NARRATOR: In 2019, a call went out
to storm the gates of the world's most top secret
military installation.
NICK POPE: This was the place
that people were attempting to back engineer
extraterrestrial technology.
NARRATOR: Millions responded.
JEREMY CORBELL: This information had been percolating
for 30 years, and then bam! A perfect storm.
BILL BIRNES: On the Internet, on the radio,
promoters were talking about let's storm Area 51.
NARRATOR: The military vowed to protect the base
by any means necessary.
The DoD said
we would bomb millennials
if they actually tried to storm the gates of Area 51.
NARRATOR: But still, thousands met the call to action.
What's behind those gates is one of the last mysteries.
I want the government to release the records now, today.
NARRATOR: Was this the beginning of a movement
that will finally tear down the walls of government secrecy
and expose the truth
about an extraterrestrial presence on planet Earth?
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: People are interested
in the extraterrestrial question,
and they want answers.
NARRATOR: There is a doorway
in the universe.
Beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything
we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
College student Matty Roberts creates a post on Facebook.
In it, Roberts calls on his friends to storm
the top secret U. S. military base
called Area 51,
a place that has long been rumored
to be housing crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft.
As part of the post, Roberts invites his readers
to click to indicate if they're attending.
I had shared it to my own personal Facebook page,
and I think it amassed probably about 40 RSVPs,
the people that were interested
or had tagged themselves as going.
NARRATOR: Roberts has no idea
whether the post will simply reach his own circle
of friends and acquaintances on Facebook
or if it will spread further into cyberspace.
He gets his answer two days later
when his phone begins buzzing with RSVP notifications.
First a few hundred.
Then a few thousand.
ROBERTS: It just kept kind of snowballing.
And it took about three days for it to really take off,
and it just took off like wildfire.
And then that's when it got posted on reddit.
And when it got posted on reddit,
it really took off.
NARRATOR: Within a week,
the number of RSVPs soars to over a million.
And then on July 11, the news got ahold of it.
Now a new Facebook event talks about organizing
a large mob to raid the base.
They were trying to organize a big mob to storm Area 51,
where all the aliens are.
Officials are saying stay away,
this is not something you want to go to.
REPORTER: There are even signs that warn it's a restricted area,
that it's unlawful to enter the area without permission,
and that use of deadly force is authorized.
In short, don't go.
NARRATOR: News commentators point out that if even a small fraction
of those who responded show up,
the proposed storming could quickly turn violent.
Alarmed at the overwhelming response to Roberts' post,
U.S. military officials issue a warning.
In ominous language, it states that
"The U. S. Air Force always stands ready
to protect America and its assets."
Within days, Matty Roberts gets a visit from the FBI.
ROBERTS: FBI did show up to my house.
They asked me to send them anybody that's trying
to radicalize this thing,
in the form of actually storming the base,
and actually causing harm to people.
They were really concerned about people sending me death threats.
NARRATOR: In the wake of the FBI's visit,
Roberts claims that he was joking all along,
and that he never actually intended
for anyone to heed his call.
ROBERTS: I was just kind of like, I didn't think anybody was gonna
take it too seriously 'cause when I created the event
on Facebook, it was meant as a joke,
kind of, like, tongue in cheek.
Never intended for it to go this far.
It was terrifying.
NARRATOR: But whether Roberts wanted people to take him seriously
or not, by early July, it seemed nothing could derail
what he had set in motion.
Matty Roberts' original post has now been reposted
hundreds of thousands of times.
Over two million people have indicated
they plan to descend on Area 51 in September,
and storm the top secret base.
No one has any idea how many might actually attend,
and both the government and the media gear up to blame Roberts
if things turn into an ugly confrontation
between the military and tens of thousands of UFO enthusiasts.
In order to take the pressure off of himself
and his associates, Roberts asks that his followers call off
any plans to actually invade the base on September 20.
Instead, he announces an alternative idea:
a peaceful celebration called Alienstock,
which he begins organizing in the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada,
just outside Area 51.
He promises a festival of music, art and all things alien.
POPE: In the weeks before the event, there are efforts aimed
at scaling down the rhetoric and averting a potential tragedy.
BIRNES: The government just did a whole counter‐media program,
letting folks know that they're not taking this as a game,
they don't think it's funny.
No, it's not Woodstock.
You want to have a rock festival outside of Rachel?
Hey, have a nice day, right?
But you cross Area 51, we take it seriously.
You will be arrested, prosecuted,
likely convicted and sent to jail.
NARRATOR: Ten days before the event, two Dutch YouTubers
penetrate the Area 51 perimeter,
hiking three miles into the restricted area.
Their arrests make national headlines, and add to concerns
that the upcoming gathering could easily get out of hand.
POPE: Astoundingly, they were sentenced to a year in jail.
The message was clear: we are going to come down on you hard.
KEVIN ALMEIDA: I think behind those gates
is something that nobody can explain,
not even the people that work there.
I have no answers, but I'm gonna find out.
That's why I came here, 3,000 miles,
to find out those answers.
NARRATOR: On the day the event begins,
the Department of Defense posts an ominous tweet.
It features a picture of a B‐2 bomber,
along with a heading that states that this is the last thing
millennials will see if they attempt the Area 51 raid today.
The tweet is quickly deleted.
They made a case of saying that it would be considered
an act of terrorism.
Even saying we would bomb millennials
if they actually tried to storm the gates of Area 51.
That was a little severe.
POPE: Now, they cleverly didn't exactly say what would happen,
but there was a palpable threat left hanging in the air.
NARRATOR: Faced with the military's willingness to defend Area 51
at all costs, many potential attendees change their plans
and decide not to attend.
But while the government warnings are largely effective,
on the night of September 20,
nearly 100 people refuse to be intimidated,
and gather at the gates.
ZACK ETKIND: I think behind the gate there could very well be,
uh, technology that the government is not
informing us of.
There's a lot of people that are, like, watching this event
being like, "This is the night.
This is the night we find some aliens."
They can't catch us all!
KYLE KALLMAN: People are prepared for a bloodbath,
but I have seen nothing.
The cops have been out in a show of force,
and they are gonna make it very unpleasant
for anybody who crosses.
NARRATOR: Both sides show restraint,
and a potentially deadly confrontation is averted.
Only two people are detained by authorities for minor offenses.
Over the next three days, approximately 3,000 more people
make the journey to Area 51 in a show of solidarity,
and in protest of government secrecy.
There's a huge alien community around the world.
It was a matter of time before this was gonna happen.
I don't think the government's being honest,
'cause I think they would freak us out if they told us
what was inside that big ol' mountain there.
NARRATOR: But there are many who believe that without the serious threat
of military action, the turnout might have been
significantly larger.
MARTELL: The government caused a lot of confusion,
and pretty much discouraged most people
from showing up to the event.
POPE: In the days and weeks leading up to September the 20th,
there was a mass of confusing reports about
what might actually take place.
And one wonders, did this play into the hands of the government
and work to their advantage?
NARRATOR: If government threats did indeed suppress the turnout
at the Area 51 festivals, what could they be protecting?
Is it only military secrets... or something else?
For ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is obvious.
So it seems a lot of people are asking the same question:
what is it that the government is hiding at Area 51?
LINDA MOULTON HOWE: The United States began
with a policy of lies and denial.
Let's call it for what it is... counterintelligence.
UFOs and ETs have been at the top
of the counterintelligence list since World War II.
Our government doesn't want us to know the truth.
TSOUKALOS: We know for a fact
that for over 50 years, not just the U. S. government
but governments from around the world have always denied
the UFO question or the extraterrestrial question.
NARRATOR: Could the U. S. government be hiding
not only crashed UFOs, but even extraterrestrials at Area 51?
Perhaps further clues can be found
at the very entrance of the secret base,
an entrance that has been strictly off‐limits for decades.
NARRATOR: Could Area 51 truly harbor
extraterrestrial secrets?
And if so, how did it all begin?
Perhaps answers can be found
in the murky history of the mysterious desert base.
We actually have to go back to the attack on Pearl Harbor
in December 1941.
The government said
we can never allow something like this to happen again.
So, let's move or create some of these installations
and facilities further into the country.
NARRATOR: Area 51 was built around a salt flat known as Groom Lake.
A runway now slices across the dry lake bed.
The reason why Groom Lake was chosen was very simple:
Groom Lake itself was a dry bed
but it was extremely long,
and it could double as a huge runway.
Some of these aircraft required long runways.
For many years, Area 51 enthusiasts were able to watch
with high‐powered binocular lenses and see base activity.
None of that is possible anymore.
They've gone to great lengths to keep whatever's happening
at Area 51 a secret.
NARRATOR: For the better part of a century,
the U. S. government denied the very existence of Area 51.
But why?
The official Area 51 now admitted by the government
is this facility where aircraft were developed and test‐flown.
The U‐2 spy plane.
The SR‐71 Blackbird,
and of course, more recently, stealth technology.
So that's the official Area 51...
highly secret, secure, remote.
But then there's the unofficial Area 51
where people say that there was an even bigger secret there.
And that was extraterrestrial technology.
NARRATOR: To further investigate
what might be hidden at the secret Area 51 base,
former British Ministry of Defense officer Nick Pope
and filmmaker Jeremy CORBELL
have enlisted the help of local resident Joerg Arnu.
Joerg, who has lived in nearby Rachel, Nevada for 15 years,
has been a firsthand witness to Area 51's recent history.
What's the strangest, uh, interaction you've seen
of people coming in or out of the base?
Heavy construction equipment going into the base
when they were doing construction.
And also, sometimes you see
military vehicles being dragged into the base.
They set them up inside
the bombing ranges for shooting targets.
Um, just pull over here.
There's a sheriff's vehicle coming our way.
We don't want any trouble.
We don't want to block them.
We don't want to go any further.
POPE: This is extra security.
I don't think we've ever seen quite this much.
NARRATOR: In light of the tension
surrounding the Storm Area 51 event,
the military has implemented a zero‐tolerance lockdown
at the gate of the secret base.
POPE: So, here we are.
I think this is about as far as we can go.
The point of no return, right?
ARNU: Yes. We cannot go any further.
POPE: All this barbed wire here,
all the security measures,
this is the point at which
if you take one step further,
the full force of security will come down on us, right?
Make no mistake, we step one step
into that territory, and everything is going to change.
If I came up here, is anybody going to talk to me?
‐Are they going to say anything to me? ‐No.
No. These are signs that spell out in plain English:
bad things are going to happen to you if you cross this line.
‐POPE: Right. ‐ARNU: It's very clear.
So now look,
if we walked past that barrier,
up that road, what would we see?
What would we find?
We would be walking down about 20 miles of paved road
into the valley that Area 51 is located in.
In between here and the base,
there's more security checkpoints,
there's more road sensors.
If you were to get to Area 51,
you're standing there and you look around
and it looks like any other military Air Force base.
But the good stuff is all in hangars.
It is not out in the open.
It's not like, you know, they got the saucer
right there on the runway.
‐So, there are hangers obviously. ‐Yeah.
But, uh, there are even rumors
of huge underground facilities,
facilities carved into the sides of the mountains.
There are people that talk about underground facilities.
They keep tabs on people that watch the base.
They know exactly when somebody's up on Tikaboo Peak,
for instance, one of the view spots of the base.
NARRATOR: Located 26 miles from the Area 51 base,
Tikaboo Peak is the only public land
where people can actually see the Groom Lake runway
and hangars.
And they know exactly, "Okay, right now is a good moment
to fly our good stuff,"
and that's when they bring out the good stuff.
I've actually been on Tikaboo Peak
when they did a test‐flight
and it was the most amazing thing.
We look at the base and all of a sudden,
in the middle of the night, all the runway lights come on.
I mean, it's‐it's the most amazing thing to watch.
All of a sudden, the‐the desert in front of you,
below you, becomes alive.
You see a light taxiing to the runway,
the light takes off,
the runway lights go out, the light goes out,
and that was the end of that.
I mean, literally feet above the runway,
the lights just went out.
‐That's ultra‐high security. ‐Yes.
And whatever that thing was,
‐clearly they were really trying to protect it... ‐Yes.
...and minimizing that anyone could get eyes on it.
Correct.
NARRATOR: Could claims that the U. S. military
discovered otherworldly spacecraft be true?
Might some of post‐war America's
greatest technological accomplishments
have been the result
of reverse engineering alien vehicles?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and insist that the truth about Area 51
was actually revealed decades ago,
not by UFO enthusiasts or whistle‐blowers,
but by two of the men most responsible
for maintaining the government's most vital secrets.
NARRATOR: In the midst of World War II,
the government presses the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation
to develop the next generation of military planes...
jet fighters designed to outflank propeller aircraft
and help turn the tide of war.
A team headed by Lockheed engineer
Clarence "Kelly" Johnson
delivers the first production model in just 143 days.
Their P‐80 Shooting Star
initiates the jet age for the U. S. military.
Kelly Johnson's secret research and development team
ultimately becomes known...
as "Skunk Works."
DOLAN: Clarence Kelly Johnson
was the first head of Lockheed's Skunk Works division
back in the '50s and '60s, up until 1975.
He's the developer of the U‐2 spy plane
which was able to fly at the incredible altitude
of 80,000 feet,
equipped with photographic capabilities
that were astonishing.
And he is a great legend in the aviation community, for sure.
NARRATOR: Despite his mainstream credentials,
Johnson becomes the primary witness
to a now‐famous UFO sighting in Agoura, California,
on December 16, 1953.
His report of the encounter,
and his personal sketches of the craft,
were preserved by Project Blue Book,
the U. S. government's official account
of the UFO phenomenon at the time.
DOLAN: He was with some of his colleagues at the time
when he saw a very, very unusual object
that he could not explain in any kind of technology
that was familiar to him at the time.
NARRATOR: During an era of official skepticism about UFOs,
Johnson risks his career
by reporting the sighting to his superiors.
But instead of being penalized or demoted,
Johnson is seemingly rewarded two years later,
when he plays a pivotal role in founding America's
most secret military base: Area 51.
Kelly Johnson was the person that identified
the location where Area 51 is as a good strategic location.
It is fundamentally located in the right part of the world
without prying eyes.
NARRATOR: But was Area 51 founded merely to test experimental aircraft,
as the military insists?
Or did Kelly Johnson choose the location as the best place
to reverse engineer the very alien spacecraft
he believed he saw with his own eyes?
Kelly Johnson died in 1990,
without ever disclosing the secrets of Area 51.
But a key person in his inner circle
openly expressed his belief that extraterrestrials
are present on Earth.
Aviation designer Benjamin Robert Rich
succeeds Kelly Johnson as the second director of Skunk Works.
He will eventually become known as the "father of stealth."
Ben Rich was one of the real legends
of the history of American aviation,
and‐and the classified world in general.
And he's famously known as the man
who's really behind the design of the F‐117A Nighthawk.
That's the stealth fighter
which would revolutionize aviation in the 1980s and 90s.
NARRATOR: Another aviation expert and colleague, Jim Goodall,
heard rumors that Ben Rich had information
confirming the existence of UFOs,
so he decided to ask, point blank,
what this legendary head of Skunk Works really believed.
JIM GOODALL: Mr. Ben Rich was a friend of mine,
and just before he passed away, I asked him, I said,
"Do you believe in UFOs?"
He said, he said, "Jim,
"we have things out in the desert
"that are 50 years beyond what you can comprehend.
"Not what you think you can build in 50 years,
"but what you can comprehend.
"And if you've seen movies like Star Trek and Star Wars,
we've been there, done that."
To me, I think it was a deathbed confession.
CORBELL: This is a man that would know
what technologies we have in our inventory as humans
and what we don't.
Ben Rich was a believer in UFOs.
I think beyond believer, I think he knew.
NARRATOR: But of all the people who worked at Area 51,
perhaps the most famous, or infamous, is Bob Lazar.
No one has been more inflammatory, or controversial.
As far as alien enthusiasts are concerned,
Lazar has done more to turn
a previously unknown military base
in the middle of an obscure Nevada desert
into the white‐hot center of America's obsession with UFOs,
aliens and government conspiracies.
But who is Bob Lazar?
And what did he see at Area 51?
Who among us has not heard about an alleged UFO cover‐up?
NARRATOR: On local TV station KLAS,
investigative reporter George Knapp
interviews a man going by the name "Dennis"
and shot in silhouette to hide his identity.
The man claims to work at the secret military installation
that the U. S. government still maintains does not exist.
And according to him, the base does, in fact,
hold extraterrestrial spacecraft.
GEORGE KNAPP: Exactly what's going on up there?
BOB LAZAR: Well, there's several, uh, actually nine, uh,
flying saucers, flying disks,
uh, that are out there of extraterrestrial origin.
POPE: Here was someone
who claimed to have worked at Area 51,
back engineering alien technology.
UFOs that had crashed, possibly at Roswell,
and trying to figure out how they worked.
And then maybe building one ourselves.
NARRATOR: Frightened that the government
might try to harm him if he remains anonymous,
the whistle‐blower and reporter George Knapp
wrestle with the idea of revealing his name.
The day that we unveiled his identity to the world,
he's in the station and he grabs the tape,
he said, "I've changed my mind, not gonna do it."
Right up to the end, he was fighting it
and arguing with himself about whether it's a good idea,
even though his life had been threatened,
his life had been turned upside down.
NARRATOR: In the end, the whistle‐blower decided
to come out from the shadows
and reveal his name... Bob Lazar.
The one good thing Bob Lazar did was came forward
with George Knapp in 1989 on May 15,
and by doing that, he protected himself.
He was scared for his life, and he protected himself
by telling you what happened to him in one shot, straight up.
NARRATOR: From that day onward,
Bob Lazar has remained the most controversial UFO whistle‐blower
in history, and going public came at a heavy price.
A price many believe was exacted by a government
determined to hide the truth about Area 51.
Not only was Bob's house broken into and they'd
move stuff around, they'd write things on the, on the wall.
He's got an Uzi peeking out the window.
The fear was real.
The threats that were made against him were real.
The surveillance was real.
NARRATOR: Faced with such harassment,
Lazar retreated from public view for decades.
I don't like being in the public eye.
I don't have money for doing this,
and quite frankly, I could make up a better lie,
but I have no motivation to lie.
NARRATOR: But if Bob Lazar's claims are true,
just how much could he expose
about what's really going on at Area 51?
On December 4, 2018,
Lazar finally decided to end years of silence
and tell his full story to filmmaker Jeremy CORBELL
in an explosive documentary entitled
Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers.
LAZAR: In the late 1980s,
the U. S. government had recovered alien spacecraft,
several of them,
and the technology, in the Nevada desert
that they were keeping quiet and analyzing.
That's a fact.
That's all my story was,
was that I was just one of the people working on these craft.
There probably wouldn't be this awareness of Area 51
without Bob Lazar.
And now we have the film, and suddenly
he's back in the media and the public eye.
NARRATOR: The most extraordinary technology that Lazar claims
to have encountered at Area 51
was an alien reactor, one that he believes
has the potential to change the world.
LAZAR: The first time they showed me the reactor in operation,
just seeing something like that
immediately starts that whole chain reaction in your mind
going, "Wow, wait, if you can do this,
"we don't need jet and rocket engines anymore.
"That means there's... wait...
there's no use for cars." I mean, boom,
the whole thing changes.
The entire world economy, everything,
would go end‐on‐end, just if we had
an answer to how that machine worked
that I was sitting there, touching.
NARRATOR: Jeremy Corbell's documentary caused a sensation,
bringing Bob Lazar and Area 51 into the spotlight once again.
Ultimately, it provided the spark
that ignited the Storm Area 51 movement.
ALEX DISCHINGER: We're all here thanks to Bob Lazar
and, uh, his good work and bravery, to be honest.
I think, you know, with the Internet,
we're just gonna continue to see more and more people
explore the ideas.
It's gonna grow hotter and hotter
as people continue to question.
NARRATOR: Is the U. S. government
still operating a longstanding campaign to suppress
the truth about Area 51?
Perhaps further clues
can be found in information exposed
by other whistle‐blowers.
Whistle‐blowers who claim that Bob Lazar
isn't the only one who has discovered the truth
and then been harassed and discredited
by the U. S. government.
NARRATOR: Critics of Bob Lazar and his audacious claims
about alien craft being studied at Area 51
insist that there is no proof of him ever having worked
at the top secret military facility.
They suggest that his stories
are simply made up.
But a powerful new witness has come forward
to corroborate Lazar's story,
former Air Force pilot David Fruehauf.
DAVID FRUEHAUF: It's only been for me, personally,
in the last few years,
all of a sudden, Bob Lazar's statements
and all the things he had said
have gelled now to the point
where I think he's very credible.
NARRATOR: While critics routinely claim
that Lazar's supporters lack any credibility,
they can hardly make that claim about Fruehauf.
U.S. Air Force Captain David Fruehauf
joins an elite group of pilots
flying America's most sophisticated spy plane,
the SR‐71.
FRUEHAUF: I was an SR‐71 pilot for four and a half years.
The aircraft, as far as performance went,
it was an hour from coast to coast.
It would warp your mind with that kind of performance.
And you just felt so proud that you were...
had an opportunity to‐to fly that airplane
and to be a part of that unit and those people.
It was family.
NARRATOR: No one is surprised when the military assigns
such an elite pilot
to duties at America's most top secret Air Force base.
FRUEHAUF: I worked at Area 51
for six years, from 1979 till 1985.
You had to have a special clearance, a top secret SBI,
Special Background Investigation.
Fortunately, I had gotten that while I was flying the SR,
so it was an easy transition for me
to move from the SR‐71 and my clearances and all
over into Area 51.
NARRATOR: Along with his colleagues,
Fruehauf commuted each day from McCarran Airport in Las Vegas
to Area 51,
using a mysterious government carrier named Janet Airlines.
BIRNES: One of the great stories about Area 51
comes from engineer TD Barnes.
Here's what he said.
"If there were UFOs being reversed engineered
at this base, I wouldn't know about it,"
because you flew out in an airline, Janet Airlines,
and the windows were blacked out
so you didn't know where you were going.
NARRATOR: Fruehauf noticed
that on his daily commutes,
a select group of scientists and military personnel
also boarded the Janet 737 in Las Vegas.
When the plane landed at Area 51,
this group boarded a bus
and headed to an even more secretive facility
code‐named Site Four, or S‐4.
FRUEHAUF: When I was there, we knew about S‐4,
but we didn't know what they did.
All we knew was there was certain people that got on
the 737 in the morning, and we got to Area 51,
they would take and go off in a different direction in a bus
and then we went on to the north,
going up towards the hangars.
NARRATOR: Fruehauf never knew exactly what was going on at Site Four
during his time at Area 51.
But when he heard Bob Lazar's story years later,
he found that Lazar's description of flying
to Area 51 on a Janet 737 and traveling to S‐4
rang true in every detail.
FRUEHAUF: When I heard, uh, Bob Lazar describe getting on the 737
and fly to Area 51 and get off
and go through the terminal and go to, uh, S‐4...
and everything he talked about and the way he put it,
uh, he sounded totally, uh, believable to me.
NARRATOR: Critics contend that no actual eyewitnesses
have ever come forward
to confirm that Lazar worked at Area 51, much less at Site Four.
But Fruehauf claims otherwise.
FRUEHAUF: I know people
that had worked for me, that after I left there,
they had seen Bob Lazar there,
and they admitted that to me recently.
I know that his critics piled on because obviously,
they did not want the word to come out that there were,
in fact, uh, UFOs in our possession,
and that he was revealing a capability
to perhaps our enemies
that we, in fact, were, uh, alien technologies.
NARRATOR: But Dave Fruehauf is not
the only highly regarded aviation expert
to corroborate Bob Lazar's explosive story.
Jim Goodall is a U. S. Air Force veteran, military historian
and investigative author who befriended Bob Lazar
before Lazar was hired to work at Area 51.
Back then, Lazar worked at the Sandia nuclear lab
in Albuquerque, and was a vocal UFO skeptic.
I have the distinction of knowing him for quite a while.
Yeah, he had been working in developing nuclear weapons
for Sandia.
You couldn't put a gun to his head
to convince him that UFOs were real.
NARRATOR: But Bob Lazar's skepticism
about the existence of UFOs was about to change.
GOODALL: A year later or so,
there's a silhouetted guy talking about
doing reverse engineering on alien spacecraft,
and that‐that silhouette was Bob Lazar.
NARRATOR: In an effort to help his friend
prove he worked at Area 51 and Site Four,
then‐Sergeant Goodall took Lazar's military tax form
to the Office of Naval Investigations at the Pentagon.
What happened when he got there was chilling.
GOODALL: There's a young, uh, lieutenant commander behind the desk.
And I handed him Bob Lazar's W‐2.
He looks at it, said, "Excuse me for a minute."
And he says, "The admiral will see you now."
I mean an admiral, to go talk to an Air Force tech sergeant
is really below his level of interrogation.
And he's looking at Lazar's W‐2, and he said,
"Sergeant, I don't know where in the hell you got this,
"but if I ever see your face cross my threshold again,
"you'll be the most sorry son of a bitch NCO
in the United States Air Force,"
as gets Bob's W‐2 and he puts it in the shredder.
And he says, "You are dismissed."
CORBELL: So he was warned
to stop asking questions about Bob Lazar.
Anybody trying to seek the truth about Bob Lazar,
there was pressure applied on them.
And that's just the way it works
when you want to try to silence somebody.
NARRATOR: Have the kinds of pressures exerted against Bob Lazar
continued to obscure the search for the truth about Area 51?
If so, will such secrets continue
to remain out of reach to the activists
of the Storm Area 51 movement?
As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,
that will depend on a new generation of truth‐seekers,
and a powerful movement that is just beginning to take shape.
NARRATOR: The Storm Area 51 event comes to an end without incident.
POPE: Here in Rachel,
people were fearing the worst.
WAYNE DICE: So everybody's coming out here,
to‐to really, to see what was gonna happen.
We're out here to make it a safe event for everybody.
I think the order has come down.
We do not want mass arrests here.
We do not want trouble.
GEORGE HARRIS: You know, they had a few arrests,
and, uh, other than that,
they didn't have any incidents at all.
Everybody behaved.
When we look at all the disinformation
circling the event of storming Area 51,
from the media, from the government, from social media,
it made it a convoluted mess
that was easily something that most people just chose to avoid.
NARRATOR: Amid what some consider to be a concerted government effort
to intimidate UFO believers,
many doubt whether the Storm Area 51 movement can last,
while others hope that this small beginning will blossom
into something much larger.
POPE: What we might find, when we look back on this,
is that this was the beginning
of some sort of cultural movement.
Something that will grow, year on year.
We might find that it starts
as just maybe a small one‐off event,
but evolves into something with global recognition...
You're all part of this. Become active participants,
not passive observers.
POPE: ...and it becomes a mainstream event.
REDFERN: I think a lot of people,
particularly due to pop culture, know of Area 51
and they accept it as gospel
that there really are UFOs and aliens out there.
That sort of demonstrates how the public is coming around
to the idea that alien life is a reality.
KEN LAYNE: For some people, the events were a good time and a fun weekend.
It could turn a handful of people
into the next decade's prominent researchers
on UFOs and government secrecy and flying saucers
and government corruption and the military‐industrial state.
HOWE: We are at a revolutionary moment.
You've got an entire generation of young people now
who have been galvanized, and they will be looking
for legitimate, credible news
about high strangeness on this planet
in numbers that have not happened before.
NARRATOR: For many, the gates of Area 51
are both real and symbolic.
Real in the sense that the gates may hide evidence
of an actual alien presence on Earth,
symbolic in that they represent
the government's wider determination
to cling to secrecy for as long as possible.
The U. S. government has kept so many secrets from the people
that I think that's, you know, a major driving force
for people to come here.
I don't know if this is a movement that we're seeing,
but the people want to know the truth, right?
And they want to know if there are secrets being kept form us.
And I think if that forms a movement,
that would be awesome.
COLLIN ANDERSON: What's behind those gates
is one of the last mysteries.
Bottom of the ocean, Area 51 and aliens.
POPE: I think the only way to get the government
to come up with answers is to keep the pressure on.
Keep demanding answers.
A new generation has to continue to demand answers,
and do what the past generation failed to achieve.
NARRATOR: In the end, some believe that the harsh treatment
once suffered by Bob Lazar is being repeated today
in the government's response to the Storm Area 51 movement.
They fear that under the onslaught
of official intimidation,
the drive for answers will slowly fade,
and the secrets of Area 51 will remain hidden.
But others are determined to make this modest event
the beginning of a mass movement
that will ultimately force open the gates of secrecy
to finally reveal that both in the universe at large
and right here on Earth,
we are not alone.