Description

The letter was written in August 1989, just under three months before Knapp first identified Lazar publicly in his Las Vegas TV series *UFOs: The Best Evidence*.

In the letter, Knapp states that Lazar told him "he graduated from high school, somewhere in Southern California, at age 15."

During a pre-sentence investigation related to his conviction for Pandering, the Nevada Department of Parole and Probation verified that Lazar graduated from from W. Tresper Clarke High School in Westbury, New York at the age of 17.

"The defendant was able to supply this department with a high-school graduation certificate dated August 30, 1976 from W. Tresper Clark High School, East Meadow School District #3, Westbury, New York."

Friedman later independently confirmed this.

In the August 1989 letter to Friedman, Knapp also describes what Lazar had told him about his college education: "\[Lazar\] attended two other colleges prior to MIT -- Pierce College and U.C. Northridge."

The letter makes no mention of Caltech, where Lazar would later claim to have earned a Master of Science in Electronic Technology in 1985.

That claim appears, among other places, in Lazar's 1990 statements to the Nevada Department of Parole and Probation, which recorded that Lazar claimed to hold a Masters of Science in Physics from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, awarded in 1982 - before receiving a second Masters degree from Caltech in 1985 (rather than attending Caltech first and then MIT, as he has claimed in the majority of interviews since 1989).