This is what the Area 51 meme is really all about – Laura Waddell

In some ways, the recent Area 51 meme is only the latest 90s fad to come full circle and return, like tattoo necklaces and tie-dye. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a Facebook event to storm Area 51 (“they can’t stop all of us”) has gone viral and is the current reference du jour online.

A sign for a motel on the Extraterrestrial Highway in Rachel, Nevada, near the mysterious Area 51 military base (AP Photo/Laura Rauch)

Those who’ve clicked attend on the attempted liberation of aliens within talk about what they’re going to do with “my alien” afterwards; a cipher for reacting to current events and just chilling out with a benevolent green pal.

The top Twitter result reads “My alien who I rescued from Area 51 sitting with me as I go through my 8th breakdown of the day not knowing what to do because they don’t know what emotions are” with a gif of a confused-looking woman. It’s weird, confessional, and funny – one big in-joke.

But the parallels between the Area 51 meme and one of the top stories in America today, migrant camps, are glaring. An attempt to storm a security facility and liberate those within?

The anti-incarceration feelings are not subtle. Aliens have always been an anti-authority interest, steeped in suspicion of what is being covered up and withheld from citizens. It’s no wonder they’re back.

It’s easier to joke about aliens than it is to confront reality. Like much of the surreal currency the internet trades in, the Area 51 meme is dissolution of real life, a fantasy thousands of people are role-playing.

Meme culture (the trading of surreal, funny images and jokes, riffing off each other and creative with language) has sprung up at a time young people feel alienated from a society where it’s more difficult to gain the financial footholds of earlier generations and current affairs are spiralling downwards.

At its bleakest, there’s the feeling, well, why not look at idiotic pictures of aliens online all night, because little else matters?

But they also contain latent feelings of freedom to live as we please, and a desire for others to do so. Go forth, Area 51-ers.