The research began with the U-2 spy plane in the s and has now moved on to drones", she says. The secrecy surrounding Area 51 has helped fuel many conspiracy theories. Most famous is the claim that the site hosts an alien spacecraft and the bodies of its pilots, after they crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in The US government says there were no aliens and the crashed craft was a weather balloon.
Others claim to have seen UFOs above or near the site, while some say they have been abducted by aliens, and even experimented on, before being returned to Earth. And, in , a man named Robert Lazar claimed he had worked on alien technology inside Area He claimed to have seen medical photographs of aliens and that the government used the facility to examine UFOs.
Area 51's association with aliens may have served as a useful distraction for the intelligence agencies. When people first saw the U-2 spy plane flying, no one knew what they were seeing," says Ms Jacobsen. Matty Roberts, 20, created a Facebook event proposing that "we can run faster than their bullets. Or at least film themselves talking about it. Joining them was a ragged army of hundreds of stoners, UFO buffs, punk bands, rubberneckers, European tourists, people with way too much time on their hands, and meme-lords in Pepe the Frog costumes — all here because of the Internet, the ironic and the earnest alike, for a party at the end of the earth.
T hree months earlier, on 20 June , the podcaster Joe Rogan released an interview with Bob Lazar. Lazar is a cult figure in UFO circles; he claims to have studied flying saucers at Area 51, the classified air force base in Nevada where the US government is rumored — by some — to make secret contact with extraterrestrial beings.
One of those listeners was Matty Roberts, a college student, anime enthusiast and video gamer in Bakersfield, California. Things snowballed. Within hours, the page had thousands of RSVPs. Within days it had more than a million. The air force warned that things would end badly for anyone attempting a raid. So he came up with a brilliant pivot: why not channel this momentum into a Burning Man-style music festival in the desert? Then came the first schism. Scornful of the internet interlopers, the Alien Research Center in nearby Hiko, Nevada, decided to host its own Area 51 event the same weekend — for serious ufologists.
Roberts and West pressed on. But the town of Rachel population: 54 lacked the infrastructure to handle thousands of conspiracy theorists and gawkers descending on rural Nevada. The local authorities feared potential calamity: people dying of dehydration in the desert, angry landowners, madmen with guns. On 10 September, nine days before the event, Roberts backed out. He accused West of being insufficiently prepared for the coming flood.
Roberts urged people to go there instead. West refused to cancel the concert in the desert. Alienstock would happen, she said, whether anyone liked it or not.
Now there were three rival events all happening on the same weekend — one in Las Vegas, another in Rachel and a third in Hiko. No one had any idea how many people were coming. I came equipped with a duffel bag of Hawaiian shirts and a case of vape cartridges, which I hoped to use as currency in the event of civilizational collapse in the desert.
But the desert would wait. When I arrived, shortly after 7pm, the outdoor venue — heavily bedecked with glowing neon alien signage — was mostly empty except for cops and local newscasters.
For decades, the American imagination has run wild conjuring up all sorts of conspiracy theories about what is really going on at the site. Or is it just a boring military base? To write the book, Jacobsen interviewed over 70 people who had first-hand knowledge of the secret facility, including 32 who lived and worked at Area The result is basically the most comprehensive account of the history of Area 51 you can get without a super-high-level security clearance.
If anyone had answers for me, it was her. And boy did she. Area 51 was the birthplace of overhead espionage for the CIA. They do this out on the wilds of Area 51 because they can bring some foreign fighters there who would otherwise not be welcomed into the country.
So the US can fly them in a plane with the windows drawn, drop them off, train them, and neither the fighters nor the American public have any idea where they were or what was going on. We would not have the kinds of incredible overhead espionage technology that we have today without the existence of Area It allowed the different wings of the federal government to pursue technologies in a very large open area that they could otherwise not pursue.
The U-2 spy plane flew at 70, feet and miles an hour. Think about how much work you would have to do to make something like that — it was this incredibly delicate plane. Pilots died out there testing it. But it taught the powers that be that with this incredible effort of testing, you could achieve radical technologies.
Why did this place become such a hotbed for spying technology and training? When the base was founded back in the early s, President Eisenhower tasked a guy named Richard Bissell from the CIA to find the most remote, most secretive place in the United States where they could work on the U-2 spy plane away from any prying eyes — Soviet or otherwise.
So Bissell smartly flew around with another CIA fellow and found the perfect fulfillment of that presidential request: a secret base centered around a dry lakebed in the middle of Nevada, located inside an already classified facility where the government was exploding nuclear weapons. There was no way, Bissell realized, that anyone was going to try to get into this facility. Why would they want to? There were bombs going off!
So how did the UFOs and aliens narrative come about? Alien enthusiasts descend on Area 51 for an event that started as a joke. The supposed UFO was actually smashed parts of balloons, sensors and radar reflectors from the wreckage of a classified government project meant to "determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research," according to a Air Force report.
But Area 51 didn't really enter the public conscience until That's when a man named Bob Lazar claimed in an interview with a local news station that he had worked at Area 51 to reverse engineer what he said was a downed alien spacecraft. Lazar's interview and the claims he made "unveiled this secret base with a big splash," Jacobsen said.
So what would we find there? According to Jacobsen, the US does work to reverse engineer technology at Area Today, she said, foreign technology captured on battlefields overseas is brought to Area 51 to be reverse engineered and tested.
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