‘Storm Area 51’ Organizer Says It’s A Joke, Isn’t Responsible For What Happens To 450,000 People Who Signed Up

The man who organized the “Storm Area 51” Facebook group says it’s just a joke, and that he’s not responsible for what happens to any of the 450,000 people who have signed up for the event, Yahoo Lifestyle reports.

As of this writing, nearly half a million people have added their names to the Storm Area 51 Facebook group, which plans to convene on September 20 outside the secretive U.S. Air Force facility in the middle of the Nevada desert and, well, storm it.

“They can’t stop all of us,” reads the group’s tagline.

Specifically, the plan is to meet at the Area 51 Alien Travel Center, a combination gift shop, gas station, restaurant, and brothel. Yes, brothel — that type of solicitation is legal in Nevada outside of Clark County. The thinking goes that, if half a million people try to make their way past a handful of armed guards, a small fraction will be killed and the overwhelming majority will make it through to the base to see for themselves the mysteries inside.

The organizer even suggested a means of outrunning the bullets.

“If we [Naruto] run, we can move faster than their bullets,” he wrote. Naruto, for those not familiar, is an anime character, and in the similarly-named show, characters run with their arms behind them, believing that it limits air resistance. Two points bear noting: that’s not true, else Usain Bolt would be doing it, and no matter how fast Usain Bolt runs, he can’t outrun a bullet.

Now, Jackson Barnes, the organizer of the event, is saying that it was all just a joke.

“Hello US government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan. I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the internet. I’m not responsible if people decide to actually storm area 51,” he wrote.

Fortunately, several posts on the page appear to be treating the whole thing as if it were a big joke.

https://www.facebook.com/events/448435052621047/permalink/467712740693278/?ref=1&action_history=null

Of course, whether or not 450,000 people, or anyone, will show up en masse at Area 51 on September 20 remains to be seen.

Area 51 has, for decades, been a part of the collective consciousness when it comes to aliens and UFOs. Supposedly, the secretive Air Force installation is where crashed alien spacecraft are kept, where alien technology is tested for military use, and/or even where aliens are kept for experimentation or to teach military personnel about their ways. The Air Force only officially admitted the base’s existence in 2013.