Project Serpo — The Exchange Program That Never Was
On 2 November 2005, an anonymous emailer claiming to be a retired Defense Intelligence Agency official began posting to a UFOlogy mailing list moderated by Victor Martinez. The story: following the 1947 Roswell incident, twelve U.S. military personnel — ten men and two women — departed in 1965 aboard an alien craft for a planet called Serpo in the Zeta Reticuli system, lived there for over a decade, and a handful came back. No paperwork was attached, which for a government exchange program of that scale is quite an oversight.
Why it was classified
It was never classified, because there is nothing on record to classify. The material arrived as email, not documents, and no supporting government record or verifiable evidence has ever surfaced in the two decades since. Researcher Bill Ryan set up a dedicated site, serpo.org, to publish the messages and the follow-on claims, which gave the story a permanent address and an air of institutional tidiness it had not otherwise earned.
Why it matters
Investigators who dug into the affair concluded it was very likely a disinformation exercise, and identified Richard Doty — the former AFOSI agent covered in our own Doty entry — as the probable source behind the anonymous disclosures. Which makes Serpo less a story about interstellar travel than a case study in how a career built on feeding people fabricated documents produces a lore ecosystem that outlives the operation, the operator, and any reasonable expectation of evidence.