Storm Area 51

Origin

On June 27, 2019, a 20-year-old named Matty Roberts created a Facebook event titled “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” It was a joke, written after he listened to a podcast episode about the secretive Nevada Air Force facility, and the event description was deliberately absurd: attendees would meet outside the base’s gates on September 20, 2019, Naruto run past security — arms trailing behind them, in the manner of the anime character — and “see them aliens.”

The Naruto-run detail is the reason it worked. It signalled unmistakably that nobody meant it, which let millions of people RSVP without committing to anything at all.

What it means / how it’s used

Storm Area 51 was a participatory joke rather than an image format. The humour was in the scale: an obviously fake plan, endorsed by more people than live in most cities, with everyone fully aware that nothing would happen.

The memes it generated fell into several strands:

• Naruto-run edits, illustrations, and animations.
• Elaborate “tactical plans” assigning roles to attendees.
• Jokes about what the aliens themselves thought of the plan.
• Post-event jokes about the fact that essentially nobody went.

How it spread

The event’s growth was extraordinary. Within weeks, more than 2 million people had marked themselves “going” and a further 1.5 million “interested.” It became the dominant internet story of that summer, spawning merchandise, brand tweets, news segments, and eventually a public statement from the US Air Force discouraging anyone from actually attempting it.

Roberts, who never intended any of it, publicly asked people not to go, told reporters the event was a joke, and cooperated with authorities after being contacted by the FBI. He then attempted to convert the momentum into a real music festival, Alienstock, in the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada — before severing ties with the Rachel event over safety and organisation concerns and backing a Las Vegas alternative instead.

What actually happened

On September 20, 2019, roughly 150 people turned up at the two Area 51 gates. Nobody got in. Over the four-day period there were six arrests in total — five for trespassing and one for indecent exposure — at an event that two million people had promised to attend.

The Rachel festival drew a few hundred to a few thousand across its run, and the parallel Las Vegas event drew more than 10,000. Both were reported as mostly cheerful, mostly uneventful gatherings of people who had come for the joke rather than the raid.

Notable examples & variations

• Naruto-run illustrations and animated edits.
• “Squad roles” charts assigning jobs like Kyle, Rock Thrower, and Naruto Runner.
• Brand accounts attempting to join in, with mixed results.
• Post-event photographs of the sparse turnout.
• The 2019-nostalgia posts that resurface every September.

Legacy / cultural impact

Storm Area 51 is the definitive example of participation without intention — a phenomenon where clicking “attending” is the entire act, and everyone involved understands that. It demonstrated, at enormous scale, that a Facebook RSVP measures amusement rather than commitment.

It has since become a fixed reference point for the summer of 2019, and a standard cautionary example in discussions of how viral event metrics get misread. Two million people said they would storm a military base. About 150 showed up, and they mostly took photographs of the sign.