system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Area 51

I know surprisingly little about it. Just brief me on everything. The extent of my knowledge is something about aliens and is it possibly in Nevada?

EDIT: Thanks to everybody answered :)
gpt
Area 51 is/was a military base in southern Nevada where the military tests/tested its latest and greatest military technology. Planes like the SR-71 Blackbird and B2 Stealth Bomber were tested here, before anyone had ever seen anything like these planes. Because of this, people would occasionally catch a glimpse of some new tech like this flying in the air, and be unable to identify what it was (Unidentified Flying Object). Because the military wasn't about to tell people what they were looking at (Top Secret) they made really bad/lazy lies about what these sightings were of (weather balloons, swamp gas etc.).

Because of how bad or boring these lies tended to be, many people assumed they were covering up aliens. The most famous event being the Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947. The government says it was a top secret surveillance balloon for Project Mogul meant for early detection of Soviet ballistic missiles. People instead preferred to believe it was an alien crash that the government covered up.