Consider that your assumptions may skew how you're reading GP's comment. What I take from this is that AGNB may have selected the most entertaining people to interview, and ignored the majority of fairly humdrum folks who were there for various reasons. Sounds like a recipe for confirmation bias to me; more like shock reporting, less like good journalism.
Mainstream people are not travelling to Area 51 to be part of a flash mob due to an internet meme. Re-set your expectations of what normal people are doing, because it's a million miles off.
A once in a lifetime (incredible) celestial event == going to the gates of a military installation and, depending on who you ask, throwing a party or attempting a raid.
It's not for everyone, but it's within the boundaries of normality.
My other response has already pointed out your apparent lack of getting the joke, but it should be noted that if your primary hangup is the fact that people were partying at a military installation, you should probably know that specific base is one important to UFO mythos and thus public imagination. There is precedence for that at multiple locations:
Area 51, of course, is of higher security than these locations, but there's no crime to be outside of the restricted zone. Personally, I had no interest in the Storm Area 51 event but Groom Lake would make one hell of a hiking expedition. It'd be quite cool to take pictures at the gate, and try to spot black project aircraft along Route 375.
A statement on the chance that an ordinary person traveled to Area 51 is in no way a statement on the chance that a person who traveled to Area 51 is ordinary. The two are wholly unrelated.
The joke was about raiding the place because Area 51 is, in popular consciousness, a securely guarded place with unfathomable secrets inside, and thus inaccessible unless a very very large number of people attempted to storm the place with bullet-defying Naruto running. Where do you get that mass of people? Why the internet of course, which is also a terrible place to organize an invasion, which makes it all that more ironic.
It should also be noted that at the gathering no violence broke out, because everyone there was for fun. There wasn't even an instance of someone present mentally unstable or too ideologically fanatic actually trying to make a run for it. By all accounts the partiers and the security forces got along amiably. It was indeed a positive, if eccentric, social event.
This debate is going nowhere because it requires the participants to have a working grasp of both pop culture and humor.
Apparently this is news to people but Area 51 is a pretty massive military base with a daily workforce in the thousands. The primary reason it exists is a combination of history (nevada test area) and geography (groom lake allows radar/radio testing with limited observers on the horizon). If anything someone working at area 51 is a HUGE discounting factor in UFO nut nonsense.
I don’t believe OP was referring to the employees. In any case, I was referring to the people who showed up at, yes, a gigantic military base in the middle of the desert.
“Completely normal” people would never go there. Ever.
I mean, you could be interested in the cultural phenomenon, the tourist trap stuff nearby, and, at least at one point, the military exercises that you could see and hear.
Did anyone (unauthorized) really show up at the base? It seems unlikely given there is a large buffer zone and armed guards responding to people who violate it, last I heard. It's kind of like Mordor, one does not just walk in.
Also, I vaguely recall the government annexing the nearest mountain that people used to view the base from.
I didn't participate in whatever the recent thing was, but I went out there to sightsee back in the 90s. There was a guy who went to live in Rachel, and wrote about the conspiracy theorists and general cultural aspects and feuded with the proprietors of the Little A'le'inn. I think I remember he wrote a newsletter that was distributed on AOL.
"Showing up at the gate(s)" just seems odd. I wouldn't think there's anything to see there.
"In 1995, the federal government expanded the exclusionary area around the base to include nearby mountains that had hitherto afforded the only decent overlook of the base, prohibiting access to 3,972 acres (16.07 km2) of land formerly administered by the Bureau of Land Management."
There isn't, it's just that "raid area 51" went viral and was basically a meme meetup. The point was to get photos of the fictional raid, which were mostly just people standing outside the fences.
Of course there’s nothing to see there. That’s why “completely normal, non-conspiratorial” people would never attend such an event.
To be clear, I’m in no way harping on non-normal people or even conspiratorial people. Just taking issue with the idea that this was a sufficiently unremarkable occurrence for the population who attended to be anything like a normal slice of the American population.
I think you’re missing the thread of this conversation.
We are discussing civilians who have no official nor unofficial relationship with Area 51/military/government/defense/intelligence/etc showing up at the gates to participate in a “Rush the gates to free the aliens” meme event.
It seems that alone would indicate that they are not non-conspiracy individuals.