The opening military test site in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in Nevada.
The film opens in 1957 with a convoy approaching a secret U.S. military installation near a nuclear test area. Indiana Jones has been forced to help Soviet agents reach a warehouse, but he escapes before the nuclear detonation and shelters inside a lead-lined refrigerator. The sequence establishes both the Cold War setting and the film’s larger interest in secret government projects.
The location is associated with the Nevada Test Site, the real U.S. nuclear testing region northwest of Las Vegas. The movie dramatizes the period’s weapons testing through a fictionalized action sequence rather than presenting a documentary account.
Nevada is sometimes confused with neighboring southwestern states because the film’s desert scenery resembles locations in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The story’s later archaeological locations are also spread across several countries, making the opening setting easy to overlook.