Ken Layne

Special to DESERT magazine

When you get mixed up with the UFO people, your life becomes deeply weird. Ask Matty Roberts, the 20-year-old engineering student from Bakersfield who created the #StormArea51 meme. He posted something dumb and funny on Facebook, proposing a nighttime invasion to “see them aliens,” and millions of people immediately signed up.

Most know it’s a joke. A few do not. More than a few will be headed up the Extraterrestrial Highway on Friday, Sept. 20, just to see what happens.

The Netflix documentary "Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers" has a lot of people thinking about that mysterious desert military installation 150 miles north of Las Vegas.

In 1989, Bob Lazar appeared on the KLAS-TV news to claim he worked on backward-engineered flying saucers. There were a few hundred holes in the story, but it hit a nerve. Area 51 became a meme of the first kind, a mythology that burrowed into the collective consciousness and never really left. "The X-Files" and "Independence Day" brought the paranoid tales to life. Video games, pop music and comic books elaborated the theology. Like Roswell before it, Nevada’s Area 51 became a dreamland of extraterrestrial secrets.

Pilots had been referring to the top-secret Air Force base at Groom Lake as “Dreamland” for years. Strange things were seen over this easternmost extension of Edwards Air Force Base, wonders in the sky. Some of these aerial oddities were later revealed as SR-71 Blackbird and U-2 spy planes. Some were Russian jet fighters stolen from Soviet airfields. And some remain unexplained: Lights dancing in the sky, things that hover with no visible or audible means of propulsion, sinister black triangles making 180-degree turns and shooting off like meteors.

Nevada is mostly federal land, and Area 51 is part of a vast, secret complex that includes the nation’s nuclear testing grounds at Yucca Flat, Nellis Air Force Range and the proposed nuclear waste dump within Yucca Mountain. Storming the base from all sides, as proposed by #StormArea51’s deliberately goofy battle plans, is impossible. But on the northeast side, where Highway 375 skirts the base’s buffer zone, tourists have been coming for a quarter-century to drink alien-labeled bottles of beer at the Little A’Le’Inn and take some pictures by the rural mailbox that marks a dirt road leading to the edge of the base. There’s the Alien Research Center down the road in Hiko, too, with a giant metallic space alien standing sentry outside the souvenir shop.

That’s where Roberts decided the millions would meet before the half-suicidal mob stormed Groom Lake under cover of darkness. Only those who could run like a beloved anime ninja named Naruto would survive to “see them aliens.” Woe to the Kyles, energy-drink-loving bros who would all be sacrificed to Area 51’s ruthless security forces so the speedier runners could slip through.

When a meme is embraced by the masses, jokes cease to exist. People are coming, and Roberts has now endorsed a peaceful festival on the fated day — hopefully the UFO Woodstock and not the Alien Altamont.

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But it’s happening, there is no longer any doubt. Come Sept. 20, it’ll be bumper-to-bumper on the E.T. Highway from Las Vegas to the lonesome high desert of Lincoln County. It’s an easy two-hour drive from the suburban Vegas grid to Dreamland. Of course people are coming. The handful of mobile-home motel rooms were all booked up in Rachel, behind the Little A'Le'Inn, long before the U.S. Air Force and Nevada Highway Patrol were compelled to acknowledge at least some kind of looming invasion on the last weekend of summer. A media and tourist invasion, at least. A lot of people who didn’t quite get the joke, at worst.

If you couldn’t follow the anime character references or recognize the intentionally bad grammar and spelling, well maybe it sounded like a perfectly good idea, to storm the most mysterious military installation on the planet. It’s a natural and insane evolution of our current snarling discontent, the gleefully self-destructive populism, the impotent bafflement as everything actually falls apart, and the unavoidable awareness —especially in the desert with yet another power outage leaving you sweltering without air conditioning — that it’s getting harder to live on this Earth. It makes people loopy, makes people look for messiahs.

The UFO phenomena is deeply weird and chaotic, like the subculture around it.

A close-range encounter shakes a person’s very soul. During the 1997 Phoenix Lights event, people pulled over on the freeways, gazing up in astonishment and horror at mile-wide silent aircraft that appeared to be right on top of them. The sense that the government is lying about UFOs is hard to avoid when, as happened in Phoenix, former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington made fun of the event and concealed his own up-close sighting on that otherworldly night of March 13, 1997. (Symington eventually admitted all, a decade later on CNN.)

There’s a baffling strangeness to these events. They rarely make any practical sense. The laws of physics are routinely and absurdly broken. And yet they are objectively real to the witnesses, regardless of what’s really behind the flying saucers and black triangles and other bizarre apparitions that haunt our skies and our social media. Military pilots chase them. Commercial pilots nervously report them. Millions of people around the world see Unidentified Aerial Phenomena every year. Maybe we are reaching a new level of global acknowledgement. Something is happening.

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UFOs are socially disruptive. The effects are unpredictable. An obvious meme or a science-fiction story can be taken at face value. Absurdities become reality. Jokes, hoaxes, lies, con-men and chaos are not bugs in the UFO operating system. They’re a feature.

Around the world but most vividly in the indigenous culture of the American Southwest, the trickster wreaks havoc for good or ill or just for the hell of it, right here in our everyday world. The trickster isn’t condemned to rule an underworld, because the trickster is an equal among gods. A lot of credible people have looked at Lazar’s story and rationally concluded that he made it up, as he claimed to have fanciful academic credentials — simultaneous masters degrees from MIT and Caltech, of which no trace can be found. He was convicted of felony pandering in Nevada, the year following his wild claims about working on alien saucers. And since childhood he has courted local publicity, first for his rocket-powered bicycle. Yet for 30 years, he has mostly stuck to the details of his flying saucer story.

That tale was mostly forgotten outside of the small and graying contingent of late 20th-century UFO researchers — and they had mostly dismissed it. Jeremy Corbell, an independent filmmaker who lives part-time near Pioneertown in the California desert, is fascinated by Lazar. Corbell has made a trio of feature-length documentaries about the UFO world, but the Lazar movie blasted right out of the flying-saucer cult and became a full-on pop culture phenomenon. "Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers" spent much of the summer as the No. 1 documentary on Netflix, right there on the home screen for millions of subscribers worldwide. It was already doing well when the monstrously popular podcaster Joe Rogan brought Corbell and Lazar to his show.

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Roberts, our meme lord of Bakersfield, caught some of the Rogan episode. He watched the documentary. Inspired, he posted his meme to a Facebook group dedicated to nonsense. That should’ve been the end of it. Instead, Roberts became a global meme himself.

“It seems like a very Bakersfield thing to come out of here,” he told his hometown newspaper on July 27, with nearly four million people pledging some sort of interest in the formerly fake event. "I’ll just be scrolling through Facebook and I’ll just see my face photoshopped on the Extraterrestrial Highway.”

Roberts is now a part of UFO culture. Corbell sought him out as soon as the meme took off in July, and Las Vegas television reporter George Knapp interviewed him; Knapp is the reporter who originally interviewed Lazar. And Roberts now finds himself lord of a real UFO festival, his counsel and approval sought by these well-known names from the UFO world.

I have become part of the UFO world, too. It always loomed large in my private life, even if mostly kept out of my work as a reporter and journalist. But five years ago, I left my last media job and started Desert Oracle, a small periodical and weekly radio show/podcast from Joshua Tree. UFOs are an inescapable and crucial part of desert history and culture: Roswell, Groom Lake, the Integratron, Gram Parsons and Keith Richards watching for flying saucers from a barber’s chair they dragged up Cap Rock. It wasn’t long before Corbell introduced himself to me, in the high desert restaurant La Copine, and said we needed to know each other. He was right.

Six weeks before #StormArea51 took over social media, Corbell and I were in the back seat of a Toyota 4Runner headed straight up a mountain dirt road just beyond Area 51. Knapp and his KLAS I-Team partner, chief photographer Matt Adams, were up front. They had joined me for an archeological field trip. I was seeking Pahranagat Man, the distinctive figure found only in the ancient rock art of Lincoln County around Groom Lake. This entity is so similar to the popular conception of “space aliens” supposedly kept at Area 51 that I thought it might be worthwhile to gaze upon these remote petroglyph panels, and contemplate the ridiculous synchronicity.

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Jeremy, George and Matt had just returned from a UFO festival in Oregon, where they had appeared with both Lazar and Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor, who chased fantastic unidentified craft all around the USS Nimitz carrier group training off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Because alongside the Lazar furor, the U.S. Navy has picked this time in history to reveal some of the interesting incidents its pilots have experienced over the past 15 years, including “Tic Tac” UFOs that supposedly hover just beneath the ocean’s surface and then shoot up to 30,000 feet in the blink of an eye. It’s a weird time.

And when the meme became reality, it was Jeremy on the phone to tell me that I would be emcee of the Sept. 20 festival at the Alien Research Center, owned by local businessman George Harris. It had all been decided. The UFO world works that way, sometimes. Who knows what interesting characters I’ll get to introduce to thousands of the faithful and curious. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, any world.

“Through all the joking, all this laughter, all the memes, I truly believe we have an opportunity to shine a light on the secrecy,” Corbell told me at the end of July. “We can have an impact on the way the topic is handled. Whatever’s going on is bigger than we can imagine.”

It was only a year or two ago when the easiest argument against the reality of Unidentified Aerial (or Underwater) Phenomena was to mention camera phones. If everybody’s got a camera in their pocket, why aren’t we inundated with UFO photos and footage?

And then, despite a phone camera’s infamous inability to even get a clear picture of the full moon, the videos and photos began flooding Instagram and YouTube. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean. Not the obvious CGI fakes with science-fiction spaceships, but the humble backyard footage of mysterious lights doing weird things in the evening or even daylight sky, traveling against the wind, forming diamonds and triangles and then just blinking off like somebody hit a switch, often with the perplexed audio commentary of a nearby child as the adult struggles to find and focus upon the weirdness overhead: Is it aliens? Are we gonna get abducted?

It took new imaging technology in the Navy fighter jets to produce those weird videos we saw on the front page of the New York Times. And when an East Coast-based carrier group was outfitted with the new gear, the oddball mystery craft began buzzing the training exercises on the Atlantic coast. Yet pilots saw the things with their own eyes, too — including a “sphere encasing a cube” that flew right between a pair of F/A-18s in close formation. Raytheon was so pleased with the media coverage that “UFO-spotter” systems are now mentioned in the aerospace contractor’s marketing materials.

Of the great historical waves of sightings, the most dramatic can predict future Earth technology, like the aerodynamic marvels seen up and down California during the mystery airship flap of 1896. Within 20 years of that hysteria, such airships were ferrying passengers across the skies, but they could never maneuver like those bizarre airships over San Francisco and Sacramento, with their impossibly bright spotlights and ability to vanish.

The black triangles predicted the shape and color if not the performance of the B-2 stealth bomber, which lacks the ability to hover silently over shocked motorists on a desert highway before shooting off into the atmosphere without producing so much as a breeze. (I have witnessed one of these peculiar craft, on the 395 in the Eastern Sierra, as have thousands of other California drivers who will never forget that particular road trip.)

Now, maybe, our technology is making it a little easier to capture some of these phenomena on video. The U.S. Navy has announced it will no longer scorn pilots who file reports. The History Channel has a nearly all-UFO schedule, especially focused on the military sightings. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — a native of Searchlight, Nevada — has come out of retirement not to stump for Democrats, but to encourage serious work on the UFO enigma.

And then there’s the networking technology, in large part based on UFO researcher Jacques Vallée’s work on the early Internet. You no longer need to submit a UFO report to some amateur or for-profit organization and await their judgment or investigation. Just post it on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter or YouTube. If it’s compelling, it will soon be seen by thousands, maybe millions.

And if you’re Matty Roberts, trying out your meme skills, you might just win a permanent place in the culture. None of us know exactly what will happen on Sept. 20 out in tiny Hiko, Nevada, but none of us will be all that surprised if a fleet of UFOs buzzes our impromptu desert festival.

Ken Layne lives and works in Joshua Tree, as publisher of Desert Oracle and host of its companion podcast and radio show on Z 107.7 FM. Find out more at DesertOracle.com.