SAN FRANCISCO — With six months to go until the weeklong desert festival, Burning Man is already keeping people up at night.

And it is not because of nonstop techno music or scantily clad fire dancers, either.

Festivalgoers from around the country are distressed about recent problems that left thousands of veteran Burners, as festival attendees are called, without tickets to the August event and might have landed tickets in the hands of scalpers.

“This has me waking up at night terrified,” said Marian Goodell, a founding board member and spokeswoman for Black Rock City, the company that organizes Burning Man in the desert outside Gerlach, Nev. “It is the end of Burning Man if we don’t solve this.”