Clap Those Alien Cheeks

About

Clap Those Alien Cheeks is a slang expression that means "to have sex with an extraterrestrial." The phrase grew in popularity as part of the Storm Area 51 meme, becoming a mock reason for why everyone wanted to storm the military base.

Origin

One of the earliest jokes about "alien cheeks" was posted on December 13th, 2015. That day, Twitter ^[1] user @OGwi11iamS shared a joke in the explainafilmplotbadly Twitter game. They wrote of the film Avatar, "Solider betrays the human race just to get some blue alien cheeks" (shown below).

Spread

Over the next few years, the expression grew in usage on Twitter. On May 20th, 2017, Twitter^[2] user @Yehawbaby tweeted, "dont try to tell me if yall were on guardians of the galaxy yall wouldnt clap some alien cheeks" (shown below, left). The following year, on May 23rd, 2018, Twitter^[3] user @YoungBasedRicci tweeted, "Just saw the new han solo movie and one question kept bugging me during the whole thing. Did han ever clap alien cheeks? Otherwise good movie. 8/10" (shown below, right).

On June 27th, 2019, three anonymous Facebook users "Shitposting cuz im in shambles," "Smyleekun" and "The Hidden Sound" created the event page "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," scheduled to commence at 3:00 a.m. on September 20th, 2019.^[4] The description reads, "We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let's see them aliens."

As the event grew in popularity, people began making jokes about breaking into with the express purpose of having sexual intercourse with an alien. The subject grew into part of the memes about the event. For example, those sharing the event frequently used the expression (example below, left). One of the most frequently shared memes featured a series of images that compared the inaugurations of Presidents Obama and Trump to those coming to Area 51 to "clap some alien cheeks" (shown below, center).

On July 11th, Twitter user @ellie_olb shared a video of a person in a Star Wars bounty hunter costume talking about breaking into Area 51 and "clapping some alien ass cheeks." The post received more than 4 million views, 175,000 likes and 68,000 retweets in less than two months (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References