In 1989, a man named Dennis, his identity shrouded in shadows, his voice distorted, gave an explosive interview claiming he worked on UFOs in a government lab called s-4.

We have since come to know his true identity, Bob Lazar, and to refer to that particular place in northern Las Vegas as Area 51. Bob claims his work there involved the reverse-engineering an alien propulsion system, technology that even 30 years later still cannot be replicated by humans.

Do you believe Bob Lazar? Lazar doesn’t care. He came forward because he felt his fellow Americans deserved to know what the government was hiding from them, but he never wanted to be in the spotlight and he certainly didn’t expect to be the face of UFOlogy for the next three decades. His testimony is both the most controversial and also the most important contribution to the UFO narrative of all time. But life hasn’t exactly rewarded him for his whistleblowing, if you consider what he did to be whistleblowing. He’s either an American hero or a traitor or a nutbar.

The UFO that he claims to have seen supposedly ran on an antimatter reactor fueled by element 115, which generated a gravity wave which allowed for movement but also camouflage by bending light around it. At the time element 115 had not yet been artificially created (it was in 2003 and officially named moscovium, but no stable isotopes of moscovium have ever been synthesized, all of them radioactive and decaying in fractions of a second). Lazar claimed to have seen documents referring to little green aliens as having contacted humans on Earth for the past ten thousand years.

Is Lazar a total kook or just a lousy secret keeper? That’s what this documentary seems intent on establishing: not whether UFOs exist and have visited this planet, but whether Lazar is a nice, honest man. Very little new information is offered and Lazar basically gets the stage to himself. This film by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell is unlikely to sway people’s opinion one way or another, but Corbell’s stance is pretty clear since he glosses over Lazar’s 1990 arrest for aiding and abetting a prostitution ring. This was reduced to felony pandering (the procuring of a person to be used for prostitution, including inducing, encouraging, or forcing someone to engage in prostitution), to which he pleaded guilty. He was also charged in 2006 for shipping restricted chemicals across state lines, pleading guilty to three criminal counts of aiding and abetting the introduction into interstate commerce banned hazardous substances. Possibly these charges are a result of the government keeping tabs on his whereabouts, and possibly Lazar’s just not as nice as he likes to pretend. Either way, even Lazar himself admits he has no way of proving that what he says is true. So it all comes down to you.

Do you believe in aliens?

In UFOs?

That the American government is hiding aliens or UFOs or both in Area 51?

That Bob Lazar was only helping hookers move?