Extraterrestrial Highway

Nevada State Route 375 runs ninety-eight lonely miles across the high desert, and in 1996 the state gave it a second name: the Extraterrestrial Highway. It is the strangest road in the region and maybe the country — a two-lane ribbon past open range and empty valleys that happens to skirt the northern edge of the most famous secret base on Earth. This is where the Silver Trails turn from history to legend. The mining camps a hundred miles west died telling true stories; out here the desert tells tall ones, and nobody can quite prove which is which.

What is actually out there is classified, and that is the whole problem. Beyond the warning signs lies Groom Lake — Area 51 to the world — a U.S. Air Force test site on the Nevada Test and Training Range where the U-2, the A-12, and the SR-71 Blackbird were all flown in secret decades before the public knew they existed. Aircraft that could outrun and outclimb anything else alive, tested over an empty desert by men sworn to deny the place existed: it is not hard to see how a rancher glancing up at dusk might have thought he was watching something not of this world.

The legend caught fire in 1989, when a man named Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas television station he had worked on recovered alien spacecraft at a site near Groom Lake and reverse-engineered their propulsion. His claims have never been verified and are widely doubted, but they were irresistible, and they turned this stretch of Lincoln County into a pilgrimage route. By the mid-1990s the state leaned in, renaming the highway with a wink — there were "Speed Limit Warp 7" signs and a dedication ceremony with the stars of Independence Day — and the alien economy was born.

For years the unofficial shrine was the Black Mailbox, a rancher's ordinary mail drop beside the highway where the dirt road peels off toward the base's back gate. UFO watchers gathered there by the dozens on clear nights; the owner, tired of strangers and vandals, eventually hauled it away, but the name and the legend outlived the mailbox itself. The dirt roads still run toward the perimeter, still end at warning signs and silent security trucks, and still tempt the curious — though there is no cell service out there, no water, and real penalties, fines and possible jail, waiting for anyone who crosses the line.

The only town on the highway is Rachel, near the midpoint — about fifty people, the youngest town in Nevada, and self-proclaimed UFO Capital of the World. Its secret is that it started as a mining town like all the others, thrown up in the 1970s to house workers at a tungsten mine just east, then reinvented itself when the mine closed and the believers arrived. Today its heart is the Little A'Le'Inn — restaurant, bar, motel, and souvenir shop in one, pronounced "alien," its ceiling papered with dollar bills and its menu running to Alien Burgers. In 2019 a viral internet joke about storming Area 51 briefly threatened to bring hundreds of thousands of people to this town of fifty; mercifully, only a few thousand came.

What is here now is the drive itself, which is the point: a long, beautiful, genuinely empty road under some of the darkest skies in the country, with a giant silver alien outside a souvenir shed at one end and the Little A'Le'Inn at the other. Come with a full tank — the nearest fuel can be sixty miles off — and stay past dark, because the same black sky that hides a secret base also throws an unreal amount of starlight. The highway runs west to US-6 and on toward Tonopah, trading one kind of Nevada wonder for another. Whatever you believe is out there, the road delivers the feeling of it.