Project Serpo
Project Serpo was an alleged exchange program between the United States government and the Eban extraterrestrials (EBENs), under whose terms twelve US military personnel were transported to the Ebans' home planet — called "Serpo," orbiting the Zeta Reticuli binary system — in 1965, spending approximately ten years there before a smaller group returned to Earth. The program was disclosed beginning November 2, 2005, when Victor Martinez, moderator of a UFOlogy mailing list, posted an email from an anonymous source calling himself "Request Anonymous," who claimed to be a retired government employee with access to program records. The posts were distributed through Bill Ryan's website serpo.org and described the team's experiences in detail: two suns, extreme heat, sparse desert-like terrain, and the deaths of most team members before or shortly after return from radiation exposure.
Dan Burisch, who had direct knowledge of classified EBE programs through the Dan Burisch case, dismissed it explicitly: "I know that it didn't happen. I know that it's nonsense. I have heard different modules for disinformation and that is one of the spins that I heard years ago."
Program details
Len Kasten devoted a full chapter to Project Serpo in The Secret History of Extraterrestrials (2010), drawing on the Anonymous e-mails and Bill Ryan's serpo.org archive. According to Kasten, "under the auspices of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) program referred to as Operation Crystal Knight, or what is now being called Project Serpo, it has been claimed that twelve astronauts left Earth in July 1965 and were taken to the planet Serpo in the binary star system Zeta Reticuli aboard an alien spaceship as part of an exchange program."
Kasten describes the team composition as "four pilots, two linguists, one biologist, two scientists, two doctors, and one security man," all given "suicide pills" and armed with "four Colt 45 revolvers and eight M2 carbine rifles." Training took place at "Camp Peary in Virginia" (the CIA's "Farm") and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, including an extreme survival test in which "each Team Member was locked inside a 5 × 7 feet box buried seven feet underground for five days, with just food and water, no contact with anyone else and in total darkness."
On the Eben homeworld, Kasten reports that the population was "about 650,000," that the civilization was "about ten thousand years old," and that the Ebens had "fought a devastating interplanetary war about three thousand years ago and wiped out their enemies using particle beam weapons." A notable detail concerns timekeeping: "Carl Sagan was consulted on this and wrote about sixty pages of opinion on the subject, but ultimately he had to acknowledge that earthly laws of physics do not necessarily apply out of this solar system."
Narrative as disclosed
According to the Serpo accounts, the backstory begins with the 1947 Roswell crash, from which the US military allegedly recovered a single surviving extraterrestrial it designated EBE-1 (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity number one). EBE-1 was transported to Los Alamos, where it lived until 1952 and established a communicative relationship with scientists using tonal, near-harmonic vocalizations; it also possessed a communication device among the craft debris that scientists eventually connected to a power supply in 1952, enabling six messages to be exchanged with the Eban home world before EBE-1 died.
A second Eban craft visited Earth for a prearranged meeting at White Sands Missile Range on April 24, 1964, during which the Ebans recovered the remains of their deceased crew and an agreement was reached for a human exchange program. In 1965, the twelve-member human team — selected from hundreds of candidates under criteria requiring military service of at least four years, no family ties (with priority given to orphans), and outstanding past mission performance — departed Earth aboard an Eban craft under a directive personally authorized by President Kennedy. The team included a commander, assistant commander, two pilots, two linguists, a biologist, two scientists, and a security specialist, each identified only by number. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) administered the mission under the codename "Project Crystal Knight."
Life on Serpo
According to the mission logs reproduced in the Anonymous disclosures, the twelve-member team landed in an open desert-like central village and immediately encountered two suns — "one brighter than the other" — and extreme heat. Their Eban guide warned them about both the heat and the persistent light, explaining that Serpo experienced no true night as Earth does. The Eban community was organized around a central clock tower, with structures resembling adobe or mud huts grouped in villages, each village fulfilling a specific function in a society structured analogously to ancient human civilizations around large factories. Radiation levels on Serpo varied significantly by latitude: the northern hemisphere showed lower levels, and the North Pole region — which the Ebans found physically debilitating — contained snow and cold weather their guide could only endure in a heated suit.
Return and aftermath
The team's stay extended beyond the planned ten years to thirteen, attributed to differing methods of measuring time. On August 18, 1978, the craft returned to Earth, but only seven members emerged from the hatch; two had chosen not to return, electing to spend their remaining years among the Ebans. Three team members had died on Serpo, resulting in three coffins — two filled, one symbolic — being buried in America. The seven survivors were placed in quarantine for one year and then held at various military bases until 1984 under the security management of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Anonymous claimed the team produced more than 3,000 pages of reports through debriefing sessions, accompanied by 5,419 audio cassettes recorded during the mission, and thousands of photographs — one of which, showing the Serpo desert illuminated by two suns, was included in Anonymous's disclosures.
Disclosure and investigation
The narrative was first made public on November 2, 2005, when Victor Martinez posted the anonymous "Request Anonymous" email to a UFOlogy mailing list. British researcher Bill Ryan established the website serpo.org to archive subsequent releases. By 2007, investigators from the British group Reality Uncovered had traced all anonymous disclosures to Richard C. Doty, the former AFOSI agent with a documented history of UFO-related disinformation operations, despite Doty's denials. Researchers further alleged that a corroborating figure named "Paul McGovern" was actually an alias used by Doty. By March 5, 2007, Bill Ryan announced his withdrawal as webmaster, acknowledging the releases contained disinformation while maintaining that a genuine exchange program might underlie the fabrications.
Investigators identified a "Team of Five" behind the Serpo narrative: Doty, Martinez, Ryan, former CIA analyst Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, and physicist Hal Puthoff.
Burisch's etymology: "Opres" and Operation Rehearsal
At a 2009 workshop in Zürich hosted by Project Camelot, Dan Burisch provided a more detailed account of the Serpo narrative's origins than his earlier public dismissals. He identified the name "Serpo" as an old NATO K-4 code word appropriated by the disinformation operation — the word "Opres" written backward, standing for "Operation Rehearsal." Burisch described this as a deliberate test conducted by elements of the intelligence community at exactly the time he and Marci McDowell were presenting genuine classified information to the public: "At the same time that we were coming up with the information that we were coming up with, and told to tell the truth to the public, what they were doing is that they were doing a rehearsal to see how much garbage they could purvey on you." McDowell concurred with Burisch's characterization, calling the Serpo material "total garbage" when asked by an audience member whether any part of the story might be true.
Project Aquarius briefing document
The purported Project Aquarius briefing document — classified TS/ORCON and originally obtained by researcher William Moore in 1980 — describes a sub-project called Project Sigma whose mission was "to establish communication with Aliens." The document states that "on April 25, 1964, a USAF intelligence officer met two Aliens at a prearranged location in the desert of New Mexico" and that "the contact lasted for approximately three hours," during which "the Air Force officer managed to exchange basic information with the two Aliens" using language originally provided by EBE. This April 1964 date and New Mexico desert location correspond closely to the Serpo narrative's April 24, 1964 White Sands meeting, though the Aquarius document does not use the name "Serpo" or mention an exchange program.
The same document describes EBE as having "provided valuable information regarding space technology, origins of the Universe, and exobiological matters" during his captivity from 1949 until his death on June 18, 1952 — placing EBE's death in the same year as the Serpo narrative dates the communication device being activated.
LA Marzulli, in a 2023 interview on Exopolitics Today, stated that he considers "the rumors about Eisenhower and the Holloman base" to be credible, and reported that unnamed individuals at conferences had told him privately: "I'm working in an alleged underground base next to aliens."