With the petition to storm Area 51 in Nevada has become a worldwide sensation and attracted millions of online signatures. And the unsavoury fate of a trespasser that tried to breach the fortified military base earlier this year single-handedly has recently emerged as a stern reminder of the possible repercussions.
An as-of-yet unidentified man drove all the way from Las Vegas on the 28th of January and unsuccessfully made an attempt to blister past a security checkpoint, before being hunted down by a squadron of security vehicles who shot the man dead upon his exit from the car, supposedly due him being in possession of a suspicious ‘cylindrical’ object.
Representatives of the United States Air Force, which has maintained the Area 51 testing facility since its establishment at the height of the Cold War, confirmed the incident reports — reaffirming their commitment to protecting the facility by force if necessary, a message that has become abundantly clear given their continually somber response to what seemingly started out as a joke.
Jackson Barnes, one of the aforementioned petition’s creators and those who maintain its Facebook page, has since made clear that never was the intention to storm Area 51 serious, and that any negative consequences would simply be an act carried out by the more rogue elements among the petition’s litany of backers.
Of course, the facility has been part of the public imagination for decades, an obvious by-product of its status as a testing airfield for iterations of jets that are scheduled to become an asset for the nation’s Air Force and the designs of which, at the time, haven’t been made public, giving birth to incessant rumors of alien activity and rumors of UFO sightings by uninformed observers in nearby settlements.