Two Million RSVPs, About a Hundred People, and One Arrest for Public Urination
In June 2019, a 20-year-old from Bakersfield, California named Matty Roberts created a Facebook event as a joke. He called it “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” The tagline: “They can’t stop all of us. Let’s see them aliens.” He did not expect what came next.
Over two million people clicked “Going” or “Interested.” The FBI visited Roberts at home to confirm he wasn’t planning an actual violent raid. Facebook eventually removed the event for violating its community standards. On September 20, 2019, at 3:00 a.m. PDT, somewhere between 75 and 100 people walked up to a gate in the Nevada desert.
What the Target Actually Was
Area 51 sits in Lincoln County, southern Nevada, about 83 miles (134 km) north-northwest of Las Vegas, officially part of the Nevada Test and Training Range, a detachment of Nellis Air Force Base. The U.S. government didn’t formally acknowledge its existence until 2013, when President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to name it publicly. Established in 1955 to test the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, it later served as the development ground for the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Nighthawk. The extraterrestrial connection is a conspiracy theory; the CIA’s U-2, flying at altitudes no civilian aircraft could match at the time, is believed to have generated many of the UFO reports filed during those years.
The Logic of the Swarm
Roberts’s event description proposed that if enough people moved at once, security couldn’t detain everyone. The meme ecosystem took it further, Naruto-running, the flat-back, arms-trailing sprint from the anime series, was proposed as a tactic to outpace guards. The flaw was simple: over two million RSVPs sounds like a mobilization, but a Facebook click and a plane ticket to Nevada are different categories of action entirely.
The Geography of Good Intentions
Rachel, Nevada, the nearest town to the base’s gate, has a resident population of roughly 54 to 56 people. Getting there from Las Vegas means more than an hour of driving along mostly empty highway. This gap between a click and a road trip is sometimes called slacktivism: joining a cause digitally satisfies the social impulse to participate without requiring actual effort. The two million people who RSVPed got to feel like part of something, mostly from a couch.
The actual event, however, drew a genuine crowd to the region. Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee counted approximately 1,500 people at festival sites in Rachel and nearby Hiko. The Alienstock festival in Rachel peaked at around 3,000 attendees, according to the Reno Gazette Journal, and a parallel celebration in Las Vegas drew more than 10,000. The “invasion” was real; it just materialized mostly at a music festival.
What the Gate Actually Looked Like
At 3:00 a.m. on September 20, 2019, the crowd at the Lincoln County gate numbered between 75 and 100 people in alien masks, space suits, tinfoil hats, and Naruto headbands. Jeffrey Gonzalez, a paranormal researcher who has been investigating unexplained phenomena since 2003 and runs ParanormalCentral.net, was among those present, camera in hand. The security officers on the other side joked with the crowd. One woman in her 20s ducked under the gate barrier and was briefly detained. The tension dissolved almost immediately into something closer to a neighborhood gathering held next to a classified military installation at three in the morning.
The Final Numbers
The most consequential legal outcome was one arrest for public urination. Across all gatherings from September 17 to 21, 2019, seven total arrests were recorded over five days. Matty Roberts watched two million people RSVP, received an FBI visit, saw Facebook delete his page, and then watched a few dozen people in costume get waved at by guards. Jeffrey Gonzalez told Gizmodo it was “the first of its kind as far as storming Area 51.” He wasn’t wrong, about a hundred people in tinfoil hats had, technically, stormed it.