MYSTERY AREA

Area 51, officially named the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake, is a high-security open training range for the U.S. Air Force in southern Nevada — though the site is still very secretive.

The public found out that Area 51 officially existed in August 2013 after Dr. Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the George Washington University National Security Archive, submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request in 2005 for information on the CIA’s Lockheed U-2 plane reconnaissance program, the secret construction and testing of spy planes used to gather intelligence.

The request forced the CIA to declassify documents on the history of the U-2 and A-12 OXCART program and the military base where the planes were constructed and tested — Area 51.

“There certainly was — as you would expect — no discussion of little green men here,” Richelson, who died in 2017, told The New York Times in 2013. “This is a history of the U-2. The only overlap is the discussion of the U-2 flights and U.F.O. sightings, the fact that you had these high-flying aircraft in the air being the cause of some of the sightings.”

Malcolm Byrne, Deputy Director and Director of Research at the National Security Archive, tells TIME that Richelson essentially solved the mystery surrounding Area 51 indirectly. “I don’t think Richelson was going after Area 51 specifically, it’s just that as often happens in these things, there’s serendipity and so material gets released that has things of interest for other people.”

AREA 51 has been shrouded in mystery for decades, so it only makes sense that the rumored alien secrets held within the remote desert site would get a reboot in the social media age.

The internet has been invaded by Area 51 memes inspired by a joke Facebook event to take over the secretive military site and find the supposed aliens kept inside. The event, called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” is planned for Sept. 20, and so far 1.5 million people have signed on.

As far back as the 1950s, people have reported seeing Unidentified Flying Objects (U.F.O.’s) at the southern Nevada military base.

On June 17, 1959, the Reno Evening Gazette published a story with the headline “More Flying Objects Seen In Clark Sky,” and described how Sgt. Wayne Anderson of the local sheriff’s office was among several locals to spot what the paper described as an object “bright green in color and descending toward the earth at a speed too great to be an airplane.”

There’s plenty of readily available material to peruse on what probably takes place at Area 51 – mostly highly classified aeronautical research for military purposes, such as technologies for stealth aircraft. And, ironically, there are suggestions that people’s focus on wild alien conspiracies at this locale have been quite helpful in distracting from the real work at the base.

That distraction is actually worth considering. As a species we’re all pretty good at getting distracted. It doesn’t have to be with intricate conspiracies about other life in the cosmos, it can be about celebrities, gossip, or online videos on how to make turnip desserts (I don’t know, but that probably exists somewhere). Almost anything but the inconvenient truths about the nature of our existence. We are born, some things are okay, we suffer a bit, and we drop dead.

No wonder we have a hard time facing up to our complicity, no matter how modest, in a civilization-spanning set of behaviors that are unhealthy for us and the biosphere that supports us. Of course, we’re not all quite as bad as each other. The vast numbers of humans who still live moment-to-moment, struggling for food, clean water, and education, are hardly as culpable as someone like me, sitting here with my ridiculously environmentally unsound laptop and effectively limitless electrical power. But that doesn’t matter, to get out of this mess every person will end up having to behave differently, it’s simply a matter of degree.

The one thing genuinely interesting about Area 51 is how it reflects on our inability to snap out of a world of fanciful thinking and fanciful hopes. Maybe there’s a lesson somewhere in there; we don’t need to give up our love of the impossible, but we definitely need to do better at differentiating between fantasy and reality.

In fact, if you want to believe that Area 51 hides wonderous extraterrestrial technology secrets you should ask what another sentient species from across the galaxy did to get itself to such a point of sophistication. The answer, I suspect, would be to first figure out how to sustain its homeworld and itself in a way that enabled a glorious future of buzzing unsuspecting bipeds in the deserts of a distant planet.