Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Have Signed Up For A Not-So-Secret Invasion Of Area 51

More than 280,000 people have already declared that they will be attending a Facebook event later this year called "Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us." What happens if this joke event actually goes ahead is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’ll find the Roswell alien hanging out with Elvis and Tupac, maybe they’ll discover the film set where the Moon landings were staged, or maybe they’ll all get stopped.

If I were a betting man, I’d probably put my money on the latter. After all, Area 51 is fiercely guarded by an army of so-called "camo-dudes" whose sole purpose in life seems to be to keep trespassers out of the top-secret military base. Ironically, it’s located just 129 kilometers (80 miles) from Las Vegas, where there are lots of betting men.

Scheduled for 3am on September 20, the raid has been organized with one mission in mind: to “see them aliens”. In order to get past security, attendees have come up with a plan to outrun any bullets that may greet them by copying the running style of an anime cartoon character called Naruto.

Even if anyone was able to get access to the base, they’d still have a pretty hard time knowing where to look for the cryogenically frozen aliens, given that Area 51 spans over 1.2 million hectares (2.9 million acres).

What goes on inside the perimeter is highly classified, although the official story is that the base – which forms part of the Nevada Test and Training Range – is an air force training center. It has also hosted a large number of nuclear weapons tests, but is most famously said to be the site where the UFO that supposedly crash-landed at Roswell in 1947 is being kept – along with its alien pilot.

In case you still haven’t worked it out, this event is absolutely not serious, and no one should even think about trying to raid Area 51. There are lots of other things to do on September 20. Maybe do one of those instead.