It was early in 1993 near the beginning of my career as a truck driver that I ventured near what is known as Area 51. I was driving from Las Vegas to Reno, Nevada on a lonely stretch of road when I came upon a fellow company driver. We started talking to one another on the CB for a while and soon decided to pull over in the middle of that desert at a roadside diner. Being from Virginia, I wasn’t accustomed to the vast, desolate and lonely landscape that makes up the southwest.
My fellow trucker and I met face to face at the diner and walked in for a quick bite. He was from Las Vegas himself and familiar with the area. He told me that we were near a place just over that hill (and he pointed toward the window) where they kept all the UFOs and aliens. I then laughed out load and repeated what he said in my most sarcastic tone, “UFOs and ALIENS!?!?!?” At that point, everyone in the diner started looking at me and I remember begin VERY uncomfortable. He told me to “keep it down” and informed me that they didn’t joke about that stuff around here.
Later on, I did a little research on Area 51 and would cut out newspaper articles about the place whenever I’d come across them. Remember, this is before the internet and information was more difficult to obtain. I collected the articles and stored them in my road atlas on the Nevada page in case I ever got the chance to get back. This place is marked as “Groom Lake” on maps and until recently was never acknowledged by our government. Even after government acknowledgment, they only say that it was a Top Secret testing facility. Who knows? But the people who lived near there in Rachel, Nevada have seen strange things over the years and as I can attest, they take it VERY SERIOUSLY…