I wasn't sure whether to put this thread in Humor, Science, or Other. I chose Other.
The Black Mailbox
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TIKABOO VALLEY, Nev. - The only landmark for about 40 miles on a barren stretch of highway is a mailbox battered by time and desert gusts. It’s known as the Black Mailbox, although it’s actually dingy white.
Over the years, hundreds of people have converged in southcentral Nevada to photograph the box - the size of a small television - held up by a chipped metal pole. They camp next to it. They try to break into it. They debate its significance or simply huddle by it for hours, staring into the night.
Some think the mailbox is linked to nearby Area 51, a military installation and purported hotbed of extraterrestrial activity. At the very least, they consider the box a prime magnet for flying saucers.
A few visitors have claimed to have encountered celestial oddities. But most enjoy uneventful nights at the mailbox, situated between the towns of Alamo and Rachel.
...The owners of the mailbox, Steve and Glenda Medlin, moved in 1973 to a cattle ranch in Tikaboo Valley, about 80 miles north of Las Vegas. There was no talk of aliens and no home mail delivery.
A few years later, a local tungsten quarry reopened. Some miners moved to a trailer park nearthe Medlins; it grew into the town of Rachel. Postal carriers began delivery, and the couple put up a common black rural mailbox about six miles from their home, near Nevada 375.
In 1989, according to a history of Rachel, a man named Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas television station that he had worked with alien spacecraft at nearby Nellis Air Force Base. He and his buddies, Lazar claimed, also watched saucer test flights in Tikaboo Valley.
So many tourists soon descended on Rachel - on the edge of the valley - that the Rachel Bar & Grill was renamed the Little A’Le’Inn. People downed Alien Burgers and quaffed beer before visiting the mailbox, the only landmark in Tikaboo Valley. The mailbox acquired a cultlike following.
“For some reason, Tuesday nights was when they thought the aliens came out. Then it was Wednesdays,” Glenda Medlin says with notable disdain.
...Three years ago, after seeing the Little A’Le’Inn on television, Spidell and her husband headed to Tikaboo Valley in early summer. She recalled peering out her car window on that trip and glimpsing three orange UFOs, followed by a giant saucer.
“We watched it for a little bit,” she says, “and then it went over the mountain, and it glowed for two or three minutes. It landed at Area 51.”
The Spidells have returned every year since.
See here.
