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Post 10: The X Files "I Want To Believe" Poster

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Post 10: The X Files "I Want To Believe" Poster

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This picture is a poster from the hit TV show The X Files, where the two main characters are FBI agents investigating ongoing mysteries relating to the supernatural and conspiracy theories, including those around aliens and Area 51. This poster's red flag is the Unexplained because the character named Mulder believes in aliens, cryptids and conspiracy theories which also makes him biased towards what he does and does not want to accept and see. Mulder spends the entire show trying to convince his partner Scully that aliens and the like do exist

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This image is of the Roswell Daily Record, the Roswell paper, the day after the so called "UFO crash" in 1947, with the headline about the "flying saucer" found on the Roswell Ranch. The red flag present here is the Suppression by Authorities because the government immediately claimed that the flying saucer they found was actually a weather balloon not extraterrestrial tech, when they had made a statement themselves about it having been a flying saucer. This newspaper was biased when it came out because everyone believed in aliens and the government themselves made a statement that they had something to prove they existed but none of them took the time to think critically.

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This picture shows a CIA agent who is supposedly an alien saying that while Area 51 may be real, aliens are not even though there's a giant space ship behind him. This shows the Appeal to Authority red flag because the alien is supposedly using the body and social power of a CIA agent to disprove the existence of aliens so that they won't be found out. The author is biased towards the existence of aliens, since they're saying they exist in the comic they drew.

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This article is a short article about the conspiracy theories connected to Area 51 are. The Proof by Verbosity red flag is present because it's talking about the cluster of information that conspiracy theorists throw at people who aren't familiar with the topic or to prove to those who don't believe the same as them. There are no concrete pieces of evidence to prove any of the information theorists put out there, only the sheer amount of theories are what get people to believe

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We may have Tang thanks to the space program, but who gave us such innovations as the Stealth fighter and Kevlar? Aliens, of course. Conspiracy theorists believe that the remains of crashed UFO…

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This article talks about Area 51 and what it does, what brought it into the spotlight and some other interesting facts. The official name for Area 51 is actually Groom Lake but due to the geographical location of it, people simply call it Area 51, giving it a more mysterious feel. This article shows the Unexplained since we all want to know what's happening there, but we can't know, even if someone were to reveal some of the information about what's happening inside, we wouldn't know everything and that wouldn't be enough for us. The information is all based on facts that are true, it mostly is just conveying the information.

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Area 51 Facts

Area 51. The name conjures an aura of secrecy, mystery, and of course, extraterrestrial happenings. Indeed, the military installation - located about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada - is the site of secretive military testing. So what do we really know about Area 51, myths and conspiracies aside? Here are 15 facts you can hang your hat on.

What's in a name?

Area 51 is just the sort of bureaucratic military jargon that sounds like the basis for a vast conspiracy. Where, after all, are Areas 1 through 50? In fact, the name comes from designations on Nevada Test Site maps from the 1950s. Area 51 is part of the Nevada Test Site (now known as the Nevada National Security Site), a remote area of desert 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of Las Vegas. It was the Nevada Test Site that hosted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests starting in the 1950s, almost 100 of which were above ground.

Conspiracy Central

Actual nuclear tests apparently aren't scary enough. Area 51's major claim to fame is as an alleged extraterrestrial technology research site. It all started in July 1947, when the Roswell Daily Record's front-page headline screamed "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region." The U.S. military claimed the unidentified crashing object was just a weather balloon; conspiracy theorists insisted it was an alien spacecraft which was then taken from the Roswell ranch property to Area 51 for reverse-engineering. And perhaps there was a large-eyed alien "gray" inside? In September 1994, the Air Force released a report with a fuller story: The wreckage was indeed a balloon, but not an ordinary weather balloon. Instead, it was an atomic monitoring balloon meant to detect far-off nuclear testing blasts.

Delayed UFO Claims

Despite the headline-making balloon crash in 1947, Area 51 didn't really get its extraterrestrial reputation until the late 1980s, when a man named Robert Lazar told a Las Vegas television station that he worked at a mysterious site called S-4 near Area 51 to reverse-engineer crashed flying saucers. This caused quite a stir, but Lazar was later found to have fabricated his employment not only on the base, but his entire background: He claims to have graduated from MIT and Caltech but actually went to neither, and he also claims to have worked for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which also turned out to be false.

Author Bio

Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor

Stephanie interned as a science writer at Stanford University Medical School, and also interned at ScienceNow magazine and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Copyright © All Rights Reserved.

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Area 51. The name conjures an aura of secrecy, mystery, and of course, extraterrestrial happenings. Indeed, the military installation - located about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada - is the site of secretive military testing. So what do we really know about Area 51, myths and conspiracies aside?

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This video is of two gamers going to the front and back gates of Area 51 to try and find pokémon in the popular Pokémon Go phone app. While there they believe that they are being watched and the government is trying to hinder their abilities to game by turning off lights at night and blocking their cell service. They believe that the government is doing this because they're trying to hide something, possibly aliens, which stems from the "confusion of correlation with causation" red flag because they believe that the government is worried about them finding out secrets so they turn off lights and cut off cell service, when it' much more likely that the cell service was just bad since they were in the desert and when the lights turned off, it was the middle of the night.

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This article speculates on what Area 51 has inside it's extremely well guarded walls, whether there's actually aliens, or a set that they used to fake the moon landing, there's too many secrets that it holds for people to just let it be, for better or for worse. This article very much has the Unexplained reason for belief in it; people don't know what's going on inside this huge government base so they have taken to making up stories about what i happening behind the outer walls, we're only human, so we want to know what's going on. This article has quite a bit of solid evidence that supports it's belief that Area 51 does not in fact contain any extraterrestrial lifeforms or their spacecrafts, it contains quite a bit of man-made machinery and airships that helped to win World War II, that's the extent of it's hidden machines.

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For decades, Nevada's Area 51 Air Force facility has represented the eye of a conspiratorial hurricane that swirls around "evidence" that aliens (and their technology) exist and are hiding behind its walls. Books, TV shows, and even massive online "raids" have tried to glimpse beyond its stark signs warning against trespassers. While aliens aren't taking up residence in the compound, what is going on there is just as interesting.
In the middle of the barren Nevada desert, there's a dusty unmarked road that leads to the front gate of Area 51. It's protected by little more than a chain link fence, a and intimidating trespassing signs. One would think that America's much mythicized top secret military base would be under closer guard, but make no mistake. They are watching.

Beyond the gate, cameras see every angle. On the distant hilltop, there's a white pickup truck with a tinted windshield peering down on everything below. Locals says the base knows every desert tortoise and jackrabbit that hops the fence. Others claim there are embedded sensors in the approaching road.

What exactly goes on inside of Area 51 has led to decades of wild speculation. There are, of course, the alien conspiracies that galactic visitors are tucked away somewhere inside. One of the more colorful rumors insists the infamous 1947 Roswell crash was actually a Soviet aircraft piloted by mutated midgets and the wreckage remains on the grounds of Area 51. Some even believe that the U.S. government filmed the 1969 moon landing in one of the base's hangars.

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For all the myths and legends, what's true is that Area 51 is very real-and still very active. There may not be aliens or a moon landing movie set inside those fences, but something is going on and only a select few are privy to what's happening further down that closely monitored wind-swept Nevada road.

"The forbidden aspect of Area 51 is what makes people want to know what's there," says aerospace historian and author Peter Merlin who's been researching Area 51 for more than three decades.

"And there sure is still a lot going on there."

The U-2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, in the late 1950s.

The Origins of a Mystery

The beginning of Area 51 is directly related to the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. After World War II, the Soviet Union lowered the Iron Curtain around themselves and the rest of the Eastern bloc, creating a near intelligence blackout to the rest of the world. When the Soviets backed North Korea's invasion of South Korea in June 1950, it became increasingly clear that the Kremlin would aggressively expand its influence. America worried about the USSR's technology, intentions, and ability to launch a surprise attack-only a decade removed from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force sent low-flying aircraft on reconnaissance missions over the USSR, but they were at constant risk of being shot down. In November 1954, President Eisenhower approved the secret development of a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft called the U-2 program. One of the first orders of business was to track down a remote, covert location for training and testing. They found it in the southern Nevada desert near a salt flat known as Groom Lake, which had once been a World War II aerial gunnery range for Army Air Corps pilots.

Known by its map designation as Area 51, this middle-of-nowhere site became a new top-secret military base. To convince workers to come, Kelly Johnson, one of the leading engineers of the U-2 project, gave it a more enticing name: Paradise Ranch.

Making a Myth

U-2 testing began in July 1955, and immediately, reports came flooding in about unidentified flying object sightings. If you read the details in a 1992 CIA report that was declassified with redactions in 1998 (and subsequently released nearly in full in 2013), it's easy to see why.

Many of these sightings were observed by commercial airline pilots who had never seen an aircraft fly at such high altitudes as the U-2. Whereas today's airliners can soar as high as , in the mid-1950s airlines flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. Known military aircraft could get to 40,000 feet, and some believed manned flight couldn't go any higher than that. The U-2, flying at altitudes in excess of 60,000 feet, would've looked completely alien.

Kelly Johnson, left, and Francis Gary Powers with U-2 aircraft behind. Powers was eventually shot down in the USSR in 1960.

Naturally, Air Force officials knew the majority of these unexplained sightings were U-2 tests, but they were not allowed to reveal these details to the public. So, "natural phenomena" or "high-altitude weather research" became go-to explanations for UFO sightings, including in 1960 when Gary Powers' U-2 was shot down over Russia.

✈ The Most Fun RC Planes for Aviation Enthusiasts

What's also interesting about the most recent 2013 report is that it confirms Area 51's existence. While the 1998 version does have significant redactions when referencing the name and location of the U-2 test site, the nearly un-redacted version from 2013 reveals much more, including multiple references to Area 51, Groom Lake, and even a map of the area.

"This Is Earth Technology"

U-2 operations halted in the late 1950s, but other top secret military aircrafts continued tests at Area 51. Over the years, the and numerous stealth aircrafts like Bird of Prey, F-117A, and TACIT BLUE have all been developed and tested in the Nevada desert. More declassified documents reveal Area 51's role in "Project Have Doughnut," a 1970s attempt to study covertly obtained Soviet MiGs.

"This is Earth technology. You got folks claiming it's extraterrestrial when it's really good old American know-how."

"They flew them [over Area 51]..and pitted our own fighters against them to develop tactics," says Merlin, "They learned that you can't out-turn it, but you can outrun it. And it's still going on today.... Now, instead of seeing MiG-17s and 21s, there's MiG-29s and SU-27 s."

The flights are ongoing. In September 2017, an Air Force Lt. Col. was killed under mysterious circumstances when his plane crashed in Nevada and the Pentagon would not immediately ID the aircraft. It seems he was most likely flying a foreign jet obtained by the United States.

Even so, the alien conspiracies gained ground in 1989 when claimed in an interview on Las Vegas local news that he'd seen aliens and had helped to reverse-engineer alien spacecrafts while working at the base. Many have disregarded this as fiction and are even offended at the notion, including Merlin, who has spent years talking with former Area 51 engineers and employees angered by all the fuss about E.T.

"Some are even mad because they worked on these things and built these amazing planes," Merlin says. "This is Earth technology. You got folks claiming it's extraterrestrial when it's really good old American know-how."

Area 51 on July 20, 2016.

The Truth Is Out There

Today, Area 51 is still very much in use. According to Google Earth, new construction and expansions are continuously happening. On most early mornings, eagle-eyed visitors can spot strange lights in the sky moving up and down. No, it's not a UFO. It's actually the semi-secret contract commuter airline using the call-sign "Janet" that transports workers from Las Vegas's McCarran Airport to the base.

As for what's happening these days in America's most secretive military base, few know for sure. Merlin has some educated guesses, including improved stealth technology, advanced weapons, electronic warfare systems and, in particular, unmanned aerial vehicles. Chris Pocock, noted U-2 historian and author of several books about the matter, told Popular Mechanics he thinks classified aircraft, more exotic forms of radio communication, directed energy weapons, and lasers are currently under development at the base.

Essential UFO Reading

While the lore around Area 51 may be nothing more than imaginative fiction, that won't stop people from gawking just beyond those chain link fences. "At the most basic level, anytime you have something secret or forbidden, it's human nature," says Merlin. "You want to find out what it is."

How to Explore Area 51

Fact or fiction, aliens are a big tourism draw. In 1996, the state of Nevada renamed Route 375 as the "Extraterrestrial Highway," and destinations such as the Alien Research Center and the Little A'Le'Inn (in the town of Rachel with a population around 54) dot the road.

To Area 51's west, there's the Alien Cathouse which is advertised as the only alien-themed brothel in the world. Geocaching also attracts visitors here since the highway is considered a "mega-trial" with over 2,000 geocaches hidden in the area.

Then there's the actual base. While getting inside is not in the cards for most, curious civilians can actually drive up to front and back gates. Locals will direct you, and the website Dreamland Resort is a great resource full of maps, driving directions, and first-hand accounts.

However, one should be careful when planning a trek to Area 51. It's the desert, after all, so bring plenty of water, snacks, and have proper weather gear-for the hot days and the cold nights. Phone service and GPS probably won't work, so have printouts and actual maps. Gas stations are few and far in between, so carry spare fuel and tires.

Also, remember the government doesn't really want you peering into Area 51. Both Merlin and Pocock confirmed that they have been closely observed or even intimidated by guards and security (including an F-16 fly-by). Do not trespass under any circumstances or arrests and heavy fines await you.
This story was originally published on September 14, 2017.
Matt is a history, science, and travel writer who is always searching for the mysterious and hidden.

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The Real Story Behind the Myth of Area 51, America's Most Famous Top-Secret Military Base

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For decades, Nevada's Area 51 Air Force facility has represented the eye of a conspiratorial hurricane that swirls around "evidence" that aliens (and their technology) exist and are hiding behind its walls. Books, TV shows, and even massive online "raids" have tried to glimpse beyond its stark signs warning against trespassers.

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This video is about the supposed alien UFO crash that occurred in 1947, a year where people reported a large amount of UFO sightings separate to this incident. It is an extremely odd story and is probably the most popular Area 51 conspiracy theory of all time. This story shows both the Unexplained and the Perception/Observation reasons for belief, the first being because of belief in Aliens is because we make assumptions that, logically, we must not be alone in the universe, and the second because many people saw and heard things that they couldn't explain so their minds rationalized what they could, but as a result, their stories may turn out to be a more dramatized version of the actual events that occurred. There's a good amount of evidence to argue both sides but it's still shaky due to the lack of the government information that would explain it all, and also the lack of whatever material the "flying saucer" left behind. No one knows the truth of what happened anymore and whatever that object had been, it'll be a mystery since many won't take what the government says as the truth.

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This video talks about various interesting facts about both Area 51 itself and also about odd occurrences that happened in relation to the site. This video shows both the Unexplained reason for belief and also believed Suppression by Authorities red flag, occurring since the person believes it's odd that anyone who comes forward to talk about their time at Area 51, is cut off one way or another before they can say much. Since there is no actual proven evidence of any extraterrestrial experimentation, or existence in general, this video lacks evidence to prove that there is anything mysterious or out of the ordinary happening at Area 51.

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By: Bridget Swift