What’s so special about Area 51? That’s what we’ve got to find out. – Jesse
Jesse and his team decide to take on the biggest open conspiracy in America, the secret airbase 90 miles north of Las Vegas, Area 51. Made famous to the mainstream by The X-Files and familiar to conspiracy theorists since the ’40s or ’50s, the US government hardly even admits it’s there, let alone what goes on there. Jesse and his intrepid team talk to people on both sides of the argument, such as those at MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) who think it does hide aliens and downed UFOs, and those who have ordinary, if out there, terrestrial answers to everything that’s been spotted there.
It’s hard to tell how much of this show is real. On the one hand, it’s totally believable that certain crackpots might demand an off-the-record meeting in the middle of the desert, but at the same time, it’s hard to believe that any show would really let their smallest and most easily attacked team members go out alone to talk to them. Unless they really are just that dedicated and hardcore.
The biggest consensus among the crackpots (or seeming crackpots) is that Area 51 is not only hiding captured spacecraft and aliens, but that they’re retro engineering the technology they’ve found in there and are probably working on biological experiments — cloning and hybridization and the like. This is exactly what The X-Files said for almost a decade, so all these claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, but the really hard to stomach idea in this is that people can’t come up with technological advances on their own. Computers, stealth technology, lasers, the internet– pretty much any major advancement in the last half of the 20th century could be attributed to stuff found in a UFO, sure, and people will take it at face value because they have little understanding of how tech happens and evolves. But it totally short changes all the people who actually did develop the advancements that make our modern world possible. And that’s unfair. Maybe even mean.
The explanation of the opposing force, the skeptics, makes more sense: they say that Area 51 really just hides and tests the super-secret projects and experiments the government won’t admit it’s spending billions of dollars on. We know that the books get cooked all the time to hide where money is actually going. What’s another dozen or so projects a year? They have admitted that they created and tested the SR-71 Blackbird and the U2 bomber in secret, and, independently, records have been declassified admitting that fake stories have been made up, and that the CIA basically encouraged UFO stories to distract from what has actually been done. The whole modern myth is a great story, but using the story as a smoke screen is also a conspiracy– isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that enough to be concerned about?
And here’s more: Because the experiments are secret, they’re exempt from environmental control issues, and they’ve been known to burn off weird chemicals with little regard or help for those who get sick because of the fumes. Why waste time on supposed aliens that may or may not exist when real humans, not far from the base, are getting real illnesses and no help for them? Why isn’t anyone but Jesse bringing up that there are actual lies that have been told to the populace for six decades?
More thoughts on Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, “Area 51”:
* It’s absolutely amazing that Jesse, former pro wrestler, former Governor of Minnesota, is going out there with a camera and getting people to talk. Even if they evade the hard questions he’s asking, that’s an answer of sorts, and it’s kind of great that someone is doing it.
* In the closing talk, he asks the question that if they’re spending all our money to build these super-advanced air and space planes, what are they still sending hundreds and thousands of people off to war without them for? What does that accomplish?
* I also love that even with all the crazy flying around, Jesse and his team manage to keep pulling it all back to practicality: how does this affect us and our world? What should we really be upset about? What can we actually do about any of this? It’s brilliant.