Bob Lazar isn’t a “controversial whistleblower”. He’s a dishonest charlatan. And - before you say it - no, it's not just my opinion.
Quoted from Wiki:
Robert Scott Lazar is an American who, since 1989, has claimed to have been part of a classified US government project concerned with the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology; he also purported to have read government briefing documents that described alien involvement in human affairs over the past 10,000 years. A self-proclaimed physicist, Lazar supposedly worked at a secret site near the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51. His story brought additional public attention to the facility and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.
Lazar has provided no evidence of alien life or technology, and his claims about his education and employment history are replete with fabrications. Lazar also has been involved in criminal activity: he was convicted in 1990 for his involvement in a Nevada prostitution ring, and his company was sentenced to probation in 2006 for violating laws prohibiting the sale of chemicals across state lines. As well as being dismissed by skeptics, Lazar has been denounced by some ufologists.
Lazar graduated from high school late, in the bottom third of his class. The only science course he took was a chemistry class. He subsequently attended Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles. In 1986 Lazar, who at the time described himself as a self-employed film processor, filed for bankruptcy.
Lazar claims to have obtained master's degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in electronics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). However, both universities show no record of him. Scientists Stanton T. Friedman and Donald R. Prothero have stated that nobody with Lazar's high school performance record would be accepted by either institution. Lazar is unable to supply the names of any lecturers or fellow students from his alleged tenures at MIT and Caltech; one supposed Caltech professor, William Duxler, was in fact located at Pierce Junior College and had never taught at Caltech. Friedman asserted, "Quite obviously, if one can go to MIT, one doesn't go to Pierce. Lazar was at Pierce at the very same time he was supposedly at MIT more than 2,500 miles away.”
Lazar claims to be a physicist and to have worked in this capacity during his tenure at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. This assertion was echoed by local journalist Terry England, who interviewed Lazar about his interest in jet-powered cars in 1982; some media outlets have since dubbed him a "physicist". Asked about the article in 2021, however, England admitted that he took Lazar's claims at face value and did not fact-check his credentials as a physicist. Inquiry into Lazar's position at Los Alamos revealed his role to have been a technician for a contractor firm, and that he worked neither as a physicist or for the lab directly. As such, the facility retains no records on Lazar, whom Prothero states was "in short, rather a minor player".The Smithsonian, along with various other mainstream news outlets, have stated that his designation as a "physicist" is self-proclaimed.
And:
"Lazar's claims were later disproven (by UFO skeptics and believers alike). He was found to have fabricated not only his employment at Nellis but indeed his entire background; almost nothing of what he said was true. Still, Lazar's lies propelled Area 51 into the public's consciousness." [Benjamin Radford, Live Science]