
The building is given a name and seen much more elaborately in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where it is recursively connected with more recent pop culture. The warehouse first appeared briefly at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a scene which has since has been parodied multiple times in media. The facility had an external perimeter which was guarded by military police while hangar basement contained a rocket testbed which Indiana Jones and Antonin Dovchenko accidentally activated while fighting each other. During the battle in the warehouse, many crates, including the one containing the Ark, were damaged.


It was the latter which Irina Spalko and her band of Soviet soldiers forced Indiana Jones to find for them in 1957. Among other secret items stored there were the unearthly remains after the events in Roswell in 1947.

Thousands of secret items were stored at Hangar 51, including the Ark of the Covenant - placed there in 1936. Hangar 51 was in operation as early as 1934, the year intelligence agents Eaton and Musgrove met with the protegé of Adventure Society professor John Allen to propose that Allen's group become their "top men."
