Original subtitles

You can be anyone you want to be on the Internet.

Criminals can conceal themselves from being held accountable for the things

they say and do.

That is the new frontier for law enforcement.

In the past, you would have detectives in a tow car looking out their windows,

hunting for bad guys.

But now you have threats that come through social media.

In 2019, I was the commander of the Southern Nevada Counterterrorism Center.

I was informed that an individual who lived with his mother in Southern

California had put information out on social media that he was trying to

organize an event where they would storm Area 51.

I was pissed off.

But I did not want to be the person that ignored something that you could see

coming a mile away.

And then the questions were going to be asked afterwards of, why didn't law

enforcement do something about this?

We've got to get this thing under control.

Now.

Two million people say they're going to storm Area 51 next month.

The Lincoln County Sheriff has some big concerns.

We're reaching out to all of our partners, federal and state. We don't

to plan for. We're only planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

I got a call from the Las Vegas Police Department.

They were getting together every government agency they could to deal

storm Area 51 thing.

So I jumped in my patrol car and headed to Las Vegas.

I walked in that room with all those different players, setting at a big U

-shaped table.

We had Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the FBI, the State

U .S. Marshals. It really brought things home.

This is big league here.

We had U .S. Air Force personnel.

Captain Tamino was running the whole event. He came in, and we went around

room voicing our concerns.

A large amount of people decided we're going to storm the base. How are we

to handle this?

Imagine someone in the crowd has a gun. If people start shooting and suddenly

hundreds or maybe thousands of people get shot over this event, then you're

looking at one of the deadliest mass shootings in the history of our nation.

This isn't a joke. This isn't play. This is definitely serious.

It's all fucked up.

We asked at the airport.

Are you really going to use your weapons on a crowd of nerds?

There are a lot of foreign intel operatives out there that are going to

infiltrate the crowd of these Naruto runner alien seekers.

They're going to look like them. They're going to smell like them. They're going

to talk like them. They're going to act like them.

Therefore, we will treat all of them as hostile until proven otherwise.

We know our best chance of getting the thing turned off was to have the

organizers of the event well aware that there will be consequences for their

actions if they continue to carry on.

We needed to be able to put somebody on their doorstep since this guy is

hundreds of miles away.

And so we all turned and looked at the FBI.

I'm at my friend's house when I get a call from my mom at about

10 a .m.

I don't answer it.

And then she texts me.

And now I'm scared to the point I'm about to cry.

I was scared.

I've never had federal agents at my door.

They said, do you know where he's at?

They took my phone and talked to him directly.

The agent is just wanting to know where I'm at and when I'll be home.

And I am telling him neither of these things.

I said, no, you have to come home. If you don't, that's when they're going to

start looking into what you've done.

I'm sheer panic.

I've got very militant anti -government people sending me scary messages,

threatening to kill other people, threatening to kill the guards at the

And what happens to me if one of these people goes in there and tries to do bad

shit, undermining?

I'm running through any lawyers I may have met in passing. I'm looking up

anybody that might have the qualifications to help with this weird

scenario I found myself in. And after I am on the edge of giving up, I called

Jeremy Corbo. Oh, fuck.

He was pretty terrified. I advised Matty he should have a lawyer with him just

because we didn't know. We didn't know what the nature of this contact was.

I have seen the pushback. When you're dealing and reporting on Area 51, they

want to keep things secret.

These are accusations of a cover -up. This is accusations that we have been

holding non -terrestrial materials tell the basic truth.

I'm hearing about all this bad shit, not only from Jeremy, but just from stuff I

found online myself on these different forums.

Our government is just not transparent with us.

I would like to ask the government, why are you keeping it from us?

Our government has been working on black ops.

Disturbing truth about Area 51.

You could get shot for giving our secrets away.

What the fuck?

It's easy to write it off as just all internet lore or phooey, but

then the FBI's knocking on your door and suddenly it's a lot more real.

I mean, I was like, fuck, Matty.

You know, that meeting, you have to take seriously.

I'm just sitting there shaking, thinking I'm about to get a bag over my head and

thrown into a van and shipped off to God knows where.

And they're grilling me about my social life, my backstory, what kind of

religious beliefs I hold, like, just to feel out whether or not I am actually a

terrorist.

I'm telling them the truth. I'm not actually planning on doing this. We're

actually planning a music festival look thing, go through my messages, just

anything to save my own ass at that point.

They essentially let me know that it was my ass if anybody decided to go in

there and storm this base.

After this meeting, I needed to figure out a way to move away from Storm Area

and rebrand this.

so I can keep myself out of prison.

We started spitballing a bunch of ideas.

We collectively got together and kind of threw out names.

We started looking at Woodstock.

What's for people in Woodstock? Man, there's supposed to be a million and a

people here by tonight.

Looks like some kind of biblical unbelievable, see?

And so we take the theme of aliens and just mash them together. We got alien

stock.

Alien stock.

It worked.

It was kind of a beautiful, just come together moment.

For all of us. Alien stock. I mean, it's like a little cringe when you think

about it, like the 60s. I mean, you know, fuck the boomers. But also, what

our version of Woodstock?

Pretty sad to me, I guess. It's pretty cringe.

It didn't make the concept any less stupid.

The whole meme is based on trespassing on a U .S. military base.

Alien stock.

You have got to be kidding me.

Nothing changed by renaming it.

We were still monitoring the situation very closely.

What did alien stock mean now? Nothing. Some people were trying to put lipstick

on a pig.

Every time Manny tried to calm things down, it just got more crazy.

This is going to be fucking epic. This is the first of its kind alien stock

three -day festival, and I'm just going to say it. I think you're out in the

desert. A lot of people are going to get high. They're going to be doing other

things, and they're probably going to storm Area 51, and we're going to be

to catch the coverage. All of a sudden, this is no longer a meme. I mean, this

is a real festival.

Alien stock was hot, so all these brands jumped in on it.

Everybody wanted a piece of it.

And Vice was like... Absolutely long for the ride because it generated clicks.

If you're not getting abducted by aliens, you are fucking up.

We knew we had to go. We knew we had to make a documentary.

It started as a Facebook post to Storm Area 51 and then went to a music

festival. As the event continued to grow, anybody who wants to get a toe in

this thing is reaching out.

We've got country bands reaching out. We've got R &B people reaching out.

got hip -hop artists reaching out.

Little Nas X said he would perform.

I was like, I have to go.

It was going to be completely wild.

Kind of like this little real -life internet meet -up.

So now you've got this festival with potentially millions of attendees, and

who's going to be putting this on? That kid in the Naruto costume?

Good luck.

We are looking at seven Woodstocks, 14 Coachellos, 50 Burning Man.

And this whole time, I'm sitting here with less than $1 ,000 in my bank

How the fuck do we make this happen?

So now we're five weeks out. We have a venue, an audience, and a ton of hype,

but we have no money.

So that was a big problem because somebody was going to have to put up the

money, and I wasn't going to do it.

What Donnie started doing was searching out sponsorships.

I talked to Arby's. They said they'd send free food, Bud Light, because they

were making their own alien cans.

And then along comes Pornhub.

Pornhub was all in.

They gave us $70 ,000 to sponsor the event.

Pornhub offering to sponsor this, it couldn't have been more perfect.

I was stoked.

I told Maddie $70 ,000 is enough to pay for a stage and a couple of staff.

But when you're doing a show in the middle of nowhere, you know, you have to

bring everything yourself.

Port -a -potty, fencing, staff, the water, the staging, it doesn't pop up

overnight.

We were building a city from nothing.

It was a hard thing to do to put on a music festival in the middle of nowhere.

I was starting to get the info on things, and I got the sense that people

panicking a little bit and starting to have doubts.

How do you create a music festival in the middle of the desert? Where are they

going to eat and sleep?

There's no cell service, no internet, no stores, no gas.

A planned music festival near Area 51 might turn out to be more like the

disastrous Fyre Festival.

It is an absolute disaster.

Firefest, it blew up for all these millennial influencers who paid all this

money to go to this Caribbean island. It was like a total shit show.

With alien stuff, there's an element of schadenfreude where it would be almost

like satisfying for the whole thing to blow up.

We were drooling over this.

Everybody's talking about fire festival this, fire festival that.

I go and look it up. Billy called and said, Andy, we need you to take one big

thing for the team.

The more I learn, the worse it gets.

Will you suck dick to fix this water problem?

And it was fucked up.

The guy who put that on ends up in prison.

So one of my main objectives is to not end up in prison.

How the hell did it come to this?

I didn't know what Fyre Fest was, but this had humanitarian disaster written

over it.

We were beginning to get worried that we would have the desert overrun with

casualties. We're going to have folks that are literally starving or

out in the middle of the desert during the scorching heat.

Naysayers. It was coming in one ear, coming out the other. I did not care

they were saying.

If this just turns out to be a disaster, we'll have a front row seat.

Our fans were going to love it. It was going to be perfect.

I was excited by the idea of a bit of carnage.

If millions of people are going to starve and die, at least I want to

it.

And if we get killed, at least have it be on livestream.

All these voices are starting now to ring true, and I'm stuck here wondering

I'm sending 4 million people out to the middle of nowhere to die.

The residents of Rachel said, we don't want this in our town.

I tried to warn people on my Area 51 website.

It's just a very hostile environment.

There's desert critters, there's scorpions, snakes.

This could potentially be a really bad situation.

So we approached the commissioners in hopes that they would not allow this

to go forward.

As the county commissioner, when people are up in arms, when they're pissed off,

they're not afraid to come and talk to you.

In the store, in the post office, the church even.

When I first heard about this, I thought it was a joke.

You know, it's like, do they really think they're going to be allowed to

through the Area 51 gate? What do they think they're going to see or do?

So we decided to call the meeting.

I figured that it was a no -brainer. The county commissioners would just stamp

it no.

There is no way on God's green earth that this is going to get permitted.

Storm in Area 51. It is illegal.

You deny the permit. You don't let it happen. It becomes an illegal event. It

goes away, and the problem is solved.

But we had no control over the county commissioner's decision.

Thousands of people will pack into rural towns near Rachel, Nevada.

The tiny communities are preparing for an invasion. For a new event, alien

stock.

I headed to the courthouse.

All of my disgruntled neighbors were going to be there.

York was doing everything in his power to stop alien stuff.

I learned that they were planning on putting a helicopter landing right next

my house.

We're worried about the people invading private properties.

Was it going to get overrun, burned down by an angry mob?

My dilemma was, Either piss off the people in Rachel or piss off a

million people or whoever, how many ever showing up because they don't have a

venue. As a commissioner, my focus was on the protection and security of the

people that pay taxes in my county.

I was really hoping that...

This would put an end to this madness.

So it has all come down to this moment.

All our eyes are on the commissioners. They are the only people that can stop

this event from happening.

There was some heavy discussion between the commissioners.

It was kicked back and forth.

We're damned if you do, we're damned if you don't.

These people intend on coming.

They said, you know, all in favor.

Raise your hand.

Now that these permits are approved, the festivals are happening. The county has

approved permits for the owner of Little Alien alien stock put on by Connie

Wath. Permit approved.

I was going to make sure this went off without a hitch.

I felt let down.

There was nothing that we could do anymore that would stop it. I called my

girlfriend and I said, I just got my butt kicked. You wouldn't believe it.

Local yokels thought they were doing the right thing for their area and didn't

really think in terms of the big picture.

I was sitting there in disbelief. We got the U .S. government is spending

millions of dollars.

But the people who are having to deal with the decision are the Lincoln County

folks. They don't deal with crazy every day. They're normally dealing with the

theft of a cow.

Ludicrous. If this many people are going to show up anyway, let's at least give

them a venue, give them some place to go and congregate.

That's what's best for the county.

A lot of people were upset that those permits were approved.

But that approval meant the promoters were on the hook financially.

There was a lot we had to do in order to be able to handle this amount of people

that were coming.

We had to go and start clearing land and finding the space and organizing where

the stage was going to be.

We have an idea of where we're going to put the vendors. Not quite sure exactly

where we're going to tweak the stage at.

Maddie had a designated list of things to do.

I had mine.

I already had the land. I already had the liquor license.

And I already had permits.

Maddie and Donnie were supposed to be managing everything else.

But I wasn't seeing that anything was being done.

At the courthouse, I was approached by a security company.

And I'm hit with over $100 ,000.

were the bills that I'm not supposed to be having to pay.

I didn't know what to do.

I'm not getting help, and Danny's telling me that it's Donnie.

You know, I called Donnie.

And that's when things started going haywire. You know, somebody drops a $100

,000 bill on you, you know, where's it going to come from?

There's supposed to be all this sponsorship money coming in, and I

it, but it was coming. It was on its way, and...

And I came out of the meeting thinking, oh, my God, when am I going to come up

with this money?

I called my son and told him, I guess I'm going to sell my house.

And then the guy who handed me the bill said to me, there were these festival

guys in Las Vegas, and they were willing to help because they had money.

I told Donnie that we should hear them out and see what they have to offer.

Connie had messaged us about this guy, Frank DiMaggio.

So I looked him up.

He's posing with all these celebrities, but I've never heard of anything he's

ever done.

So to me, that's a big red flag.

I was like, these guys are no good.

My reputation in this town depends on who you talk to.

I don't.

let people fuck with me and I don't back down to anybody for any reason.

My partner John said, this woman that owns a little alien where they're doing

the event is in over her head.

And he said, can you help her?

I said, maybe.

We had an investor that was willing to put up a large sum of money.

But we have to find out what they have in place before we can make any

on whether or not we're going to be even involved.

So we asked Connie and Maddie to sit down for a meeting.

The event is happening in a couple weeks, but I don't really have any clue

what's going on. And there's all these fucking people that I don't know getting

involved. It's confusing.

We're down to the wire. I've got people hounding me for money.

So we just decided collectively that we would hear them out.

And Donnie's like, I won't be there.

Connie said, you know, that she was going to work with Frank. I said, thank

People were already starting to call this Fyre Fest 2 .0 the way the world

off my shoulders, right? I didn't have to deal with it anymore.

I just thought, two weeks out, Frank running the show, good luck, I'm out.

The meeting with Frank and company was scheduled for the 6th of September.

I was the first one to show up.

Maddie was on his way.

We talked. We were smiling, laughing.

Maddie showed up. We assumed that they had this massive, organized

event ready to go. They just didn't know how to pull it off.

And we needed to find out what they had in place.

I said, what are you planning?

How's it going to work?

How much are you going to charge?

We don't know anything.

Frank says, you know, you want stages from us. You want lighting from us. You

want this from us. You want that from us. We need to see your bank account.

Open up your bank account.

The fuck I will.

And they're like, excuse me, you need our help.

Connie's not answering any questions.

Everybody's yelling and screaming at each other. And then all of a sudden

starts slamming his hands onto the table.

Bam! Bam!

Get the fuck out. I'm done. And I stood up.

It just completely explodes out of nowhere. It's like everybody's gone

absolutely fucking bananas like chimpanzees at the zoo.

What the fuck is going on? What the fuck just happened?

Fuck you. Our relationship with Connie ended when we told her to leave the

house.

I asked Maddie, what would your parents tell you to do right now? Because I can

tell you what my parents would tell me to do. They would tell me to run.

I go, because this could ruin your life.

If something happens out there and you're not prepared for it, somebody

killed, you're going to get sued. Even if it's not your fault, you're going to

get sued.

I told him it's not worth going to jail or throwing your life away. I don't want

you to get shot either, Matthew.

Connie's gone home in tears.

And I'm watching this cool thing that we've built up until now just

disintegrate.

I said to Maddie, we can help you, but not with Connie and not out in Rachel.

We had a venue ready to go here in Las Vegas.

My heart says...

Let's go to Rachel. It fits the spirit of the event. It's right by Area 51.

But then my brain is telling me that it's the worst fucking idea we can

have because there's infrastructure in Las Vegas. There is security in Las

Vegas. Everything's set. It's safe.

I've got a really tough decision to make. Do I go with Connie or do I go

Frank? And at 5 a .m., I've got to go on TV and the world is watching.

Maddie Roberts is scheduled to be on Good Morning Las Vegas around 6 .45.

Final countdown is on for the human invasion near Area 51.

The man behind the viral event to storm Area 51 will be here at Channel 13.

We're hoping.

Sitting in the newsroom. I'm really fucking

anxious. I have no idea what's going to happen.

It was 6 o 'clock. I have the morning show on, and I'm watching it live.

People in Lincoln County are gearing up for the Storm Area 51 invasion, and

there's been lots of talk about it. Joining us this morning is Matty

created the Facebook event.

And as far as, you know, what's going to take place in two weeks, you're still

not sure yet.

And you can just see him. He's sitting there. He seemed, his body language just

seemed so stressed out. Will you be there?

I'll be in Nevada for sure. I'll be in Nevada for the rest of September. So

wherever we do an event, there'll be an event there.

What? I'll be around.

But it's two weeks away, so he's kind of got to, like, figure it out, I guess,

somewhat soon, right? And I know that that's what you're in the process of

doing. Yeah, we'll have more information later today.

What?

What the fuck? Like, this is now fully out of his control, even.

Then he does a taped interview with Frank. If you had a message for anybody

that's going to be out there watching this.

What would you tell them about coming out?

I'm not going to send them out to the middle of nowhere where there's no

infrastructure. I can't have my name associated with something that could be

Fyre Fest 2 .0. What the fuck is going on?

And what is the likelihood at this point that something is actually going to

happen? Take a miracle.

But you can see this look on Frank's face. He kind of looks very satisfied

himself that he was able to convince Maddie to move it.

It needs to go away before it becomes the biggest disaster that Southern

has ever seen.

I cried.

I was heartbroken because I didn't understand what was going on.

I just wrote over $100 ,000 worth of checks to pay for these people to be at

Rachel. And I am finding out live that this isn't happening and the world is

being told that I have created a disaster.

I'm sorry.

Tonight we can confirm there has been a falling out between the man behind the

idea to storm Area 51 and organizers on the ground near Area 51.

This interview that I do with Frank just goes absolutely ballistic.

Now the organizer behind Storm Area 51 event says he's pulling out.

23 ABC, they're in the works at a venue in downtown Las Vegas.

Connie said despite all of this, alien stock is still happening.

Oh, it was chaos. It was chaos.

And because it's America, everybody starts suing each other.

A cease and desist letter was sent to Connie West to stop Alien Stock. Alien

Stock organizer Connie West is now suing Storm Area 51 creator Matty Roberts and

his associate.

I'm like, what the fuck are you guys doing? You asked us for help, and then

sued me.

Fuck you.

You know what? Fuck Frank DiMaggio and fuck Maddie.

What do the people want me to do? Run out there and get shot? There are claims

here of sabotage and secrecy.

The keyboard warriors, they now hate me.

I never asked to be

anybody's hero. I just put up a prank post at 2 a .m.

I didn't steal Maddie from them. Maddie had a choice to walk away from an event

they didn't have a contract for.

Yeah, Maddie could walk away. And if he did, I couldn't.

People were still coming.

Here's what I thought.

Where's Area 51?

Is it in Las Vegas?

No.

Area 51 is near Rachel. And that's where I thought the majority of people were

still going to go.

They bought airline tickets. They rented cars. They took time off work.

They were coming.

It's canceled, Kev. Don't go. It's canceled.

You know what I mean? Fucking losers.

Oh, my God. We were freaking out. We flew to L .A. We loaded up with

Do we need walkie -talkies?

That would be epic.

I think we should get the diapers.

We got everything at Target. I mean, coolers, water, snacks, sexy alien

costumes.

The day before I was supposed to storm Area 51, I broke my neck. Doctors

recommend that I just lay down and recover for the next couple weeks.

But I'm not doing that because we're storming Area 51 and we're going to find

some aliens.

We had a warlike mentality.

We were preparing for desert survival.

We were preparing for conflict with the military. We were preparing for

anything.

One of the most difficult parts of my job is telling my young airmen who are

defending the space that they may have to take deadly force against their

Use of deadly force is authorized. Why risk it, though, even if there's nothing

at Area 51? Why would you risk it?

We got some additional people. We got some additional vehicles. We got some

additional weapons to make sure that we could deal with multiple things

happening. This was by far the largest defense of the base that has ever

happened on the installation.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced a temporary flight restriction

areas surrounding Area 51.

We knew we're going to have to prepare for the worst here.

When things had fallen apart between the organizers, it became clear that the

little alien is completely out of their league with this.

So we did whatever we could to keep our town safe and to keep this

event from being a total disaster.

There's no turning back. It's beyond the point of coming back. People are

coming.

When I saw that Kanye was still going ahead with it, I wasn't really

The people that wanted to go out there were going to go out there regardless of

whether or not I told them not to.

We are full steam ahead on the event in Las Vegas.

With Frank's connection, it just all came together really quickly.

Who could have predicted this? You make a post at 2 a .m. on a page that has 62

likes, and now you have thousands of people that are ready to come out to

show. It's just, it's absolutely amazing.

We knew that we weren't really going to go to the Bud Light event in downtown

Las Vegas because it seems lame to us.

So we knew that we were going to go right into the hornet's nest, whatever

supposed humanitarian crisis was going to be.

As we're heading out to the desert, we didn't really know.

who was there to party and who was there to storm, but we expected, like,

everything to go wrong.

We wanted to go out there. We wanted to see some shit.

20th of September, 2019, I posted, today is the day.

Headed to the infamous Area 51 takeover.

The only thing that we had in our maps was Area 51.

So, like, we literally drove towards Area 51.

It's so far, man.

I mean, I wasn't even out of Las Vegas. I started losing signal. But I just went

on faith, man, pure faith. I knew I was going to get there.

As we were getting closer...

We'll see more and more people and see more and more law enforcement.

I remember seeing swaths on the side of the road. Police cars lined up. It felt

like, oh, fuck, we're about to enter something crazy.

And we start to see, like, vehicles with large antennas on their roof, vehicles

with blacked -out windows.

What's it going to look like when we get to that fucking base?

Everybody was holding their breath.

We're all ready to go.

People are coming in. Okay, now what?

We'd gotten some information about a suspicious vehicle headed to Area 51.

To me, it had a potential to be bad, and we wanted to avoid it.

So I just jumped in my patrol vehicle.

I was able to locate the pickup truck.

And he identified himself.

I looked inside the vehicle.

I thought, oh, man, we have a problem here.

He was saying he was going to go to Rachel, to Area 51.

I was able to talk him into allowing me to keep those weapons until the event

was over.

It made us think, okay, well, if this guy could have firearms, how many others

could have firearms as well?

Are we live?

Let's fucking start this.

Man, that's when things get crazy.

What happened to Matty Roberts? Matty Roberts, where are you?

We started approaching 3 a .m. on September 20th. We started getting hyper

-concerned about what was going on.

On the original Facebook post, this was the point that they're going to go storm

the gate.

So all of our forces are ready.

We've been monitoring the situation very closely. We're starting to see some

increased activity.

We're fully prepared, ready for anything that might happen.

I don't care if you have guns. You still want to know.

The manpower was at its peak.

Everybody was ready to go.

I was like, yo, I'm about to storm this base.

I was like, Ted!

Nine. And I turned around.

Eight. Seven.

Six. Five.

They were recording like there was a fucking crowd.

Four. Three.

Two. One.

They can't catch all of us.

And they began to run.

And it stopped.

Yeah. um it was a joke

they got their moment of fame they got their picture

and it was done

3 .5

million people turned out to just be a few hundred oh my gosh all right yeah

had a good looking fall man you really rolled i was like just

trying to make like Something entertaining happened before those

We're here to rescue the aliens!

Rescue the aliens!

Everybody, no more gangs! I think there was more cops than there were people.

They called in reinforcements, right? They sure did.

They could definitely stop us all.

Get off the gate. Get off the gate, he said.

We've got two million people.

There were no Chad's there.

There were no Kyle's. There were no Karen's.

The name of Limbo.

Whoa!

No one was even wearing the Naruto band. It was a letdown.

Stop looking at me. I've got to commit something illegal.

It was just a meme.

Open Sesame.

That doesn't work that way, brother. We had spent months preparing for this

event. And that was it. And that was the biggest activity we saw.

Those poor aliens were stuck in there thinking they were going to get busted

out.

They're still stranded there.

We'd heard that there was going to be a big raid at 3 a .m. But we woke up and

there was nothing there.

I felt trolled.

Fuck me, right?

Fuck us.

We did everything in our power to hype it, and ultimately the joke was on us.

I wasn't watching what was going on in Rachel.

I was just having a fucking blast.

Once the stage comes alive with music and those people are dancing, all that

stress that you've gone through before just completely disappears.

Grab the microphone and...

I step out on stage.

The crowd went insane.

Just because it's Matty, the guy that did the meme.

It's just a sea of people having a great time.

It's that moment that makes everything that I've done so far worth it.

Ealingstock was never the desert. It was never Area 51.

It was Maddie.

A lot of lights and lasers.

Like, that doesn't impress me very much. I just didn't think that that was how

the meme should go down in history.

Like, it should go down as this ragtag piece of crap thing.

Once we realized nobody was going to Great Area 51, everybody just started

dancing and vibing.

Here's your thousands of people that are going to show up.

Okay, that was worth going out to the Port -A -Potty's for.

People were just having a great time.

I know that you love Reese's Pieces.

We are so grateful for this space here in Rachel, Nevada.

Of understanding that aliens are real. Everyone was having fun, and I felt like

the aliens were dancing with us.

I want to be a human. You know, you guys are just fun.

Every time I turned around, there was nothing but cameras everywhere.

I got to be the host, so I did my best to make sure that everybody was going to

be taken care of. The world cameras are here in Rachel, Nevada.

I was, like, pretty much surrounded by booms and by cameras the whole time.

So many news. So many YouTubers.

YouTube, YouTube, YouTuber.

Everyone was just trying to be like, this is my moment to be famous and try

get in front of the cameras. What's your name? Dylan Capps. Is that like your

actual name? It's my actual name, my first name. The residents of Rachel,

literally brought out lawn chairs and were watching us like we were a zoo

animal.

I live here.

You're not right here.

We were cautiously keeping an eye on things going on from the distance.

There was a lot of these social media wannabes interviewing each other.

We were there to document the scene of a humanitarian crisis.

But then I realized at the end of the day, there was a few people partying in

the desert talking about aliens.

I mean, shit, that's exactly what it was supposed to be the entire time, you

know?

It was cool.

When I saw the videos from the Rachel event, it honestly looked kind of cool.

Like what I had pictured our event being to begin with.

Sort of the opposite of Fyre Fest, where they built everything, but then there's

not enough people.

There were more port -a -potties than there were people.

And I started to think about my own role in this as a blood -hungry media

producer who was like, we want the conflict.

And I think we got ahead of ourselves by wanting this Fyre Fest 2 .0 story to

come to fruition.

We're driving back past all the media trucks.

There's this entire mobile police headquarters that they've erected in the

middle of the desert. All the different, like, emergency vehicles.

I just think to myself, I'm like, how much did this all cost?

We did exactly what we needed to do. If it would have gone bad, they never would

have let me forget it. And I would have had to live with that until the day I

retired and beyond.

You want to know how much money I won in a lawsuit?

She can chase me to the ends of the earth. They can put me in jail. She'll

never get the money.

Mobilizing a lot of resources.

That costs money.

$11 million?

That's how much the military lost?

For what, added security?

What the fuck?

That's insane.

You can easily say, well, you know, we shouldn't have done it. We should not

have wasted those resources.

My argument will be that there were too wide a range of possibilities, with the

worst -case scenario being a mass casualty event, and I will defend to the

day that we did not overspend in our preparation for it.

Every day, people are doing crazy stuff because of the Internet.

USA!

USA! You don't really know which stuff is real.

USA!

So you have to take everything seriously.

If lots of people were shot, killed, all the finger -pointing and recrimination

would occur afterwards where who knew what, when, and how come they didn't

a better plan.

The problem in this day and age is how do you police a joke?

Any future plans? I mean, after this weekend passes, do you have anything in

store? What's next on your bucket list?

I have no idea. Do you know what happened to Maddie?

I've just gone through the most surreal and exciting moment of my life.

And then one week later, I'm back on the clock at the vape shop.