People who gathered to storm the Area 51 military base ended up just taking photos in front of it. Credit – Netflix
The last 2025 installment of Trainwreck, Netflix’s series on disasters in recent history, is more about a trainwreck that was averted.
Out July 29, Trainwreck: Storm Area 51 explores what happened when conspiracy theorists gathered at a highly-protected military base in rural Nevada, convinced that was where the government was doing top-secret U.F.O research.
They were prompted by a Facebook post that was created as a joke. When Matty Roberts of Bakersfield, California, created the public Facebook event “Storm Area 51” for Sep. 20, 2019, at 3 a.m., he didn’t expect it to go viral. It racked up millions of RSVPs and was poised to be a trainwreck of sorts for the nearby town of Rachel, Nevada and its 56 residents. But only a few hundred people showed up in the end, and a parallel celebration in Las Vegas drew more than 10,000 attendees. Both events were considered a success in the end, in the sense that no one died, and attendees had fun.
Here’s how ‘Storm Area 51’ inspired countless memes and what actually went down at Area 51 on Sep. 20, 2019.
What is Area 51?
Area 51 is a classified testing facility for the U.S. Air Force, built in 1955.
As Annie Jacobsen, author of Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, told CNN, the base has worked on the development and testing of U-2 reconnaissance planes designed to spy on the Soviet Union, which civilians have often mistaken for U.F.Os.
The base’s existence was largely kept secret during the Cold War, and President Barack Obama was the first U.S. President to publicly acknowledge its existence in 2013, as part of a joke in a speech at the Kennedy Center.
How ‘Storm Area 51’ went viral
Roberts was a 20-year-old mall employee living in Bakersfield, California, when he stumbled upon a Joe Rogan interview with someone who worked at Area 51. Roberts wondered why Area 51 was so guarded—could the government be hiding something?
He had a Facebook account with 40 followers where he posted memes, satire, and other random thoughts, and during a bout of insomnia one night, he created a public Facebook event called “Storm Area 51” for 3 a.m. in three months with the tagline “They can’t stop all of us.”
“It just seemed like a hilarious idea to me,” Roberts says in the doc. “I didn’t think it’d go anywhere.”
When he woke up the next morning, thousands had already RSVP-ed to the event. Within a month, over a million people RSVP-ed as attending, and the people were making alien memes for the event. Roberts had a blast doing television interviews, saying he created it as a joke while playing video games.
“I felt like I was standing on the doorstep of fame, and all you really had to do was ring the doorbell,” Roberts says in the doc.
Roberts enlisted the help of a promoter known as Disco Donnie to help turn the Facebook event into a proper festival in Rachel, the closest town to Area 51. It was dubbed “Alienstock”—a play on the famous 1969 Woodstock music festival. But it was a “mission impossible” type of situation; the area around Area 51 was all desert, and everything would have to be shipped in.
The logistics became too overwhelming for Roberts. As he put it, “I can’t have my name associated with something that could be a Fyre Fest 2.0.” He and Disco Donnie shifted to planning an “Area 51 celebration” in Las Vegas and left any logistics in the Rachel area up to local business owners who were ticked off and felt abandoned.
But many people did show up in the Rachel, Nevada, area on Sep. 20, 2019.
The scene at Area 51
In the walk-up to the event, YouTubers had been going to Area 51 to stalk the bus that took employees into the base, streaming the scene for their channels. The military spent an estimated $11 million safeguarding Area 51 as part of the largest defense in the base’s history.
Authorities were expecting people to start running towards the base at 3 a.m. in the morning. People did run towards the gate, but they ended up stopping before it and taking photos. In the end, a few hundred people—compared to the 3.5 million expected—flocked to the Rachel area as an excuse to dance and dress up as sexy aliens. Social media influencers livestreamed the action, and more tuned into those livestreams than attended the event. The running joke was that there were more porta-potties than people.
A local sheriff did pull over a guy en route to the event with multiple weapons in his car and seized the weapons. However, overall, the crowd at Area 51 was peaceful—boisterous, but not violent.
Footage of the event in real time shows a social media influencer known as Unicole Unicron leading a prayer for aliens. In the doc, she says she considered the event a success, explaining, “I felt like the aliens were dancing with us.”
Roberts says in the doc that the scene near Area 51 “looked kinda cool” and what he originally had in mind for the event. He went back to working at a mall and looks back on his 15 minutes of fame as “the most surreal and exciting moment of my life.”
Write to Olivia B. Waxman at Trainwreck: Storm Area 51&body=https%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2F7306006%2Ftrainwreck-storm-area-51-netflix%2F” data-ylk=”slk:olivia.waxman@time.com;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas” class=”link rapid-noclick-resp”>olivia.waxman@time.com.
