Alien Research Center

The Extraterrestrial Highway begins just past the town of Alamo, and at its entrance a two-story alien of silver metal stands guard over a silver Quonset hut. In 2013 the columnist John L. Smith called him “a galvanized metal giant with the other-worldly noggin” who welcomes all peaceful beings from throughout the universe, though mostly he is expecting those traveling by automobile on State Route 375. Travel Nevada says the building gleams in the desert sun like an actual spaceship. The sign on it reads Alien Research Center.

Hot sauce and socks at Crystal Springs

The center sits on SR 375 near Crystal Springs, in Lincoln County, about a 90-minute drive northwest of the Las Vegas Strip by its owners’ reckoning. It gives its own street address as 100 Extraterrestrial Highway, Area-51, Hiko. Its website calls it the “Basecamp for your adventure thru Area-51” and lists what it sells: alien T-shirts, alien socks, mugs, hats, toys, snacks, drinks, and Area-51 Hot Sauce. Its online store adds bacon jerky, coffee, books, glassware, golf shirts, hoodies, bike plates, license plates, and magnets. Smith in 2013 described “a dandy souvenir and candy and nut shop,” with documents on display about Area 51, Roswell, and other matters of interest to people fascinated by the galaxy’s possibilities.

Beyond the hut the highway runs on toward Rachel, home of the Little A’Le’Inn, which a traveler reaches only after passing the research center. The distances depend on whose figures a visitor reads. The shop’s own page puts it 20 miles from “the world’s most secret military base.” The Lincoln County Record puts Hiko about 45 miles east of both Rachel and Area 51, and the Associated Press called it a 45-minute drive between the two towns. The highway between Hiko and Rachel is open range for cattle.

Linda Looney, the center’s manager in 2019, told the Record that in late summer most of the people who stopped in were usually foreign visitors.

The shop’s version of Area 51

The center’s web pages carry a primer on the base, written in the shop’s own voice and hedged in its own way. It begins “Welcome to Little Green Men.” It says many believe the base is home to survivors of the Roswell crash. It says that in 1955 the Central Intelligence Agency chose Area 51 for clandestine research. It says CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter is believed to have picked the Nevada desert because the Roswell crash took place in Lincoln County, New Mexico, and Area 51 sits inside Lincoln County, Nevada; his inner circle, the primer says, called the base “Project Lincoln.” Then, “in April 1955, it’s believed both the ‘flying disc’ and three extraterrestrial occupants were moved to Area 51.” The U-2 tests that began there that August were, in this telling, a distraction.

The same pages describe the country around the base. “A light glittering off a shiny rock on the desert floor could be a beacon to the mothership to warn of approaching interlopers,” the primer reads. “While driving the dirt road to the back gate of Area 51, one could imagine the Joshua trees with arms reaching to the sky, as aliens on the march.”

A padlock and a museum

The center was the idea of George Harris, a Las Vegas businessman. In 2013 Smith wrote that people had thought Harris “certifiable” when he came up with it more than a decade earlier. Harris made his living as proprietor of Mundo, an upscale Mexican restaurant in downtown Las Vegas, and marketed the Alien tequila brand in his spare time. UFOs and the government’s secret military work had been his passion for years.

The recession forced him to padlock the research center for a year. By August 2013 it was open again, and Harris was putting the finishing touches on a free museum. A feature in The New York Times had brought business back. “It generates a lot of business,” Harris said of the coverage. “It generates conversation. And it generates credibility.”

He told Smith he was fascinated by visitors’ accounts of their own sightings, including those who said they had been abducted. “A lot of people see things,” he said. “They’ve seen things since the early ‘50s. A large contingent began to see stuff after the Roswell crash, and people from all over the world started seeing things.” Whether they saw government aircraft or something interstellar, Harris said he did not know. “I think people naturally want to believe in a higher power. I think people naturally want to believe in God. I think people naturally want to believe in aliens.”

Basecamp, September 2019

In the summer of 2019 a Facebook post invited people to “Storm Area 51 and see them aliens.” Its author, Matty Roberts (the Record’s August story spells it Marty), told KLAS-TV, “I posted it on June 27 and it was kind of a joke.” A later Record story places the posting in late July. More than 2 million people responded to it.

Harris decided to give them somewhere else to go. “We are telling callers and visitors, don’t do that,” Looney told the Record in August. “The Air Force is going to protect it. You can’t get anywhere. Come here to our music festival instead.” The center leveled more of its ground for campers and RVs and planned for food trucks, portable toilets, and armed security. Its permit, approved by the Lincoln County Commission on Aug. 19, named the event Storm Area 51 Alien Palooza Day. Harris told the commissioners he expected 8,000 to 15,000 people. “But they are going to come no matter what we do,” he said. He promised a 55-foot truck of bottled water from Las Vegas and a pallet of it for the sheriff’s department, and described the plan as “more of a family-oriented UFO studies seminar.” The commission gave final approval on Sept. 3, at a meeting in Pioche, to what was by then called Area 51 Basecamp, set for Sept. 20 and 21.

Harris hired Keith Wright, a Las Vegas event planner, who said he and his partners were spending about $200,000 of their own money on some 80 portable bathrooms, generators, food trucks, medical services, and a semitrailer of water. “We’re focusing on the true believers, we’re not looking for a rave in the desert,” Wright told The New York Times. The announced speakers included Jeremy Corbell, who made a Netflix film about Bob Lazar and Area 51, and Dick Marcinko, a retired Navy SEAL commander. A $51 pass bought parking, two bottles of water, a $10 food-truck voucher, and a commemorative lanyard.

On Sept. 18 workers raised a stage near a replica Area 51 gate sign. Harris said visitors could take selfies at a replica of the base’s back gate without driving several miles to the real one. “As long as they don’t go on the desert floor and destroy the ecosystem,” he said, “everyone will have a good time.”

Wright had planned the Friday concert for 5,000. About 500 came. “We put on a safe event for the people that showed up,” he told the Associated Press. “It was a gamble financially. We lost.” By late Friday night the Saturday show was canceled, and cover bands played to an empty field. The DJ Paul Oakenfold, billed by the AP as Friday’s headliner, appeared on Sept. 21, by the Record’s account, before about 100 people; the promoters dropped the music, cut the $51 entry to $20, and then let people in free. The Record reported that many visitors went on to Rachel, where Alienstock charged no admission and the open ground was larger. Outside the research center gift shop, meanwhile, long lines formed and the store stayed crowded all day. A young woman from Brazil who lived in Las Vegas filmed an iPhone report there in Portuguese.

The sheriff reported one arrest, for disorderly conduct, at the end of the Basecamp concert. A man who had set out from the Hiko campground toward an Area 51 gate on Thursday was reported missing and found safe Friday evening. Two vehicles struck cows on the highway. “Our event was successful,” Wright said afterward, “with the major exception that nobody showed up.”

Forty-two thousand dollars

Ticket holders were refunded. A year later the Record reported that Harris had lost about $42,000 and expected to need four or five years to pay off the bank loan. Harris, quoted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, counted it another way: “I got at least $8 million in worldwide advertising. We were literally all over the world for four days.”