A large wildfire torched up this week near Nevada's mysterious Area 51 Air Force base — and naturally, the rumor mill is churning.
As the Daily Mail reports, the blaze near the highly-classified base was sparked by the so-called Gothic Fire, a massive wildfire that broke out some 20 miles away from the base and has since burned through tens of thousands of acres of desert.
EWU Crew, a livestream based in the nearby town of Rachel, Nevada that watches the Air Force base around the clock, captured video of a massive plume of smoke unfurling over Area 51. Soon after, conspiracists began to speculate about what they believed might really be happening there.
"Look to lame contrived bullshit like this to distract from Trump / Epstein Files," one user posted on X. "Just release the Files."
"Locals said they heard a boom and don't believe the official story," another account claimed.
To be fair, recent reporting has revealed that there's good reason to be suspicious of any official narratives out of Area 51. In a wild new exposé last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that years ago, an Air Force colonel gave out photos of a fake flying saucer at a bar near the Air Force base — likely in an effort to obfuscate the testing of actual experimental aircraft in the area.
So rampant were these conspiracy theories that a reader-submitted note explaining that the smoke was the result of the Gothic Fire was affixed to the bottom of one of the posts of the EWU Crew footage.
In its reporting on the blaze, the Daily Mail noted that the Gothic Fire — which is still burning, per the Watch Duty wildfire-tracking app, and is currently about 35,000 acres in size — gained traction as it spread through the heat and low humidity of northern Nevada.
The tabloid also pointed out that the area surrounding the classified base is full of burnable vegetation, including pinyon pines, juniper trees, and Joshua trees. Indeed, data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed timber as the primary fuel method, which is now about 20 percent contained.
Despite its massive size, per the Bureau of Land Management, there have been no evacuations ordered for the Gothic Fire because it broke out in such a remote part of the Nevada desert.
More on blazes: Millions Of Americans Are Being Advised Not To Go Outside
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