They only explained to us that they had the best men working on it, but when the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark started rolling, what was shown to us was a large warehouse filled with boxes where, presumably accompanied by other artifacts just as powerful and dangerous, the Ark of the Covenant would rest forever. As the credits began to roll while the camera showed us the immensity of what that place held, not only did a legendary movie come to an end, but also a phenomenon was created among the population.
Although we had to wait for three more movies – and a series – to have more clues about what was hidden in that place, the failed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull officially tied the place to Area 51 by calling it Hangar 51 and placing it in Nevada. However, the myth of the secret US base was largely due to that mysterious warehouse.
The origin of the Area 51 conspiracy
If there is a conspiracy theorist historian in the room, they will probably not take long to point out that Area 51 was already a well-known place long before the release of the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, and they would not be wrong. However, in the sea of conspiracy theories about the military base, the warehouse from Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford’s movie played a prominent role.
Despite being located in a remote area of the Nevada desert, away from prying eyes, its construction in 1955 was announced as a test base to develop spy planes that could help the CIA in its fight against the Cold War. At that time, the situation in the United States was particularly delicate, and both the public opinion and the journalism of the era had grown tired of the half-truths and secrecy of their government.
Just a decade after its construction, with locals nearby already talking about strange planes flying over the skies of Nevada, in 1966 President Johnson presented the Freedom of Information Act, a law that guaranteed the public’s right to access information under government control that was previously hidden.
After the scandal of Watergate in 1974, in which it was discovered that Richard Nixon was involved in a conspiracy to win the presidency, the necessary access to confidential documents meant that the act had to be reformed to further guarantee the transparency of the United States to its citizens, leading to a flood of cases that shocked public opinion.
Indiana Jones, The X-Files, and Stranger Things
Documents about the overthrow of governments, domestic espionage programs, and even projects like MKUltra, in which the CIA experimented with children and which ended up inspiring the plot of Stranger Things, were released at that time. At that point, no one could trust what the government was hiding or not, so simply facing that warehouse full of relics that the government deliberately hid not only from the general public but also from science, the fact that it was pure science fiction mattered very little.
During the 80s, the number of UFO sightings skyrocketed, and the “former workers” of Area 51 came out of the woodwork to share their experiences in search of a moment of glory on television. The idea of a secret hangar filled with technology and forbidden or even extraterrestrial objects became part of the popular culture of the time, and even though the internet was not accessible to everyone at that time, the search for the real truth became a trend.
Five years after that explosion in search of classified secrets, the Reagan administration was forced to tighten the requirements for declassifying documents because the requests received were so massive that, faced with the slowness of being able to respond to all of them, even more conspiracy theories emerged. Although the ending of Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark threw the stone and hid the hand, the motto of the truth is out there from The X-Files, the Men in Black from Men in Black, or even the inspiration of Hangar 51 for the series Warehouse 13, took up the torch while keeping the flame alive.
Image | Oliver Pacas
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