The Area 51 Raid Is Off, But the Bud Light Alien Merch Is Still On

Brendan Menapace

If you had your hopes up that a swarm of curious volunteers would storm the gates of Area 51 and release all of the extraterrestrial beings the U.S. military has been housing there like some sort of galactic Julian Assanges, we’ve got some bad news. The event has been canceled. If you were hoping to at least drown your sorrows in Bud Light—specifically cans decorated to coincide with the Area 51 raid—we have even worse news: that Twitter campaign to create the themed cans for mass production failed.

But this story isn’t without good news. Bud Light is sponsoring a music festival in Las Vegas on Thursday called the Area 51 Celebration, and those planned alien cans will be in stock at the Luxor Hotel and Casino’s VIP section.

The beers are there now, and will be until the Sept. 20, but the fridge is locked and requires an “alien finger scan” to open. They’re kind of like those Browns victory fridges, in that finding alien life is as likely as a successful Browns season.

If you didn’t get tickets to the festival, don’t fret. You don’t have to get thousands of your friends to storm the gates of the Luxor. (Please, please don’t do this.) You can just as easily (or easier, in fact) hang out outside of the festival and buy limited edition Bud Light alien merch, like can coolers, shirts, hats and bomber jackets.

For those who can’t even get to the desert in time, the goods are available through the brand’s online gift shop.

With this development, you have to wonder whether this was the plan from the get-go. Yes, Bud Light might’ve seen a boost in beer sales if they slapped a little green guy on the can. But by teasing it online, withholding it and now releasing it for sale, they make it so everyone who wanted that spacey cans can buy them separately.

And anyone who has been to a music festival, Las Vegas or both knows that they can charge an arm and a leg for these products. It’s also a lot more hands-on and interactive than just sending branded boxes of beer to your local distributor or bar. As Marketing Dive points out, it creates “an experiential element” that adds more to the whole promotion.

Maybe some day they’ll finally let us see what’s inside Area 51. Maybe it’s a cache of new alien friends like the scene in “Men in Black” when they go to the headquarters, or maybe it’s just a few government employees keeping fancy airplanes under wraps. Either way, we can hopefully bring some Bud Light and some Bud Light alien swag to share.

(Hopefully the aliens won’t mind that we took some creative liberties with their appearance, though.)

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