Secret Journey to Planet Serpo (10 page)

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. E-mail moderator Victor Martinez provided Gene's last name—Loscowski.
^*17
Anonmyous tells us that Loscowski gave out these details of the training agenda because he wanted to “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 an anonymous e-mail 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 (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 5' × 7' box buried seven feet underground for five days, with just food and water, no contact with anyone else and in total darkness” [see item 14 in appendix 1]. Evidently, candidates with any tendency toward claustrophobia had been weeded out by the selection process. Otherwise, for anyone with such tendencies, this 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 Reticuli, and it wasn't known in what sort of living quarters they would be ensconced on Serpo.

TWO LADIES

A section of the Serpo website invited comments from anyone who had direct knowledge about Project Crystal Knight, but preferred to remain anonymous. Many e-mails were received that confirmed all the basic facts about this remarkable journey. Regarding the training at Camp Peary, this letter basically authenticated the story revealed by Anonymous. The writer says:

I was involved in Project CRYSTAL KNIGHT from about 1960 until 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 the 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/Codeword.” 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.

The “NO women” interjection in this e-mail contradicts the claim by Anonymous that two women were part of the original team. There has been other testimony on both sides of this issue, and it remains contentious. It is possible that the twelve trainees referred to here consisted of ten original team members, and two male alternates. The following e-mail helps to clarify the contradiction.

The Project 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 what was mentioned on the website,
www.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 the 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 e-mail keeps the controversy alive.

I congratulate and commend you for getting this very important piece of America's 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 on whether two (2) women went or not. At least one (woman) went for sure. I knew six (6) of them while in training as their instructor. Two (2) were NURSES, one was a LINGUIST and I'm not sure about the others with the passage of time.

ESCAPE TO EARTH!

As discussed in previous chapters, we had at least one intact Eben craft in our possession. Anonymous makes mention of the one that crashed in the Plains of San Augustin 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 Datil, but wasn't discovered until 1949. This discovery date was disputed by other Roswell witnesses, but all agree that this disc was virtually undamaged. It was sent to the Wright-Patterson Foreign Technology Division, headed by Dr. Eric Wang, for analysis and reverse engineering. The seriously damaged Corona craft was also shipped to Wright-Patterson. At that time, Area 51 was not yet in existence. However, after it became operational, both discs ended up there.

We learn from Anonymous that the training plan actually contemplated a possible emergency escape contingency! He says:

Several selected team members (pilots) were trained on flying an Eben 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 Eben alien 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 1964–/‘65 around the West could be attributed to these test flights by our team members.

In this reference to the San Augustin craft, Anonymous implies that we had more than one flyable Eben craft in our possession. The other one could only have been the disc that was “delivered” to us at Kingman, Arizona, on May 21, 1953, and was hauled on a tank carrier over the road to the Nevada Test Site (see chapter 5 and
plate 6
). This is a masked reference to Area 51, which was fully functional by that date, and had now become the major facility for the reverse-engineering and flight testing of all recovered alien craft.
^*18

The belief that our pilots would be able to fly an alien craft forty light-years from Zeta Reticuli back to Earth was a very naive supposition based on lack of knowledge of the scientific principles involved at that 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 1966, did not mention time travel, but referred to “warp drives.” It wasn't until the advent of
Star Wars
in 1977 that the term
hyperspace,
basically a synonym for the time domain, gained popular currency. Furthermore, the Eben 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.

TYNDALL TRAINING

Another e-mail testimony confirmed the training at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, and the fact that no women were in the final team. Evidently, the Tyndall training took place after the final twelve had been selected.

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 this mission was about 12 military astronauts that went to another planet in a spaceship that was found in the New Mexico desert. He said the 12 men were trained at Tyndall Air Force Base, 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 1978 and 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 realise [
sic
] he was telling the truth. It is 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 e-mail describes the last training component for the remaining twelve, I believe that it is safe to conclude that the final team composition consisted entirely of men.

Tyndall AFB was originally an air gunnery training 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, Tyndall became a general air weapons training facility and officially became an air training command base in 1950. In 1957 it became part of the Air Defense Command (ADC), which is responsible for defending the continental United States and its territories. In 1964, when the Serpo team went there, it had already begun training airmen for high altitude and space operations, and then in 1968, the Air Defense Command officially changed its name to the Aerospace Defense Command.

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 selected were sent to a military prison and then told of 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 Leavenworth, Kansas, must have added insult to injury. There was, no doubt, an attempt to imbue the team with pride and to stimulate a feeling of the 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 Leavenworth until the team returned in ten years!

High-altitude training at Tyndall AFB

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

THE DIPLOMATIC GREETING

The two alien craft entered our atmosphere on the afternoon of April 24, 1964, right on schedule. These were not scout craft, but were much larger and were considered shuttle craft. The first ship missed the rendezvous point and landed somewhere near Socorro, New Mexico. This was about a hundred miles north of the planned landing site. We sent a message to the craft that it had landed at the wrong place. The second ship picked up the message and made the navigation correction. It landed shortly thereafter at the precise designated location at White Sands, where a greeting party waited. It can be assumed that it was late afternoon at that point, although it could have been nighttime, as was shown in the movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Since we don't know where Steven Spielberg obtained his information, we don't know how accurate it was. But it was distinctly possible that night had fallen by the time the alien craft had landed and, presumably, the planning committee was prepared for that contingency with appropriate lighting, as in the movie. We are not told what happened to the first craft. More than likely, it also flew to the correct location.

The greeting group consisted of sixteen senior government and military officials. Anonymous does not give the identities of these people, but most probably President Johnson was not among them. The twelve team members waited in a bus nearby. Forty-five tons of supplies and equipment stood ready to load onto the alien ship.
^*19
A canopy was in place connecting the landing point with the waiting officials. A contingent of Ebens disembarked from the craft and walked under the canopy. Movie cameras and tape recorders were rolling. The Eben official presented us with some technology gifts. Anonymous says, “The Ebens had a crude translator device. It appeared to be some sort of microphone with a readout screen. The senior U.S. official was given one of the devices, and the Eben kept the other one. The officials spoke into the device and the screen showed a printed form of the voice message, both in Eben and in English. It was crude and hard to understand everything that was said.” Direct translation was also provided by one of the aliens who was designated Ebe2. This was a female who spoke decent English. She later became an invaluable resource on Serpo.

White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

THE YELLOW BOOK

Ebe2 presented us with the Yellow Book. This was a remarkable and generous gift to the people of Earth and clearly demonstrated the aliens' wish to become our galactic friends. About the Yellow Book, Anonymous says:

It isn't exactly a book. It is a block of material, approximately 2½ inches thick and transparent in nature and appearance. The reader looks at the transparent surface and suddenly words and pictures appear. It is an endless series of historical stories and photographs of our universe, the Eben planet and their former homeworld, and other interesting stories about the universe. It also contains an [a] historical story and various accounts about Earth's history and distant past. . . . I am one of the very few people who has actually SEEN the Yellow Book. . . . As has been commented on by others, it would take a lifetime to read it and another lifetime to understand it.

The Yellow Book also describes the Eben involvement with the evolution of human civilizations on Earth. Evidently, as we learned later, there were some controversial claims made in this regard that caused some recipients of the information to doubt the veracity of the material, which brought up the possibility that these claims were intended to accomplish a hidden diplomatic agenda. On this subject Anonymous says:

If one reads the Yellow Book and reads between the lines, one would come away with the thought and clear impression that the Ebens had something to do with Jesus Christ or, possibly, Jesus was one of them. Also, if you look at some events that are shown in the Yellow Book (remember, there are no dates shown in the Yellow Book), you can connect some incidents, such as Fatima, etc., with an Eben landing.

We learned later that it was Ebe2 who had translated the book into English.

The Ebens informed us at that time that they had reconsidered the timing of the exchange program, and wished to reschedule it for a later date. They preferred to only retrieve the bodies of their dead compatriots on this trip, and to return to Earth in July 1965 to accomplish the exchange of personnel. This posed an enormous logistical problem for us, since all the equipment and supplies would now have to be warehoused somewhere, and we would have to keep the team motivated and in a highly secure facility for another year. There were also possible political ramifications that could change our willingness to continue with the program if the Johnson administration decided to cancel it. The aliens took the bodies of the nine Ebens who had died in the two Roswell crashes, as well as the body of Ebe1, onboard. We had performed autopsies on some of the bodies.
^*20
The remains had been kept at Los Alamos Laboratories in a special state-of-the-art cryogenic facility. The visit lasted about four hours. The film and audio recordings of the entire event have been stored in a vault at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

THE EXCHANGE

The time selected for the return visit was July 16, 1965. It was agreed that this time the landing location would be the northern section of the Nevada Test Site. About this choice, Anonymous says, “Planners did not wish to keep the same location for fear that something might leak.” Once again, the extreme security concern becomes evident. The Team members were returned to their lockup at Fort Leavenworth for one month, and then were sent back to Camp Peary to hone their original training and to learn some new skills. This gave them all, but especially the linguists, a chance to improve their ability to understand and speak the Eben language. The linguists were now able to achieve a passable fluency with the high-pitched singsong speech, but the other team members struggled with the bizarre language.

As before at Camp Peary, the twelve team members remained isolated in their own little community within the larger CIA training facility and did not communicate with anyone other than their trainers. This period coincided with the first year of the Vietnam War in which the CIA Special Operations Group played an important role, so the camp must have been a very busy place while the team was there. In April 1965 they were sent back to “jail” again at Fort Leavenworth to wait out the final three months. By this time, they must have begun to feel like real prisoners, and probably wondered what strange political concerns could have justified such harsh treatment. It is likely that the team morale must have then reached an all-time low, although the mounting excitement and anticipation of the rapidly approaching departure date probably helped to offset their depression.

The two Eben shuttles returned right on schedule on July 16, 1965. This time they landed at the northern section of the Nevada Test Site, as planned. The diplomatic niceties having been attended to in their previous visit, this was strictly a working meeting. The twelve team members waited in a bus, as before, and the military vans were poised to unload their massive cargo, consisting of 90,500 pounds of supplies, equipment, and vehicles (see appendix 2). I think we can safely assume that there had been extensive communications between Los Alamos and Serpo in the intervening year to refine the arrangements, but Anonymous makes no reference to this. The team boarded the Eben shuttle craft, and the cargo was loaded by military personnel onto one of the craft.

Three M151 Vietnam-era Jeeps like this one were taken onboard.

The team boards the alien shi
p
(from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
)
.

The massive size of this ship can be appreciated when we learn that the entire cargo fit into a single level of the three-level craft! The lone Eben ambassador disembarked from the shuttle and was taken away in a military vehicle. He was then sent to the alien facility at Los Alamos Laboratories.

“SKY KING” TAKES OFF FOR THE STARS

Understandably, the team had no intention of allowing the rigid protocols of the planners to infect their ranks by referring to each other robotically by three-digit numbers. They quickly adopted suitable nicknames for each member, but never used their real names. They did, however, use the “number names” for more formal and written communications. The Team Commander, an Air Force colonel, became “Skipper,” the two doctors were “Doc 1” and Doc 2,” and the pilots were referred to as “Sky King” and “Flash Gordon.” Anonymous doesn't supply the other nicknames. A comment sent to the Serpo website in March 2006 points out an interesting reference that adds authenticity to the entire Serpo story. He reminds us that in the golden days of radio,
Sky King
was a very popular kids' series, along with
The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet,
and many others.
Sky King
ran on radio from 1946 to 1954, and then a TV version was produced and shown from 1951 to 1959. The TV show reruns were telecast on Saturday afternoons up until 1966. So the show was still on television when the team departed in July 1965. The comment contributor says, “Most people today have either never heard of Sky King or have long forgotten about him. However, it wouldn't be surprising that a young pilot in 1965 would have adopted the nickname of ‘Sky King.'” A pilot who was about thirty-five when the mission departed would have been an impressionable teenager in the 1950s, and probably watched the TV show. If he was forty, he probably lay on the living-room carpet like millions of other kids of that era, glued to the radio when Sky King came over the airwaves. Could that young boy ever, in his wildest dreams, have imagined that he would one day be among the first Earthlings to depart the Earth to travel to a distant star system?

Poster for the TV version of
Sky King
from the 1950s

The Team Commander kept a diary from the first moment of the mission. Anonymous supplied the following account of that first day from that diary.

Here, for posterity, is the Skipper's exact entry for those first scary moments of that historic mission. Anonymous doesn't explain the acronyms, but we can be quite certain that the M refers to “Mission” in each case. MTC might be “Mission Training Coordinator,” and MVC is probably the “Mission Voyage Coordinator,” who we find out later does not speak English very well and travels with the team. Consequently, he must be an Eben.