A Facebook site has called for Americans, on 20 September 2019, to ‘storm Area 51, they can’t stop all of us seeing them aliens’. At time of writing, 1.4 million Internet users have signed up to join in and the American government has issued a warning against would-be trespassers.
If you don’t know (and you are not supposed to know!), Area 51 is the name given to a secret military training facility in the Nevada desert. The site was acquired by the US Air Force in 1955 for testing experimental craft. However, its secrecy fuelled various outlandish conspiracy theories regarding alien spacecraft and technology.
Roswell
Earlier, in 1947, not far from the base there had been a mysterious crash at a site called Roswell. A government agency cleared the debris away and so the claim that it had only been a weather balloon did not satisfy the curious. Sightings of unidentified objects near Area 51 and its role in films such as Independence Day and Men in Black have kept it in the public imagination.
Comedy, free speech and warnings from the past
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, …