It’s the restricted access United States Air Force base where conspiracists believe the government is playing host to all sorts of spooky goings-on.
Area 51, deep in the Nevada desert, has long been the centre of rumours about exactly what goes on in the facility, and we might just find out in the coming weeks and months following a mammoth Facebook pledge.
The event, called ‘Storm Area 51: They Can’t Stop All of Us’, was perhaps set up in rather tongue-in-cheek fashion on the social media platform, but it has already received nearly 400,000 confirmed attendees.
The RSVP date is set at September 20, with the event’s description suggesting that those in attendance ‘can move faster than their [guards] bullets’. They will be meeting at the Area 51 Alien Center, which is something of a shrine (and brothel, bizarrely) to the site, in the Amargosa Valley.
It pays not to take such things seriously, of course, but it is worth noting that Paddy Power have slashed the odds on alien lifeforms being discovered this year to 5/1 – roughly the same price as Barcelona winning the Champions League in 2019/20.
The pledge comes just a couple of weeks after a group of US senators were called into a classified briefing with the Senate Intelligence committee, were they were reportedly told about a series of encounters the US Navy had had with an unidentified flying object.
When asked about the briefing by ABC News, Donald Trump confirmed the meeting had taken place but when asked if he believed in UFOs responded by saying ‘not particularly’.
But stranger things have happened….such as Trump becoming President of the United States, as one example.
Area 51: The Very Best Conspiracy Theories
The boring reality is that Area 51 is a military site where aircraft and equipment are probably stored (nobody knows for sure, of course) on behalf of the United States Force.
But it’s much more fun to believe, and many do, that this is where the government is holding various forms of alien life to perform experiments on them.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that the craft that landed on Roswell, the classic ‘is it or isn’t it’ incident where locals claimed a UFO had crashed in the town (the government insisted it was a weather balloon), is being ‘reverse engineered’ in Area 51 to understand where the aliens have come from.
Some also believe that the government is using Area 51 as a time portal, with teleportation technologies tested on the site.
And perhaps the best theory is that this is a meeting point for extra-terrestrials and the Majestic 12, a shady ‘one world government’ organisation supposedly founded by Harry S. Truman in 1947.
Whether you are a believer or not, there is something fishy going on at Papoose Lake, just eight miles from the Area 51 site which is said to appear and disappear from Google Maps seemingly at will.
However, conspiracists are going to have to go some way to prove claims that it is home to a transcontinental underground railway system or an airstrip that only emerges when water is sprayed onto it.
Either way, the truth is stranger than fiction….and you can put your money where your mouth is courtesy of Paddy Power!