ET highway

For a long time the town of Rachel and the so called ET highway have been high on my list to visit. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t believe in little green men, or UFOs, although….. well ok not really. What I do find fascinating is that whole highways, secret bases and most of all a whole town is dedicated to something that “does not exist” (play X-files tunes here).

But for something that isn’t real…. well there are lot of people believing/making money off it, and of course it’s fun.

And I don’t fool you, even the navigational system gave us a real feeling of being somewhere special….

While visiting PSW this year we decided it was time to visit this area during our day off.
From Vegas it’s a nice ride through the desert of app 2-3 hours, but it was not without obstacles. A few miles before Rachel we were stopped by a group of people who said the road was almost caving in due to some floods, at first we thought “well maybe…..” but as soon as they showed us the road we decided that it was not worth the risk.

And indeed (as you can see here) within a few minutes the police was on site to warn people about the cave in danger. Now what stunned me was that in fact this was the only road in Rachel, unless you wanted to travel 2 hours more…. pffff so we drove all this way to be stopped by nature, maybe there are aliens after all…….. But there was another site that should be cool to visit… the famous AREA 51….. (play tune of the Twilight zone here).

As you all probably know Area 51 is the highly secret military base where the American military is hiding UFOs, Aliens etc. So of course we had to visit this especially after seeing so many documentaries on this area on NGC and Discovery. Now some people might say that most is lied but it did surprise me a little bit that the “famous” white cars are indeed standing on top of a hill to keep watch over the entrance of this area. We were also very happy we rented a good car with AWD because the road to Area 51 is not… well easy to travel.

Actually the images down here were in a different location which we visited after we stopped in Rachel, both however are often labeled as Area 51 so I placed them together in this piece.

After visiting Area 51 we decided to drive back to the road and see if we could maybe get a detour around the broken road. When we returned to the road it was indeed possible, there was already a lot of work going on and we could drive through a by-pass. And we arrived a few minutes later in Rachel Nevada.

The main attraction of Rachel is a cafe with a “heavy” Alien theme as you can see here.

On the way to Rachel you also have to look out for probably the most famous Mailbox in the world, often called the “black” mailbox, this is a mailbox in the middle of nowhere and according to many this is where topsecret “alien” documents were posted for the military… now let’s be honest… do you really think that the military would take the risk to put this highly secretive material in a mailbox where everyone could get to it….. well ok at least it was the meeting spot for many UFO watchers and many many sightings were reported here.

In reality the mailbox belongs to someone that lives down the road (but far down the road). However this did not stop us from also visiting this part of the ET highway of course.

Now some of you will wonder “why did you drove all that way for something this weird?” well to be honest, after seeing a documentary by Louis Therioux (a documentary maker I really love) Rachel always have been on my list to visit because the whole feel and sense in that area is I think best described as special and because the roads leading to it (as most roads in California) are just plain awesome to travel.

After visiting Rachel and Area 51 I have to be honest, that everytime we saw a cow in the rear view mirror we just expected….. well that it would be beamed up, but nothing happened….. oh well….