What if Area 51 is hiding aliens?

There's a sign at the edge of a desert in Nevada that, as a photographer, I find almost personally offensive. It says, more or less: restricted area, use of deadly force authorised, and photography prohibited.

Behind that sign is Area 51, probably the most famous secret base in the world. For over seventy years, people have believed that what's hidden there isn't just secret planes. They think it's alien spacecraft, maybe even the aliens themselves.

The base that didn't exist

Part of what makes Area 51 so fascinating is that, for decades, the US government wouldn't even admit it was there. It didn't appear on official maps. Pilots were told to avoid the airspace. Workers flew in from Las Vegas on unmarked planes and weren't allowed to talk about their jobs.

The CIA only officially acknowledged the base in 2013, when declassified documents about the U-2 spy plane were released. If you want to grow a conspiracy theory, there's no better soil than a government pretending something doesn't exist.

Roswell: where the alien story starts

In 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico found strange debris on his land: rubber, foil, sticks and tape. The local army airfield put out a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc". The next day, it corrected the story: it was a weather balloon.

That correction, of course, was exactly what a cover-up would look like. Decades later, the Roswell story grew into crashed saucers, alien bodies and autopsies, and the bodies were said to have been taken to, you guessed it, Area 51.

In the 1990s, the US Air Force released reports explaining that the debris came from Project Mogul, a top-secret programme using high-altitude balloons to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. The "alien bodies", they said, were most likely memories of crash-test dummies dropped from balloons in later years, mixed up over time. It fits the rubber, foil and sticks pretty well.

The truth is out there. It just might be a balloon.

The real secret: spy planes

Here's the part I find most convincing. Area 51 was built in 1955 to test the U-2, a spy plane designed to fly far higher than any airliner of the time. Later came the A-12, the even faster ancestor of the SR-71 Blackbird, and the stealth prototypes that became the F-117, which looked like nothing anyone had seen before.

A CIA history published in the 1990s admitted something remarkable: many UFO sightings in the 1950s and 60s were actually these secret planes. A silver aircraft glinting in the sun at 60,000 feet, where people thought nothing could fly, looks a lot like a UFO. And the government was happy to let people believe in aliens rather than reveal its spy programmes.

So, in a way, the theory is right. Area 51 really was hiding strange flying objects. They were just ours.

But then the Pentagon started talking about UFOs

This is where it gets interesting again. In 2017, the New York Times revealed a secret Pentagon programme that had been studying UFOs. In 2020, the US Navy officially released videos taken by fighter pilots, showing objects that seemed to move in impossible ways. UFOs got a new official name: UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena.

In 2023, a former intelligence officer told the US Congress under oath that the government had recovered crafts and "non-human biologics". It was headline news around the world.

But in 2024, the Pentagon's own UFO office published a review of decades of records and said it found no evidence of alien technology, or of any secret recovery programme. Most cases, when there's enough data, turn out to be balloons, drones, birds, satellites, or sensor glitches. Some remain unexplained, mainly because the data is poor, not because it's alien.

Why we want it to be true

I think the Area 51 legend survives because it combines two things people believe deeply: that we're not alone in the universe, and that governments don't tell us everything. The second one is definitely true. The first one might be.

And honestly, I'd love it to be real. Who wouldn't want proof that we're not alone? But wanting something to be true is exactly when you need to be most careful.

In 2019, a joke Facebook event called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us" got millions of people clicking "going". On the day, only a small crowd showed up in the desert, mostly for the festivals and the photos. Which, honestly, is the most human response to a conspiracy theory I can imagine.

Verdict: a real secret base, real secret aircraft, and very real cover-ups. Aliens? No evidence yet. But I'll keep watching the sky.

— Desly