Blog: The Chuck Clark UFO Video!

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

Recently, footage taken of a video that has been described by documentarian James Fox as the holy grail of UFO videos has been shown online. The original video on VHS had been in the possession of one of the early Area 51 researchers, Chuck Clark, since 1995. Clark was reportedly offered a large sum of money to turn over the video, and he refused, whereupon underhanded means were employed to get what was on it out to the public.

This story goes all the way back to the 1990s when the United States was in the midst of its own special brand of paranoid UFOlogy, which emphasized government cover-ups and conspiracy theories fueled by the popularity of The X-Files. Area 51 had become the most famous secret base in the world after Bob Lazar, in silhouette using the name “Dennis,” was interviewed by George Knapp on KLAS in Las Vegas in May 1989. He claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering nine recovered alien space craft at a site he said was called “S-4” located in the southern section of Area 51.

The excitement stirred up by Lazar’s claim resulted in a flood of UFO tourists descending on the area. Many would stop at the only bar in the nearby small town of Rachel, Nevada, a population that usually numbers around 50 people. According to the “Rachel Timeline” section of A Short History of Rachel, Nevada by Glenn Campbell and Edith Grover, Pat and Joe Travis bought the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1988. They renamed it “The Little A’Le’Inn” and held the first annual UFO conference there in July of 1990.

According to the timeline, Campbell moved into the Little A’Le’Inn in January 1993, and started “publishing his Area 51 Viewer’s Guide.” In August 1993, he was “kicked out” by Joe Travis and started the Area 51 Research Center in a mobile home in the trailer park owned by the founder of Rachel, D. C. Day.

The first Area 51 researcher to gain notoriety was Norio Hayakawa. According to his autobiography on DreamlandResort.com, he first became interested in Area 51 in 1987 when Bill Moore sent him a copy of a satellite photo of Groom Lake taken by the Russians along with a 10-page research paper. He says he attended a lecture given by Bill Steinman who wrote The Crash at Aztec, which had a chapter devoted “to the mysterious base in Nevada, and also that “Area 51 was briefly mentioned” in the 1988 TV special UFO Cover-Up?: Live! He goes on to describe the developments that led to Rachel being permanently associated with extraterrestrials and credits Campbell as being the person to discover the Area 51 vantage point that came to be known as “Freedom Ridge.”

It appears that Clark’s history with Rachel and Area 51 begins around 1991. There is a 1995 video covering a UFO Clark said he saw over Area 51, and he is described as an author and astronomer who has lived near the base “for the past four years.”

A comprehensive look into his history and activity regarding Area 51 is presented in the article “Chuck Clark: The Desert Astronomer Who Kept Looking at Area 51” posted on UAPedia. According to the writer, “biographical data on Chuck Clark is sparse, which is itself very Rachel. In a video posted 17 years ago on YouTube, Clark says he formerly lived adjacent to Vandenburg AFB in Southern California and was the director of the Western Spaceport Observatory. A web search failed to find any such observatory, so it might have been an amateur facility and Clark is often described as an amateur astronomer. He describes capturing footage a UFO passing by a rocket during launch and what seems to be that footage is shown.

According to the UAPedia article, Clark has been described as ex-military and there is a link to an Area 51 tour site where Clark is described as “ex-Air Force Captain Chuck Clark.” Anyone with access to military records could, of course, verify this.

Clark put out his own guide for Area 51 tourists around 1995-96 titled The Area 51 & S-4 Handbook, which is said to have angered Campbell. He continued his observation of Area 51 into the 21^st Century and ran into trouble with the Air Force and the FBI. According to the UAPedia article and other sources, Clark had discovered sensing devices on public land, dug them up, reburied them, and mapped them. After Clark showed several of them to a Las Vegas TV crew (KLAS), Air Force personnel and FBI agents raided his trailer and took his computer, photos and records. One of the sensors reportedly went missing and Clark was charged with “malicious interference with a communications system used for the national defense.” He reached a deal to either replace the sensor or pay restitution, and the case was dismissed in January 2005.

James Fox made the acquaintance of Clark when he was working on his first UFO documentary. He spoke about this in an interview with Richard Dolan. According to him, he interviewed Clark about his reported Area 51 sighting and later got a phone call from him saying he had something to show him and that in Fox’s words, “When you see it, your jaw is gonna hit the floor.”

Fox says he drove twelve hours to Clark’s double-wide trailer in Rachel where Clark told him that what they were going to watch was shot by two men from Los Angeles, one around 19 and the other around 30. Fox says it was a typical Area 51 road-trip video with them hitting all the stops and that there is then a section shot at dusk from what seems to be the armrest of the car.

At this point he describes the men being in a panic and seeming like they’re trying to crawl under the seats. According to him a “yellowy-orange light” flooded the inside of the car and the shadows shifted as if the light source was on a pendulum. He describes the effect as “fluid” like “something you’ve ever seen before.” One of the men, Fox assumes it was the younger man, said he was getting out and in the midst of his companion’s protests, took the camera and started filming what was above the car. Fox describes it as a “perfect, perfect flying saucer” at about the height of a telephone pole. He says it was rocking and that it glowed like “phosphorous on a beach.” He says there were seams like the lines in a sliced pizza.

What was on the video can now be seen thanks to Logan Paul who made arrangements to see the video through Royce Meyers, known for running the website UFO Watchdog. On the May 9, 2023, episode of his Impaulsive podcast, Paul admitted to secretly filming the video using a button camera after Clark had refused to sell him the video for $1oo,ooo. He says he’s waiting for the right time to release it, describes it as “compelling, not convincing,” and that “everything about it screams bullsh*t.”

Coming full circle in the Area 51 saga, Paul chose to show his footage for the first time to Bob Lazar (at around 1:22:00) when Lazar was a guest on the April 13, 2026, episode of American Alchemy hosted by Jesse Michels. Lazar comments that “it’s moving the right way, it’s the right color, and it’s the right shape. It makes it very compelling.”

Adding some context, Reddit user SignalsIntelligence posted a link to a transcript of an interview he did with Clark regarding the video, where it came from, and where it is now. According to Clark, he got the video from someone who “was in the media out of Hollywood, Burbank.” He was a cameraman for a, in the writer’s words, “major network news organization,” the name of which was redacted. Clark got to know him when he was in the area working on a non-UFO-related Area 51 documentary. This person was “acquainted with at least one” of the men who shot the video. They had brought it to him, he made a copy of it, and he gave it to Clark to evaluate. Clark said he made a promise not to release it and that the man had since died.

As for Paul offering to buy the video from him, Clark says he didn’t recall Paul offering him money. He adds that he “made it pretty clear that it wasn’t for sale.” He says he was “advised” afterwards that Paul had $200,000 with him.

Meyers made an unsuccessful attempt to locate the men who had shot the video by posting stills on X on March 26, 2022. Their identities remain a mystery.