“This has a high potential of getting ugly. Please consider visiting at another time.”
–Website of Rachel, Nevada, quoted by Billy Cox in the De Void blog
“This,” of course, was “Storm Area 51,” the event that was supposed to happen four weeks ago, on September 20. It didn’t “get ugly,” and it’s worth considering precisely why it didn’t. And what the whole episode meant.
In retrospect, it’s easy to say, “Oh, of course nothing was going to happen at Area 51.” It didn’t always feel that way. “Nevada officials are quivering in their boots,” reported the Toronto Sun on September 8. “Lincoln and Nye Counties have declared a state of emergency. Millions signed up and thousands are expected to hit the speck on the map.
“Linda Looney manages the Alien Research Centre in nearby Hiko and is very familiar with Area 51 aficionados. At first, she was thrilled. ‘I got excited,’ she told The Atlantic magazine. ‘And then I got worried.’ … An estimated 30,000 are expected to flood the area.”
“There may be bloodshed,” I told a neighbor ominously when she asked me what the fuss was all about. Then I thought about it more soberly and knew: no, there wouldn’t. I posted on September 9 to my Facebook Fan Page:
“My prediction? Nothing of any significance is going to happen on September 20. If I turn out to be right, I’ll explain my thinking. If I’m wrong, I’ll be too busy cleaning egg off my face to explain anything.”
So I got it right, and here’s my thinking:
I remembered back to when I was a teenage UFOlogist, in the early 1960s. I believed in UFOs–I really and truly did. I believed they were from outer space. What was more, I believed they were hostile. Given the fantastically advanced technology these ill-intentioned aliens had at their disposal, this was grim news for our planet.
Wouldn’t it have been a wonderful relief to discover that the bad news was all wrong?
That the UFOs not only were no menace to anyone, but they didn’t even exist?
And yet–when debunker Donald Menzel’s The World of Flying Saucers came out in 1963, and my friend and fellow-UFOlogist Jerry Clark warned me in one of the multi-page letters we used to exchange that Menzel was the most persuasive skeptic he’d ever read, I felt a chill strike my heart. I still remember that; and I remember my anxiety when a copy of Menzel’s book arrived late that summer in our Levittown public library and I checked it out and bicycled home with it. The relief when I began to read the book and decided that, heck, Menzel wasn’t so convincing after all. That my belief in the impending space invasion could remain intact.
Was this belief for real?
I now can understand: it was and it wasn’t. It was a real belief, in that I held it with absolute sincerity, a genuine conviction that it followed necessarily from the UFO evidence. But it was an “as-if” belief, in that the emotional consequences that should have followed from it–they just didn’t. I should have been scared of the alien invaders, but I wasn’t. Not the way I was scared that if I were ever to ask a girl for a date, she’d say, “You want me to go out–WITH YOU????” and spread it all over the school.
In my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (forthcoming in March, from Stanford University Press), I tell the story: how my belief in alien invaders was a mirror of something left unacknowledged, something truly terrifying for the young boy I was. Namely, my mother’s slowly approaching death. Like Perseus’s mirror in the myth, my UFOlogy helped me to deal with a prospect so dreadful it would have turned me to stone if I’d had to look at it directly.
And Donald Menzel was going to shatter that mirror? No wonder I trembled as I opened The World of Flying Saucers.
Now back to 2019, and the Facebook page Storm Area 51: They Can’t Stop All of Us.
It started on June 27, originally intended as a joke. But the joke, if such it was, resonated. By the end of July, according to cnet.com, “more than 2 million people have signed up to attend the Sept. 20 event in the Nevada desert, and an additional 1.4 million are ‘interested’ in attending.”
“We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let’s see them aliens.”
And if there’s 3 million of you, and you’re prepared to die, even without “Naruto running” the authorities aren’t going to be able to stop you.
As it turned out, something like 3,000 showed up, and they didn’t show the smallest intention of storming Area 51 to see “them aliens.”
So then, what motivated the 3 million to respond as they did on Facebook? Were they, like the creator of the page, only joking? Or did they really believe that the US military is storing dead aliens–or, just possibly, one or two living aliens–at Area 51?
As 71-year-old Dave Halperin who in my heart am still 15-year-old Dave Halperin, I can answer with certainty: they did and they didn’t. Their belief was real, in that it was (and still is) sincerely held. It was unreal, in that it was a stand-in for something else; they knew deep down that it wasn’t literally true. Certainly not worth facing bullets or even arrest for.
Billy Cox, whose De Void blog covers UFOs for the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune, was on hand for the events in Rachel and nearby Hiko, Nevada. His posts give a wonderfully vivid picture of what happened on the weekend of “Storm Area 51.” Of the people who’d come to Nevada to make it happen.
“‘I don’t know, I just didn’t feel like this is something I could miss,’ said Jerry Johnson, a Baby Boomer who drove down with friends from Carson City. ‘I go to Burning Man,’ he said, alluding to the 33-year-old bohemian festival staged at the opposite end of Nevada in late August, ‘and already I’m getting the same feeling here as I do there. Everybody there knows everybody else, and they have a lot of respect and dignity for each other. There’s a lot of love. And I’m sensing that here, too. Maybe it’s because everybody here can talk freely about something they maybe can’t talk about with friends or their own families.'”
(Which is what? Dead aliens? Or something that those dead aliens represent, as the UFOs represented something for me at age 15 that I couldn’t talk about with friends, and certainly not with my family?)
Another visitor, quoted in the same post: “Just think, this all started with a meme on social media, and it became a phenomenon. Who would’ve thought something like this could happen, and over UFOs? There’s something going on, and people want to know what it is.” And another: “I’m so glad we came because we all feel like we’re a part of something. Everybody here seems so nice and so happy.”
I spoke with Billy over the phone last week, and he told me that as many as 10% of the people he saw, who’d come for “Storm Area 51,” might have been African-American. This corresponds pretty closely to the percentage of blacks in American society as a whole, and goes against what I’ve observed in the past: that the world of UFOlogy is segregated, with a distinct African-American UFO tradition that runs parallel to the white tradition, but differs from it in significant ways and is mostly ignored by it. The times they are a-changin’? And are these changes, and the current blossoming of UFOs throughout American culture, part of the aftershocks of the 2016 election? (As I suggested about a year ago, thinking of the New York Times‘s precedent-shattering UFO reportage of December 2017, that ushered in the new era.)
Billy’s final post of the series has a photo of a young white man and a somewhat older black woman, their arms around each other’s shoulders. The white man wears a T-shirt, “Alien Lives Matter.” His name is Odin Meacham. Hers is Marrissa Neal, and (Billy writes) she “drove in from California’s Simi Valley because her daughter insisted they be here. Facing an empty nest after her kid leaves for college next year, mom relented. But as she began mixing with fellow travelers like 25-year-old Odin Meacham, Neal knew she was in the right place.
“‘I think one of the reasons we’re all here today is, we don’t feel like we can trust anything anymore,’ said Meacham, who came from Utah. … ‘But you have to believe that trust can be restored somehow. You just can’t give up. That’s why I’ve enjoyed being here–you meet people who feel the same way.’
“Meacham and Neal discovered they were both here, ultimately, as a result of childhood events. She was 6 when she got a glimpse of a glowing UFO. Nobody believed her. Meacham … was just 5 years old. He saw it staring at him, glowing red eyes, outside his bedroom window. His folks told him it was just a dream. …
“Neal says she was surprised by the civil conversations she had with people harboring opposing political values. She even had a decent chat with a Trump supporter, because conventional politics never cropped up. That’s one of the reasons she insists on coming back next year, because there is no liberal or conservative divide on The Great Taboo [as Billy calls UFOs and UFOlogy]. Maybe, she says, it’s the one issue that can unite and maybe even mobilize a nation so sick and tired of being lied to it doesn’t even bother to vomit anymore.”
And I predicted that “nothing of any significance” would happen on September 20? I sure got that one wrong, didn’t I?
by David Halperin
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