Stretch those quads and prep that tinfoil hat!
Over 960,000 people have signed on to a Facebook event pledging to raid Area 51 in Nevada in a quest to “see them aliens.”
The event, titled “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” is inviting users from around the world to join a “Naruto run”—a Japanese manga-inspired running style featuring arms outstretched backward and heads forward—into the area.
“We can move faster than their bullets,” the event page, which is clearly written with tongue in cheek, promises those who RSVP for September 20.
What They’re After
The mysterious Area 51 has been the focus of conspiracy theories for decades, and many people think it’s where the US government stores its secrets about aliens and UFOs.
The area was officially acknowledged as a military site in 2013, but the theories live on.
Though the September event is most certainly a joke, it comes just a few weeks after a group of US senators was briefed about reported encounters between the US Navy and an unidentified aircraft— literally an unidentified flying object.
So what do they know? Where can we sign up to hear about that?
Government Response
According to HuffPost, the page was started by a social media user who goes by the name “SmyleeKun” who is best known “for posting memes and streaming to fans on Twitch,” which is a streaming video platform used by gamers.
The news outlet reported that the post had caught the attention of the Defense Department, which has subsequently posted a warning about it.
″[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces,” Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews told The Washington Post on July 12. “The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.”
CIA Declassifies Area 51 Documents
After decades of extreme secrecy surrounding the site, the CIA lifted its veil on Area 51 in 2013 in response to a public record request from George Washington University scholars in Washington.
The university’s National Security Archive released a 400-page CIA history containing the first deliberate official references to Area 51, also known as Groom Lake, as a site developed by the intelligence agency in the 1950s to test fly the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane.
Other top-secret aircraft were tested there later, including the supersonic reconnaissance A-12 aircraft, code-named OXCART, and the F-117 stealth ground-attack jet, said archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson, who asked for the CIA’s U-2 history in 2005.
“It’s the first time that there must have been a senior-level decision to acknowledge the term ‘Area 51’ and its specific location,” he told Reuters.
The CIA has also declassified a trove of UFO-related documents and published them online, inviting interested sleuths to “Take a Peek Into Our X-Files.”
A separate CIA catalog headlined “UFOs Fact or Fiction?” contains decades of documentation relating to the agency’s dealings with reports of alleged alien spacecraft.
“Most of the documents concern CIA cables reporting unsubstantiated UFO sightings in the foreign press and intra-Agency memos about how the Agency handled public inquiries about UFO sightings,” the agency said.
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor T.D. Barnes, who allegedly served at Area 51 as a radar expert, was cited by The Las Vegas Review-Journal as saying that besides Area 51, other unofficial names used for the facility include Dreamland, Home Base, Watertown Strip, Groom Lake, and Homey Airport.
The CNN Wire, Epoch Times reporter Tom Ozimek and Janita Kan contributed to this report.
