rectangle, is not particularly interesting to behold. What draws the attention however, is the tattered and faded sign which still hangs by the roadside proclaiming “Alien Fresh Jerky”.
Knowing nothing of what I was looking at it was decided better to stop and film the place while there, rather than regret a missed opportunity upon my return to New Jersey.
Turns out... there's not much of a story to tell.
A common misconception is that the jerky shop was run out of the old yellow structure behind the sign. In reality “Alien Fresh Jerky” was simply a small road-side stand.
The yellow building was abandoned before the jerky shop was ever set up, and they simply utilized the sign posts from the disused building to hang their banner.
A banner that they left behind in 2002 when the business moved to its new home in Baker California. Since then tourists driving past area 51 through the Nevada desert via the Extraterrestrial Highway
have been greeted with this enigmatic sign and abandoned building at their journey’s end (or beginning depending on which direction you're coming from).
The yellow building, from what little information I have found, seems to be the ruins of a long abandoned casino. Any physical clues to what it really was have long since been destroyed or gone missing.
Still, it seems people find the place interesting enough that it has become a kind of unofficial tourist spot. I came across numerous images of people posing in front of the banner
and snapshots of the building from out car windows during my time on Google. That being said, it's popularity-through-oddness was reason enough for me to create this entry.
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What a strange place for anything to be - out in the middle of nowhere.
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