What is Area 51, and why is everyone talking about it

Within the past week, one of the major trending topics online has been conversations around the existence of alien presence on earth. This being because this week a facebook page has gone viral rallying the raid of Area 51, a highly classified US Air Force (USAF) Facility. The details of what happens in Area 51, located in Nevada, USA, a few miles from Las Vegas, has never been exposed to the public, but the USAF has simply described it as a highly classified top secret open training range. The intense secrecy that surrounds the area has provoked many different conspiracy theories of what may be inside, the most popular of which has been the possibility of the US Government hiding extraterrestrial forces from the public. 

Although this area has been in existent since the early ’90s, it has only now become the centre of attention because late last month, on June 27, Matty Roberts, a California resident, created the Facebook page Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us as a joke. The event, that included the instructions If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let's see them aliens, was clearly not created with any serious intentions. However after a few days, people started noticing it, “I waited for like three days and there were like 40 people and then it just completely took off out of nowhere,” he said during an interview with CNN. Today the page has accumulated over 1.7 million people, planning to “set the aliens free” from Area 51 on September 20th later this year.

Roberts also explained that he was inspired to make the page after watching an interview with physicist Bob Lazar who claimed that he worked with an alien spacecraft while being employed at the Area 51 facility. However, after the page gained popularity, he soon became scared, “I just thought, the FBI is going to show up at my house and it got a little spooky from there,” he said. In response to the rumoured raid, the US Air Force told the Washington Post that the 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.” Despite this serious response, the facebook page has still remained and many people from the internet have still been scheming to move forward with the raid later this year. Some people have taken it seriously,  creating actual maps of the area and what areas to enter from, scheming to meet at an Area 51 tourist centre nearby, while others have found it funny, resulting in a wave of memes on what will happen post and pre-raid if we come in contact with aliens. This week, Pornhub even released a survey showing that searches in Area 51 and "alien sex" has skyrocketed massively within the past two weeks, which shows that people are definitely taking this way too far. 

There have been around 30 allegations of UFO sightings within the last century, 13 of which have been reported in the United States, so perhaps there may be something interesting to discover within the walls of Area 51, but the premises is said to contain seismic intrusion devices designed to detect the rumble of vehicles from miles away, along with heavily armed guards. According to the USA’s Internal Security Act of 1950, any act of trespassing upon the facilities premises can be punishable by a fine as low as $750 to the “Use of Deadly force” that has been authorised.

So what say you? Where will you be on September 20th? Risking your lives for aperitivo with the aliens? Let's see how many of the millions of people will actually turn up.