Challenge accepted.
The U.S. Air Force says it’s prepared to stop any invasion of its base in the Nevada desert, without specifically mentioning the more than 1 million people who have pledged to “storm Area 51″ in search of the facility’s “aliens.”
“They can’t stop all of us,” the Facebook event‘s description reads. “Let’s get them aliens.”
Air Force spokesperson Laura McAndrews told the Washington Post that they are indeed prepared to stop any threat to the Area 51 facility, without going into specifics about the Facebook event.
“The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect its assets,” McAndrews told the Post on Friday. She added that the site 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.”
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McAndrews did not comment on the decades-old speculation that the facility is housing advanced technology or little green men from outer space.
The Pentagon confirmed that the top-secret site exists in 2013, but they’ve never acknowledged the alien rumours. The facility helped develop stealth aircraft technology as a detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, according to declassified CIA documents.
Area 51 captured the internet’s imagination last week when a Facebook group proposing a “raid” of the site went viral. The number of attendees has quickly ballooned in the last week, from approximately 200,000 to over 1 million people saying they will attend.
The raid is supposed to start at 3 a.m. on Sept. 20 in the Nevada desert outside Area 51. The group hopes to breach a rather unwelcoming site surrounded by signs warning people to keep out or risk punishment.
The group’s battle strategy is full of tongue-in-cheek pop culture references. For example, they propose to dodge gunfire by doing a “Naruto run” — a reference to a Japanese anime show in which characters run with their torso bent forward and their arms held back.
The event has sparked a flood of memes on its discussion page, where people frequently joke about their battle plans, the hopelessness of the mission or what they will do once they liberate the “aliens” inside.
The event has also attracted some naysayers who appear not to understand the joke.
“It will never happen,” user Mike Wagner wrote Monday morning. “The logistics of just getting that many people close to Area 51 at the same time without extensive planning and money for things like parking, food, water, shelter (and) waste disposal is just unbelievably overwhelming.”
Another user quickly shut him down. “This is a meme and not an actual event,” he wrote.
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The movement also appears to have won over one of the most experienced (and hard to kill) fighters from TV show Game of Thrones. Actor Liam Cunningham, a.k.a. Ser Davos the Onion Knight, echoed the group’s motto in a tweet on Monday.
“They can’t stop all of us!” he wrote.
Would-be alien hunters celebrated the tweet on the Facebook event’s discussion page.
“We got the Onion Knight,” wrote user Hugo Luna. “Let’s go!”
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