Over the years, hundreds of people have converged here in south-central 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.

This night, Lester Arnold, a 59-year-old industrial mechanic, is in Rachel offering to show visitors Mailbox Road or the state-christened Extraterrestrial Highway. He has travelled from Declo, Idaho, for the annual UFO Friendship Conference Camp Out. A few years ago at the mailbox, Arnold says, he saw a fireball-like object shoot over the mountains, stop and shrink until it vanished. The cows grazing alongside it, conspiracy theorists whisper, are mounted with spy cameras.

The box is made of quarter-inch-thick bulletproof metal, and its door is clamped shut with a Master Lock. Its owner, say the black letters printed on its side, is STEVE MEDLIN, HC 61, BOX 80. Visitors have added bumper stickers and their own musings: “Trust no one” and “I am the last alien” among them. “It’s become this mecca,” says a Las Vegas man who’s admiring the weathered box.

The owners of the mailbox, Steve and Glenda Medlin, moved in 1973 to a 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 near the 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 Highway 375.

In 1989, a man named Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas television station that he had worked with alien spacecraft at nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Soon, tourists descended on Rachel. The mailbox acquired a cult-like following.

UFO tourists left messages in the mailbox for the aliens. “They were waiting for the aliens to abduct them, and they were anxious to meet them... We’d just shake our heads,” says Glenda Medlin, who long ago stopped reading the notes. “It was so asinine.”

Some people opened the couple’s mail, hoping to intercept classified correspondence. Some camped at the mailbox—for weeks, in some cases. A few shot the mailbox, leaving holes in the Medlins’ bills and junk mail. That was too much for the ranchers.

Glenda Medlin doesn’t remember when her husband swapped out the black mailbox for the larger white bulletproof one, but an online posting pegs the date as March 27, 1996.

“They were waiting for the aliens to abduct them, and they were anxious to meet them... We’d just shake our heads”

—Glenda Medlin, owner of the mailbox