UFO fans stop just short of Area 51
RACHEL, Nev. — Jebb McAfee drove down the narrow desert road as far as he could and parked near some other cars alongside the scrub brush. In front of him and his two friends was a barricade, a stop sign and a dream.
The three had traveled all the way from Florida to get here: The back entrance to the top-secret military base Area 51.
Caleb Lower said they hadn’t slept in 24 hours. It was the big moment, though, and they weren’t going to screw it up.
“Hey, we need the sword,” McAfee said.
Lower opened the door and produced a small plastic saber. McAfee waved it a few times and nodded.
“Do I need to be dressed like an alien?” Dajah Potter asked.
“Only if you feel like it,” McAfee replied.
Potter did feel like it. She slid a green mask over her face to match her tight bodysuit.
The trio strode past the barrier toward the entrance a few hundred yards away. Police vehicles came into view. So did cameras on top of tall poles that watched them right back. An armed man in military fatigues — along with a German shepherd — stood behind a redand-white gate arm.
Barbed wire extended into the desert. Signs warned people not to enter.
McAfee and his friends stopped. It was all they had hoped it would be.
“We’ve seen pictures, but this is amazing,” he said. “We’re here.”
They weren’t alone, either.
Hundreds of people began arriving at the gate Friday. They came in tinfoil hats and orange jumpsuits. One guy arrived in his pajamas holding a bottle of liquor. They posed for pictures. Many sprinted the last 100 yards before stopping at the gate.
Their adventure had been inspired by perhaps the most unlikely internet phenomenon of the summer.
At 2 a.m. on June 27, a 21year-old Bakersfield college student named Matty Roberts was bored and decided to create a Facebook event: “Storm Area 51: They Can’t Stop All of Us.”
It was his idea of a joke — one Roberts said he believed so absurd, nobody would ever take it seriously. How wrong he was.
By July, his Facebook event, scheduled for Friday, had gone viral. By August, more than 2 million people had said they were going to storm Area 51, longtime fodder for conspiracy theories about aliens and UFOs. The town of Rachel, population 58, was suddenly faced with an existential crisis: What if they all show up? An alien invasion might have been easier to handle.
The town — led by the Little A’Le’Inn — gamely tried to prepare. Located in a vast bowl of Nevada high desert, it is so remote that there isn’t gas within an hour. No grocery stores, either. Just vast expanses of land where dust devils can be seen spinning for a few minutes before vanishing as if they were never there.
Roberts tried to dissuade people from rushing the military base by offering them an alternative: “Alienstock,” a music festival that would be a cross between Burning Man, Woodstock and Comicon.
Lincoln County, population 5,000, approved permits and geared up for the unknown. The Air Force was ready, too, with public statements warning people to stay away from the base.
But after Roberts and the owners of the inn had a falling-out, he moved Alienstock to downtown Las Vegas. It was held Thursday night, and according to a promoter drew 10,000 people.
Pat Travis, the owner of the inn, pushed ahead with her own concert festival, a three-day event she called A’Le’Inn-Stock.
Another event Friday in Hiko, about 45 minutes from Rachel, was expected to draw a few thousand to the Alien Research Center for a series of talks by UFO experts and people who say they have seen them.
As people began arriving in Rachel on Thursday, Travis stood behind the inn bar, selling cans of beer and doing interviews for television and YouTube channels.
Travis has owned the inn for more than three decades. It’s a series of blueand-white buildings whose rooms sold out almost immediately after Roberts’ internet joke went viral.