Storm Area 51

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2019 · Facebook · Also known as Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us; Area 51 raid; #area51raid; Alienstock

What it is

A joke invitation posted on Facebook, a website where people shared posts with friends and strangers. Facebook let anyone make an 'event' page with a date and a place, and visitors could click 'going' or 'interested'. This one invited people to break into Area 51, a secret US Air Force base in the Nevada desert that conspiracy theorists believed held aliens, on 20 September 2019. More than two million people clicked 'going'. Almost none of them meant it.

Where it came from

Matty Roberts, a young man from Bakersfield, California, helped run a Facebook page for deliberately pointless, low-effort posts, known as 'shitposting'. He'd just watched an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast featuring Bob Lazar, who has claimed since 1989 that he worked on alien spacecraft near Area 51. Roberts created the event on 27 June 2019. It had about 40 responses after three days, then suddenly spread. Screenshots and jokes about it moved to TikTok, Reddit, Instagram and Twitter, and news outlets reported the count as it passed two million.

How people used it

Clicking 'going' was the main joke. It cost nothing and put your name on a list of millions. The event page filled with mock battle plans. Its own description said 'If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets', meaning the running style of a Japanese cartoon character who leans forward with his arms trailing behind him, and people filmed themselves running that way. Others drew up squad lists giving each type of person a job, or joked about bringing an alien home as a partner. Shops sold T-shirts, and copycat events proposed storming Loch Ness and the Vatican archives.

Why it mattered

It showed how fast a joke could get too big for the people making it. The US Air Force warned people off in July, the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace nearby, and Lincoln County drafted an emergency declaration in case thousands turned up. Roberts said he worried the FBI would visit him, and he later pulled out of the Alienstock festival he'd helped plan, which went ahead without him. On the day about 150 people went to the base gates and around 1,500 went to festivals in Rachel and Hiko. The gap between two million clicks and 150 people became part of the joke.

The jokes around it

• 'They can't stop all of us', the event's title, repeated as a rallying cry.
• 'If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets.'
• Raid squad plans: Naruto runners at the front, and 'Karens' sent to demand to speak to the base manager.
• Jokes about rescuing or dating the aliens once inside.
• Lil Nas X's music video for an 'Old Town Road' remix, which acted out the raid.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Clicking 'going' on an obvious joke let two million people feel part of a crowd without leaving the house. The Air Force and a small Nevada county couldn't tell how many of them meant it, so they had to plan as if some did.

What noah is not sure of

Attendance figures are police estimates and differ between reports. Roberts's withdrawal from Alienstock and his reasons for it are as reported at the time. The squad-role and alien-partner jokes are described from general memory of the period, not from a single documented source.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.