In the basement of Bandit’s Cantina
Editor’s Note: You never know what’s behind the scenes with a custom bike builder. We’ve worked with Bill May for decades and recently he revealed his inner interests. He has the knowledge and has followed the UFO topic since ’64. We need to know what happening, so we’re starting a department in the basement and Bill will keep us up on his investigations. Hang on!
My name is Bill May. I seem to have been involved on the edge of UFO stuff since 1964. Maybe it is because I was born in 1947. In 1964 I observed a very high blimp shaped object overhead in a clear sky about 2:00 in the afternoon. I was riding in a pickup with my mother and stepfather. I couldn’t get either one of them to look at it.
I thought at the time that was strange. I was 17 at the time. I graduated from high school in 1965. I immediately joined the Navy. They sent me to aviation electronics school in Memphis and then sent me to NAAS Fallon Nevada for the rest of my enlistment. I got to watch the Air Force put an engine in a SR71 in 1968. They told us not to talk about it and we didn’t.
I got out in ’69 and rode a Harley from Fallon to Oklahoma City the northern route through Wyoming. In ’71 I got married and in ’72 we moved to Vernal Utah where I worked as a welder in an oil field machine shop. I never heard about any aliens or UFOs in the Uinta basin during that time.
I split with my wife and moved back to Oklahoma in January 1973. I worked as a welder and as a truck mechanic through the rest of the ’70s. In ’77 I married again and had a little daughter. Five years later that marriage fell apart and I was single again.
All those years I remained very interested in the UFO topic. I watched every documentary on the subject I could find. I read books on the subject. In ’82 I was single again and working at a food delivery company as their truck maintenance man. I got involved with a lady in their finance department. We were a perfect match. She shared my sense of adventure.
We rode a motorcycle to San Francisco and back. We decided to move to Reno and get jobs. She had a daughter the same age as mine. We made the move to Reno with a large travel trailer and lived in it for about a year. During that time we got married and had a son.
We could never seem to earn enough to buy a home in Reno so in February of ’88 I rode my motorcycle to Las Vegas and got a job. I left the bike with a friend and flew back to Reno and moved my family. We got good jobs in Las Vegas.
We made new friends and started hearing about John Lear and Area 51. One of my friends was a young air Force lieutenant named Jack. In the summer of ’88 I asked Jack about what he had heard regarding the presence of aliens at Area 51.
He said the rumor was there were three types living there. A short gray, a tall gray, and some that looked like us. He called them ebbies. That was the first time I had ever heard that term. Now it is common.
The following May the Bob Lazar story broke and I started paying attention to our local investigative reporter George Knapp. He was not only on tv, he wrote for the weekly news magazines free everywhere because they advertised Las Vegas. The main one was called the Mercury. The other one was simply the Weekly.
George always had a column with good information about local intrigue regarding the mob or political infighting or things of that nature but also anything about UFOs, aliens, or secret air bases.
Around ’92 George took off to Russia and created a series of videos called UFOs the best Evidence. They were available at local video stores. I heard George lost a lot of his own money on the venture but they are great videos and worth watching if you can find them.
During those years from ’88 to ’98, I worked as a transmission technician for the local Ford dealers. My wife got a job with the state in the unemployment office. She did very well and became an officer in the state labor union SNEA.
We campaigned for local and state politicians who could help improve worker benefits. I got to know Bob Price and Tom Collins well. At a picnic in ’95 Bob told me in the 1960s he worked at Area 51 installing underground electric cable to wire a secret facility in a nearby mountain for the storage of ET craft.
He said everyone was sworn to secrecy but it was common knowledge that was the purpose. The base was originally built in 1955 to develop the U2. Kelly Johnson flew over the area looking for a good spot to test secret aircraft. Later they developed the A10 which became the SR71.
Kelly was succeeded by Ben Rich. The pilot who flew Ben Rich out there from Palmdale has retired in Boulder City and is a friend of mine now. The mountain that houses the alien craft is several miles from where the regular Area 51 workers are allowed to go.
I have spoken to many people who worked there in some capacity, and most will say they never saw anything ET related. I worked with Wayne Higdon and Dave Rhode at Friendly Ford. Dave and I were very close until his untimely death in December of 2010. They were both close friends of Bob Lazar from before he was ever hired by EG&G.
EG&G had a big office building on east Flamingo Rd. in Las Vegas. After all the publicity they got from the Bob Lazar story they shut down that building, changed their name and hired a third party to screen and do background checks on all potential employees.
I guess George Knapp is responsible for that. My wife was in several minor car accidents not her fault but resulting in her becoming disabled in 1998. She also became involved with another man while I was working.
I got a job in the state motor pool in 1999 in order to keep her state health insurance. In 2000 we attended our first NUFOC convention in Laughlin. We both loved it. I met Robert O Dean and Wendelle Stevens, researchers I had seen on several UFO documentaries.
I also watched George presenting his interviews with Phil Corso, and a young Richard Dolan talking about his adventure writing his first book.
Donna and I got divorced in 2002. I kept going to the conventions. I sold my house for huge profit in 2004 and bought a little acreage in Oklahoma. I would drive back for the conferences. Also, I made all the crash retrieval conferences in Las Vegas.
I missed the last few Laughlin conferences but in November of 2011, I moved back to Vegas and ended up living in a small RV in Boulder City where I worked on my friend’s old cars.
I made the Fountain Hills Conference in 2012-2016. I missed 2017 but stopped in for the banquet in 2018 and won tickets for 2019. I also attended two contact in the desert conferences in Joshua Tree.
Over the years I became very good friends with Jim Marrs and Linda Howe as well as Richard Dolan and Travis Walton. After all this study and exposure to the subject and the people involved, I have come to believe that most people who claim to have had an up-close experience with UFOs and aliens are telling the truth. These things really happen. They happen a lot.
There is some kind of alien agenda. The government has hardware, and bodies both living and dead are being kept in the most secure and secret places by contractors working for a few secret groups within the military or intelligence agencies.
Presidents and other politicians are not told about this. Hardly anyone ever talks even on their death beds because they believe it should be kept secret from the general population for reasons we can only speculate.
Suddenly, they are now showing interest and releasing gun camera footage and letting people talk as part of a gradual controlled disclosure. Any disclosure is better than none, I guess. It will continue to fascinate me the rest of my days.
There is much, much more information in the public domain now that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this stuff is real. There are several written death bed confessions such as the Walter Haut memorandum who explained what happened and how it was handled.
Real disclosure would be to open up the hanger doors on papoose mountain and invite the press and tell the world the whole story of how they acquired them and everything they know about the people who built them as well as photos of contacts and presenting any live ETs that might be hanging around. Nothing less will ever convince mainstream science and the world.
–Bill May
