Nome, Alaska, has garnered interest lately due to its use as the site of a 2009 movie, “The Fourth Kind”. The film is a mock documentary, or “mockumentary” that purports to present factual information about alien abductions. The film, however, is fictitious, and was not actually filmed in Nome, Alaska, but in Bulgaria and Squamish, Canada.
The real town of Nome, Alaska, is located in Northwest Alaska on the southern Seward Peninsula coast on Norton Sound of the Bering Sea, approximately 500 miles west of Fairbanks, Alaska. Nome has a population of about 3,650. It is located a bit north of 65° latitude, just south of the Arctic Circle, giving it a subarctic climate with long, very cold winters and short cool summers. February is the coolest month, with temperatures averaging about 6° F (-15° C). Average seasonal snowfall is almost five feet (1.5 m). There are about 21 hours of daylight during the month of June and about 5 hours of daylight during January.
In 1900 Nome was the largest city in the Alaska Territory with an official census figure of 12,488. It is estimated that Nome’s population peaked at 20,000 between 1900-1909. The source of this relatively high population was the discovery of gold at Anvil Creek in 1898.
In the winter of 1925 a diphtheria epidemic broke out among the native Inuit population in the Nome area. The necessary life-saving serum could not be flown in to Nome from Anchorage due to severe blizzards throughout the surrounding territory. The required serum was delivered to Nome by a relay of dog sled teams. This historic event has been commemorated each March since 1973 in the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Nome is the site of the finish of the dog sled race, which covers 1,049 miles (1,678 km) through some of the most extreme wilderness in the United States. The population of Nome increases by about 1,000 for the finish of the race.
The native Eskimo people have lived in the Bering Strait region around Nome for at least 4,000 years. The earliest documented evidence of human habitation dates back 10,000 years.