But it’s somewhere in northern Wyoming. Somewhere between Agent’s Gulch and Groupie’s Creek. It’s what the government doesn’t want you to know. It’s what the concert industry doesn’t want you to find. It’s what insiders call “Area 21.”

It’s the secret federal testing grounds where the best minds of our time are feverishly working 24/7 to discover ways for teen acts to successfully mature and extend their careers into adulthood.

It’s here that scientists and artist managers study adult bands like Faster Pussycat and W.A.S.P. as they try to find the key that unlocks the secrets of reaching out to the 20-something audiences of the future. They research the biographies of Madonna and Electric Light Orchestra, they map the genomes of echobelly and they analyze the DNA of Berlin, Chuck Mangione and Lynyrd Skynyrd in hopes of finding the “magic bullet” that will propel the teen acts of today to the top of tomorrow’s charts.

Of course, there have been some failures along the way. Veterans of the facility still speak in hushed whispers of the Leif Garrett career derailment of 1979, the 1991 Tiffany implosion and the ill-fated Gary Coleman reverse-engineering attempt of 1993. However, it should be noted that the controversial Rick Schroder/NYPD Blue Experiment did show some promise.

So far, the government has been keeping mum on Area 21, prompting Internet rumors claiming that the mature growth shown on the latest *NSYNC CD is a result of alien technology recovered from the supposed 1947 flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico. And the tabloids have been having a field day claiming that an unidentified NASA source said that the songs on the upcoming Britney Spears’ CD were co-authored by the “Face on Mars.”

Will the teen stars of today enjoy a long and profitable future as mature performers of tomorrow? Or will they stumble against the barrier known within the industry as the Pearlman Phenomena? Insiders say that the researchers at Area 21 are more than hopeful. “If we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to book the Backstreet Boys into arenas when they’re way past 40,” says one unidentified government staffer. “That truly would be ‘one giant leap for fankind.'”