The Alien Exchange Program - Project Serpo

July 16, 1965, the Nevada Test Site, about 80 miles north of Las Vegas. A craft comes down, and 12 Americans in military uniform walk aboard it. It leaves, and they only come back 13 years later, while some of them. That's what this book says happened. It's called "Secret Journey to Planet Serpo." Written by Len Kasten in 2013, and I'm going to read it to you. Well, part of it, including the training, the voyage, the arrival, the 13 years on the ground. I'm going to start to part two because that's where, you know, the real meat and potatoes are, but part two doesn't make any sense if you haven't read part one, so I'm going to try to get through the first 100 pages in a bit of a synopsis here for you guys. It also helps you understand why anyone would agree to this, and so strap yourselves in like this video, subscribe. Let's get into it. So this book comes 20 years after the story, and the story starts with emails in November 2nd, 2005. Victor Martinez, a former US government employee, ran a private UFO mailing list. He forwarded something out to his subscribers from an anonymous sender who said that he was a retired government official. The email describes an exchange program. American personnel sent to a planet in the Zeta Reticuli system, and the planet was called Serpo. Then he sent another one, and then more through the rest of 2005 and into 2006, 2007, and then again in 2011 after like a long break. And he was only known as Anonymous. So Martinez's list was pretty important. It wasn't just a random subscriber list. It wasn't a public forum either. The subscribers included people with intelligence and defense backgrounds. And so the material when it showed up, it kind of arrived with this certain sense of borrowed credibility. Anonymous also said that he wasn't working alone. He described himself as a spokesman for six people connected to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, and three of them apparently, still active. And he said his information came out of a 3,000-page briefing of the team that came home. Along with the diary, the mission commander kept the entire time while he was gone. And so by December 21st, there was enough of the email exchange and the dumps to merit its own platform. So a British subscriber named Bill Ryan, he built a site and he called it Serpo.org. And so Kastin's book is basically just this conglomeration of all these different emails, things arriving out of order, contradicting each other, and he tries to put it into one coherent body of work that you can read front to back. And Bill Ryan comes back later in the episode, so put a pin in that. We'll get back to him. I've been waiting so long to cover this story and I cannot wait to get into it. So this happens in three parts. Part one is called the Prelude. It's six chapters. You have Germany, Antarctica, Roswell, Los Alamos, Kingman, and Kennedy. This is basically just like a backfill of history to get us up to speed of them embarking on this journey. And part two is called Project Crystal Knight. In that name is the name of the alleged project or program. So the planet was Serpo and the program was allegedly Crystal Knight. And that has 10 chapters and that covers like the training, the landings, the voyage, the arrival. There's a confrontation, a police state exploration, and then eventually the return. Part three is the epilogue, so the Eben technology. And then, which I find very fascinating, a chapter arguing that close encounters of the third kind was seeded with classified material. Following this 13 appendices, including one on the Aliens religious beliefs and then one that's just a supply manifest. So I'm very much looking forward to reading this story. This will be my first time reading it and I'll be reading it with you starting in part two. But before we do that, I'd like to cover the entirety of part one just to get you up to speed and yeah, why it is we're here. So chapter one starts in Germany. It's the Nazi era. He's arguing that the fear that eventually produces Serpo begins with German engineering and he leans heavily on a researcher named Vladimir Tarziski. So Tarziski's claim is that Germany built working anti-gravity discs, the Haunibu series. So Kasten talks about that, including the part where a large one, the Haunibu four, is crewed by German and Japanese volunteers and sent to a one-way flight to Mars crash landing there in January of 1946. Okay, if I haven't told you to suspend your disbelief at this point, do so now. Because obviously Germany's rocket and jet programs were real and we're genuinely ahead of everyone and the Allies did scramble to grab the people who built them. That's known as Operation Paperclip and that's just a fact. It's a part of history. But the discs are not. There's no archive anywhere really of anti-gravity in it. Tarziski's material has never been independently confirmed or corroborated and the photographs that travel with all of this fall apart under any serious scrutiny. So keep that in mind. But Kasten needs this chapter to help set up the rest of the book and especially chapter two. So chapter two is Antarctica. We've all heard a lot about this place, very mysterious area in the world. But two things in this chapter are actually like solid parts of history. So in 1938 and '39, a Germany ran a real Antarctic expedition and claimed part of Queen Modland, naming it Nois Schwabbenland or Nuswabia. Schwabia? And in the winter of 1946 and 1947, the U.S. Navy ran Operation High Jump under rear admiral Richard E. Bird. Thousands of personnel, 13 ships, aircraft, it ended earlier than the original plan called for and Kasten builds on both of these stories. In his telling, Nois Schwabbenland became a fortified base senior right personnel equipment and thousands of civilians moved down there before and after the surrender allegedly with the surviving disc program flying out of Antarctica rather than Germany and high jump wasn't an exploration. Apparently it was said to destroy that base but it ran into the aircraft that it couldn't fight and retreated. Now everything in the back half of part one rests on this. By 1947 the Pentagon believes the Reich survived and is operating out of Antarctica and is flying something the United States cannot match. It puts American intelligence in a very specific mood going into that summer. It brings us to chapter three. Roswell. Chapter three, Roswell. Early July 1947, something comes down in New Mexico. Roswell Army airfield puts out a press release saying they've recovered a flying disc. A few hours later, well it's a weather balloon and the story dies. Well, dies. They wanted it to die. But decades on the Air Force explains it is project mogul, a classified balloon array built to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. But the SERPO version, which Kasten writes about, goes past that. So it talks about more than one crash. Roswell and a second location with a corona named most often, though the accounts sort of disagree more than one craft, multiple bodies and one survivor. Injured but alive, down but not out. So he's taken Roswell and put into the custody of the senior intelligence officer, isolated from essentially everyone. In the next day, the military convoy moves him out, which brings us to chapter four, Los Alamos. Another very familiar place. They designate him EBE, extraterrestrial biological entity. He becomes EBE one a little later, once there are others. But he's housed at Los Alamos, which in 1947 is about a secure in address as exists. And over roughly five years, the people around him work out how to communicate. Now we've read books about this and you've heard lore. So there's all that to take into consideration as well. But apparently they started with drawings and then something like language developed. The alien eventually tells them where he's from, the planet, orbiting a binary star system in the reticulum, 39 light years away. They don't have a name for the species, so they build one out of the acronym EBE and then the planet's name comes from him, Serpo. And unfortunately, sadly, he dies at Los Alamos in 1952. Before he dies, he helps them with a communication device recovered from the wreck. Repairs it or explains it depending on which version you read. And after his death, They get it working, and in December of 1952, something responds. Then nine years of slow correspondence gradually resolving into Russ English, in 1962 they arrange a meeting. Ebens will come back, meet, and at a time, and place agreed in advance, apparently in April 1964, in New Mexico. This brings us to chapter five, Kingman. So chapter five goes a little sideways to another crash in Kingman, Arizona, in May 1953. Another very important and very well documented crash in the sort of UFO history. And this one's attached to a man with a checkable biography, which makes it a little different from most of part one. His name was Arthur Stancell, and for years he was known publicly as Fritz Werner. He knew to them, given to him by the investigator Raymond Fowler. Stancell was an engineer who worked the atomic test program in Nevada during Operation Upshot Not Hole in 1973, 20 years after the fact. He signed an affidavit for Fowler. He said he was pulled onto a special assignment, flown out, driven to the site on a bus, with blacked-out windows, and put to work with a team of specialists who were instructed not to speak to each other. Sound familiar? His assignment was narrow, calculate the impact velocity. That was it. He described a novel craft about 13 feet across, made of something resembling brushed aluminum, embedded about 20 inches into the sand with no visible damage. A hatch about a foot and a half by three and a half feet, a tent pitched nearby, and a tent, a body, around four feet tall, with a silver metallic suit. Folks on Area 52, we do talk a lot about how our privacy is at risk. I mean, constantly, whether it's your cell phone collecting data from you or the website or browsing, or what have you. It's an issue in today's day and age, and your cell carrier is actually a huge part of that, and that's why I like what Cape is doing. Cape is America's privacy first mobile carrier. So with Cape, you don't just get your premium cell service, but you also get privacy and security. One of the newest functions that Cape has is the identifier rotation. So your phone normally has like this static identifier called an IMSI, and Cape basically automatically rotates that identifier for you every 24 hours. And what does that mean? It makes it significantly harder to track you over time. And on top of that, you get two additional text-only phone numbers. So first of all, these are real phone numbers, not VOIP. So you actually use them for things like logging into social media or verifying accounts online. That way it keeps your primary private phone number private. Also Cape deletes your call and text metadata every 24 hours. So to protect your privacy, at the network level, go to Cape.co/area52 and use code Area52 at checkout for 33% off your first six months with Cape. Cape is connection without compromise. By the mid-1950s, this was pretty much routine. There was already a procedure, buses, blackout windows. This was run-of-the-mill crash retrieval that already had been established by allegedly the Majestic 12, or MJ12. And if you want to know more about them, I've made a video in the past. You can check that out. But the last chapter of Part 1 puts the president in it, and the claim here, again, your disbelief should be actively suspended at this point. Cape declaims that Kennedy personally approved the exchange in 1962, received the ebans in '64, sent a team back with them, and that the Air Force runs it as a lead agency with civilian scientists brought in to plan the mission and picked the crew. So the meeting happens April 24, 1964, to ebans, craft, enter the atmosphere. The first one lands at the wrong coordinates near Sukoro, 39 light years, and they miss by about a hundred miles. The Americans are waiting at White Sands, and they send a correction up, and the second craft comes down at the right spot, west of Harlem and Air Force Base, in front of sixteen senior U.S. officials. The terms get settled there, the ebans take their dead home. The United States sends twelve people to Serpa. Kennedy is dead by then, so Castan does what most everybody writing in this area eventually does, and goes looking for a line between UFO secrecy and what happened in Dallas. To two documents, and they're not necessarily in the same category, but National Security Action Memorandum 271 is very real, Kennedy issued it on November 12, 1963, ten days before what happened on the grassy knoll directing cooperation with the Soviet Union on outer space matters, and that's public and you can read it. But the other one surfaced in 2011, through an author named William Lester, who said he got it via a freedom of information request. Same date addressed to the director of Central Intelligence, ordering a review of the agency's UFO files with an interim report due in February. When the Kennedy Library was asked about it, the staff went through the presidential office files, the CIA files, the NASA files, and the National Security files. And they found, now a big surprise, no copy and no reference to anything like it. They also noted that the formatting and the redaction pattern didn't match other classified memorandum, and I'll put both on screen here and you can have a look. So where does this leave us? Well, going into part two. So the United States at this point believes that its technology is outmatched first by Antarctica and then by whatever came down in New Mexico. It is held a living non-human for five years and learned to talk to him. It is kept a channel open to his home world for over a decade. In 1964, it met his people at a scheduled landing and made an agreement at Holliman, and twelve people get selected, four pilots, two linguists, two doctors, two scientists, a biologist and one security man. They are trained for two years, chosen partly on the basis that nobody would come looking for them. July 16th, 1965, they walk on expecting to be gone ten years. They are gone for thirteen. Okay folks, I'm not going to read to you six episodes of this, pretending I don't know what's been said about this in the past. So to be very transparent, there's never really been verifiable documents, photographs, or named crew member attached to any of this. The whole thing is from an anonymous email. The releases contradict each other. Versions give different numbers of how many left, or how many died, and how many came back, and how many stayed. In 2007, a British research group called Reality Uncovered went after the origin of the emails and traced them to, well, Richard Doty, a former Air Force office of Special Investigations agent. Now, I've had Doty on the channel, Doty denies it. His name is going to come up a lot in this channel eventually. People hear about him, because he's pretty much the most thoroughly documented disinformation operative in American ufology. He was at the center of the Paul Benowitz case in the 80s, where a private citizen was fed fabricated alien material for years until his mental health decline. On March 5, 2007, Bill Ryan, the man who built the website, the story's biggest advocate, stepped down as its webmaster and said the releases contained disinformation. He left the door open to crack, however. He said that he still thought something real might be underneath it, but he walked away from the material as published. So take that for what it's worth. I'm going to read it anyway, because I think it's interesting, and if it's fabricated, I mean, somebody fabricated a planet with two sons, a heat problem, a crew that never adapts to the system over there, a calendar, and all of this, which is pretty insane. So somebody worked out what they ate and what they died of and how the politics functioned. It feels like thousands of hours of work to aim at a mailing list of a few hundred people. So whoever did this, either believed it or wanted very desperately for other people to believe it. And I think that's worth looking into. So now we get into chapter 7, the selection, the training, 12 people getting told they won't be home for a decade. Strap yourselves in, folks. It's going to be a wild ride. Thank you for a hundred episodes, by the way. I know that we'd never officially. You know, said our thank yous here, but thank you so much for all the support along the way. A hundred episodes is a huge milestone and I'm very glad to be here, very glad to be here covering this stuff with you. Secret journey to planet Serpo Part 2 project crystal night. Very intrigued by this, by the way. This part of the book draws heavily upon the diary of the team commander, who we also know as 102, which we'll see on page 97. We are very fortunate to have his personal record of this amazing journey as it was happening. In this diary is recorded far more than simple information and observations. We can also now appreciate all his anxieties, his misgivings and his impressions. When he says I dreamt of earth and describes his Colorado home, we experience a wave of sympathy for this man who is volunteered to travel 240 trillion miles from earth as we try with great difficulty to comprehend what such a journey could be like. We also become spectators to what he is seeing and hearing. And we learn what he thinks about his own adventures. We must give many thanks to anonymous who had access to the actual diary and who painstakingly transcribed it verbatim and sent it to the Serpo website. In sending in these diary entries, anonymous prefaced them with a plea to Victor Martinez, the website moderator, he said. Attached for your UFO thread list are just four pages of the team commander's diary. The diary contains a large number of pages all hand written. It took me several days to prepare the attached four pages from the diary. This is the actual verbatim diary of the team commander. It was started the morning of the departure. There were code names for control personnel and three digit numbers for each team member addressed above. There are other codes and abbreviations for certain things which is not explained. All right. I've typed the exact words phrases and abbreviations. Nothing has been changed and likewise I will ask you not to alter change or correct any of the text here as you often do with mine to make it grammatically correct. This includes your use of caps to emphasize things. I've written. I ask you to not do this with these journal entries, Victor. Okay. Seems a little salty about some of the corrections in making this plea. Anonymous is communicating to Martinez how important it is to leave the commander's precise phraseology intact and to reproduce it exactly as he recorded it with incorrect spelling, grammar, and inconsistencies included. He understood that this diary must be given to posterity, warts and all. He knew that someday schoolchildren all over the world would read these words in their history books and they would be right there with the commander to witness these events as they happened to see it all through his eyes. So in the diary extracts in this section, we have tried to maintain this high degree of authenticity and have reproduced the exact text as it was sent to the website and we ask the readers indulgence in reading the diary entries that are laced with errors, some careless, some in the interests of saving time and some without regard for grammatical accuracy. In some cases, absolutely necessary. I have added the correct text in brackets. In any case, I am confident that the commander's intent will easily be understood. So despite the commander's specific orders to like, hey, don't change anything. We're not commanded the anonymous. They proceeded to put brackets in there anyways, which I do appreciate, by the way. All right. The more we learn about 102, the more admirable he becomes. And that's the commander, I suspect. Having dared across the galaxy, he must now shepherd his team through 13 years of an incredibly challenging existence. They must endure extreme heat, strange food, constant daylight from two sons in the sky, excessive radiation exposure, and little or no recreation. All the while, he must carry out his mission to learn all he can about this civilization. There are times when he can easily be mistaken for Captain Kirk from Star Trek, such as when he confronts the ebonds for authorizing the cannibalization of his dead teammate for a cloning experiment. Interestingly, the team arrived on Serbo within a few months of the date that Captain Kirk first appeared on our television screens in 1966. Apparently the timing was right for both. Sometimes it seems there is an amazing confluence of a reality and fiction. I would agree with that. Here we go. Chapter seven, selection and training. President Kennedy gave the official directive for the Eben Exchange program. The date for the alien landing had been previously set for April 24, 1964, and the landing site was to be at the western border of Harlem and Air Force Base, adjacent to the southern entrance to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It was originally planned to be only a diplomatic visit during which the aliens would also retrieve the bodies of the nine dead victims of the two New Mexico crashes, as well as the body of eb1. President Kennedy decided to request that the event become an exchange program. This request was communicated to the Eben Home Planet and was approved by them around September 1962. As noted earlier, the exchange program idea was originally put forth by eb1 in his fifth message in 1952. In a reply directly to him, the ebonds agreed to a return visit but did not mention an exchange program. They suggested a date 10 years in the future. This reply may have suffered from eb1's translation and the military handlers at Los Alamos first believed it to be a mistake, but before they could obtain a correction, eb1 had died. So that date 1962 remained until the new one in 1964 could be established in 1955 via human to Eben communication. All right. And when you hear me say, all right, that means like, all right. As it turned out, the new date was really 12 years into the future from when eb1 had received his reply. Now in 1962, when communications were much improved, Kennedy realized that the exchange request might now receive an approval and it did. It was agreed that we would send 12 American astronauts to the alien planet and they would leave one eb1 ambassador here for a period of 10 years. Since the planned date of the landing could not be changed without great difficulty, that meant that the government planners had only about 18 months in which to select and train our an ambassadorial team. It was a very tight schedule for such an unprecedented complicated program. The selection process alone could easily involve a six month effort. While President Kennedy had placed the entire program in the hands of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, this did not preclude the use of civilian subcontracting agencies. However, it was quickly decided that the Air Force would be the lead agency taking responsibility for finding 12 volunteers for this historic mission. The Air Force brought in civilian consultants to help with personnel selection and mission planning. Interestingly, NASA, which became operational on October 1, 1958, had no involvement in the mission. Under the terms of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of July 29, 1958, NASA was to be the official government agency charged with space exploration. And since they had fully absorbed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA, they already had a 46-year history of space research that could certainly help to expedite the program planning and preparations, but the NASA Charter specified that it remained non-military. NASA could not be involved in a DIA program. However, as we'll be seen below, NASA did participate in training the team. That's interesting because now as of a few years ago, I think NASA was made sort of the official government liaison for space exploration, you know, along with NRO and Space Force and whatnot, but they are like an official government entity now in regards to that stuff, I believe. I believe. Correct me from wrong. A grand adventure. The Appointed Military Civilian Selection Committee debated for months about the criteria to be applied in choosing the team members. This was precious time lost. It was finally decided that all candidates must be military, but not necessarily from the Air Force. There were to be no civilian members of the team. They had to have chosen the military as a career and had to have completed at least four years of service. This decision made a lot of sense. The mission required an ultra-high level of personal and team discipline. Since the team members would be facing enormous hardship and they would have to rely on that discipline to handle the challenges. Furthermore, as previously discussed Kennedy and the DIA were not absolutely certain that they would not be facing a possible threat from the ebens and they wanted people who could defend themselves and could possibly even find a way to return to Earth by force if it became necessary. The committee would be looking for individuals with special skills appropriate to their roles in the mission who had additionally been cross-trained in other needed skills. Also, they wanted some evidence that each team member had the the ability to step into the shoes of another member if necessary, so just trying to take all precautions, trying to make sure they got all their bases covered as much as as many bases as you can cover in a situation like this, I suppose. The team members had to be currently unmarried, presumably this requirement did not eliminate those previously married, but they could not have any children. Preference would be given to those who were themselves orphans. The goal was to select candidates with as few family ties as possible. Apparently, there was concern that the family members might somehow learn of the program and might conceivably make public their worries about its safety. These twelve individuals would be entirely in the hands of another civilization on a planet in a distant star system in the government had little or no leverage to ensure their safety. Their safety, of course, was highly problematic. This was a very dangerous mission, and the fate of the team was basically unpredictable. If they did all die, we would have no way of knowing whether it was accidental, so we could not retaliate against the ebony in our custody, nor would we want to anger an alien race that had the technology to invade the Earth. This was a delicate balance, but we had enough experience with the ebony to feel confident that the team had a reasonable chance of survival and returning safely, oh how nice. We basically had learned to trust them, but this was to be the first time any human would be sent out into space beyond Earth's orbit. It was a grand adventure, really more appropriate of the realm of science fiction than that of reality, but it was worth the risk. If they all, or even some of them, returned safely to Earth, we would have complete details, about a civilization on a distant planet, should be a window into the universe of incalculable value. The call for volunteers was placed in military publications, eventually after some months, the final 12, ten men and two women were chosen. There were eight Air Force selectees, two Army and two Navy, additionally four alternates were picked. They would go through the same training as the main team in case a trainee was eliminated or dropped out, these 16 were the very best and most likely to complete the mission successfully. Relative to selection, the following quoted information came from someone in England who claimed to have been in MI6, the British Intelligence Agency, and was involved in the program. It was sent to the website and was not disputed by anonymous. Interesting, so a third party corroborator apparently, allegedly, but this could also just be anonymous, sending it from another email, let's say. As a side note, bit of an aside here, but it would have been way easier to sigh up the public in the 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s than it is today. In terms of the methods used, today I would assume that all the methods used to sigh up the public would not be leaked to documents or anything of that sort. It would probably have to do with algorithm manipulation. If you look at AI and how it's able to mimic real human characteristics online, I feel like the algorithms that are being presented to us could be manipulating our consciousness in some way, our decision-making, our ability to filter information when you spend five to ten hours staring at a screen every day. It's a lot of time for you to be able to be sigh up, and people, if you see somebody on a podcast or wherever you could shut off the podcast, but then you're still on your phone. It would be a massive oversight if they weren't trying to sigh up you using AI technology rather than the way they did it before, which was maybe a leaked document or a misinformation or disinformation agent, although I'm not ruling all of that out also. My point is it was a lot easier back then because the weight that credibility carried to a topic was much greater than today. Your role being, you know, having a, whether it's an academic background, you know, a large pedigree of scholarship or being highly ranked in some agency or in the military, like those things added credibility and credibility mattered more when it came to that stuff. Nowadays, you can just fact check everything and you can look at, you know, historical documents to see if someone was telling the truth or not, but back then, if a colonel or if a doctor told you something, it held a different amount of gravitas, like you held it in higher regard. And so it would have been easier to just lie to people or for people to be lied to than it is today. I don't say it's easier. It would have just been like people would have been more prone to believing something from the horse's mouth rather than today. I think today people are rightfully more skeptical of everything they hear. Here's the portion of the email that was sent to the website. The advertisement, which was sent out, asked anyone interested in volunteering for a space program to apply. It was a semi-classified announcement. The disguise was that the USAF was selecting a special team to travel to the moon and these people must undergo special training in a special selection process. None of the military people trying out for this team knew the real mission, about 500 people applied and that narrowed down to about 160, but there was a problem. Some specialists required on this mission were missing. But besides, the requirement called for each team member to be single never married, no children and if possible, orphans. The USAF had to go out and recruit two doctors and several other specialists. Sheep dipped as a term that comes up quite a bit in this topic. So the selection committee decided to completely dissolve the identities of all the team members and to assign them three digit numbers as their new identities. They wanted to sever all their existing connections to Earth except those with the mission personnel and that meant destroying traceable identities. Consequently, they were all "sheep dipped." According to an article in Time magazine on February 3rd, 2003, titled "The CIA's Secret Army by Douglas Waller," if a soldier is assigned a highly clandestine work, his records are changed to make it appear as if he resigned from the military or was given civilian status. The process of this is called "sheep dipping," after the practice of bathing sheep before they were sheared. This metaphor is slightly a skew. It really is the shearing and not the dipping that applies here. Identities are sheared off like the wool of a sheep. One suggestion was that they all be listed as dead. That was debated and rejected. It was finally decided that they'd be shown on their official military records as "missing." That's interesting, isn't it? There's some other highly ranked military officials that have gone "missing" that have been tied to pretty secret programs. That seems like a very odd decision since the missing category was really only appropriate in wartime when thousands of military personnel were listed as "missing" an action. In 1963, the Vietnam War had not yet begun. It wasn't clear how the military would be able to explain how 12 people could be "missing" in peacetime. How could members of the armed forces suddenly not show up for duty without being labeled as "deserters"? Stranger still was the decision to either destroy their military records or to place them in a secret storage facility. That meant that no investigator would ever even know that they had been in the military. This means that they could never question the "missing" designation anyway. All other records were to be collected and destroyed or placed in a vault, including internal revenue service, tax returns, medical records, and any other papers that showed that these 12 individuals had ever existed. That was really an impossible task since there were probably papers such as birth certificate school and college records and social security cards that may not have been retrievable by the military. Even harder today, by the way, with the existence of the internet and the digital footprint. The purpose of all this strict "depersonalization" is obscure. Very possibly the committee wanted to prevent the writing of articles and books when the team members returned to Earth and were released to civilian life. The security oath alone should have accomplished that goal, but they weren't taking any chances. By eliminating their credentials, the military made it easy to disavow such writings. They wanted the full report of the space travelers to remain under lock and key for as long as they chose. There could have been a justifiable security reason for this at the time, but now in retrospect, it seems a great shame that these 12 courageous space pioneers must forever remain in the dark halls of historical anonymity. the final makeup. of the team with their new three-digit identities is as follows. You have the list here. So the team commander would be two, or assistant team commander, two or three team commander, be 102, pilot one and two would be 225 and 308. I don't expect any of you to remember this, but I will put it up on screen here in case you need to reference it. In case we need to reference it, moving forward. In one of his emails, anonymous answers some questions regarding the Serpo material that were sent in. One question relates to the selection process and offers some additional insight following is the question and answer. Okay, we've got a Q&A here with anonymous. Another question pertains to the team makeup. Why were only two females taken? If one considers the monumental problem associated with picking a team of 12 people, where each person must be totally erased from the military system. No family ties, no spouses, no children. One can see the difficulty that the selection group had. Selection group picked the best team members from a limited pool of military people. The original selection group picked 158 people. The final 12 were selected from that number. If you consider psychological medical and other tests that had to be administered, the final 12 were the best qualified from the original number. Why they chose two females was never written. Apparently, those two females were the best qualified in their individual specialty, a doctor, and a linguist. All right. I like that they were being fair, huh? That's nice. All right, the farm. The primary training for the mission took place at Camp Piri, Virginia, on the York River near Williamsburg. This is the not-so-secret main CIA training location popularly known as the Farm, but officially referred to as the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity. A FETA, the project was assigned its own training complex within the larger facility, where it could impose its own secrecy and security within the already highly secure CIA system. So it was necessary to go through two levels of screening to gain access to the team training location. Camp Piri was the home training site for the team, but they were also trained at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita, Falls, Texas, Ellsworth Air Force Base outside of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Dow Air Force Base in Bangor, Maine. Wow, that's interesting. Ellsworth being home to, well, being home, being the location where, you know, Sergeant Mario Woods also had his encounter in Richard Dodie was also assigned to investigating Mario Woods' case. So maybe a connection there, maybe this leads back to Dodie. Interesting. I wish I would have followed up a little bit more on this. So I'm reading this. I skimmed through it partially before my conversation with Richard Dodie. There was so much there to talk about, and another reason why I feel like it merits more conversation, but I wish I would have brought this up a little bit more. And I had it in my notes, but, you know, time flies. They were given high altitude astronaut training at Tindle Air Force Base near Panama City, Florida. Anonymous says that they were also sent to unidentified locations in Mexico and Chile for special training. Camp Piri was a logical choice for training the team, primarily because it was self-contained and it was ultra-secure. Since it was operated by the defense department, it was really a military base under the nominal control of the US Navy. It was named after a famed naval explorer, rear admiral Robert E. Piri, who died, oh sorry, who in 1909 was the first man to reach the North Pole. Self-containment was important to the planners of the mission. They didn't want the team to make any connections outside their training facility, where they might inadvertently drop a hint or reference to their mission. Camp Piri also already had pleasant homes and apartments, recreational facilities and retail establishments for the CIA trainees that were easily adaptable for the team. Since it was previously a Virginia state forestry and game preserve, the camp residents could even enjoy hunting on the 9,000 acre, heavily wooded reservation in whatever spare time they were given. Secrecy and self-containment had always been the major virtues of the main training camp for the Navy Seabees. And then it was used to house those German prisoners of war, mainly officers, who were supposed to have been killed in action, but had actually been rescued by the Navy. And we know this as paperclip. Consequently, the German high command thought they were dead and couldn't give away any information. Prisoners could live normal lives securely at Camp Piri while they were being interrogated. Eventually, most became naturalized American citizens. The Navy gave the reservation back to Virginia in 1946, but then took it over again in 1951. The purpose of the CIA training at the farm is to imbue deskbound intelligence operatives with the paramilitary skills they would need in enemy territories. Here, the keenly academic types are toughened up and made into pseudo soldiers. This kind of James Bond commando training was resumed after 9/11 by George W. Bush after a long era of blunders by CIA paramilitary operatives in foreign countries who were in the special operations group SOG. Waller says in the time article, "until fairly recently, the CIA in an effort to clean up reputations, sullied by botched overseas coup, accuse and imperial assassination attempts had shied away from getting its hands dirty. Until about five years ago in 1998, it focused instead on gathering intelligence that could be used by other parts of the government." For that, traditional CIA officers often working under cover of US diplomats got most of their secrets from the embassy cocktail circuit or by bribing foreign officials. Most did not even have weapons training. Now, says Waller, at Camp Piri, new SOG recruits also hone their paramilitary skills like sharpshooting with various kinds of weapons, setting up landing zones and remote areas for agency aircraft and attacking enemy sites with a small force. This rebuilding of the special operations group by CIA director George Tennant required a makeover of the facilities and capabilities of Camp Piri starting in 2001. By the mid-1960s, there had been some improvements as a result of the lessons learned in the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, but those facilities were still rather primitive when the Sherpo team was in training at the camp between 63 and 65. Interesting little history lesson there about Camp Piri that I did not know, and so again, you know, we're reading through these things who many people might assume is just completely riddled with disinformation and they very well might be right. However, even when reading stuff like this, and allowing ourselves to suspend our disbelief, we can learn a thing or two that we hadn't previously known. So far, everything checks out. It seems a little strange, obviously, that you know, President Kennedy would give this order to have this exchange program, but I've heard crazier things. Extreme confinement. The complete training curriculum, according to Anonymous, is shown in Appendix 1. He claims to have received it from an associate named Gene. Email moderator Victor Martinez provided Gene's last name, Laskowski. We later learned that his real name is Gene Lakes. Anonymous tells us that Laskowski gave out these details of the training agenda because he wanted to, quote, unquote, beef up the released information with more specificity. Expected to be completed in about six months, it was a very ambitious program. We find out from Anonymous email to the website that it actually lasted about eight months. The training was intense. Anonymous says each team member had to demonstrate their abilities to endure hardship, which included a battery of psychological tests, medical screenings, and a PAT, a positive attitude test, which is a military test given to pilots and special forces personnel. Each team member had to endure extreme, psychological, and physical training. In one training test, each team member was locked inside a five by seven box and buried seven feet underground for five days with just food and water no contact with anyone else and in total darkness. Evidently candidates with any tendency toward claustrophobia had been weeded out by the selection process. Otherwise, for anyone with such tendencies, the ordeal would definitely have caused the trainee to break down. Apparently, all the team members passed this test. It does seem logical to have imposed a claustrophobic stress test on the team, since they had to be prepared to be cooped up in the alien spacecraft for an extended journey to Zeta-Bertekulai. It wasn't known in what sort of living quarters they would be as sconce on CERPO. In sconce, it's a good word. Two ladies. A section of the CERPO website invited comments from anyone who had direct knowledge about Project Crystal Knight, but preferred to remain anonymous. Many emails were received that confirmed all the basic facts about the remarkable journey. Regarding the training at Camp Peary, this letter basically authenticated the story revealed by anonymous. The writer says, "Not I was involved in Project Crystal Knight from about 1960 to 1965. I was assigned as a civilian to this project. I was a CIA employee with a specialty of survival in a foreign environment. I was a training instructor at the CIA Training Camp in Virginia. I trained 12 men, no women, who went on this mission. They spent about eight months at our training facility. Few knew their exact mission, which was classified top secret slash code word. I had no other involvement with this mission after 1965. I was very surprised to hear this story come to light now after all these years. Interesting, corroborative piece of information once again, but once again, where's this information coming from? Larpe or leak? We are faced again with the existential question. The no women interjection in this email contradicts the claim by anonymous that two women were part of the original team. There has been other testimony on both sides of the issue, and it remains contentious. It is possible that the 12 trainees referred to here consisted of 10 original team members and two male alternates. The following email helps to clarify the contradiction. The project's serpo information that I just read is not totally correct. There were two women in the original 16 selected for training. I helped train the team, including the two women. But after the final selection process, which did not involve any combat training, like was mentioned on the website on serpo.org, the two women were dropped from the list. During the training, the team members didn't know their actual assignment. When the final cut was made, the 12 selected were sent to a military prison and then told of the assignment. The 12 were isolated from that point on. The 12 were removed from payroll of the government and placed in a special file within the defense intelligence agency. The DIA was the controlling agency in Project Crystal Knight, which was the name of the operation. However, the following email keeps the controversy alive. I congratulate and commend you for getting this very important piece of America's history out. Hidden history out. I really enjoyed reading this information. I just shared it with many of my old intel friends, and they knew about it. It's truly an amazing story, all of which is fact. I guess there still is a controversy whether two women or went or not. At least one woman went for sure. I knew six of them while in training as their instructor. Two were nurses. One was a linguist, and I'm not sure about the others with passage of time. So again, just more corroborative anecdotal information. Nowadays, it would be so easy to retrace the IP address or to find out who sent those emails. Well, maybe not with Proton and whatnot, but I feel like if that website existed now, which I think it does, but if it existed in the capacity that it did with all these defense people being a part of a mailing list, I feel like we'd get a lot further today. Escape to Earth. As discussed in previous chapters, we had at least one intact ebony craft in our possession. Anonymous makes mention of the one that crashed in the plains of San Agustín in Western New Mexico. He claims that this craft collided with the corona disc on July 4, 1947, but limped on westward and finally came down near the till, but wasn't discovered until 1949. This discovery date was disputed by other Roswell witnesses, but all agreed that this disc was virtually undamaged. It was sent to Wright Patterson Foreign Technology Division, headed by Dr. Eric Wang for analysis and reverse engineering. Would that have been right airfield back then and not Wright Patterson? Interesting. And Dr. Wang is also noted to be one of these scientists who have worked on anti-gravitics and, seriously, either passed away or vanished. The seriously damaged corona craft was also shipped to Wright Patterson. At the time, Area 51 was not yet in existence, however, after it became operational, both discs ended up there. We learned from anonymous that the training plan actually contemplated a possible emergency escape contingency. He says, "Several selected team members, pilots, "were trained on flying and even craft." One of which was the one captured near Western New Mexico in 1949. The plan called for these selected few to fly the craft back to Earth in case of an emergency. There were four pilots on the team, 102, 203, 225, and 308. These four spent many weeks at the Nevada Complex learning to fly the recovered ebonylion craft. It wasn't hard to fly once one could understand the operation of the controls. I'm sure many of the UFO sightings back in '64, '65 around the West could be attributed to these test flights by our team members. So that part raises a little bit of a flag to me. One, the alien controls, you know, we hear lots of different speculative ideas about how these things were piloted, including just like brain to craft interface with no controls or very limited amount of control panels, like very minimal sort of no buttons or joysticks or anything like that. But also the idea that the sightings in '64 and '65 would have been us flying them around, it would surprise the hack out of me for something so sensitive. To be taken off of a secure area and flown around for people to see. Because if that thing crashes, everything comes crashing down with it. And so I do not expect anyone to have seen any of the flight tests unless you were directly on base. That just sounds completely made up to me. And this is something that Bob Lazar talked about as well. He, you know, I asked him, do you think some of these craft would be us flying them? And he said, no, there's no way they would ever take something so valuable and fly it in civilian airspace for many reasons. And I got to agree with that, like that would be an insane oversight. In this reference to the San Augustine craft anonymous implies that we had more than one flyable even craft in our possession. The other one could only have been the disc that was, quote, unquote, delivered to us at Kingman, Arizona, on May 21st, 1953. And was hauled on a tank carrier over the road to the Nevada test site. See chapter five and plate six. This is a massed reference to area 51, which was fully functional by that date. And now had become the major facility for the reverse engineering and flight testing of all recovered alien craft. The belief that our pilots would be able to fly an alien craft 40 light years from Zeta reticulate back to earth was a very naive supposition based on the lack of knowledge of the scientific principles involved at the time. Apparently in 1964, nobody in the military industrial complex had yet conceived the possibility that covering such vast distances could only be achieved by time travel through wormholes. It seems highly unlikely that human pilots would have been able to comprehend that sort of technology in that era, even Star Trek, which debuted two years later in '66 did not mention time travel, but referred to warp drives. It wasn't until the advent of Star Wars in '77 that the term hyperspace basically a synonym for the time domain gained popular currency. Furthermore, the even discs in our possession were only small scout craft. They were not meant for long distance interstellar journeys. Since we had not yet seen the larger craft when the training took place, it is understandable how this judgment error could have occurred. Tindall Training Another email testimony confirmed that the training at Tindall Air Force Base in Florida and the fact that no women were in the final team. Evidently, the Tindall training place, the Tindall training took place after the final 12 had been selected. Here's the email. My father died in 1995. He was retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1990. He told me a story about a special mission that he was involved in back in 1965. He told me that the mission was about 12 military astronauts that went to another planet in a spaceship that was found in New Mexico desert. He said the 12 men were trained at Tindall Air Force Base in Florida, where he was stationed. He helped train the 12 in space endurance, which he was trained to do. He said the 12 left in 1965 and came back in '78. He was there to check them after they returned to this planet Earth. I didn't know what to think about my dad's story back then. I just listened to him and thought maybe he was just making this up. But now I realize he was telling the truth. It's too late for my father to know about this, but I know my father was being truthful to me. and that makes me feel good. I look forward to reading more about this incredible story. Since this email describes the last training component, for the remaining 12, I believe that it is safe to conclude the final team composition consisted entirely of men. Tindall Air Force Base was originally an air gunnery station base during World War II, hosting allied as well as American pilots. One of its famous alumni was Clark Gable, who graduated in 1943. After the war, Tindall became a general air weapons training facility and officially became an air training command base in 1950 and in '57, it became part of the air defense command, the ADC, which is responsible for defending the continental United States and its territories. 64, when the SERPO team went there, it had already begun training airmen for high altitude and space operations, and then in '68, the air defense command officially changed its name to the air space defense command. This is all fascinating, Jargon. I'm sure the likes of UAP Gerb would appreciate a little bit more than I. As mentioned above, by one of the trainers, during the training, the team members didn't know their actual assignment when the final cut was made. The 12 select were sent to a military prison and then told the assignment. One can imagine the reactions of the trainees to this revelation. Certainly, they could not have imagined such an assignment in their wildest dreams, even though some of the training might have suggested some sort of exotic mission. And then, after all, they had gone through to be confined at Fort Levenworth, Kansas, must have been added insult to injury. There was no doubt an attempt to imbue the team with pride and to stimulate a feeling of heroism of their mission and the glory they could anticipate, but they must have nevertheless been shaking in their boots. They knew that the promise of glory was a fiction, and all that they could look forward to was tremendous hardship and an early anonymous death on a distant planet, or a life in long-term isolation to keep them from revealing what they knew. So it is not surprising that one of the team members asked to be excused. He changed his mind when he was told that he would have to remain at Fort Levenworth until the team returned in 10 years. And folks, that is all I'm going to cover today because the next chapter, chapter 8, we talk about the landings. Oh boy, this is, I gotta say, I am way more enthralled by this story than I thought I would be. Being skeptical, I think, is a natural reaction to this type of story, however, the amount of detail I must say is compelling. And if nothing else, as you know, this is extremely entertaining. And I'm someone who enjoys being entertained. And entertaining, an insane narrative is something that I enjoy doing as well. And so let me know what you think so far. Have you independently, perhaps some of the listeners out there, have you independently heard about this project? Do you have any knowledge of this project? Is there anything you would like to add to this? Do you have a family member that worked at one of these facilities that were named throughout this episode? And if so, were they stationed there in the 60s? You know, this is the internet now. Whereas back then, you would have so many anonymous emails. Nowadays, we can times that by a thousand with the amount of people watching this video. I would love to know if there's any connection to be made that hasn't been made before. And if anything else rings a bell in connection or conjunction to what we've read in regards to perhaps other literature that is out there, please bring that forward and make it available. Let me know. Please keep the discussion going as well on the Discord channel. If you're not a member, you can become a member for free on Discord or you can join the Area 52 membership and have top secret access over there as well. Do with that what you please. It is a very fun place and it is a very safe place to discuss these topics in a judgment-free environment. I want to thank you for listening. Thank you for 101 episodes. You're all very kind and I look forward to continuing this story. Next week, we won't be taking a break. We're going to go right into this story once again and bring you part two of the secret journey to Planet Serpo. Peace and love. [Music]