Bob Lazar & Luigi Vendittelli on the Joe Rogan Experience #2479, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: Rogan states element 115 was first proven to exist in a Large Hadron Collider experiment in the 2000s. Element 115 (later named moscovium) was synthesized in July-August 2003 by a joint Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research's U-400 cyclotron in Dubna, Russia, not at the Large Hadron Collider; the reaction bombarded an americium-243 target with a calcium-48 ion beam. The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, is a proton-proton collider built for particle physics research and did not begin operating until 2008, and it has never been used to synthesize superheavy elements such as moscovium. A second team at Lund University in Sweden independently confirmed the production of element 115 isotopes in 2013, and IUPAC formally named the element moscovium in 2016. The claim's method and facility are both incorrect, though the general decade (2000s) for initial synthesis is roughly right.

What the evidence shows: Bob Lazar claimed element 115 can have a stable isotope in addition to many unstable ones, similar to other elements on the periodic table. Element 115 (named moscovium in 2016, symbol Mc) was synthesized in 2003 by a joint Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research working with Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, and Vanderbilt; it does not occur naturally and exists only as laboratory-produced isotopes. A peer-reviewed nuclear chemistry study reports a measured half-life of about 193 milliseconds for the isotope 288Mc, which decays via alpha emission, consistent with all confirmed moscovium isotopes being short-lived and radioactive. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's own announcement describes these superheavy nuclei as having progressively longer, but still finite, lifetimes as they approach the theorized 'island of stability,' not as reaching a truly stable, non-decaying isotope. No stable isotope of moscovium has been produced or observed. The claim that element 115 can exist as a stable isotope is not supported by the published experimental data.

What the evidence shows: Vendittelli asserts that a 1941 U.S. Department of the Interior map shows a road running directly into the site he and Bob Lazar identify as S-4 near Papoose Lake, Nevada, and that later map editions omit the road. No government agency, published historical record, or independent journalistic outlet has verified this specific 1941 map, its provenance, or that any road depicted corresponds to a facility called S-4; the claim originates from research conducted for Vendittelli's own documentary, "S4: The Bob Lazar Story," and has circulated only through UFO-interest outlets. The USGS (part of the Interior Department) does maintain historical topographic editions of the Papoose Lake quadrangle, including a 1952 survey edition, confirming that revised map editions of the area exist, though the public catalog record does not establish what any given edition depicts or corroborate the 1941 edition Vendittelli describes. The CIA's own declassified account of Area 51/Groom Lake describes the site's documented history as a U-2 and A-12 OXCART reconnaissance-aircraft test and training facility, explicitly states there were no aliens or flying saucers in its hangars, and makes no reference to any facility called S-4 at Papoose Lake. Because no public government record confirms that S-4 exists, a map's depiction of a road cannot be independently verified as leading to it. Status: unsupported.

What the evidence shows: Vendittelli states that a researcher named Scott Mitchell obtained aerial photographs of the Papoose Lake area, taken by a private pilot on December 25, 2020, and interprets features in the images as camouflaged hangar bay doors corroborating Bob Lazar's account of a secret S4 facility. Restricted-airspace aerial photography of the Groom Lake/Nevada Test and Training Range area by private pilots is a documented phenomenon, but the declassified U.S. government record of the site, published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, addresses only the U-2, A-12 Oxcart, F-117, and other Cold War/stealth aircraft programs; it does not describe, confirm, or deny a separate Papoose Lake facility, hangar structures, or any extraterrestrial-technology program, and its editors state the site's UFO mystique is better understood as arising from secrecy around unconventional classified aircraft rather than any documented alien program. No independent imaging expert, agency, or peer-reviewed remote-sensing analysis has verified that the terrain features in the 2020 photos are man-made hangar doors rather than natural rock formations or shadow artifacts; the camouflaged hangar bay doors identification is Vendittelli's own visual interpretation, produced for his documentary about Lazar. The claim is therefore unsupported by independent, verifiable evidence.

What the evidence shows: Lazar has claimed since 1989 that a 223-gram, stable sample of element 115 fueled a reactor at S-4, and that the site ran three projects he named Galileo, Sidekick, and Looking Glass. Element 115 (moscovium) is a real but entirely synthetic superheavy element, first produced via nuclear fusion reactions in a Dubna/JINR-Oak Ridge-Livermore collaboration and formally named in 2016; per Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it has only ever been generated one atom at a time, arising as a decay product of element 117 in accelerator experiments, not synthesized or isolated directly in bulk. Its most stable known isotope corresponds to an atomic weight of 289, matching the figure on Los Alamos National Laboratory's periodic table entry, whose listed physical properties are explicitly labeled as theoretical predictions rather than measurements, since no macroscopic quantity of the element has ever existed to measure. No stable, weighable quantity of element 115, let alone 223 grams, has ever been produced or documented by any laboratory. The Galileo, Sidekick, and Looking Glass project names, like the 223-gram figure, exist only in Lazar's own testimony and interviews going back to 1989; no government document, physicist, or S-4 colleague has ever independently corroborated them, and no verified record places Lazar in a physicist role at any such facility. The claim is unsupported by physical evidence and contradicted by the established properties of the real element it invokes.