About 18 months before the projected landing was due to occur, President Kennedy - who, some say, was killed before he could reveal the truth about UFOs - authorised a foreign exchange of cosmic proportions. A team of 12 specially trained humans (there's some debate as to whether two of them were women) whose identities were subsequently erased, would return with the ETs to their home planet. In 1965, the Exchange Team took off while another ET, EBE 2, remained on Earth.
Named SERPO by the human visitors, the ETs' planet is 38 light years from Earth, in the Zeta Reticuli star system (famed in UFO lore since the 1962 Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction story). SERPO is a little smaller than Earth and has two suns. It is hot, flat and dry, harsh but habitable, especially in the cooler northern regions where the humans eventually made their home. The Team spent 13 years on SERPO where, despite a few misadventures, they were welcomed by the Ebens, as they are dubbed by Anonymous.
Further emails provided more details. There were about 650,000 Ebens on SERPO, living in about 100 small, autonomous communities around the planet. There was no centralised government, though there was one large, central community that served as a hub for Eben industry and resources. All Ebens worked and were, in return, supplied with what they needed to live their Spartan but happy lives. Crime was non-existent in their quasi-socialist utopia, but war was not. 3,000 years ago, the Ebens had fought a vast, 100-year interplanetary conflict with the civilisation of another planet, which they had annihilated. Since then, the Ebens had been intergalactic drifters, visiting a number of other species and civilisations, including our own, before settling on their current home planet. Curiously, while we are provided with a wealth of detail about the Ebens' culture, their living habits, even their digestive systems, we're never given a description of what they look like, perhaps because the people reading the report already knew what they looked like - there was an Eben at Los Alamos after all. The report includes a number of photographs, which Anonymous has promised to share with us, though none has yet emerged.
By the time the human team returned to Earth in 1978, two of their number had died. Two chose to remain on SERPO, and stayed in contact with the Earth until 1988. It was discovered that those team members who did return had been exposed to relatively high doses of radiation on SERPO, and it was this that ultimately killed them - the last one in Florida in 2002.
Rather than being greeted with incredulous laughter, Anonymous's first post was immediately verified by two members of Martinez's list - Paul McGovern and Gene Lakes (aka Loscowski) - who provided some significant extra background detail. McGovern has been identified as a former DIA security chief, stationed at Area 51. Lakes appears to be another DIA insider.
Their credentials sound impressive, but have yet to be verified outside the confines of the online UFO community. Others on the Martinez list who verified the SERPO story included former Air Force Office Of Special investigations special agent Richard Doty, well known for his role in spreading disinformation within the UFO community during the early 1980s, though he insists that he has no role to play in this current arena.
Further support for the SERPO exchange came from within the wider UFO community. On the Coast to Coast radio show, Communion author Whitley Strieber described meeting an old man at a UFO convention in the 1990s. The man told Strieber he had been to another planet before muttering what Strieber thought was the word 'Serpico' (the name of a 1973 thriller starring Al Pacino, who is not currently suspected of playing a part in the UFO conspiracy).
As excitement about the SERPO revelations began to spread, an English-Canadian management consultant and personal development trainer named Bill Ryan offered to set up a web site (
www.serpo.org) as a clearinghouse for Anonymous's information. He also, bravely, and perhaps foolishly, took on the role of SERPO's front man. While no stranger to fringe beliefs and ideas - he admits to having dated a woman he believed to be an extraterrestrial - Ryan was a newcomer to the UFO scene. SERPO has been his trial by fire, and he has since been accused of being a hoaxer, a government agent and a Scientologist. But he continues his work unbowed and remains convinced that SERPO is worth pursuing. "I think a simple hoax or a prank can absolutely be ruled out," he says. "It's too complex for that, and there's too much circumstantial corroboration. Misinformation falls into the same category - that would mean it's all false. But it could be disinformation. That means part truth, part fiction. And the fiction part could be as little as five per cent for the entire story to be thrown off-kilter."
