News

Man behind ‘Storm Area 51’ event to hold three-day ‘Alienstock’ music festival

The man behind the viral “Storm Area 51” Facebook event to “see them aliens” is now planning a three-day alien-themed music festival in Nevada.

According to the Alienstock Festival website, the festivities will be held in Rachel, Nev., the closest town to the Area 51 Air Force base, where many conspiracy theorists have long believed the U.S. government holds top secret information about extraterrestrial life.

{mosads}The event — slated for Sept. 20-22 and starting the same day as the Storm Area 51 gathering — is expected to be a “party in the desert” featuring camping, art installations, music and surprise performances. The website has not released the lineup of performers, citing what it called “festival radius clauses,” but promised “huge names.”

Brock Daily, an Arkansas college student who helped organize the festival with Storm Area 51 creator Matthew Roberts, told The Washington Post in an interview that he expects as many as 30,000 people to show up for Alienstock.

The announcement has prompted the creation of memes and drawn comparisons between the event and the scandalous 2017 Fyre Festival that left hundreds stranded on an island without proper food and shelter, resulting in fraud charges for its organizers. But Daily and Roberts told the Post their event isn’t about making a profit and gave assurances that they are planning to provide guests with access to water, bathrooms and other essentials.

News of the festival plans come more than a month after the initial Storm Area 51 event was posted on Facebook, with more than 2 million people saying they plan to attend.

“We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry,” the event description reads. “If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.” 

Federal officials have issued multiple warnings against storming Area 51, saying: “[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces.”