Glenn Campbell
| Name(s): | Glenn Campbell |
|---|---|
| Birth Date: | Nov. 22, 1959 |
| Birth Place: | Boston |
| Death Date: | Dec. 13, 2021 |
Born and raised in the Boston area, Glenn first came to public attention in 1994 as a UFO researcher and unofficial spokesman for Area 51, the secret military base in the Nevada desert. If you have heard the name "Area 51", it is due in part to his successful efforts to publicize the base in the mid-1990s.
Glenn had worked as a computer programmer in Boston and gained a driving interest in aliens as a child because as he said, “I wanted them to help me escape.” While this childhood interest in ufology waned, he again caught the UFO bug in 1991 reading magazines which mentioned Area 51. The stories of being able to see UFOs regularly finally drove Glenn to chase his passion and drive cross country to the Little A’le’Inn in January of 1993. Once there he would plug in and live in his RV just behind the A'le'Inn. He only intended on staying for a month, but this trip ended up being 2-and-half-years of life in Rachel, where he became the self-proclaimed “Area 51 Public Relations Officer.”
In 1993, having found some modest success in computer software, Glenn moved to the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada to devote himself full-time to exploring this unacknowledged government facility. Featured in a major article in the New York Times Sunday magazine in 1994, Glenn soon hosted dozens of journalists and appeared in countless news broadcasts as an Area 51 expert. The highlight of his early television career was an appearance on "UFO Cover-Up Live", a live two-hour broadcast by Larry King from the desert outside the base. He also appeared on "The Montel Williams Show", several national news magazine shows, such as "CBS Sunday Morning", and on the first paranormal TV series of the cable TV era, "Sightings" and "Encounters". In all his TV appearances, Glenn served as both as an on-screen expert and as an off-screen location fixer, supplying producers and film crews with essential information about the local area. Glenn helped many TV crews pull off complex expeditions in the remote desert with few hitches.
Glenn was a pragmatic personality who eventually left Rachel, NV to report on family court in Las Vegas, then becoming a baggage handler for US Airways before gaining a wanderlust lifestyle akin to Christopher McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp) where he began traveling the world on the cheap (he had been laid off but could fly for free), ultimately visiting 88 countries before his first battle with lymphoma in 2018. He would beat lymphoma and continued to travel around the United States living out of a car (he ran a side business of transporting people’s vehicles cross country) out of choice, documenting his travels and thoughts. He was diagnosed again with lymphoma in early 2021 and ultimately declared it a draw on December 13th, 2021.
Glenn withdrew from the public eye in the early 2000s to explore marriage and family but returned in 2009 as an on-screen guide and off-screen consultant for the Area 51 episode of the History Channel's "UFO Hunters", which became the highest rated episode of the series. Since then, Glenn has appeared on paranormal and news shows about once a year, mainly drawing upon his Area 51 expertise from the 1990s. (Glenn is no longer an active Area 51 researcher.) His latest appearances are on German and Danish TV networks. Glenn now considers himself a UFO agnostic. He can't say definitively whether or not aliens exist, only that they are not currently relevant to our life on Earth.
A former airline employee and obsessive traveler, Glenn now lives continuously on the road without any fixed residence. As of February 2017, he has visited 78 countries. He has self-produced several full-length travel shows on YouTube, including visits to Kazakhstan and Arctic Norway. His stunning photos and videos from around the world are found on Instagram (2 accounts). He posts to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter almost every day, and to YouTube about once a week. He is "BadDalaiLama" on most social media platforms.
Glenn is also an author. His book "The Case Against Marriage," has been published in both English and Turkish. He is the author of two self-published novels, including "Harper Junction", the story of an inch-high young man who lives on a basement train set.
