“I don’t have time for this right now”, she said gruffly into the phone. And she was busy – for a burger bar in a small village in the desert hundreds of miles from anywhere, this place was hopping. If it was film noir, she’d have said, “of all the burger joints in all the towns in all the world, an alien walks into mine”.
Because this wasn’t any old roadside dive. This was the Little A’le’inn in Rachel, Nevada, just about a stone’s throw from one of the most secretive locations on Planet Earth, Ground Zero for the 90s alien conspiracy folklore that fuelled the X-Files, Independence Day and Men in Black: Area 51.
The sign on the door gave a good idea of why our otherwise very friendly server was so busy: business propositions by e-mail only! Thanks to a college-kid prank, potentially thousands of people would descend on tiny Rachel, NV, on 20 September 2019 to “storm Area 51”. Why? Because “they can’t stop all of us!” Of course.
Despite the US Air Force actively suggesting people stay away – “we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces” – by the time we dropped by in early August 2019 there were major plans for a music festival and (forgetting for a moment this was a joke) a mass invasion into the forbidden zone, “Naruto running” to avoid the security guards’ machine gun fire.
 Lunar Crater |
 Wheeler Peak |
 Southern Cloud |
But if Area 51 only recently came back to the public consciousness, it had never fully left mine. In the mid-90s, I was a socially awkward, long-haired political science student trying to make sense of the end of the Cold War and the unmitigated mess the world was in as it tried to do the same. I didn’t actively believe in the alien conspiracy – the idea that the US government had recovered alien technology from a 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and was keeping it, and maybe its crew (maybe alive!) at Area 51. But I liked the nature of conspiracy theory, and secretly I kind of liked the idea that it could be true. And I’m not ashamed to admit I kind of liked the X-Files, too.
So I was all over it and read deeply – as deeply as you could in those days when the internet was chained to the library at university not glued to my hand 24/7. I lurked in discussion groups where people debunked the alien autopsy film for fantastic reasons like “curly phone cords were not in widespread use at the time” it purported to have been filmed.
I read all about “Majestic 12”, the supposed high-level advisory group set up by Truman but similarly debunked after careful analysis of how his signature appeared on the alleged Top Secret documentation setting up that mysterious committee (among other clues). I lapped it all up until abruptly losing interest when shooting for a First suddenly occupied about 15 hours of every day.
Life moved on and work began and the zeitgeist shifted too. Like anything that gets commercialized, it’s not long before it becomes a boring shadow of its quirky former self. Then, it’s best to leave it alone until the next generation re-invents it, allowing us to wade back in and say, yeah, well, I liked it before it was cool. On a 2010 trip to New Mexico, we passed nearby Roswell, though not nearby enough to make the detour worthwhile. But when we moved to the US, and started thinking about a summer holiday, Nevada came onto the radar. It turned out Rachel, NV was not far from where we were heading anyway. And just like that, Area 51 found its way out of the dusty filing cabinets of my brain and onto our road trip itinerary.
Around exactly the same time, it burst back into the mainstream with the viral “Storm Area 51” Facebook prank. So then it was a sure thing – after our hiking and camping trip in the wilds of Great Basin National Park, we were going to stop by Rachel and Area 51.
Our Alien Burgers came on the server’s recommendation: “they’re world famous, people come from all over the world to eat them”. Great, we’ll take two, I guess. Verdict? Well, if Rachel was the only human habitation for 150 miles then these were certainly the best burgers for 150 miles. The place was interesting, though. It kind of reminded me of a vanilla version of Pancho’s bar in The Right Stuff, with black and white photos of early jets and colourful squadron patches mounted on the bar. Except instead of Chuck Yeager, Jimmy Doolittle and Buzz Aldrin getting shitfaced there after pushing the edge of the envelope – maintaining “an even strain” as Wally Schirra had put it – this was populated by tour groups out of Vegas and their guides in cargo shorts.
But they brought their own authenticity as UFO believers. As I perused photos of jets signed by various luminaries of aerospace – there was even one signed by Yeager – I came across autographed photos of the top names in UFO-logy. Stanton Friedman, perhaps the grand-daddy of the field, and until his death in May this year, still the biggest advocate of Majestic-12. Bob Lazar, who claimed to work at Area 51 reverse engineering a crashed UFO. Others I didn’t recognize from my 90s interest in this stuff. While looking, I overheard the tour guide talking about another wall of photos – the one with images of purported UFOs.
“I think about two thirds of those are fake. I wish they didn’t put them up there because it takes away from the ones that are real. But I think maybe a third of them are real”. People at the table talked lightly about UFOs while the guide reminisced about Stanton Friedman.
Our daughter, meanwhile, was busy drawing her own aliens to put on yet another wall (this place only had four of them, but they certainly used every inch). Who knows what she made of it in her four year old mind – she understands space travel and the solar system and happily only knows “alien” to mean extraterrestrial and not unwelcome migrant – whatever the case it was too soon to bore her with arcane 90s UFO conspiracy theories. Instead, we bought her three tiny toy aliens for the princely sum of one dollar, and we headed back outside into the searing desert sun.
From the Little A’le’inn, we headed down the Extraterrestrial Highway towards the famous “black mailbox”, another quirky fixture of Area 51 lore. From there, we could drive up to the gates of Area 51. “Could” was the operative word here. As I said to Yon, I’m adventurous but not stupid. Thanks to youtube, I already knew what was there – a bunch of signs authorizing deadly force and a gate complex so impressive that, in the words of Robert Redford in Sneakers, “the whole building says ‘go away’”.
Someone was shot and killed by guards near Area 51 (at another very sensitive site nearby) in January, and since we were there, two Dutch tourists were arrested as well (they were given a short jail sentence, which they could “buy off” with over $2,000 in fines; their cameras and drones were also seized). As migrants in the present-day US, with a four year old sitting in the car and a drone in the back, it seemed pretty obvious to me that the downside of getting arrested on that road might be instant deportation and our kid sitting in a cage without toothpaste (plus a fine, a confiscated drone, and a US criminal record). Even if the risk was very low, what was the upside payoff? A stupid photo of us grinning like numpties in front of a sign that was for sale back in the shop anyway?
So we got some photos in front of the mailbox, and I looked with real curiosity at the ridge that concealed Area 51 from view. Then, because it was over 40 degrees C, we set off again, down the Extraterrestrial Highway towards the last stop – the Alien Research Center. I don’t know what I expected of that, but surely something more than it was – a shop full of tacky UFO themed souvenirs.
Of course, we were as oblivious after visiting Rachel and the driveway to Area 51 as we were before about what actually happens there. For all anyone knows, there could be a hangar with a crashed UFO. Back in the 90s there was only evidence of a handful of exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. That was a handy datapoint for those wanting to debunk the idea of extraterrestrial life at all, much less aliens who’d visited Earth by spacecraft. Today, of course, scientists have catalogued more than 4,100 exoplanets, the nearest just four light years away. It’s not completely inconceivable that a spaceship from somewhere crashed on earth, even if the rest of the story becomes progressively more credulous.
Whatever the truth, Area 51 is certainly a seriously secret place. It was only publicly acknowledged in 2013, though in 2006 details were declassified of an interagency dust-up over accidental Skylab astronaut photographs of it in 1974 (the place was the only site on earth they were explicitly forbidden to photograph from orbit, but they somehow managed to do so). The facility was used to develop the U-2 spy plane (remember Gary Powers? the Cuban Missile Crisis?), the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117 stealth fighter (remember Desert Storm?).
 U-2 |
 SR-71 |
 Have Blue (prototype F-117) |
It was also used to assess various Russian and Chinese aircraft which today can be bought on the warbirds market but in those days were incredible troves of hard to obtain secret intelligence about enemy capabilities. Area 51 has a secretive airline, known online as Janet, which flies people in and out of a private terminal at Las Vegas airport in unmarked 737s (somewhat unbelievably, bought second-hand from Air China). According to some, it’s still today used to test the descendent of the Aurora, itself a never-confirmed hypersonic successor to the SR-71, with an entire folklore of its own.
But the answers aren’t to be found in Rachel. The truth’s not out there. It’s all on the internet, man.
