Area 51 won’t be ‘stormed’, but revelers will be allowed to hold UFO-themed festival after all

Area 51, the secret Air Force base hidden away in the Nevada desert, is a pop culture treasure trove.

For decades now, America has been obsessed with the clandestine location, believing that our government may very well be hiding extraterrestrial secrets out at the remote base.  Recently, thanks to the popularity of a documentary entitled Bob Lazar:  Area 51 and Flying Saucers, over two million people RSVP’d to a Facebook event named “Storm Area 51, they can’t stop us all”.  The event itself was eventually removed from the popular social media site, but not before the idea of actually descending upon the remote and rural site had taken hold.

While the prospect of actually storming the base is unrealistic at best, deadly at worst, neighboring towns have taken to the idea of hosting something akin to a UFO-themed, Woodstock-style festival.

With two weeks to go before alien-obsessed crowds are poised to possibly descend on a rural Nevada county for “Storm Area 51,” officials have given the final permits to a pair of festivals that may draw thousands to the area.<

The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners gave final approval on Tuesday of a promoter’s plan to hold a music festival for 5,000 people in tiny Hiko and an inn owner’s effort to let perhaps 10,000 camp on her property in Rachel, the town closest to the once top-secret Area 51 military base.

There are still challenges for the tiny communities now in the crosshairs, however.

“Still pretty concerned knowing we don’t know how many people will be coming,” Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee told FOX5 on Tuesday. The sheriff added that plans as of now call for more than 300 police officers and first responders to be brought in from around the state. Officers from Las Vegas will also be on standby if needed.

“We got to figure out how we’re going to get all those agencies to talk to one another and communicate that back to our 911 center and to make sure everything flows because in any large incident, probably the biggest downfall has always been communication,” Lee added.

Some neighbors are less than enthused, however, and believe that the woefully small town fo Rachel, Nevada will be overrun with tourists.