Perspective: Conspiracy theoryOK, but Seriously, What Really Goes on Inside Area 51?

So apparently a bunch of people showed up in the Nevada desert this weekend to follow through on their Facebook pledge to storm Area 51 and “see them aliens.” And it wasn’t nearly as exciting as some had hoped.

OK, but really. What goes on at Area 51? If people had actually gotten inside — which, to be clear, was ill-advised — what would they have found?

Dakin Andone writes fir CNN that there’s a lot that we don’t know about the Area 51 (thus, the conspiracy theories). But here’s what we do know.

Area 51 is a classified US Air Force facility in the Nevada Test and Training Range, a massive government facility outside Las Vegas.

It was originally used by the CIA as a site to develop and test the U-2 reconnaissance plane, which was meant to spy on the Soviet Union, said Annie Jacobsen, a journalist and the author of the book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base.

By the time the US government finally acknowledged Area 51, it had been used for decades as fodder for conspiracy theorists.

“Area 51 is among the most mysterious, most secretive bases,” Jacobsen told CNN, “which only adds to the public fascination and lore with it.”

Perhaps the most widely known conspiracy theory was that Area 51 housed an alien spacecraft that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, along with the bodies of the pilots.

The supposed UFO was actually smashed parts of balloons, sensors and radar reflectors from the wreckage of a classified government project meant to “determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research,” according to a 1994 Air Force report.

But Area 51 didn’t really enter the public conscience until 1989. That’s when a man named Bob Lazar claimed in an interview with a local news station that he had worked at Area 51 to reverse engineer what he said was a downed alien spacecraft.

Lazar’s interview and the claims he made “unveiled this secret base with a big splash,” Jacobsen said. “And since then, the lore and mythology and myth has only grown around Area 51.”