In the summer of 2019, a joke Facebook event called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us" turned into one of the biggest meme waves of the year. The idea was absurd: thousands of people would rush the secretive US Air Force base in Nevada on 20 September and finally "see them aliens". By mid-July more than a million people had clicked "going", and by late August the number had reached about 2 million, with another 1.5 million "interested".
The event was created on 27 June 2019 by Matty Roberts, a young man from Bakersfield, California, who later said he never expected it to go beyond a few dozen friends. Instead it spread across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram, inspired an Air Force warning, a music video, brand promotions and two real festivals in the Nevada desert, and produced a flood of memes.
When the day came, only around 150 people actually showed up at the base gates, and nobody got in. This gallery collects 30 of the memes from that summer, with a note on each one explaining the reference, plus the background on what Area 51 really is and what happened on the day.
What Area 51 actually is
Area 51 is the popular name for a highly classified US Air Force facility in southern Nevada, about 83 miles (134 km) north-northwest of Las Vegas. Its official name is Homey Airport, and it is also known as Groom Lake after the dry salt flat beside its runways. It operates as a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base in California.
The US Air Force and the CIA took over the site in 1955 to test the Lockheed U-2 spy plane away from prying eyes. Over the following decades it hosted flight tests of the A-12 OXCART, the D-21 drone, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth jet and captured Soviet MiG fighters. The government only acknowledged the base's existence in 1998, and in 2013 the CIA released declassified histories of the U-2 and OXCART programmes, including a map, after a Freedom of Information Act request.
The secrecy is why the base became a magnet for UFO stories. Veterans of the early programmes have said that their high-altitude test flights, seen by airline pilots and the public, explain many of the sightings from the 1950s and 1960s. In 1989 Bob Lazar claimed to have worked on alien spacecraft at a site called S-4 near the base, a story that has been widely disputed but remains famous. Lazar's 2019 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience is what inspired Roberts to create the event.
The perimeter is marked by orange posts and watched by cameras, motion sensors and guards in unmarked pickup trucks, nicknamed "camo dudes". Signs warn that the use of deadly force is authorised against trespassers. This is not a place to joke your way past.
How a joke event became a movement
The original listing promised that if everyone did the "Naruto run", the arms-back sprint of characters in the Japanese anime Naruto, they could move faster than the guards' bullets. That ridiculous image did a lot of the work. Within days the event had hundreds of thousands of responses, and the meme-makers took over.
The guards imagine this happens every year, but for the internet it is a first. The picture is Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in Men in Black (1997), holding the "neuralyzer" that wipes people's memories, the perfect tool for a base that wants visitors to forget what they saw.
A tweet by Mike Primavera (@primawesome) from 12 July 2019 proposes a busy schedule: storm Area 51, then sail to the edge of a flat Earth. It pokes fun at the overlap between UFO enthusiasm and other conspiracy theories.
Answering the event's famous slogan, this meme shows a soldier behind a vehicle-mounted rotary machine gun, with a caption saying he is laughing at 3,000 rounds per minute. It was one of the most shared reminders that a real military base was involved.
Lisa Simpson presents a "smarter" plan in the familiar presentation meme: dress up as aliens and wait for the military to take you inside. The format, from The Simpsons, is used whenever someone wants to pitch an idea with mock seriousness.
A YouTube commenter once joked that there would one day be an "Enter Area 51 challenge". The reaction image of John Krasinski as Jim from The Office, smiling through window blinds, signals that the prediction came true.
A time traveller from 2029 mentions a "Great Area 51 Massacre", and the speaker's response is a close-up of a startled Yoda from Star Wars. The meme plays on the fear, voiced by many, that the joke could end badly.
Arriving on an ordinary bicycle, leaving like Elliott in Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), with a blanket-wrapped alien in the basket. It is one of the gentlest jokes in the collection: the dream is to rescue an alien friend, not fight anyone.
Not every meme was purely silly. This two-panel image contrasts the excitement over storming Area 51 with people asking why the same energy was not directed at immigration detention centres, which were in the news in 2019. It shows how quickly internet jokes became a way to talk about politics.
The worry here is that freed aliens might take everyone's jobs. Two lanky alien figures lounge around an office kitchen with coffee mugs, parodying the anti-immigration slogan about outsiders "taking our jobs".
What if the government had already moved everything to an Area 52? The punchline is the "confused Travolta" GIF, John Travolta as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction looking around an empty warehouse.
The military, the government and the risks
The US Air Force did respond. Spokeswoman Laura McAndrews told The Washington Post that it would "discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces." The FBI said it would monitor the situation, and the Federal Aviation Administration set temporary flight restrictions over the area.
Leaving the raid with a "stray dog" you found, which turns out to be the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott's Alien films. The image is a digital edit of a boy walking the creature on a lead.
The two-panel reaction meme shows a man grinning, then looking worried. The joke: the military laughs at civilians with no training, then remembers that Americans have easy access to firearms.
Here the government is played by Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson in Marvel's The Avengers (2012), who finally gets to test an experimental weapon. The meme sums up a common fear that the base would treat a crowd as target practice.
What if the aliens were locked up for good reason? The image is a blurred still of a woman sprinting away in panic from a crowd scene, a reaction picture often used for "run" moments.
A four-panel scene from Doctor Who with Jenna Coleman as Clara and Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. "Is two a lot?" becomes a joke about how many people walk into Area 51 compared with how many walk out.
SpongeBob SquarePants unrolls a scroll with a conspiracy theory: maybe the government created the event to lure people in. The meme pokes fun at how quickly every viral event spawns a counter-theory.
A cartoon in The Simpsons style shows a guard cheerfully posing with three green aliens at an "Area 51" fence. Fans love to say "The Simpsons predicted it", but many such images circulating online are edited or fan-made, so it is best not to take them as real episode stills.
Crashing a stolen UFO because you cannot fly it: the picture is the famous scene from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), in which a flying saucer smashes into the Washington Monument, an effect created by stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen.
"My alien driving me home": a green novelty hand on a stick rests on a car's steering wheel. A simple prop, a good caption, and a meme is born.
Pop culture takes over
Asked why you are flying to Nevada, you start sweating heavily. The image is Jordan Peele in a Key & Peele sketch, a reaction picture used for any moment of nervous guilt.
Turning up as a spectator: Will Smith snapping photos from a taxi window in the opening credits of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Many people who joined the event online clearly planned to watch rather than storm anything.
Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, bearded and followed by a crowd of runners in Monument Valley. In the film he simply decides to keep running for years; here the crowd heads for Area 51 instead.
Sulley from Pixar's Monsters, Inc. looks horrified at discovering that Area 51 holds your private browser history. The joke links government secrecy with fears about online surveillance.
A two-panel scene from Parks and Recreation with Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson, answering a doctor's question about family history with a crude story about an uncle and aliens. The meme spoofs the stranger reasons people gave for wanting to go.
An alien figure in sunglasses and a shirt sits on a bed holding a phone, waiting for a message that the rescuers have arrived. It flips the story so that the aliens are the ones impatient for the raid.
A parody of a social media post: one panel shows a boyfriend with coffee, the second a woman with her hair wrapped in foil for dyeing, captioned as the alien he brought home. The foil, of course, also recalls the tinfoil hats associated with conspiracy theories.
Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik in the 2019 trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog, smugly asking who is really in charge. The meme casts the reckless online crowd as Robotnik, unimpressed by official warnings. Its caption uses a dark joke about young people's state of mind, a common style of millennial humour.
The "Nobody:" format builds up to a crowd of young people sprinting along a park path, labelled as the whole country rushing to Area 51. The clip circulates widely as an all-purpose "everyone running" reaction.
A tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory: maybe Mark Zuckerberg created the event to trick people into freeing "his people". The same Jim-through-the-blinds image from The Office returns for the punchline.
The morning after: a man relaxing on a sofa beside a rubber alien, the two sharing a joint, dated 21 September. It imagines the best-case outcome of the raid, a new extraterrestrial friend.
What really happened on 20 September
The plan was to gather near the base between 3 and 6 a.m. on 20 September 2019. In the end about 150 people walked up to the two main gates. A few made half-hearted dashes, mostly for the cameras, and none got anywhere near the base itself. Law enforcement reported a small number of arrests, around seven, for offences including public urination and indecent exposure, and one person was warned for attempting to enter. Two people were injured in a vehicle rollover near the town of Rachel.
Two festivals took place nearby. Alienstock was held in Rachel, a tiny town on State Route 375, the road nicknamed the Extraterrestrial Highway, and was organised by Connie West, owner of the Little A'Le'Inn. Roberts had pulled out ten days earlier, citing poor planning. Another event, the Storm Area 51 Basecamp, ran in Hiko. Officials had prepared for tens of thousands of visitors, but police estimated that about 1,500 people attended the two events combined.
Brands and celebrities also joined in. Bud Light promised a free beer to "any alien that makes it out", Arby's said it would deliver food, and Lil Nas X released a music video of an "Old Town Road" remix that depicted the raid. Copycat jokes targeted Loch Ness, the Bermuda Triangle and the Vatican archives.
Myths and lessons from the Area 51 raid
Myth: millions of people planned to storm the base. Clicking "going" on Facebook costs nothing. The 2 million figure measured how many people enjoyed the joke, not how many intended to travel to a remote desert.
Myth: Area 51 is where the government keeps aliens. There is no evidence for that. What the declassified record shows is decades of testing secret aircraft, which is reason enough for the security and the rumours.
Myth: the whole thing was harmless. Mostly it was, but residents of small towns like Rachel worried about crowds, traffic and water supplies in the desert, and local authorities spent real money preparing. The episode is a good example of how fast an online joke can create real-world costs.
For anyone visiting the region today, the Extraterrestrial Highway, the Little A'Le'Inn and the alien-themed roadside stops are still a fun detour. Just stay on public roads and well away from the orange perimeter markers.
Sources: Memes and screenshots by their original, mostly anonymous creators, as compiled by Bored Panda in July 2019; Wikipedia: Storm Area 51; Wikipedia: Area 51; Air Force statement as reported by The Washington Post (July 2019).
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