x115," Physical Review C 69, 021601(R) (2004).
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, "Livermore scientists team with Russia to discover elements 113 and 115," February 2, 2004.
• D. Rudolph et al., "Spectroscopy of Element 115 Decay Chains," Physical Review Letters 111, 112502 (2013); C&EN, "Element 115 Detected Again," August 30, 2013.
• IUPAC, names of elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, press release, November 30, 2016.
• FRIB/NNDC Discovery of Nuclides Project, moscovium isotopes; Oganessian et al., Physical Review C 106, 064306 (2022).
• Yuri Oganessian and Krzysztof Rykaczewski, "A beachhead on the island of stability," Physics Today 68 (8), August 2015.
• A. Yakushev et al., relativistic effects in the chemistry of nihonium and moscovium, Frontiers in Chemistry 12 (September 23, 2024); joint GSI, HIM and Mainz University press release, November 5, 2024.
• National Security Archive, "The Secret History of the U-2, and Area 51," Electronic Briefing Book 434, August 15, 2013.
• More in the magazine: Hessdalen lights: 40 years of data · Remote viewing and the Stargate files · 3I/ATLAS: comet or probe?

Everyone in this article is quoted with what they said or published themselves. The quantity estimate in the Darmstadt section is our own back-of-the-envelope calculation. Cover image and supernova picture are generated illustrations, not photographs. Questions about an order: 28@templeofdesire.com.