Joerg Arnu, a 62-year-old Rachel resident and a love for military aviation, runs the town’s tourism website and Dreamland Resort, a hub for information related to Area 51, explains some of the technology believed to be used behind the gates of Area 51 in Rachel, Nevada on Thursday, April 25, 2024.
Sunday, May 5, 2024 | 2 a.m.
RACHEL — The sky is nearly clear blue on this early afternoon, spotted only with a few white clouds, outside the windows of Joerg Arnu’s home.
Arnu grabs a mug from his coffee table, rises off the couch and walks over to the kitchen to refill the glass with water when he sees a rapidly-approaching dot cutting through the sky. The object was flying so low he thought it would crash right into his property just off the Extraterrestrial Highway — also known as State Route 375.
Despite living near the road known for its many UFO sightings, this wasn’t one of them. It was a military jet from Nellis Air Force Base doing practice maneuvers, Arnu said, and just another day for the Rachel resident, who lives only miles away from one of the perimeter gates of Area 51, the legendary former top-secret U.S. Air Force base that has long been rumored to be the home of extraterrestrial life.
Arnu, 62, a German-born retired computer programmer, has a love for military aviation, the mystery of Area 51 and the desert — making Rachel, a town of only 50 people, a perfect place for him.
And for the past 25 years, Arnu has ran both the Rachel town website as well as Dreamland Resort, an online hub for Area 51 enthusiasts that has become a sort of community for people to share their theories or information on the happenings at one of the United States’ most well-known – and fantasized – military bases.
“When I first came here, it was all word of mouth; there was nobody recording the history of Rachel; there was no tourism (or) nobody promoting tourism, so I started this Rachel website,” Arnu said, adding that he also developed the Dreamland Resort website and has bought and operates “a handful” of other sites.
Arnu’s descent into Area 51 lore began in the late 1990s, when he moved from Berlin to San Francisco for a programming job. He’s had a love for planes since his childhood, when he’d watch air shows in Hannover, Germany, where American and British teams would fly overhead in elaborate shows of technological might.
After visiting near Area 51 on a short trip down from the Bay Area, Arnu said he became enamored with Rachel and the mystery surrounding the military base, which has been the focal point for over 50 years of theories that the U.S. was hiding aliens and interstellar technology.
According to the CIA, the reality is that Area 51 — situated within the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake roughly 85 miles north of Las Vegas as the crow flies — is an Air Force facility that was used as a secret testing site for the highly-classified U-2 and A-12 OXCART reconnaissance aircraft programs.
Following his first day trip, Arnu began visiting the area more often, but he had no way to find reliable or recent information on Area 51 and Rachel. He took matters into his own hands and created Dreamland Resort while camping near the Nevada-California border, coding the website’s first few pages in the back of his truck.
He said it “just took off and became this focal point for people that were very much into military aviation, figuring out what’s going on at Area 51 — so called ‘Black Projects.’ ”
Arnu stresses he is “not a UFO guy.”
Since the website was established in 1999, Dreamland Resort has received over 8.5 million online visits, Arnu said.
Dreamland Resort, which gets its name from the call signal used at Area 51 and is branded as “Endorsed by FBI and AF OSI,” has tabs full of information on the military jets, other aircraft and aviation-related information Arnu has collected with his online community.
Bright yellow links lead visitors to pages filled with aerial photos of possible Black Project sightings over Area 51— like the RQ-180 jet — maps showing buildings inside the base and the comprehensive history of aircraft testing at the facility.
He even has a special area for the Roadrunners Internationale, an association of former CIA, Air Force and contract personnel that served at Area 51 during the Cold War. Much of this information was collected and compiled by Arnu, who said he updated the website almost daily with tidbits he hears from radio transmissions on his three scanners or photographs he captures himself.
The former programmer lives only a few miles away from the back gate of the Area 51 perimeter and has routinely visited nearby areas like Coyote Peak to grab pictures.
“They got the Russian radar sites right by the back end and tested all stuff against them, so I’m seeing warning lights and I see maybe a light flying over at night and I know there’s something going on,” Arnu explained. “So I’m listening on the scanner and I can kind of get an idea of what they’re doing. (But) you just never know what to expect; that’s the great thing.”
Arnu has insisted since the website’s inception that no classified information has been posted on Dreamland Resort forums, even amid questions from the public. He also emphasized that he’s not interested in uploading information the government wouldn’t want in the public domain and is willing to take down anything problematic so long as someone notifies him about it.
“Many watchers here are former site employees from decades ago and would be very quick to inform Joerg of a posting that contains sensitive (classified) information,” said Don, a member of the Dreamland Resort forum, in response to a question uploaded Monday. “There are many watchdogs here trying to stay to the plan Joerg laid out. Not wanting to disclose any information until the US Government wants that info out to the public.”
Despite this, Arnu said he had his home in Rachel and second house in the Las Vegas area raided by federal investigators two years ago.
Lt. Col. Bryon McGarry, now-former public affairs chief at Nellis Air Force Base, told The Associated Press in 2022 that he was aware Arnu’s properties had been searched by the FBI and Air Force Office of Special Investigations agents. He did not provide any additional information to the AP.
Arnu said FBI agents busted his gate, knocked on his door in the early morning and dragged him in handcuffs outside of his house.
Arnu said the agents took all of his electronic devices — his phones, computers and backup drives – all of which had materials on the military base that he spent years collecting. He added that his girlfriend, who stays at their house in Las Vegas, was also dragged out of their other home in her underwear and detained in the back of a federal vehicle.
Some of the devices taken included personal items, like pictures of Arnu’s deceased parents, medical records, financial statements and over 20 years of memories contained in old photographs that he now believes are gone forever, he said.
Arnu’s confiscated devices will stay with the FBI for five years, then they would be returned to him, but Arnu said much of the material on them would be outdated and useless to publish at that point.
“I think all that was to send a message that, you know, back off,” Arnu said. “It’s kind of, ‘Let’s just screw with that guy.’ They thought I might not show it on my website, I might quit publishing photos (but) I have no intention of doing any of that.”
After the raid on his homes, Arnu set up a GoFundMe to raise money for new equipment and damages to his house, including broken doors and blinds, caused by the government agents, he said.
On the fundraiser page, Arnu said he needed $20,000 to replace his equipment, $5,500 in repairs and $7,000 — and growing — in legal fees. Jeorg said he was never given a reason for the raid, and no charges have been filed against him, but he has hired an attorney just in case. The fundraiser was created Nov. 17, 2022, and has amassed $17,672 from 442 donations. Its goal is $30,000.
“Appreciate the time and value of the work on the website in the many years I have visited and traveled to the area,” said David Hardy, a frequent visitor to Rachel who donated $100 to Arnu’s GoFundMe campaign. “Best of luck and don’t stop fighting.”
Arnu said he was “very, very grateful for the help that the community has shown” him through donations or messages of support. Though the run-in with the FBI has left an indelible mark on Arnu, he refuses to stop preserving the history of Area 51, the Roadrunners or Rachel.
Arnu is not sure about the future of the website and who will take it over when he’s eventually too old to run it — someone young, he hopes, with just as much passion for military aviation as him and his community of fellow enthusiasts.
“I am preserving the early history of Area 51, on the Roadrunners website and also on my Dreamland Resort website; I’m preserving the history of the town of Rachel on the Rachel website, and that is too important to just let me be intimidated,” Arnu said. “I’m trying to find ways to attract more of the younger crowd and maybe to find someone who, like me back then, wants to run with it and wants to bring it to the next level, but I’m hoping that I still have a number of years until then.”
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