The True Story Behind Trainwreck: Storm Area 51

The last 2025 installment of Trainwreck, Netflix’s series on disasters in recent history, is more about a trainwreck that was averted.

Out July 29, Trainwreck: Storm Area 51 explores what happened when conspiracy theorists gathered at a highly-protected military base in rural Nevada, convinced that was where the government was doing top-secret U.F.O research.

They were prompted by a Facebook post that was created as a joke. When Matty Roberts of Bakersfield, California, created the public Facebook event “Storm Area 51” for Sep. 20, 2019, at 3 a.m., he didn’t expect it to go viral. It racked up millions of RSVPs and was poised to be a trainwreck of sorts for the nearby town of Rachel, Nevada and its 56 residents. But only a few hundred people showed up in the end, and a parallel celebration in Las Vegas drew more than 10,000 attendees. Both events were considered a success in the end, in the sense that no one died, and attendees had fun.