Sparks (little girl):
Hey Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?
Dad:
I don't know Sparks, but I guess I'd say if it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact
(Warner Bros. Films, 1997)
Screenplay by John V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg
Based on the book
Contact
by Carl Sagan
INTRODUCTION
Queen Elizabeth I:
A play! Comedy or tragedy?
Player:
Comedy, your Majesty.
Queen Elizabeth I:
Comedy! By whom?
Player:
Anonymous, your Majesty.
Queen Elizabeth I:
Anonymous! I so admire his verse.
A
NONYMOUS,
C
OLUMBIA
P
ICTURES
(2011);
S
CREENWRITER:
J
OHN
O
RLOFF
ANONYMOUS AND PROJECT CRYSTAL KNIGHT
First let me introduce myself. My name is . . . Anonymous. I am a retired employee of the U.S. government. I won't go into any great details about my past, but I was involved in a special program.
With those words, sent in an e-mail to Victor Martinez, the host and moderator of perhaps the largest and most prestigious space-related e-mail network on the Internet, known as the UFO Thread List, a totally new era of government transparency commenced. It was sent to Martinez on November 2, 2005, followed by incredible facts about what the government knows about alien visitations. “Anonymous” then sent in eighteen more e-mails to the network, each more sensational than the last. That first batch continued through August 21, 2006. He then sent in fourteen more e-mails between June 4, 2007, and April 13, 2011, revealing heretofore top-secret information that had previously been classified as “Top Secret Codeword,” the highest secrecy classification in the government.
The e-mail postings by Anonymous mainly concerned the events following the Roswell crash (see chapter 3) that led to an interstellar exchange program in which we sent twelve U.S. military personnel to a distant planet on an alien spaceship in 1965. This program was directed and monitored by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA called the program Project Crystal Knight, and Anonymous, then much younger, was allegedly one of the agency officials assigned to the project. It is now popularly known as Project Serpo.
CREDIBILITY, “THE LIST,” AND WWW.SERPO.ORG
That first e-mail to the network immediately elicited comments by longtime network members. Gene Loscowski (real name: Gene Lakes) said, “Who is this person? Most of the information is absolutely correct.” Paul McGovern said, “Interesting, but not totally correct.” List member “Anonymous II” said, “As for the Roswell incident: This was the story I read in the historical document called the âRed Book.' Almost exactly to the word. Although there were more details about the crash sites and what was recovered.”
These remarks from individuals who apparently knew at least some of the details of the secret program, should be considered definitive confirmation that Project Crystal Knight was a real event and that the story that Anonymous revealed was substantially correct. It should be noted that virtually all the people on the list were considered “insiders” in one way or another and not just a collection of people with an interest in UFO activities, whether they be investigators or even abductees. These individuals were largely government connected and many had been exposed to classified information. That is precisely why Anonymous chose to make these momentous revelations to this group. Bill Ryan, who later published the website for the list, explained it this way:
The list at that time contained about a hundred and fifty people, including many extremely well-known names in UFO research and related or leading-edge scientific fields. . . . Those on the list have differing views regarding the veracity of Anonymous's claims. However, the pedigree of the list as a whole is important to emphasize. There has been a substantial amount of intelligent discussion about the revelations, and
it is important to state that there are many senior people in the U.S. intelligence and military community who are taking this information very seriously.
Any skepticism about the Serpo revelations by Anonymous among list members largely evaporated as he sent in more and more details about the program to the list network. It soon became very clear that this amount of detail, some of which they could personally attest to, or had already heard about, could not have been invented. Consequently, on December 21, 2005, network members decided to launch a website dedicated to the revelations of Anonymous. To that end, a longtime, well-respected British member of the network named Bill Ryan volunteered to create and moderate the website, named
www.serpo.org
. That website ultimately became fleshed out with additional material from other anonymous contributors and from postings by Martinez, who added supplementary explanations relating to the information revealed by Anonymous and other insiders. The result was an amazing compendium of government knowledge about our relations with aliens from across the galaxy.
THE
RED BOOK
Any lingering doubts about the credentials of Anonymous and his role in Project Serpo were completely erased by a post that he sent in to the website on June 16, 2006. In that e-mail he identified himself as the editor of the
Red Book.
Since he spoke in the present tense, we must conclude that he still acted in that capacity in 2006. This mysterious “book” is well-known to highly placed government officials involved with secret UFO investigation and contact with extraterrestrials. Anonymous describes the
Red Book:
Serpo website developer Bill Ryan
The Red Book is an extremely thick, very detailed account summary, written and compiled by the U.S. government on UFO investigations dating from 1947 to the present day. This orange-brownish book is updated every five years.
Then, on August 9, 2007, Anonymous sent the following message, elaborating on the use of the
Red Book
and revealing his role in producing and editing the entries in the book:
. . . claims about the Red Book being updated continuously or when needed are somewhat true, but need to be placed in proper context.
What actually occurs is that as UFO reports come in [and are] deemed credible by the reporting government agencyâbe it military or civilianâthey are routed to a special section of our government for a follow-up analysis. After that vetting process, they are then sent to a special group which then places [them] into final review for POSSIBLE inclusion into the Red Book.
. . . I know all of this because . . . I have served as the editor for several editions of the Red Book and have written and delivered the Executive Summary for several sitting U.S. presidents, so I KNOW of what I speak. And when I say “editor
,
” it is NOT in the sense of the word you are familiar with. I do not correct nor review any of the hundredsâif not thousandsâof reports which are distilled into the final five-year report for grammar and punctuation as you've done with the “Project Serpo” material.
I only present and include the most important, compelling cases [in] the RED BOOK, which includes an analysis by me and others of any trends, types of sightings, human contacts with the ETEs [extraterrestrial entities] and any national security concerns our government or planet might have. My part is to write the Executive Summary and present it to the current sitting president of the United States. If there was a national security matter that presented itself, that five-year published review of the RED BOOK would be interrupted, but that has been unnecessary as we have a good relationship with our visitors [aliens].
We did have visitors from nine other star systems. The Grays, which some people characterize as being like the Ebens, were not [Ebens]. They came from a planet near Alpha Centauri A. The third class of visitors came from a G2 star system in Leo. Another class of visitors came from a G2 star system in Epsilon Eridani. The visitors were classified by a code. The code, which was classified in itself, was, “Extraterrestrial Entities” (ETE). ETE-2 were the Ebens, the Grays were ETE-3, and so on. The “Red Book” lists nine different visitors. We determined recently that some of the visitors were the same type of race but a “mechanical life-form. ”They were hybrid beings that were created in a laboratory rather than by natural birth. The creatures were more like robots, although they were intelligent and could make decisions. They might be the “hostile” visitors that some people report.
Anonymous's involvement with the
Red Book
and with briefings to the presidents clearly places him at the upper reaches of the intelligence community with regard to relations with extraterrestrials. Although he never mentions it, it seems very likely that he is, or has been, a member of Majestic 12 (MJ-12), the secret organization set up by President Harry S. Truman to deal with extraterrestrial affairs. Consequently, his Serpo revelations should be considered authentic.
ANONYMOUS AND THE DIA
In further communications to the network, Anonymous discloses that he is not acting entirely alone, but is part of a group of individuals from the DIA. In his Introduction to the website, Bill Ryan says:
Anonymous reports that he is not acting individually and is part of a group of six DIA personnel working together as an alliance: three current and three former employees. He is their chief spokesman. . . . When sending information to Victor Martinez, Anonymous wrote 85 percent of the material; another 13 percent came from another source directly connected with the project; and the final 1â2 percent came from a “ghost,” who canceled his e-mail account as soon as he sent his information.
AUTHORIZATION
The revelations made by Anonymous and the DIA-6 were not some sort of rogue operation, but were authorized for release at the highest level within the DIA. It's not known whether or not that authorization came from an even higher level within the U.S. intelligence community and the executive branch, or from MJ-12. As is pointed out in chapter 6, the DIA was created by President John F. Kennedy in part to make the intelligence network more accountable to the public, rather than permitting it to maintain a policy of exclusivity and frequently high-handed behavior. Consequently, the ideal of transparency was instilled in the DIA from the beginning, and this ideal has remained in its DNA. These revelations by the DIA-6 reflect that ideal. As quoted by Victor Martinez in his brief history of the DIA (see appendix 8), a Pentagon official told
The Washington Post
: “We've got to do to intelligence what CNN has done to news.”
The reader can accept Anonymous's writings as genuine with confidence, because it seems highly improbable that he, now at an advanced age and retired, should suddenly decide to advance a piece of very complicated government propaganda as part of a disinformation campaign. What would be the point of creating and telling this fantastic story, almost in the realm of science fiction, at this point in history and in his life, when he didn't need to make those disclosures? The fact that all this information was written in the
Red Book
would strongly tend to nullify the disinformation hypothesis. The enormous amount of detail alone makes the likelihood that this whole story was the product of his imagination almost impossible. It would place him among the science-fiction ranks of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Isaac Asimov!
WHY NOW?
The hypothesis that is far more likely is this: an aging, highly placed intelligence operative in an agency inspired by the transparency policy instilled by President Kennedy has decided that, as he nears the end of his life, the public has a right to know the fantastic truths about our dealings with extraterrestrials. It is a matter of “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” and “Tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may.” Anonymous chose the date of November 2, 2005, because it is precisely twenty-five years after the final report on Project Crystal Knight was written (1980). Government policy allows for the declassification and disclosure of secret documents after that quarter-century period. One can only remark, along with Queen Elizabeth I, “I so admire his verse.”
THE BACKGROUND
In telling the Serpo story, it seemed to me that it was necessary to first talk in part 1 about events that preceded the 1947 Roswell crash so that the reader is not left with the impression that Roswell was our first exposure to antigravity spacecraft or to extraterrestrials. In fact, the U.S. military had been dealing with these types of craft for at least five years at the time of Roswell. Furthermore, and most importantly, we had been aware of the alien presence on the planet since the 1930s, and we had learned about their role in World War II.
*1
So, to the military at least, Roswell did not really engender any form of culture shock. It seemed to me that it was important to give some of this pre-Roswell history, not previously available to civilians, so that the reader can understand the state of mind of our military leaders in July 1947, and why they reacted with such alacrity to the crash and to the hosting of the surviving alien. In spite of appearances, they were not terribly surprised by the whole series of events, and, in fact, were probably better prepared for it than they were for Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The Pentagon knew immediately what it meant to have an alien craft crash on U.S. soil. Military leaders recognized all the implications thereof, and what sort of culture shock could be expected in the American populace. So part 1 complements the Serpo saga, and together they paint a realistic picture of America's introduction to galactic affairs in the twentieth century. It is an amazing story, far more incredible than science fiction. And yet it is only the first chapter. What awaits the human race in the twenty-first century cannot even be imagined now, in our wildest dreams.