Area 51: the mystery 30 years after Clinton's announcement

The story of UFOs, now called UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, and Area 51 begins in the 1950s. Something undefined and luminous fell to earth: in reality, it was just a sounding balloon returning to earth, which was frequent, but that was classified, i.e. top secret: it was supposed to observe the nuclear tests that were happily being carried out in the American deserts at that time. Partly because of the appearance of the phenomenon, partly because of the military's behaviour, it was suspected to be a UFO from somewhere in the solar system. Ufologists, especially those fond of conspiracy theories, established that there, in Area 51, the American government had transported what was left of the alleged UFO that had crashed in New Mexico in 1947.

Since then, every opportunity was good for the Area 51 conspiracists to shout about the hidden secret, the 'they won't tell us', which is very much in vogue even today for the most disparate topics, from aeroplane chemtrails to vaccines.

In short, Clinton tried his best, but, as the famous saying goes, there is none so deaf as those who will not listen, and so the suspicion about the existence of crashed flying saucers, living or dead extraterrestrials held hostage to study them, remained. For a long time, UFO enthusiasts continued to visit the military base, obviously staying outside the gates. To say, even as recently as 2019, a flashmob sparked by a good-hearted prankster brought hundreds of thousands of people to Nevada's State Highway 357, renamed Extraterrestrial Highway, convinced that the gates would open for them. A headache the military certainly did not need. The interest remains, if one considers that some 200,000 people visit the International Museum and UFO Research Centre in Roswell, a small town near Area 51, every year, where one can consult hundreds of books on UFOs, maps of landings, and finally eat at the only Mac Donald's in the shape of a flying saucer. The Americans certainly could not pass up the opportunity to create tourism about the phenomenon.

Today, the US military is trying everything to shed light on the matter, as far as possible, since we are talking about military secrets, and there is even a site of their own, www.aaro.mil where one can see footage of alleged UFO sightings. In the age of social networking, however, it takes very little to continue the UFO tradition, which today is being replenished by the continuous sightings of drones of all shapes and sizes, and on the other hand, in that huge base today it is realistic to think that sophisticated systems will be developed for the future, such as stealth drones, hypersonic aircraft and electronic warfare systems.

In addition, 20 per cent of Americans believe fideistically in the existence of UFOs, and here too the percentages are high, even though Nasa continues to perjure itself even in writing with its serious reports that no proof has ever been found of the existence of these objects and their pilots. Just as obviously, AI is now being used at NASA to analyse the data accumulated so far, although perhaps a modicum of common sense would suffice.

The fascination with life outside the Earth remains, although eminent scientists, such as Stephen Hawcking and others, warn that the fact that extraterrestrials are 'good' is a pious hope, they could in fact also be 'bad', and not a little. According to Carl Gustav Jung, aliens are often symbols of the unknown and the collective unconscious, they represent universal anxieties, fear of death, invasion or loss of identity, they are the symbol of a superior and incomprehensible power. This is also something to think about.

Nowadays, when we are familiar with at least 6,000 planets outside our solar system that revolve around other stars, the discourse may change, not least because this is just the appetiser, for it is evident that around the billions of stars that populate our Galaxy, the Milky Way, there are just as many billions of planets revolving.

This, however, is a terribly serious problem, that of life in the universe, which with some probability is not confined to our beautiful Earth. It is probable but not certain, and above all that life could be there, and we should also clarify what we consider to be a form of life. A thought-provoking question, but we are still searching for a definition.