Area 51: A History

“We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let’s see them aliens.” 

This event, known as “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” has brought Naruto Runners to the edge of their seats. Regardless of whether it is for memes or to “See them aliens,” almost everyone seems to have an opinion.

Initially created as a joke on Facebook by Matty Roberts, this post caught the attention of people globally, amassing nearly two million supporters as of today. However, social media wasn’t the only thing to be credited for the conspiracies.

Run by the US Air Force, the base is a testing ground for military aircraft, set on a desert in Nevada. In fact, Area 51 wasn’t even officially mentioned until around 2013. Its level of secrecy instigated public response and engaged many conspiracists after unusual sightings – UFOs in particular. However, the ‘unidentified flying objects’ only began to appear after one sighting in particular, occurring outside of Nevada.

The Howl reached out to Pentagon and the Air Force to find more information about Area 51, however, they have not commented on the matter. 

It traces all the way back to 1947. A flying object. A possibility of extraterrestrial life. It makes the Area 51 trend seem a bit Déjà vu. 

Appeared to have been made of thin metal foil, the UFO was discovered crashed in New Mexico. The US Air Force immediately took the debris in, only causing even more suspicion after they released a statement.

They claimed that the debris was from a weather balloon. This was later addressed by a former nuclear physicist, Stanton Friedman, who disagreed with their take. He was certain that the supposed “weather balloon” was an extraterrestrial spacecraft and did not hesitate to call out the US Air Force.

A “cosmic watergate,” Friedman described their cover-up.

A log of government records from the Air Force’s General Accounting Office (GAO) was then released in response to the public outrage, proving that the UFO was a top-secret government surveillance balloon.  

“It was part of ‘Project Mogul,’ a surveillance effort that used high-altitude balloons to listen for the reverberations of Soviet nuclear-testing blasts,” according to Business Insider.

The US Air Force provided numerous details on the incident; yet as Albert Trakowski said, “The psychology is simple: People believe what they want to believe.”

Since the controversy, people have begun to doubt everything the government says.

Soon after the occurrence, these unidentified flying objects began to appear in Nevada, specifically close in proximity to Area 51. However what really pushed it over the edge was an event that occurred thirty years ago, sparking a whole other debate about Area 51’s true purpose. 

Bob Lazar, supposedly a former employee at Area 51, caused the conspiracies to take a huge turn after releasing his own account about working at the military base. This caused a large uproar in the conspiracy community, some even say directly influencing Area 51 raid.   

During an interview aired in 1989, Lazar (remaining anonymous at the time) reportedly claimed that he worked at an undercover facility which worked to imitate alien technology for human use, ultimately allowing the Pentagon to utilize it. People began to question the accuracy of Lazar’s accusations, however, many turned to believe it. This worked to spark a national controversy on the soon to be raided military base.

The government has previously spoken out on its right to keep things from the public.

“Our nation has secrets, and those secrets deserve to be protected. The people deserve to have our nation’s secrets protected.” said David Goldfein, Air Force Chief of Staff.

This, of course, only worked as a way to confirm the doubts of many conspiracists.

All in all, whether we’ll actually find aliens in Area 51 or not can be debated; however, we can’t deny that Area 51 has had an interesting past, to say the least.