RACHEL, Nevada – A black van guards 24 hours a cobbled path in the mountains of the state of Nevada where coyotes and antelopes roam at will until they come face to face with the entrance to the most enigmatic military base in the world: its name is the Area 51.
A decade ago the Department of Defense confirmed its existence and specified that since 1955 it has served as a training camp for the United States Air Force, but that announcement came too late, because some 50 ufology enthusiasts had already moved to a town nearby in the 90’s.
Caravan trailers and barely twenty prefabricated houses still make up that town, called Rachel, where retired Americans who had found the location of the base and believed that the government was analyzing UFO remains inside it settled.
In Rachel, two and a half hours from Las Vegas along the cinematic Extraterrestrial Highway with its tens of miles in a straight line, the name of David Grusch is now repeated in every conversation of his neighbors.
This is the former Air Force Intelligence officer who on July 26 assured before the Capitol that the government has been hiding evidence of extraterrestrial aircraft and “non-human biological remains” for years.
“The Grusch thing is not new. To those who do not believe that there are beings that visit us, I would tell them to spend a night here. They would see unimaginable things,” warned EFE Michael, manager of the Little A’Le’Inn bar and motel in Rachel, located 20 miles from the also known as Groom Lake base.
However, Grusch’s appearance – as part of a Homeland Security subcommittee promoted by Democrats and Republicans – was unprecedented in the US House of Representatives.
And that opens the way to “overcoming the stigma” according to Jamie, a 50-year-old cowboy who, as Nevada law allows, arrived at the town bar with a gun drawn after a day at his ranch.
“How long have we been listening to people talk about us as crazy aliens? Something is changing now,” Jamie told EFE, who moved to Rachel after investigating the “Roswell Case”, in which an unknown object was crashed into a New Mexico farm in 1947.
That alleged extraterrestrial incident went largely unnoticed, but the issue took on an unusual dimension in 1978, when nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman and other researchers completed a study suggesting that the US government had hidden impact debris at Roswell, citing confidentiality motives. “National security”.
Then a long-running social debate began that intensified in 2017, after the Department of Defense admitted that it had been working on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program for a decade to investigate flying objects of unknown origin.
Once the existence of these aerial phenomena is accepted, which according to the Pentagon have been sighted up to 650 times so far this year, the positions are divided between the extraterrestrial hypothesis and those who maintain that they are aircraft, balloons or radars of the intelligence services of powers such as China or Russia.
“They want us to think that they are foreign aircraft to continue hiding information and, incidentally, justify missions in those countries,” said Rosie, a tourist from the state of Tennessee, in statements to EFE from Rachel’s only motel.
Like her, 55,000 more people visit the town every year to try to get as close as possible to Area 51 and, taking advantage of the fact that capitalism thrives on even one of the most secret bases in the world to make all kinds of souvenirs, take a pin with alien shape or a spaceships t-shirt.
The confrontation over UFOs has become so bitter in recent years that, according to a Gallup study, approximately 135 million Americans already endorsed the alien hypothesis by 2021.
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And the echo has transcended the scientific community in the United States, where there are important personalities such as Avi Loeb, professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University, who speaks openly of “attempts by extraterrestrial civilizations to establish contact” with humans.
As Loeb told EFE, Grusch’s testimony could “offer new possibilities” if both he and the other two appearing on Capitol Hill – former Navy commander David Fravor and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves – provide “conclusive evidence.”
In contrast is Seth Shostak, an astronomer at Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a scientific institution originally promoted by Carl Sagan and financed by NASA, who was blunt when speaking to EFE: “What Grusch said is stupid.”
The researcher argued that work is being done to detect possible “life forms outside of Earth”, but that Grusch’s reference to alleged non-human biological remains is “ridiculous”.
“Are UFOs and aliens only interested in the United States? Or are all countries in cahoots?” Shostak said wryly.
Night falls, and waiter Michael’s warning seems to echo through the mountains surrounding Rachel. Meanwhile, the wind shakes the stars and stripes flag on the roof of the Little A’Le’Inn, because in the United States you can believe in UFOs and even question your government, but why would you not be a patriot? ?
