I know, I know: virtually nobody talking about flash mobbing Area 51 are actually going to do anything at all that resembles flash mobbing Area 51. ‘Tis silly-season time, so out come the silly stories and we all have a good chuckle. It’s just that the silly-season concept, like virtually everything else in our culture that was designed to be funny, doesn’t really take social media into account.
Let’s say 99.9% of the 770K signed up so far don’t go. That still leaves 770 extremely gullible* people who will be wandering around and wondering where everybody else is. Admittedly, it’s more likely that the ratio will be 99.999%, which means that the eight who actually show up might even be able to score a limited tour and a run at the gift shop**. Still. Maybe think about these things, OK?
And get off of my lawn!
Moe Lane
*Not to be That Guy, but: it’s not nice to take humorous advantage of gullible people, or people who aren’t as intelligent as you are.
**If Area 51 doesn’t have a gift shop then somebody isn’t doing his or her job properly.
Groom Lake doesn’t have a gift shop. It has very observant, heavily armed men with no discernable sense of humor. And it is only accessible via a single remote, easily monitored road. (Don’t be surprised when you’re driving that deserted stretch through nowhere, and there’s suddenly an unobtrusive vehicle following you at a discreet distance. It’s surely just a coincidence that you didn’t notice it before.)
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But the free market provides. Over on US-93, there are gift shops aplenty. Make sure to try the alien jerky. It’s out of this world.
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I might have driven through the region quite a few times.
I also had a relative who worked at Skunkworks. Not that he would tell me much, but he did share a great story about getting to ride in a rather famous titanium airplane he helped design. The phrase “like a homesick angel” was used.
Yes, the last bit was totally gratuitous.
But so very awesome.
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Besides, he’s been safely dead for two decades, so his facing repercussions from me flapping my yap is pretty much a nullity.
Being dead didn’t stop Cromwell from being dug up and decapitated, so your relative being dead might not protect him from prosecution by someone who was sufficiently unamused by your yap-flapping.
Strictly speaking, that’s not the ONLY way, but I don’t think any of this band can book JANET.
With everybody carrying around still and video cameras in their pockets everywhere they go, I feel like the probability that we’ve been visited by aliens becomes vanishingly small with each passing day (even compared to the very low likelihood it had even before the smartphone era).
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Hopefully the Air Force has some plans in place to deal with the situation in a reasonably non-lethal way if there are idiots who decide to do this. Because to borrow from RAH, using lethal force would only be momentary pleasure and is bound to get them talked about.