The man behind a viral Facebook page to invade Area 51 has now come forward to say it was “completely satire” and the joke has gotten out of control.
Matty Roberts created the Facebook event page “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” telling people online, “We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Centre tourist attraction and coordinate our entry… We can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.”
He didn’t realize his comical call to invade one of the most secretive and mysterious locations on Earth would become a rally cry, but after keeping a low profile, Roberts told KLAS-TV in Las Vegas , he never planned on invading the Nevada military base.
“I tried to make it seem as much as a joke as I possibly could but there are definitely some people taking it seriously,” Roberts told George Knapp from KLAS-TV.
The page currently boasts 1.7 million people who “are going” and another 1.3 million who are “interested.”
KLAS-TV says Roberts got the idea for the page after listening to an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, where Rogan discussed rumours that alien and UFO technology was buried deep beneath the desert around Area 51.
He made the page on June 27 and planned the takeover for Sep 20, but it went massively viral in a matter of days.
“Once it got past 500,000 people that were interested or going, I was just like ‘the FBI is going to show up to my house’ and it got a little spooky from there,” he told KLAS-TV.
And while it doesn’t appear the FBI did come knocking at his front door, his plans did catch the eyes of U.S. Air Force officials.
“[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train America armed forces,” U.S. Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews told the Washington Post .
“The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.”
While some may be serious about breaking into the air base, others have used the page to create comical invasion plans with strategies like having people flank the base with a Naruto sprint (a nod to an anime character with the same name who runs with his head forward and arms pointing behind his back) while people named Kyle storm from the side with the help of energy drinks and magic mushrooms.
The plans also spawned an official website with merchandise and promises of a “special announcement.”
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