Article 4: UFO Magazine (Feb 2006)

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 find it 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 the website at http://www.serpo.org/consistencies.html (unable to find link’s source).
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 http://www.serpo.org/ comments.html#1 (unable to find link’s source) 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 http://www.serpo.org/information.html (unable to find link’s source)
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 hypothesise 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 emphasise 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?