An anthropologist from California had an unexpected encounter during a covert expedition into the Nevada desert – he found himself immersed in the peculiar events unfolding at Area 51.

Jerry Freeman, in 1996, ventured not in search of UFOs or classified government schemes but to trace the path of the 1849 pioneers who journeyed west in pursuit of gold.

However, that path took Freeman through a part of Nevada restricted by the US Air Force, forcing him to travel at night to avoid security patrols.

During one night of his week-long excursion, Freeman witnessed a remarkable sight near Papoose Lake, a dried-up lake bed in Lincoln County speculated to hide a covert alien spaceship storage facility referred to as ‘S-4.’

Freeman told journalist and UFO researcher George Knapp that a doorway suddenly opened up in the middle of the air near Papoose Lake, emitting a bright blueish light before closing and completely disappearing into the desert landscape.

‘It looked like a dry lake bed to me, nothing else, but at night it was a different story,’ Freeman revealed.

‘I could clearly see what were security lights on the perimeters and I could see lights that opened and closed near the center of the lake,’ the anthropologist continued.

Freeman also revealed that he felt vibrations similar to an earthquake as he watched the strange scene unfold for about two minutes at the top secret base.

‘It’s something they’re testing either directly underground or I was feeling vibrations completely from Groom Lake, I don’t know,’ Freeman told Knapp during a recorded interview before the anthropologist’s death in 2001.

‘I think if they’d have caught me in there that they’d have lit me up like a Roman candle,’ he feared.

Freeman’s desert trek originally intended to track down the lost inscriptions of a doomed group of gold prospectors who died while trying to find a shortcut to the gold fields of California.

These 1849 pioneers veered off the historic Spanish trail which was taking miners out west through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.

However, this group is believed to have broken off from the trail in Utah and tried to make it to California quicker by cutting through the Nevada desert.

Unfortunately, they never made it, and the area would eventually gain its infamous name – Death Valley.

All that is left of the lost explorers were their journals, revealing that they had left behind seven inscriptions in the desert, marking their journey during the Gold Rush.

Unfortunately for Freeman, the journals revealed that some of these historic markers now sit within the boundary markers of the Air Force’s Nevada testing site – where the secretive Area 51 sits.

Although Freeman received encouragement from the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management to find these lost pieces of history, the Air Force flatly denied him access to the area – leading the adventurer to make the journey at night without permission.

Making matters worse, S-4 had just become a public talking point thanks to a man named Bob Lazar.

Lazar claimed he was a former government physicist who worked at S-4, reverse-engineering alien spacecraft and extraterrestrial technology.

Lazar began making his claims that the US military was not only recovering UFOs but creating their own aircraft using modified alien hardware in 1989.

He continued to make television appearances revealing the existence of Area 51 and secret government projects taking place in the desert for years, including several interviews with Knapp.

Although the US government would not officially acknowledge that Area 51 really existed until 2013, the secret base was already becoming a cultural phenomenon in the 1990s.

Moreover, a 1996 lawsuit by a group who claimed they were stationed at Area 51 alleged that they were exposed to toxic chemicals while at the base.

That lawsuit was eventually dismissed based on national security concerns and President Bill Clinton would actually sign an executive order exempting the base from the nation’s environmental laws.

However, the government avoid actually naming ‘Area 51’ in the court documents, instead referring to the site as ‘Groom Lake’ – right where Freeman said he encountered the strange door in the middle of the lake bed.

Although the exact details surrounding Area 51 are still largely a mystery, it’s been widely speculated that the military uses the facility to test experimental aircraft.

The base sits in a roughly 60-square-mile tract that encompasses most of Groom Dry Lake, and it is believed to lie close to the northeast edge of a mountain, which stands between Groom and Papoose dry lakes. 

Since Freeman’s sighting near the end of 1996, Area 51 has continued to spark wild conspiracy theories tied to aliens and UFOs.

This month, a mysterious triangular tower at Area 51 was spotted on Google Maps, setting off widespread speculation that it is somehow involved in alien contact.

While it’s still unclear what Freeman saw that night in the desert, the answers may be hiding in files which could soon be declassified by the Trump Administration.

Jim Goodall, an aviation journalist with firsthand sources who have worked at the classified base, gave an interview in the mid-1990s where he discussed top-secret technologies at the site that ‘would make George Lucas envious.’

‘One gentleman spent 12 of his 30 years in black programs at Groom Lake [as Area 51 is also known],’ Goodall explained in the unearthed documentary interview.

‘I asked him, ‘Can you really tell me what’s happening out there?” he continued.

‘And he said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of things going on there that I won’t be able to tell you until the year 2025.”

The mention of ‘2025’ could refer to an executive order by then-President Clinton, which established a 25-year timer for the ‘automatic declassification’ of government secrets.

Moreover, President Trump has publicly stated that his administration would be reviewing and releasing documents tied to several national mysteries over the year, including the decades of reports about extraterrestrial life.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida was recently appointed to lead a new task force focused on declassifying ‘government secrets.’

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said, ‘Rep. Luna is committed to shining a light on the truth and ending the era of secrecy.’