In the summer of 1994, less than a year before he blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, Timothy McVeigh visited Area 51, the secret installation north of Las Vegas, Nevada, where legend has it that the U.S. government keeps captured UFOs. McVeigh apparently made the visit to protest restrictions on public access to the base, but he also had had a long-standing fascination with flying saucers and tales of alien life forms. On death row he watched the film Contact, a story of a scientist contacted by aliens, six times in two days. McVeigh was also said to have been a regular listener to the shortwave-radio broadcasts of Milton William Cooper, an Arizona-based conspiracy theorist who first emerged in UFO circles in the 1980s and later acquired a large audience among antigovernment activists. A friend of Cooper’s claims that McVeigh visited Cooper shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing. The substance of their conversation is unknown.