Area 51 is a highly classified US Airforce base in the Nevada desert, 85 miles north of Las Vegas. No one quite knows what really goes on there, activity at the facility is kept top secret, protected by electronic surveillance, and armed guards.
There’s been speculation around the origin of the name ‘Area 51.’ It’s thought to be from an Atomic Energy Commission numbering grid; though Area 51 is not part of the system, it is adjacent to Area 15. According to the CIA, the actual names for the facility are Homey Airport and Groom Lake, however ‘Area 51’ was used in a CIA document from the Vietnam War.
Area 51, or Groom Lake, was established by the CIA in April 1955 for Project AQUATONE, the development of the Lockheed U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft. This was because the flight test and pilot training programs couldn’t be conducted at Lockheed’s Palmdale facility due to the extreme secrecy of the project.
You can see the Area 51 complex in satellite images; however, it doesn’t appear on any public U.S. government maps. The US government have provided very little information on Area 51, and the space surrounding the lake is permanently off limits to both civilians and military air traffic. Even military pilots training in the area risk disciplinary action if they stray into the box surrounding the Area 51 airspace.
There are a lot of conspiracies surrounding Area 51. Some believe it was used to store and examine the materials from the wreckage of the Roswell Incident, others believe it could be used for the development of weather control. A common hypothesis is that the underground facilities are used for a transcontinental underground railroad system, a disappearing airstrip, named the ‘Cheshire Airstrip’ after Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat. It’s thought to briefly appear when water is sprayed onto its camouflaged asphalt and to be engineered on alien technology.
Conspiracy theorist, Robert Scott Lazar, says to have been hired in the late 1980s to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology at Area 51’s ‘Sector Four’ (S-4), located underground inside the Papoose Range near Papoose Lake. He claims he examined an alien craft that ran on an antimatter reactor powered by element 115, which had not yet been synthesized. He also claims to have read government documents detailing alien involvement in human affairs for the past 10,000 years. However, Lazar never provided any evidence to support these claims and his story has been rejected by sceptics and ufologists.
In 2019, a Facebook event was created titled ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.’ The event was initially created as a joke, however it soon gained traction. Over two million people responded ‘going,’ though on the day of the event only around 150 people were reported to have shown up, with none succeeding to enter the site. We may never know what really goes on Area 51. Let us know your theories!