Listen, I’ll get this out of the way: The government has asked you kindly not to storm Area 51 on September 20, like the Facebook group “Storm Area 51, They Cant Stop All of Us” is suggesting, please. It’s dangerous. “[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 American armed forces,” Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews told the Washington Post on July 11. “The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.”
But that hasn’t slowed down the memes, which probably didn’t start with Supreme Memes, the account that made a Facebook event page that made national news when thousands of people expressed interest in going to Area 51 to “see them aliens.” It probably first started on TikTok, where impossibly young humans—born after 2001 somehow—do 15-second sketches usually set to music. Then maybe Reddit? Or Instagram. Can’t say for sure. But the attention from the government and local news stations around the country has only attracted more memes, which then pushed the meme narrative forward, from crashing Area 51 in order to “save” the aliens, to planning what they’re going to do with their alien after they “get” him, to distracting the guards in order to “clap” the aliens’ “cheeks.”
It’s one big joke that has nothing to do with actually pulling a Bastille Day on Nellis Air Force Base Complex, home to Area 51. In fact, many of the jokes describe what it will look like when one to seven people from the 12,000-strong (and counting) Facebook event show up. These are my favorite because they take a classic teen joke—wherein you joke about doing a thing, but don’t do the thing—and make that the whole joke, before anyone can even be embarrassed by doing the thing that was just a joke all along.

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God, why is it so funny? Maybe it’s because storming a secretive government agency sounds mighty appealing at a time when secretive government agencies weigh so heavily on us all. But you don’t know how to deal, so you make jokes. A lot of jokes. An overwhelming number of jokes. God they are so good at jokes, these kids! Like any good meme, the Area 51 invasion has the ability to expand and contract to make room for other, older memes: Florida Man. Lil Nas X and his “Old Town Road” remixes. John Wick. Harambe. Confused Travolta.
But mostly, it’s so funny because these idiot kids with their perfect, stupid jokes sound so reasonable. In an era when Pizzagaters are showing up in public spaces with guns and QAnon has celebrity spokespeople, the relief when you hear “Large group of people plan to storm Area 51,” and then realize that they’re actuallyjoking—it’s a balm. A breezy balm made of one part relief and the rest, pure joy.
The minute a person posts with any sort of seriousness about actually storming Area 51—and these posts are few and far between so far—they get smothered in a light sort of derision. It makes the joke feel safe—for now. The problem is we’ll all live a thousand years between now and September 20. A lot can happen. A lot will happen. The kids will create and abandon hundreds of thousands of new jokes. And as for this one, the milk will turn, and the idea of storming the Area 51 gates could be taken over by some deadly serious conspiracy theorists. It seems to happen to everything these days—Twitter, pizza, the presidency. But until that inevitability, let’s take inspiration from our best teens, storm Area 51, and “get” our aliens.

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