from UFO Magazine

February 2006

from Serpo Website

 

1) Editor William Birnes

Among the more exciting threads that have surfaced on UFO email lists over the past couple of months is the story of Project Serpo, which in previous incarnations, is not a new story. Many in the UFO community have heard versions of this tale before. Among the key elements of this particular story are the following:

1. The Roswell crash didn’t take place in Roswell, actually, but in Corona and near Datil, New Mexico.

2. The surviving ET or EBE, according to the MJ-12 briefing documents, was from the Zeta-Reticuli system, the same system that was home to the alien abductors of Betty and Barney Hill.

3. This EBE made contact with its home planet and in the ensuing negotiations between the U.S. government and the EBEs the parties agreed to set up an exchange program under which U.S. military personnel with different professional specialties would be taken to the EBE’s home planet, Serpo, for an extended reconnaissance mission.

4. The basis of this story made its way to Steven Spielberg and was part of the background for his 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

5. Some members of this mission to Serpo returned to earth. They have since died but have passed their story along to others.

6. Those others, still fearful of releasing classified information, do want to tell the story and are looking for ways to release the information without any criminal sanctions, or worse.

7. There is a Red Book that contains the debriefing information and history of the mission.

8. The journals of some of the mission members are still extant.

9. Photographs of the mission may or may not be released.

10. This story has been above top secret for decades even though some folks in the intelligence inner circle know all about it.

There are many more aspects to this story, each of which is as exciting as the next. However, only those who either read the files and know the files are true and not disinformation or those who actually went on the mission know if this story is true. However, it does make for exciting speculation, regardless of whether it is true or false.

If we give those who are telling the story the benefit of the doubt—and why not—we can claim that we are keeping thoroughly open minds. Unlike the Burisch story, which is aggressive in its exclusivity and virulently antagonistic to all who dare dispute a story of an alleged PhD holder who can’t produce his PhD diploma, the narrators of this story openly seem to encourage questions, criticisms, challenges, and the like.

So, for the time being, we should keep our minds open even though this story is utterly fantastic and raises more questions than it answers. Besides, doing so is just plain fun in a sometimes fun-less world.

One attorney who has been following this story posted his opinion that, because the Serpo report was ostensibly completed in 1980, it might be conceivable that there are aspects of declassification of previously classified material that could corroborate parts of this story.

What if, because there is a group of former high-ranking intelligence officers that have decided to release selective facts of one of the most secret United States military intelligence operations in history, that the National Security Council has decided to go along with the release?

After all, who can really be hurt after 40 years? And what if, rather than having the EBEs themselves show up on the White House lawn, the powers-that-be have all agreed that the story should be allowed to come out on its own?

If so, a disclosure on a quiet UFO email list is probably the best way to let it get out. After all, would you want to be the POTUS who stands up before a news conference to talk about UFOs, ETs, secret missions to a distant planet, and why we kept that secret for so long? On the other hand, what a better way to ensure your legacy than to be the disclosure president? We’ll leave those question for others to answer.

Ufologists will have their own criticisms and comments about the Serpo story. Those who comment will also have their own thoughts and criticisms about other commentators. That, too, is part of the fun of the Serpo story.

My own questions concern the way the story relates to the different presidents under whose tenure the UFO incidents first began. For example, we now have the private ruminations of presidents who never intended their ruminations to become public.

Notwithstanding the infamous Richard Nixon tapes, there exist the Lyndon B. Johnson tapes released to the public by Lady Bird Johnson, the John F. Kennedy tapes, and the Harry S. Truman diary.

The Truman diary entries for the latter half of 1947—and these were very private diaries—make absolutely no mention of anything having to do with UFOs, even though President Truman reveals that he thinks he sees or feels Abraham Lincoln’s ghost making its presence known in the White House.

It seems that Eisenhower has left no private record of anything having to do with a decision to send U.S. military personnel to a distant planet. No one has said that JFK revealed anything about the Serpo mission in his Oval Office tapes.

And, a careful review of the excellent Michael Beschloss book, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (Simon & Schuster, 1997), containing the transcripts of LBJ’s Oval Office tapes indicates no commentary about Serpo.

Maybe the Serpo references were redacted by Lady Bird herself. Maybe. But why would the former First Lady take out references to a space mission when she did not take out a piece of incredible evidence inculpating her husband and former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a conspiracy to conceal information of a murder conspiracy, specifically the JFK assassination, from the very commission LBJ assembled to investigate the crime?

In one of the released transcripts, Hoover reveals to LBJ that the FBI has discovered that there was another Lee Harvey Oswald. This Lee Harvey Oswald was an CIA plant, not the real Oswald. Thus, there is a CIA conspiracy afoot. LBJ and Hoover agree to keep the secret to themselves and not to tell former CIA Director Dulles that they know. Now it’s a double conspiracy. Yet, astoundingly, this conversation appears in the LBJ tapes. But nothing about Serpo.

We have it on very good authority directly from Jackie Gleason himself that Richard Nixon took him to Holmstead Air Force Base in Florida where The Great One saw ET bodies with his very own eyes. Yet, no mention from Nixon that the U.S. had an ongoing military exploration mission to Serpo. Wouldn’t Nixon, who clearly wanted to satisfy Jackie Gleason’s curiosity, have revealed the truth about this? Maybe he did, and Jackie simply did not tell the person who told it to me.

President Jimmy Carter, despite his subsequent denials over the ensuing years, did seem to know something about our government’s involvement with extraterrestrials. He even asked DCI George H. W. Bush for the inside information, but was promptly turned down. Reagan seemed to know something because he certainly referred to extraterrestrials enough times during his administration and even admitted to following a UFO across the California desert.

And, finally, Anonymous reveals that President Clinton tried to get the Serpo mission re-started but was dissuaded from that by members of his administration. An astounding story, indeed, especially in light of another piece of information from the same person who told me that Jackie Gleason had revealed his Holmstead Air Force Base experience to him personally.

I am told that this person asked Bill Clinton shortly before his inauguration whether he planned to find out what the government knew about UFOs. Reportedly, Clinton told him that “they” would not let him get near it. After his inauguration, did the president finally learn the truth, and was he so astounded that he wanted the mission to continue? Is this something that President Clinton is inclined to talk about?

As do the rest of the members of this UFO mailing list, I await more information about Serpo and even whatever photographs those keepers of the secret can release. Meanwhile, the Serpo story and journals follow along with comments from Richard Doty, Bill Ryan, and the mailing list administrator, Victor Martinez.


2) Victor Martinez

There are two issues I’ll address here.

  • First, I’ve been asked to comment on whether I believe the postings from a high-ranking U.S. government source from the Defense Intelligence Agency who has taken the name Anonymous are authentic or are part of some incredibly complex hoax?

  • Second, what is the best method for releasing this information?

Should it be through a small but highly specialized email group’s moderator or through a more credible, traditional source like CNN or Fox News?

With respect to the authenticity of the emailed postings to me from Anonymous, I believe they are true and correct in terms of the basic or core story: In 1965 twelve very carefully screened and selected individuals were sent to an alien home world called Serpo approximately 38.42 light years away in the Zeta Reticuli binary star system. They resided there until 1978, when eight of them returned. Two died on the foreign planet, and two decided to remain there.

Their story, their journal entries, their photographs, and the samples they brought back were all memorialized in a final 3,000-plus page report entitled Project Serpo, which was finalized in 1980 with two supplementary reports to which the late Dr. Carl Sagan contributed and grudgingly but finally signed off on regarding the astronomical and math anomalies that did not add up.

Many have found themselves bogged down in the minutiae of whether it was ten men and two women or twelve men, or how could Anonymous make a mistake over the amount of equipment taken? Was it 9,100 pounds or 91,000 pounds? So what! Let’s concentrate on the core story—the overall big picture—that twelve of our citizens from the United States of America embarked on a 13-year mission to live on another world. That’s where the focus should be—not on all of these petty, nit-picky details! That’s what everyone should be in awe of.

What BS! Little wonder ufology finds itself progressing ever so slowly over the years. It constantly shoots itself with all its inhouse pettiness and fighting; it finds itself hardly any further along after a major disclosure is made in the UFO field.

The evidence we have that such a human-alien exchange program did take place is backed up by several high-ranking former government officials: retired USAF colonel Ed Doty, ex-AFOSI special agent Richard Doty, Paul McGovern, Gene Loscowski, and USAF Colonel Jack Casey.

 

In addition, author Whitley Strieber claims to have met a surviving team member of Project Serpo in Florida. Anonymous later confirmed Whitley’s story to me—that, in fact, Whitley ran into this team member on three separate occasions.

A retired USAF colonel actually oversaw the project and commented privately to an acquaintance of Bill Ryan, amazed that details were now being released; this incident is recounted in the comments section of Serpo/Comments#1. I know his name from Anonymous, as confirmed by Bill, but I will withhold it since he has chosen not to go public at this time.

Next, there is the former high-ranking government official who is actually coordinating this programmed release between the former DIA officials who worked on and oversaw the project and the three DIA officials who allow them access to the secure reading room where they can transcribe this material to be released to the general public through me. His name would be known to 99.99 percent of the readers of this magazine and my UFO email list because the readers and subscribers to these two forums follow such intelligence and black-world matters more closely than the general public.

For obvious reasons I’m not going to disclose his name because many UFO investigators, kooks, and freaks would soon be beating down his door asking him if it were true, and he would say, “No, it isn’t true!” and then make it so. He’d order it stopped. And last but not least, former high-ranking government official Paul McGovern had lunch at an Arlington, Virginia restaurant on December 8, 2005 with another former high-ranking intelligence official now retired and working as a consultant. Paul gave me a brief summation of his conversation with this official under several administrations and the official said he was never briefed on the specific details but was aware of the project’s existence and its overall big picture. I was going to provide his name for this article, but after careful reflective thought, I’ve decided not to for the same reasons I cited above: I don’t want him harassed by anyone reading this article and the zillions of self-styled investigators in this field called ufology.

This former official believes in disclosure, but he feels that some of the information should be kept from public view, and I totally agree now that I’ve been made privy to much of it via the postings from Anonymous. Much of it which will never see the light of day. Besides, for the UFO field enough never seems to be enough. I could have provided twelve names who have gone on record that such a program did in fact take place while stating that I had another twelve names that I was keeping to myself, and people would still want those other twelve names; the twelve they got just wouldn’t be good enough. It never is with the kooky, mental whack-job ufologists.

And now on to the second issue—the method of disclosure—which I’ll briefly address to my highly regarded and respected colleague in all of this, Richard C. Doty. In Sergeant Doty’s piece, he suggests that while there was really nothing wrong with Anonymous making his stunning revelations through me, it would have carried more credibility had it been done through a more open source like CNN or Fox News.

Again: BS! More credible than li’l ol’ me? Absolutely! I agree with Rick, but the real question is: Would those more credible, mainstream open sources have ever run with it and published the material from Anonymous? Absolutely not.

CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, 60 Minutes, Dateline, 20/20, and others would have demanded that the story be verified by the White House itself, meaning either Bush, Cheney, or one of their subordinates, with their implicit knowledge and permission, would have signed off on such a disclosure before being made public. Now does Doty or anyone reading this article really believe that the single most secretive presidential administration of the past 50 years or so would sign off on verifying such a highly classified project? Does anyone in their right mind imagine the White House spokeshole as saying to one of these major news media outlets: “Oh, yeah, wow, so you found out; someone leaked it to you guys. OK, the cat’s out of the bag, so yes, it’s all true. Go ahead and run with it; President Bush is fine with it!”

Yeah, right. And my mother’s the Queen of England! In fact, look at what’s happened in fewer than 60 days with postings 1–11, November 2–December 21, 2005 coming through me: It’s sparked a worldwide phenomenon and has caused people to really, seriously consider that a mind-boggling human-ET exchange program actually occurred during that time period.

At this point, I won’t elaborate on how postings to my small but highly influential UFO email list, ironically loaded with former and current government insiders, really got the word out much more effectively than a mainstream news media outlet would ever have, except to refer the readers of this article and magazine to the absolutely brilliant summation written by my learned, scholarly, and erudite colleague Bill Ryan. He wrote an executive summary of sorts specifically for Anonymous on the tremendous reach, impact, scope, breadth, and sociological inroads Project Serpo has had thus far. Amazing!

 

People are actually beginning to think outside of the box. Bottom line: Could approaching CNN or Fox have resulted in greater publicity for Project Serpo than the method chosen by Anonymous and his small group at the DIA? That’s right: We’re not alone in the universe and our government, for its own paranoid, sick reasons has been keeping this—what ufology’s cop-on-the-beat Stan Friedman calls the Cosmic Watergate—from us for umpteen years! And mind you, your tax dollars pay these government clowns to keep us in the dark. Does any of this really make sense?

Think about it: We pay these government kooks, spooks, and ne’er-do-wells high GS-grade salaries to keep us from learning what they’ve discovered over the years. That’s the real outrage that the UFO community should be up in arms over, not about the gender makeup of our team members on Project Serpo nor the weight of the equipment taken on their 13-year journey. Gimme a break, mental patients! I respectfully disagree with Sergeant Doty, whose wise counsel and sage advice I have often sought with respect to intelligence matters, but I totally disagree with his assessment here. In all fairness to him, he is really out of his league.

Why the secrecy? And when will it end with at least some major announcement regarding the UFO subject being made public? The most troubling aspect of all this is that most people need an authority figure to come out and say this-and-that is so for reasons of credibility because most people can’t think for themselves. In other words, they can’t weigh and evaluate the evidence on its own merits and come to a definitive conclusion on their own; they need someone to do it for them.

Short of that, people are never going to buy this story—nor any other UFO-related story—short of a former director of Central Intelligence, secretary of Defense, or chairman of the Joint Chiefs coming out and saying:

“Yes, Project Serpo occurred and I was apprised of its overall program, structure, makeup, and mission when I was the DCI during the XX administration.”

Keep dreamin’.

In closing, I’d like to cite a few choice passages from well-respected UFO author Timothy Good’s 1996 ground-breaking book, Beyond Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up (William Morrow, 1988). Much has been made of the widely published comments that President Reagan made after a private White House screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but what has been nearly forgotten were the following comments which appear in Good’s book and which deserve equal consideration:
 


CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND—A REALITY

During a talk given to the Tulsa, Oklahoma Astronomy Club in 1982, former Air Force intelligence officer Steve Lewis revealed that the 12 years he spent investigating UFOs for the military both in the U.S. and abroad convinced him that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are visiting Earth. Apologizing for being unable to be more specific owing to strict orders from the Air Force not to divulge specific details about his UFO research from 1965–1977, Lewis stated that only a fraction of information accumulated by the military has been released.

“That movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind is more realistic than you’d believe,” he told the audience. “You can believe that or not.”

Pressed to reveal what had convinced him that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft rather than top-secret military devices, Lewis commented:

“The records, the information I saw while in my job. I no longer rule out what the possibilities might be.”

Next, we have this information, which includes a cryptic comment by former DCI and President George Bush:

Nobody likes to look silly. Fear of ridicule is a very compelling reason for politicians to debunk the subject. British Air Minister George Ward explained [1954] that, if he admitted the existence of UFOs without evidence that the general public could actually touch, the public would consider that the Government had gone barmy. Few politicians—in Britain, the United States and worldwide— have any inside knowledge of the subject of UFOs, which is why their repeated pronouncements debunking all the reports are so convincing. And those few who have troubled to study the matter, or who have been privy to top-secret information, may be so bewildered and even alarmed by the awesome complexity of the phenomenon that they would rather say nothing at all.

 

“You don’t know the half of it,” was all former CIA Director George Bush could say when asked by a campaign committee member about UFO secrecy during his first presidential election campaign. Politicians, furthermore, are unlikely to speak out on such a controversial topic without a mandate from the electorate. Relatively few people write to their elected representatives about UFOs, although I am pleased to report than an increasing number are doing so.”

And continuing with these choice comments:

In these respects, I am fully in sympathy with the current official policy. “From an intelligence point of view,” remarks Dr James Harder, “the UFO phenomenon must be truly awesome – the worst of science fiction come to life. However, over the years, the intelligence agencies must have come to the realization that the strangers from space are nothing exactly new – that evidence indicates that we are experiencing only an intensification of what may have been going on centuries.

And continuing with this same line of thought, we have:

It has been suggested that those in the know are concerned about the reaction of the public and religious authorities to revelations regarding the link between the UFO phenomenon and religion (one hypothesis being that homo sapiens is genetically linked with extraterrestrials). And with one final notation on this same train of thought from Good’s other book, Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth (Harper Perennial, 1999)

In addition to the visitors being responsible for genetically upgrading the human race on two occasions in our distant past, it was alleged that a few of our great spiritual leaders—including Jesus—were genetically “engineered” by a type of artificial insemination, in an attempt to instill Earth people with spiritual concepts. The reluctance of this particular group of extraterrestrials to communicate with humanity at large was due mainly to the fact that we simply are not psychologically nor spiritually ready for contact with a higher civilization, and it is necessary for us to evolve independently. Essentially, we are spiritual beings surviving beyond death. And finally, these are author Timothy Good’s personal, closing observations

It is my conviction that we are being visited by several groups of extraterrestrials, and that, while some may not be well-disposed towards us, others are benevolent. From my own investigations throughout the world, however, I am convinced that selective contacts have been made with possibly thousands of individuals. The visitors have no need to establish open contact, nor do they want the majority of us to know what they are doing here. It is probably, in my view, that the cover-up is sustained to a certain extent by the aliens themselves.

And in closing, we have this choice snippet from former DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter.

One authority in a position to know facts—as known at the time—was former CIA Director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who was unequivocal in his condemnation of official policy.

“The public has a right to know,” he declared in 1960. “It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings … through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”

Forty-six years later, we’re still those mushrooms living under a canopy of darkness and ignorance somewhat like the infamous, ignorant inhabitants of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of The Republic. So, while the UFO community continues to wallow like swine in their petty jealousies and bicker, argue, and fight amongst themselves, this rather profound and awe-inspiring information will continue to be withheld from us. We berate the government insiders who withhold this information which rightfully belongs to us as losers. Believe me, they’re not the only losers. Go look in the mirror and see who’s staring back at you.


3) Rick Doty

 

 

4) Bill Ryan

To offer you my promised personal perspective on the enigmatic Serpo story, here are the major points and perspectives which I believe are worth dwelling on when analyzing the entire affair. For the most concise and also most recent overview of my own position in audio, there is an mp3 is available for download as a podcast for the Above Top Secret forum and was intended to be heard by a knowledgeable and reasonably sophisticated audience.

 

You can listen the related extract about Serpo below,

or the full audio at http://podcast.abovetopsecret.com/atscpod_1232.mp3.

 

Next, a summary of my reasons why I think the story should be taken seriously, and not dismissed without very careful thought. Some, but not all, of my points are covered on Serpo/Consistencies. 


The first compelling reason to believe this story is the accidental testimony of the retired Air Force colonel with 33 years in Intelligence. When he read the Serpo account in hard copy, he was visibly shocked and confirmed “Yes, [it’s] all real.” That full text is at Serpo/Comments#1 and I recommend that it should be read carefully by any commentator.

In my view this is very important, and although it’s circumstantial evidence, it seems to me to carry quite some weight. I have the name of the person who supplied me with the story, a very straight and intelligent man, a serving Air Force lieutenant colonel who checks out in every respect.

A number of insiders and researchers have reported hearing of such an exchange program before, including such respected individuals as Linda Howe, Paul McGovern, and Gene Loscowski, whose real name is Gene Lakes. All these people have gone on record as openly confirming the existence of the project; see Anonymous’s website post #1 on Serpo/Information.

Rick Doty records a private conversation a number of years ago about Serpo with an individual whom he names, and he also confirms Anonymous’s data about the Roswell incident. To my surprise, I don’t think anyone has followed this up, an anomaly in itself considering how well researched Roswell is. If Anonymous’s Roswell claims can be substantiated, this would lend some support to his other claims about Serpo, although the disinformation hypothesis is of course not ruled out by this.

Paul McGovern also clarified what the acronym DIM—an item on the equipment manifest—stood for. Anonymous didn’t know. McGovern explained it was the duty information manual. If this exchange was staged, with Anonymous saying he didn’t know and McGovern supplying the answer, it was very clever and quite subtle; more so than the way the rest of the story seems to have been crafted, particularly in that the issue would have been totally overlooked if I had not drawn attention to it myself.

I’d jumped on the DIM question to draw attention to it and had thought I’d discovered what it meant. McGovern corrected me with a one-line email to myself and Victor Martinez. All that smelled very genuine to me. This is one of many indications, it must be said, that McGovern is privy to some, if not all, of the Project Serpo data.

Here’s another incident that intrigues me: Whitley Strieber’s tantalizing and brief encounter over 10 years ago with a man who, so it seemed, was claiming to have been on the Serpo team.

On the other hand, some of the data provided by Anonymous seems way off-beam, such as the information on orbital data, but a simple hoaxer would have been sure to get the numbers right. It’s very easy to do. Doesn’t a hoaxer want to convince? One can find accounts of believable worlds in the science fiction section of any bookstore. They are easy to research, craft, and create. Why would Anonymous, if intent on deception, have made himself so vulnerable by immediately presenting a world with some aspects that are actually quite hard to swallow?

Anonymous is not operating like a hoaxer or disinformationist. A hoaxer or disinformationist would actually have done a better job for himself. Many eventually proven UFO hoaxes have taken quite a bit of uncovering.

This story is too easy to dismiss as a hoax or disinfo without some serious thought, yet the factors above indicate that if it is a hoax or disinfo, it would have been much more sophisticated, for example, if it were choreographed by the DIA itself. Yet Anonymous’s releases are not sophisticated at all. Rather, they are naive, exactly like an elderly person telling a great story of what he did in his youth.

A bit of mental arithmetic can convince us that Anonymous is indeed elderly. Assuming he was involved with the project, directly or peripherally or is of the same military generation as those who were, he would be at least 70 and possibly in his 80s. Frustratingly for myself personally, there is no indication that Anonymous understands the requirements of effective public relations in the 21st century. But if we think of our own grandfather or great-uncle, maybe, why should we expect his generation to possess modern, sophisticated PR savvy? This seems to me to be a factor that a number of commentators have overlooked.

The apparent anomalies and absence of the photos to date can all be accounted for if we suppose that the context under which Anonymous is operating is not as it may first appear. Anonymous hardly has the 3,000 page report in his living room just sitting there like a Sears catalog. Such a report would be guarded under the tightest security and the conditions of access highly restricted.

We can hypothesize that Anonymous may not even have access to the document at all and may be relying on his memory, someone else’s memory, or perhaps someone else is supplying him with the information maybe by phone or by tape under conditions over which he himself has no control.

It’s worth remembering that it was not Anonymous who first mentioned the 3,000 page report. That was Paul McGovern. Anonymous subsequently quietly went along with that. Anonymous has never claimed to have access to the report; that has just been everyone’s assumption.

As for the photos: they may again be in a different location, maybe not even in the U.S. Suppose Anonymous is receiving his information from a retired person who was involved in Project Serpo, who is, for example, now living in Thailand, Australia, or South Africa?

Anonymous could receive the voice transcripts by phone, which would explain the intermittent postings, the errors, and occasional later corrections, and the absence of hard data. Maybe the photos are in a shoebox under his contact’s bed. This is, of course, just a picture painted to show that we still have no idea what is happening behind the scenes.

Paradoxically, Anonymous has gone quiet since December 21, and this may be precisely because he has indeed met with difficulties engineered by insider agents. He has stated to Victor Martinez that he’s been experiencing significant problems from people “poking their noses in where they don’t belong.”

Why should we disbelieve this? It’s totally credible—even likely. We know that there are different factions within the Intelligence community regarding disclosure. Some, wishing to support disclosure, may be looking the other way, but some may be trying to stop Anonymous, or they might even have supplied him with false data after he started his disclosure.

Just about anything could be happening. These are not reasons to blindly accept the story, but they are persuasive reasons not to dismiss it without very careful thought. Of course, it is absolutely possible that this is disinformation; even 10 percent injected fiction or altered data would account for all the factors in the story to which skeptics draw attention.

The point here is that if this story is 90 percent true—or even 10 percent true!—it’s still the story of the last millennium. Some people cannot believe that twelve American astronauts could have made a trip to another planet nearly 40 light years away in 1965. It’s just too much of a leap to believe.

But logically, if the visitors have come here, all that the twelve would be doing is catching the shuttle flight the other way. There’s no illogic there. If the aliens can come here, we can also go there. It’s just as easy. If we can accept the possibility of one, we must accept the possibility of the other. The reasons to reject that particular claim on the grounds of believability are purely emotional. The claims need to be believed or not only on the basis of evidence, which, despite all the above, we do not yet have.

There are a number of other minor factors which, if the story goes totally quiet—and it’s too early yet to assume that it has died already—Victor Martinez and I can lay open to public view so everyone can pick over the tiniest bone. These factors all support the story, but all are circumstantial.

For instance, we believe that we know the names of some of the individuals involved at high levels and also the location of the 3,000 page report. We’ve also received an enigmatic threat described in general terms on the Above Top Secret podcast but which we cannot confirm was real. And even that incident has its own analysis: If it was real, then it further confirms the story, but if it was staged, then the nature of that deception was highly sophisticated, which Anonymous’s releases have not been.

We have no source data apart from Anonymous’s very first message to Victor Martinez on 1 November 2005, which he has archived. All the rest of the messages from Anonymous and everyone else have been deleted by Victor’s Web TV system, which erases all messages after 96 hours by default. Victor has explained that he has cut and pasted some of the incoming information for presentational purposes and that sometimes that information has come from different sources.

Victor has explained that 85 percent of the information comes from one source, whom we have casually referred to Anonymous. But there is a second source contributing 13 percent of the information and a third source contributing 2 percent. This third source sends information from a military address which cancels itself after sending and cannot be replied to. This is a standard military technique.

So the posts on the website, which are faithfully archived from Victor Martinez’s postings, are not necessarily in Anonymous’s words. I should emphasize here that Victor’s integrity is the highest and he has always done what he thinks is right and best in presenting this story to the public.

My own hypotheses: Anonymous is getting his information remotely, does not have personal access to the report or the photos, and it is not in his hands when and what kind of information he will relay to us. He’s elderly and is doing his best. He does not understand modern PR, is not a scientist, and does not understand the stringent requirements of proof or evidence.

He believes the story should stand on its own because he knows it’s true himself, and he is both frustrated at the objections and at the increasingly level of obstruction, interference, and even harassment which he’s been suffering privately. He’s in the twilight years of his life, and he could do without all this. He may pack up and go home if he feels others are ungrateful for his sincere efforts. He himself may wish that he’d never mentioned the photos, because he’d been given to understand at the time that they would be made available to him.

On the other hand, I could be convinced that there’s an extremely clever disinformation campaign going on. It may even have started with a maverick self-starting individual, but insiders may have acted very quickly to add their own disinformational spin to the story while other insiders, favoring disclosure, may have been helping him as best they could.

Anonymous may not even be knowingly imparting disinformation, and the false-data percentage may not be high but inserted at critical junctures. You don’t have to remove too many components from an engine to make it misfire. The project might even have existed, under a different name. Human astronauts may have indeed visited another planet, and why not?

The reason for this may be to ease the way for the real disclosure later or sooner; thus, the U.S. government gets to be the hero of the day. If the latter is the case, then I would predict that the photos will indeed be released, but they will eventually be shown conclusively to be fakes. Would not a disinformation campaign be sure to include impressive images or fabricated documents? As many have argued, fabricated pictures of another world would be quite easy to create. We see them in every Star Wars movie. So why have they not appeared?

Paradoxically, this suggests that if we see the photos then they may be fakes, and if they do not appear, then Anonymous may be fully genuine. But the problem is that once having promised them, their nonappearance will be a sure sign of chicanery. This is also theoretically possible, of course. The principal factor to consider here may be to ask oneself: If this were a disinformation campaign, how would it have been choreographed?

Presumably great expense, together with hundreds if not thousands of man-days, would have gone into the planning and execution. How good would it be? What would it include? And would not the information offered by Anonymous be more sophisticated and convincing?