The Birth of Area 51
Here's when UFO culture first associated Area 51 with aliens... probably a lot more recently than you thought.
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The other day I had an enjoyable phone call with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. He wanted my thoughts on a couple of points related to the old Majestic 12 hoax (a set of fake government memos purporting to reveal the government’s relations with an alien race), mainly, who are currently believed to be the author(s) of them1. Another thing he was tracking down was when Area 51 first became associated with aliens and UFOs.
The whole “alien crash at Roswell” mythology did not exist as a story in pop culture until 1978, when the National Enquirer published it. That’s a case where we are able to track down Case Zero — the ultimate origin of the tale.2
But what about aliens at Area 51? When did that become a thing? Turns out we now have a Case Zero on that story too.
Contrary to popular belief, Area 51 itself has never been secret. Its establishment in 19553 was even announced to the world via a press release, and a large civilian workforce has been there ever since, flying in every day from Las Vegas.
And this is where the WSJ reporter clued me into something I had not been aware of: this 2-hour TV movie released in October 1988, UFO Cover Up? Live. It was presumably made to promote the upcoming book The MJ-12 Documents by UFOlogists Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera (two of the presumed hoaxers behind the documents).
Moore and Shandera were better hoaxers than actors. Watch how stilted and awkward they are in this totally-candid-and-totally-not-at-all-scripted “interview” from the show (starts at 1:03:47):
Area 51 is mentioned just once in the program by some anonymous person shot in silhouette and with a disguised voice, talking about the government’s agreement with the aliens:
“The agreement says that we won't disclose your existence if you do not interfere in our society; and we will allow you to operate from a designated base here in the United States. It's in the state of Nevada, in area called Area 51 or Dreamland.”
If you need help judging the credibility of that, a second anonymous silhouette person (actually Richard Doty) goes on to claim:
“The extraterrestrials have complete control of this base which is located in Nevada. My understanding is that three different aliens of the same species have resided within the United States from 1948 or 49 until present day.”
Riiight. Pretty busy place, all those civilians and busy aircraft development programs, with everything under the “complete control” of three aliens.
The point being is that, so far as I could find, this was the very first time Area 51 was ever claimed by UFOlogists to be associated with aliens, at least in print or media.
October 1988. Want to know what’s interesting about that date? Two months later in December, career faker Bob Lazar first “went public” with his false claims of being a scientist at Area 51 reverse-engineering alien spacecraft.
This dumb TV movie, made to promote a UFO book, was Bob Lazar’s inspiration. Interesting how the dots of a mythology are connected.
Anyway, mark down 1988 as the first time aliens were publicly associated with the 33-year-old classified test site.
Currently believed by most researchers to be a collaborative effort between some or all of Richard Doty, Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera, and Stanton Friedman.
And yes, I know the Roswell Daily Record ran an article in 1947 when the balloon debris was originally found, but it was retracted the next day; and that article was only seen by the tiny local community and was quickly forgotten, leaving no mark on culture until the Enquirer sensationalized it.
Initially for project AQUATONE, the development and testing of the U-2 spy plane; and later for the OXCART program for the A-12 and later variants.
I love UFO Cover Up? Live. Not for the reasons they want me to. I find it hilarious and watch it every once in awhile. Bill Moore, of course, was involved in some nasty stiff too.
Thinking about this question philosophically, let’s first try to understand: What is mathematics? While there is no conventional definition of the word, according to the traditional context, mathematics is simply an abstract system with which to analyse anything that follows a set of rules.
Thinking about it historically, looking at how we had developed this set of rules as human beings, different societies each came up with the same rules as each other, at similar times. Ancient civilisations - Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, etc. had all developed systems of mathematics which discovered different things, but the mutual things they did discover, they had mostly agreed on. While their representations may not have been identical, the concepts were the same.
Even looking at more recent history, the development of Calculus cannot even be attributed to one individual - Newton and Leibniz are both treated as having independently discovered this then-new system of mathematics.
Using this line of thought, we can say that there may be things that they understand that we don’t, and similarly in the other direction, and our notations for mutually understood ideas may not be the same, but living within the same universe, which follows the same natural laws, which can be obtained using the same logic, our laws of mathematics are most likely to be the same as the alien civilisation’s.
Edit: I have been asked to elaborate on whether an alien civilisation would necessarily use ten digits - 0 through 9. Absolutely not. There is nothing sacred about 0 through 9. A computer uses 0 or 1, better known as Binary. The Babylonians used a picture representation for 0 to 59.
For a more abstract example that cannot be used for a full basis of arithmetic, but to be stated purely as food for thought: 24 hour time is in 60 minutes and 60 seconds. The calendar has 365 days per year, 366 in years that are multiples of 4, 365 in multiples of 100, and 366 in multiples of 400.
What do each of these systems have in common? For the ones that we can use as a full basis of arithmetic, each place has a 0, and they all have same count. We use a 10 digit system because some of our ancestors decided to do so because we have 10 fingers, which we just so happen to call our digits, and it just stuck. An alien civilisation may not have a number system exactly like ours, but they would most definitely have a number system, which would most likely be able to do the same things as ours.