ITC 70: Project Serpo

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
The streshold omens step through fast impressive future. We are
not allowing time Think.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Think the.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Time, Think.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
S and Welcome back to and Grease the Only show.

(02:24):
Somehow went from night stabbing each other in the face,
two physicists arguing over whether we all live forever to
this now. If you joined us last time, you'll remember
episode sixty nine, the exoplanet gold Rush, where we kind
of asked a big question what happens when humans turn
the cosmos into real estate? And I know we might

(02:47):
have had one or two mining jokes, maybe a Minecraft
reference or two, and probably a lot of hidden in
the window about drilling, because come on episode sixty nine tonight,
we're gonna step into something maybe a little little bit stranger.
Because if you believe the right whispers, humanity didn't need

(03:08):
to wait for Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or the
next NASA budget crisis to go interstellar. No, if you
believe the Lord, the US government has already tried it,
not just sending probes, just sending out radio signals, but
packing up twelve Americans, handing them boarding passes, and shipping

(03:29):
them off to another star system the destination. Say that
Rita can I'm never I'm we're just gonna call it ZR.
I even practiced pronouncing it before the start of the show.
I'm never going to get it anyway. The mission a
cultural exchange program with aliens known as the Evans, the
code name Project Servo. Now it sounds like a botched

(03:55):
X Files cold open, right, shadowy corridors, black subs, a
Manila sliding across the desktop with the words top secret
stamped in red ink. And yet this isn't just television.
This is a real conspiracy legend. And at first surface,

(04:15):
not in the nineteen sixties, not even in the UFO
panic of the eighties, but in the wild wild West
days of the early Internet, with a single leak, a
handful of classified documents, and before long every UFO forum,
late night talk show, and basement with AOL dial up
modems buzzing about a human alien exchange program hiding from

(04:38):
the world. Now it's basically the Cold War meets a
bad road trip movie Twelve Americans leave Earth on the
eight come back. Critics call it implausible, but here's here's
the real hook. It isn't just a Roswell spinoff. It's
a story with layers secrecy, Internet mythology, and are very

(05:03):
you know, human desire to believe in something bigger than ourselves,
even at something is you know, aliens teaching us how
to run better desert irrigation systems on a planet that
sounds suspiciously like something in the Bada, but it has
two suns. So tonight we're going to try to break
it down. Not just a legend, not the leakers, not

(05:23):
just the supposed mission, but why believe it or not,
why it matters, and why hoaks are not. Project Surpo
refuses to die. So girl, grab your blackest, deepest, nastiest
coffee you can find. Make sure your FOIA request forms
are filled out, and you might want to have a
flashlight handy for when the Men in Black cut our

(05:46):
power hit episode. Now, if you want to understand why
Project Curpo explode it the way it did, you got
to rewind the tape and set the stage. By the
early two thousands, the UFO world was kind of a
of a slump. The glory days of Roswell were half

(06:08):
a century behind us, but had once been a dazzling mystery.
A rancher's field littered with strange debris, whispers of bodies
whisked way under armed guard had calcified a bit into
more of a cliche. Roswell wasn't their revelation anymore. It
was a punchline town. Now it has UFO Museum, alien

(06:30):
alien themed dinners and plastic green men on parade floats.
And for the true believers out there, that kind of
commercialization felt a bit like betrayal. The sacred had become kish.
And then, of course there was Majestic twelve. Back in
the nineteen eighties, those top secret documents had been hailed

(06:53):
as the missing puzzle piece, proof that secret Cabala scientists
in generals had overseen alien contact. But a boy, the
nineteen hundred serious researchers had torn them apart. Signatures, no,
they didn't look like they matched, formatting sort of didn't match.
One memo had a typeface that literally didn't exist. In

(07:13):
nineteen forty seven, the sot of called Smoking Gun turned
out to be a bit of a jammed nerf blaster. Meanwhile,
the much hype Disclosure Project of two thousand and one
promised to break everything wide open. Stephen Greyer gathered hundreds
of supposed insiders, pilots, radar operators, military officers. Their testimony

(07:35):
was all dramatic lights in the sky craft that could
out maneuver jets spaces. When alien tech was reversed engineered,
for a moment, it seemed like Hissory was about to pivot.
Press conferences were held, cameras flashed, Government cover up was
back on the lips of mainstream journalists, and then and

(07:56):
then silence. No hearings, no fire investigations. The government just
shrugged it off. The media moved on in. For many believers,
it felt like Lucy pulling away the football one more time.
By the early two thousandths UFO scene was running on fumes.
The stories were getting old, the evidence quite stale, and

(08:18):
the community fracturing between hard and skeptics and the die
hard faithful. But there was a new arena entering the game,
the internets. Before swa, social media swallowed everything online, cultural culture, mint,
message boards, mailing list and I know orty and raptor

(08:43):
listening in chat. Thank you will probably cringe at this
next word web rings. That's true. The BOP Top Secret
became the gladiatorial arena for conspiracy. Theorist open minds drew
the more scholarly crowd websites like surpo dot org would
later spring up just to catalog the leaks. Back then,

(09:06):
you had flame Wore's fault post by post, thread by thread,
with users' names like star Watcher eighty eight and Truth
Secret forty two. UFO world was no longer depending on
a few publishers or even a few radio hosts. It
was raw, fast, and now it was decentralized. And speaking
of radio, you couldn't talk UFOs in that era without

(09:28):
mentioning Art Bell and Coast to Coast, a m for
millions of insomniacs, truckers, and late night loaners. Art Bell
was the high priests of the paranormal. He broadcast stories
of shadow people, time travelers, men who claim to have
doug holes, to Hell itself, and every few months he
would circle back to aliens. Even if mainstream science wrote

(09:50):
its eyes, Art kept that fire alive. Culturally, the moment
was ripe. This trust in government was at an all
time high. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wrote it
public confidence and official narratives. The CIA's failure around nine
to eleven made secrecy and confidence look inseparable. And if

(10:11):
you already believe your leaders weren't telling you the truth
about terrorists, Why wouldn't you believe they were hiding the
truth about ET's as well. It was a peculiar crossroads.
Official uf culture was exhausted. The paranoia and distrust were
stronger than ever. The old stories did not have the

(10:31):
bite they used to, but the hunger for something new
had never been greater. And that's that's when it happened.
In November of two thousand and five, into this atmosphere
of jaded believers and restless seekers, strange news story dropped.
Not another shaky camcorder tape, not another recycled roswell antidote,

(10:56):
but land it in boxes across the UFO community was
something different. It wasn't a saucer in the sky, it
wasn't a blurry photograph. It was a set of emails, plain, simple, digital.
And yet inside those emails was a story outrageous enough
to reignite the entire UFO world, a story that claimed

(11:17):
the United States government had once done the unthinkable, packed
up a dozen of its own citizens, drapped them into
an alien craft, and sent them on a thirteen year
trip to another star system. To remember this, this is
the year two thousand and five, Facebook was barely out
of its college dorm fees. YouTube had just launched. Most

(11:41):
people still had you Got Nail echoing in their heads
every time they check their inbox, and tucked inside one
of those inboxes was a man named Victor Martinez. Martinez
ran a modest email group, essentially a mailing list of
UFO enthusiasts. It wasn't flashy, no logos, no webs banners,
with a bunch of true believer swapping stories, speculation, and

(12:03):
the occasional you won't believe what my neighbor saw over
Phoenix last night. And then one day Martinez's group received
something different. A new participant who signed only as Anonymous,
began posting long, detailed messages. Not grainy photos, not campfire rummors,
but what looked like official government memos. Anonymous claimed to

(12:27):
be a retired employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency the DIA.
If true, this wasn't your cousin's fishing buddy who swell
her he saw lights over a cornfield. This was someone
who claimed to have worked inside the machinery of US intelligence.
Someone with access, and one Anonymous laid out was a

(12:48):
story so audacious, so cinematic that it immediately sets keyboards
clattering around the UFO world. Now, the claim itself was simple.
In nineteen forty seven, Roswell wasn't just a crash site.
It was first contact surviving extraterrestrials. Beings later nicknamed the Evans,

(13:11):
established communication with the US government. After years of quiet negotiation,
in nineteen sixty five, in exchange was arranged. Twelve American
military specialists would be taken aboard an alien craft, flown
across the stars, and lived for ten years on the
Evan home world. The destination a planet called Sirpo and

(13:34):
the ZR System thirty nine light years away. Twelve left,
eight came back. The others well, two died on Cirpo,
and two chose to stay behind, choosing never to return
to Earth. It was a kind of story that hit

(13:54):
every button at once. You got the continuance of Roswell.
You have some cold war, secrete human bravery, interstellar adventure.
Let's face it, it read like an Arthur C. Clark had
been hired by the Pentagon to write a new story.
And the details, oh oh, the details. Anonymous didn't just

(14:16):
spin a yarn. He sent entire packets to supposed mission logs,
breathing notes, technical descriptions. They all read like paperwork from
some secret NASA program crossed with a bit of a
Cold War spy novel. List of personnel, descriptions of equipment,
notes about training, reports on Cerpo's climate. It's the n atmosphere,

(14:37):
it's twin suns. There were even logistics about the trip itself,
how long the journey took, what food was packed, how
the evans steered the ship, and whether or not you
believe that documents had the cadencey of bureaucracy. It was
jargon heavy, acronym laden, sometimes tediously specific, whereas we like

(14:58):
to call around this part real and that that was
the hook, because by two thousand and five, the UFO
world was jaded. People had seen enough shaky VHS tapes
of lights in the sky. What they wanted was paperwork.
They wanted government stamps, the sense that this wasn't just

(15:21):
folklore but classified truth, and anonymous delivered that aesthetic perfectly. Now,
of course, the skeptics immediately noticed problems. The documents contradicted themselves,
The dates didn't line them up, the math, the math
was off. The distances to z R was botched in

(15:44):
ways in any astronomer could spot. But that wasn't enough
to kill the story. It actually kind of fueled it
because to Trueliever's messy details was a feature and not
a bug. Real government leaks are never They're often full
of typos, redactions in half troops. The very inconsistency made

(16:04):
the document feel more authentic, So within weeks the story
went from an email chained curiosity to something akin to wildfire.
It started to spread to the big forms, It got
its own dedicated websites. Researchers like Bill Ryan, who would
later co found the Project Camelot, picked it up and

(16:26):
ran with it. And of course, once Art Bell's Coast
to Coast AM touched it, CERFO had officially entered the
bloodstream of modern UFO culture. What was a handful of
emails had all of a sudden become a global phenomenon,
and once Anonymous dropped his payload in the Victor Martinez
the email List, the ripple effect was immediate. The story

(16:50):
didn't just sit in those inboxes. It migrated, it multiplied,
it mistasticized across the early Internet. The first big stop
was above top secret, those who never spent sleepless nights
on conspiracy forums. ATS was the arena where believers, skeptics
and the perpetualists curious duped it out. Every UFO photo,

(17:13):
every nine to eleven theory, every blurry Bigfoot track got uploaded, dissected,
and argued over until the mods would lock the thread.
When the SURFO documents hit ATS, the place lit up
thread after thread filled with speculation. Some posters were treating
it like gospel, printing out PDFs, highlighting passages, connecting dots

(17:36):
to Roswell and MJ twelve. Others tore into it line
by line, calling out all of the inconsistencies. But whether
you thought it was revelation or nonsense, you were talking
about it and not only help make it spread more.
From there, it would spill into other forums Open Minds,
UFO Casebook, the Rents Network, and already having some weird

(18:00):
flashbacks and flashbacks at the mention of those. And it
wasn't just hobbyists. More polished voices picked it up. Once
the more and most influential with Bill Ryan picked it up.
That was the end of the little corners of the Internet.
Every leak, every memo, every scrap of supposed testimony. Bill

(18:26):
Ryan gave the story a central hub, a place where
curious outsiders could binge on quote unquote official Sir profiles
without having to dig through half broken form threads. And
of course, as we've mentioned before, if you were awake
at two AM in two thousand and five and you
had an AM radio, odds are you could catch George

(18:49):
Norrie or sometimes Aren't Bell himself broadcasting tales of government
secrets and alien whispers. And coast to coast wasn't just
your background noise. It was this is a megaphone of
the paranormal. Once Sirpo hit that stage, it jumped from
real niche Internet rumor to the phenomenon that would become

(19:14):
Trucker is barreling down. I eighty were suddenly hearing about
twelve Americans who supposedly lived on another planet for thirteen years,
and all of a sudden it came. It went from
a just a story to something more akin to mythos.
It wasn't limited to that single mailing list anymore. It

(19:37):
was bounced between radios, forums, lecture halls, and eventually conferences.
By two thousand and six and two thousand and seven,
you could find cerco slideshow projected on screens at UFO
conventions from Los Angeles. The leads, power points well full
of grainy texts, timelines, and the briefing reports presented in
hotel ballrooms to wrapped audiences. It didn't matter, once again

(20:02):
that the documents were riddle type. It was. It didn't
matter that astronomers immediately pointed out at the distance in
the star maps, so it didn't really add up. But
it did feel more authentic than they've had in a
very very long time, and hoax are not. That was
the genius part. He hadn't linked a UFO citing or

(20:28):
alien photograph anonymous. That is, paperwork was leaked, bureaucratic sludge
memos so bland that they could have been staple to
any Pentagon file. It looked real precisely because it was
boring as all heck. And the more it spread, more

(21:00):
believers filled in the blanks. The SURPO leaks became a
canvas at every UFO mystery, every piece of Roswell folklore,
every suspicion about Area fifty one, all of a sudden
got wrapped into the SURFO narrative. If you believed in abductions,
Surpo explained him. If you believed in hidden tech, Surfo
was the pipeline. If you believed the Cold War had

(21:22):
a secret cosmic dimension, Surpo tied the bow. It had
become a legend of global proportions in a matter of
two years. But here's the thing. Legends don't spread just
because they're outrageous. They spread because they scratch an itch.

(21:47):
And to understand why Cerpo dug in so deep, you've
got to look at it what it offered, not just
to the UFO world, but to the culture at large.
And that's where we're going to go next. Because the
remarkable thing about Project Surfo isn't that it appeared. It's
that it's endured. By all rights, it should have burned

(22:08):
out within weeks, but Cirpo didn't drift. It became rooted,
and you have to ask yourself why. Well, it kind
of had three powerful things going for it. First is,
of course the Roswell connection. Whether Hoaks or not, anonymous

(22:32):
frame Surfo as a natural sequel to nineteen forty seven.
Roswell was no longer just a crash.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
It was a meeting.

Speaker 4 (22:41):
Second, you have the Cold War timing. The legend mission
began in nineteen sixty five, right in the thick of
the space race, America in the city, you know, were
vying for dominance, not just on Earth but in orbit.
It felt plausible. If the government could hide misso silos
and black projects like the U two and the SR
seventy one, why not a quiet arrangement with aliens. And Third,

(23:09):
and perhaps the most important one, was the aesthetic of authenticity.
It didn't look like the folklore of yesteryear. It didn't
look like well, I saw the lights up in the sky.
It looked like paperwork. The memos were full of acronyms
and project names and very very dry descriptions of food

(23:32):
storage and mission logs, which works great for a Lost
Warner podcast, but for this maybe not as much so.
Even within the UFO community, researchers like Stanton Friedman dismissed
it as junk, but the true believers, those very flaws
reinforced the sense that it was a leak. Real government

(23:55):
documents aren't perfect. They're messy, and they often contry addict
themselves to no end. All tied in with the early
two thousands as an age of eroding trust with the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, exposing how intelligence could be
easily manipulated, how governments could spin or hide the truth.

(24:21):
People became primed to believe in secrets, especially once a
government would never emit. And thus SURFO was the perfect
story for that climate. And so by the end of
the decade, SURFA had taken on its life of its own.
More and more forms would dissect it, and coast to
coast would replay it frequently. Books and websites sprung up

(24:44):
dedicated to archiving every possible SURFO file and angle, And
when it started as a few strange emails, became an
enduring legend, and one that still circulates nearly twenty years later. So,

(25:10):
if you believe the cir profiles, the whole thing began
not with little Green men knocking on the door of
the White House, but with a negotiation, one that allegedly
stretched from the wreckage of Roswell in nineteen forty seven
well into the heart of the Cold War. The story
goes that after the crash, one surviving being an eben,

(25:30):
stayed behind. Communication was thus established slowly over the next decade,
it plan took shape, not just observation, not just study,
but exchange, a human delegation would be chosen to live
on the Eben home world, learn their ways, and in
the return, the Evans would share their knowledge with Earth.

(25:53):
And by the mid nineteen sixties the paperwork was done
because government moves that slowly, the mission was approved. The
stage was now set, and according to anonymous twelve Americans
were selected. Not astronauts, not jet set test pilots, but
a hand picked team of specialists six men, six women,

(26:16):
military backgrounds, trained in medicine, linguistics, engineering, biology, and even psychology.
They weren't there to plant flags. They were there to survive,
to adapt, and to observe. And it reads a little
bit like a casting sheet for the World's Strangest reality show.
A doctor to treat wounds, a linguished to bridge the gap,
a soldier to hold the line in a biologistic catalog

(26:38):
the unknown. And the more I read this, the more
I understand SG one. Not heroes, not celebrities, not public figures,
just twelve names buried in a file folder and their
identities never to be revealed. We're going to pause here
because on paper, it almost makes sense. If you were

(27:04):
designing an exchange team, this is what you'd want a
cross section of practical skills, resilience, and adaptability. But this
is also where the story starts to wabble. In nineteen
sixty five, NASA was still flying the Gemini program. We
hadn't even landed on the Moon. Our understanding of long
duration space travel was still primitive at best. Life supports, systems,

(27:28):
radiation shielding, even the basics of deep space navigation were
still the stuff of chalkboards and prototypes. And yet the
SERFO files claimed twelve people were casually prepped for a
thirteen year mission to another star system on No training
logs have ever surfaced, no names have ever been confirmed,
No families have ever come forward decades later and say,

(27:50):
you know, my mother disappeared in sixty five, and the
Air Force told us never to ask. If you're counting
red flags, that could be your number one. Still, Anonymous
lays it out with the confidence of a government brief.
The training he said took place in extreme secrecy, most

(28:12):
likely at facilities in New Mexico. Canidates were supposedly quarantined
and doctrinated, tested for psychological stability. They knew they would
never return the same if they would even return. Then
came the launch The file describes Holloman Air Force Base

(28:32):
as the departure point, early July of sixty five, under
desert heat, in the shadow of the Santa DRez Mountain,
and alien craft allegedly touched down on US soil, not
a flying saucer buzzing treetops, but a coordinated landing under
military supervision. Witnesses. None were officially recorded evidence, None that

(28:57):
have survived. One by one. The twelve boarded, one small
step for man, one giant leap into the unknown. There
was no ticker tape parades, no television broadcast, just twelve
shadows walking into the belly of a machine no human

(29:18):
engineers had built, trusting it would carry them to another world.
Don't think about that for a moment. If it happened,
Remember if it happened, If you're depending which side you
lean on this, what would have felt like the rumble
of alien engines beneath your feet, if they even did rumble,

(29:39):
The suffocating awareness that you were leaving Earth, not for
a week, not for a year, but for a decade.
Twelve strangers bound together, not by choice, but by assignment.
Twelve chosen, twelve vanished, twelve ghosts in the record and
then silence. The Evans craft lifted away. No official documents,

(30:03):
no press releases, not a trace. By all normal measures.
The mission never existed. But in the Serpo story, this
was just a beginning once again in July nineteen sixty five.
Now here's a bit of a counterpoint. Holloman Air Force

(30:25):
Base does have a rich UFO history. In fact, in
nineteen sixty four, a year before the alleged departure, a
famous film was supposedly shot there, showing an alien craft
landing and officials greeting it on the runway. The footage
has never resurfaced, but the rumors of the Holoman landing
have persisted for decades. So Anonymous didn't pluck Holloman out

(30:45):
of thin air. He anchored Cerpo to an already existing legend.
And I have to admit that's a touch of clever storytelling,
if nothing else. Now, if for the twelve, the files
say they were volunteers, but with limited understanding of what
they were walking into. They had been told the trip

(31:05):
with the last ten years. In reality, they wouldn't return
until nineteen seventy eight, thirteen years older, battered by a
planet that wasn't Earth, but that we're skipping ahead here,
so for now, picture this nineteen sixty five. America is
passionately watching the space race on television. Gemini astronauts are orbiting.

(31:28):
Earth engineers are dreaming of Apollo, and behind closed doors,
if you believe the Serpo files, yeah, twelve annas, Americans
are leaving, not for the Moon, not for Mars, but
for another star system. Entirely, it's a story that sounds impossible.
It's a story that sounds absurd, and it's a story that,

(31:49):
if true, should have rewritten history overnight. But you have departure,
disappearance in silence. So that's the boarding past. Twelve names,
twelve seats, one ship, no fanfare, no photographs, just a

(32:11):
story buried in a leak that would resurface forty years later.
And according to that story, what awaited them wasn't triumph,
it wasn't utopia. It was a very long, grueling journey
to a world humanity had never seen. Now, according to
the files, the jour journey itself took nine months, nine

(32:32):
months in a vessel not designed by Yum. It's not
fitted with human ergonomics and not shaped to our biology.
Though they did have twenty years to do it so
it could have been comfortable. The craft was described as cramped, metallic,
and alien in its logic. The seats weren't seats so
much as contoured depressions on the floor. The air recycled

(32:52):
through systems that the crew didn't understand. The food that
was provided by the ebbens tasteless paste like rations that
kept them alive but made their stomachs turn. For nine months,
those twelve Americans hurtled through the void with no windows
to even watch the stars, no familiar nightsky to charge

(33:13):
where they were, just the home of systems they couldn't repair,
guide it by hosts they couldn't fully comprehend. Some accounts
claimed the gravity fluctuated, making sleep impossible. Others described illness, dizziness,
and disrientation. And then we get to the arrival. The

(33:34):
craft descended onto surfo sometime in nineteen sixty six by
earth reckoning, but the minutes they set foot on alien soil,
the very concept of time began to slip away. They
would report was a harsh world, roughly Earth's size, but
with a thinner atmosphere. Breathing was, of course possible, but

(33:55):
it was labored just like trying to hike at high
altitude every moment of every day, the sun, or rather
in this case, the suns, poured down relentlessly per surpo
orbit at a binary star system, two blazing lights in
the sky, one larger, one smaller, creating a perpetual glare.
Daytime was apparently oppressibly bright, and night never truly dark.

(34:22):
The lands, the landscape stretching shades of ochre and rust,
vast desert, scrub land, distant mountains shimmering under the twin suns.
What little vegetation there was seemed hardy. Scrubby adopted to
the more dry heat, and according to the files, much
of the surface was barren, a place more suited for
survival than exploration. And the heat that I mentioned. The

(34:45):
heat records claim the temperature hovered uncomfortably high, draining energy,
forcing the Americans to shelter whenever they could, as water
was scarce, rationed very carefully, and drawn from alien wells
and reservoirs. So it wasn't an alien paradise. It was
more of a hell. It was something strange or replace

(35:10):
that was sort of survivable, enough to remind them every
moment that they just didn't belong now. Their host, of course,
welcomed this. Anonymous or welcomed them. Anonymous described them as small,
thin beings with elongated heads, large eyes, and leathery skin
that handles sunlight with ease. They seemed unfazed by the

(35:33):
heat in the thin air. I mean, let's face it,
for the evans, this was home. For the humans, it
was an endurance test. Food became an immediate problem. The Evans,
of course were good host and provided rations, but the
taste was alien and nutrition strange. Their bodies would reject

(35:57):
the foreign diet, and at times they relied on what
little food they had carried from Earth, rationing it carefully
until eventually they had no choice but to adapt. Illness, exhaustion, disorientation.
These were the first impressions of Surfo. Now we're gonna
pause in here because the skeptic in us has to

(36:17):
step in because the way the anonymous describes surfo it
sounds a bit like we're an Ord's backyard, sounds a
little bit like places in Nevada, endless deserts. You know,
vision goes wonky. Maybe you see two suns instead of
one that keeps it very hot and thin air. You know,

(36:37):
the higher plateause. There is something almost convenient about that description.
If you wanted to invent an alien planet in nineteen
sixty six, you might just paint New Mexico red and
call it extraterrestrial. But even here, this is why it stuck.

(36:59):
It wasn't eton lean cities floating in some amazing, glorious clouds.
It was oceans of liquid methane or jungles of impossible beasts.
Czerpo sounded plausible, familiar enough to imagine, alien, enough to
be intrigued by it, and yet the file say there

(37:19):
was all too standing under twin suns, watching the horizon glow,
not with one sunrises, but with two, feeling your shadow
stretch in strange directions because light came from two angles
at once. Yes, it was survival, but it was also
wonder The Americans were giving living quarters primitive by our standards,

(37:44):
not houses, not barracks, but simple shelters near Evan settlements.
Communication was halting at first. The Evans, so course, had
their own language, more tonal, sing songy, unlike anything on Earth.
The linguist and the team began slowly mapping it, but
in those early months it was Gesture's drawings trial and error,

(38:05):
day and night would be blurred. The rotation of Surpo
didn't match Earth's. Their circadian rhythms eventually broke down, sleep
became irregular, time keeping equipment failed. According to anonymous after
about a year, many of the twelve had lost track
of how long they had actually been on the planet,

(38:26):
and then came the first casualties. Now the files claimed
that two members of the team died within the first years,
one from illness unable to adapt the cerpo's environment, and
another from an accident, with details being very vague but
often described as an equipment mishap in the harsh terrain.
So ten now remained ten, trying to keep faith, to

(38:49):
keep discipline, and to keep sanity. The file suggests that
despite these hardships, there were moments of connection. They did
this the evans as welcoming and even nurturing. They treated
that humans not as captives, but as the guests that
they were children, would approach them without fear. Food was

(39:13):
actually shared, shelter was offered. For all the apparent alien strangeness,
there was a bit of human hospitality. Still, the sense
lingers in every line of the leak. Surfo was no Eden.
It was survival. Every breath, every meal, every step was
your reminder that this was not Earth. So now we

(39:41):
have to ask ourself what happens when you stop being
a visitor and start being a resident. Now, if anonymous
is to be believed, the Americans quickly discovered that survival
is only the first test. The harder challenge was life
on surfo not for a week, not for a year,
but or what was supposed to be a decade. It

(40:07):
really did sound utopian at times. They lived without money,
without crime, without annoying competition of human politics. Everything was communal,
Everything was shared. If one Evan ate, everyone ate, one

(40:27):
needed to shelter, all worked to provide it. It sounds
like a form of communistic Amish backyard, but through the
eyes of the Americans, it was still alien in more
ways than just a language. Imagine trying to explain ambition, ownership, rivalry,

(40:52):
only to be met with blank stares. The Evans file
claims just didn't understand those concepts, and of course the
Americans would set cataloging the strange society. Days were filled
with surveys, mapping terrain, collecting samples, hold onto that note,

(41:14):
making notes about Evan customs, the linguists worked tiresly to
bility translation framework. Communication improved slowly, but it was really
never perfect, as the language was tonal, fluid, and full
of sounds that hum in his mouth, which struggled to
reproduce even after years. They never mastered it completely. And

(41:38):
of course, as always, you have time, because the surfo
day didn't match Earth's rhythms yet longer rotations, harsher cycles
of light and heat. The Americans, of course, tried to
keep to Earth hours, making days and nights on Riskwatcher charts,
but as we stretched in the months, their schedules unraveled.

(42:01):
Anonymous claimed that after only a few years, most of
the Americans had lost track of Earth time entirely. They
had just been simply living in perpetual blur of light
and exhaustion. They didn't know if it was a day
long or a week long, and sometimes with the weeks
weren't just actually a full year. But then there was

(42:21):
the other aspect of this, As time pressed on isolation,
no letters from home, no contact with Earth, no new supplies,
just twelve strangers bound together, surrounded by beings. They couldn't
understand in a land that they really wasn't there so
if they had no right to it. Occasionally attentions would

(42:47):
be flared, disagreements would break out, and leadership was contested.
At least two of the Americans, according to the files,
with drew almost entirely, barely functioning within the group. Then
came more loss. Two had already died, one from illness
and one from the accident. Now, after years, two more
chose to stay behind. Why well, the files are very

(43:11):
very very vague on that. Some versions say they adapted
too well, preferring Eben life to Earth's chaos. Others say
they simply couldn't face the journey home. Whatever, the reason
remained when the rest eventually departed, so out of twelve,
only eight would return. Because we need to pause here,

(43:33):
because the skeptic in us has to tap the glass.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Now.

Speaker 4 (43:39):
The picture of the Evans it readed suspiciously like the utopian,
utopian alien societies of the sixties science fiction communal, peaceful,
crime free borderline. Hey, communism is great, money doesn't exist,
and everyone works for the good of all. If you squint,
it's almost Star Trek's Federation without warp Drivespia on the surface.

(44:00):
But when you dig a little deeper, the communism part
shows up, and it really sucks. But yet that was
part of the allure. Apparently, this wasn't the terrifying alien
invasion of the pulp magazines. It was a gentle cooperative
Other the fantasy that if only we could meet them,

(44:21):
we might learn a better way to live. You also
had another issue that would crop up, discipline. The files
describe the Americans as soldiers first, scientists, second, guest third.
They kept logs, they conducted experiments, They buried their dead.

(44:42):
They endured for more than a decade. They endured discipline, survival,
slow unraveling. In the end, life on Surfer was not
a grand adventure. It was a long exile, a trial
of endurance under the alien suns, and when the time
came to leave, only eight were left to make that journey.

(45:07):
So the story of Surfo, if you believe it, ends
not with triumph but with return. Nineteen seventy eight, thirteen
years after the departure, the mission was over. The Evans
kept their promise. A ship was provided, the survivors were
loaded aboard, and the journey back had begun. But think
about what that meant. Americans had lived on surfo longer

(45:33):
than some of them had lived outside of military service.
They had buried two teammates under alien sons. They had
watched two others chose to stay behind forever. Only eight
were making the journey home, and of course that voyage
took once. This time, the alien ship wasn't a marble,
it was a tomb. The rations again were bland and alien,

(45:56):
the conditions cramped and stifling. The Americans were already gone.
Whether their bodies adapted awkwardly to curpostin air and heavy heat,
some of the files do suggest the voyage home was
worse than the one out. The excitement that they had
on the way there was now gone. The novelty also gone,

(46:16):
only fatigue, illness, and knowledge that Earth might no longer
feel like home. And when they landed, Earth was not
the same planet they had left behind in sixty five.
America was full of optimism, Genini capsules in the air,
Lyndon Johnson was in the White House of Beatle had

(46:36):
just played the Ed Sullivan Show. When they returned in
nineteen seventy eight, the world had shifted under their feet.
The Vietnam War had scarred the nation, Watergate had toppled
a president. Elvis had left the building. Disco now ruled
the charts. Home computers were creeping in the offices. Even

(46:59):
the uniform had changed. The slang, of course, had changed.
The entire texture of culture had changed. For the servo
ad it might have felt like stepping back into another
alien world. And of course, there was no welcome home parade,
no headlines. According to Anonymous, the return was handled in

(47:21):
complete secrecy. The ship touched down to the secure location,
most say somewhere in the American Southwest, though some versions
also point to Holloman. Again, military handlers met the crew,
hustled in the isolation, and immediately began the debrief. They
were interrogated, examined, interview for weeks and even months. Doctors

(47:44):
cataloged their health, psychologists charted their minds. Interpreters tried to
decode their notes. They wrote and dictated thousands of pages
of testimony. The reports, if real, would be extraordinary. The
crew described cerpo's climates in painstaking detail. They even estimated

(48:06):
the Evan population at roughly six hundred and fifty thousand.
They spoke of the technology efficient, almost elegant in its
blending of biology and energy production, but oddly underdeveloped in
other areas. There was no advanced computing, no complex machinery,
no weapons beyond the tools of hunting. In a way,

(48:31):
a contradiction and a suspicious one, because interstellar travel but
no concept of a clock, bester than like journeys, but
fumbling with mathematics that high schoolers on Earth had already mastered.
It was as if the Evan world was equal parts
futuristic and stone age, a mirror of the utopian alien
tropes from mid twentieth century science fiction, and once again

(48:57):
on paper, it really did read a pit like ice.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
Now.

Speaker 4 (49:06):
The reports also say they returned with radiation exposure, chronic illness,
and accelerated aging. Anonymous claim that most of the eight
died within just a few years of their return, their
names being never to be revealed and their families were
never informed and acknowledged. They just simply faded away ghosts
in the system, their graves unmarked in any official history.

(49:35):
The tale of struggle to readapt to Earth's gravity, Earth's food,
and Earth time cycles were also there. They also tell
of depression, of sleepiness, of utter disconnection. The aide can
never fully return to their old lives. How could they
for thirteen years, they had been cut off from everything human.

(49:56):
So the debrief wasn't just about extracting information. It was
about breaking the silence, letting the survivors bill out the
weight they carried. Yeah, maps were drawn, the language charts created,
and the depictions of the Evan biology, their diet, their customs,
and their rituals were all recorded, locked away file and

(50:17):
then nothing. Now, this could be considered one of the
most haunting details of it all. From nineteen seventy eight
until two thousand and five, not a whisper of surfo escape,
no leaks, no memoirs, no deathbed confessions. Nothing. The greatest
secret in human history, if true, was kept air tight

(50:40):
for nearly thirty years until anonymous typed it into a
Yahoo group. So we're left with a bit of a
paradox either of the surper omission was the most successful
cover up in American history, twelve gone eighty turn, thousands
of pages being locked away forever. It never happened at all.

(51:10):
But the mission isn't the end of the legend, because
once the files appeared online, once the story went public,
that's when the real battle began, the battle over the evidence,
over hoaxes and over why people wanted to believe. We'll
talk about that in the next act, but for now,
you're gonna take a bit of a longer break than normal.

(51:31):
Stand up, stretch your legs, pour another cup of your
blackest coffee. Maybe you know, check your emails, see if
you got Tony inbox with classified attachments, et cetera, and
et cetera. When we return, we'll sift through the file,
separate the fakes, and then watch the fallout.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
O so so.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
The sky cracks open with bard him.

Speaker 5 (53:29):
Notes like fire on the canyon, shadows, call.

Speaker 6 (53:40):
Over the side, storm.

Speaker 5 (53:48):
Mountain on set secrete cour.

Speaker 6 (54:00):
The mountain comes it same, good Bye's the same, no
more time, noos.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
Only the sun. So figures laid by I name nor

(55:06):
hands are trembling.

Speaker 7 (55:07):
Still they step once more, swell shows and and the
bag made names raised, promise, stead.

Speaker 4 (56:33):
And welcome back. Now, now we're gonna move from the
story itself. Let's look at the evidence, or at least
what passes we're past, depending on your view of this
or evidence. Because Surfo wasn't just a campfire tale, it

(56:54):
wasn't just a late night radio rumor. It came packaged
in a way that gave it power. Not his photos,
not his recordings, but files, documents, and in the world
of UFO, lord that oh, that makes all the difference.

(57:16):
The so called SURFO files began appearing in November two
thousand and five on that UFO email list. Now Victor
Martinez was a former school teacher turned enthusiast, running a
simple mailing group where believers, researchers, and a few board
skeptics traded stories. We have anonymous who claims to we

(57:38):
retire to employee of the DIA. Let's start with the
opening statement, the heart of the Clean. One of the
first documents began. Twelve selected individuals, ten men, two women
departed on an alien spacecraft from Holam and AFB one

(57:59):
July sixteen, nineteen sixty five. And I'm sure some of
you are going mm. But there it was in black
and white, no frills, no adjectives, just a military style report.
Twelve names never revealed, boarded, a shipped and banished into
the stars. The memo would continue. The scheduled duration of
this project was ten years. The team actually stayed thirteen

(58:21):
years due to the death of two team members and
the decision of two others to remain on SURFO eight
members returned in nineteen seventy eight, so that was the
basic scale of know the story twelve out eight back
Foe Gone forever. It's simple. It's stark and and has
that flat, declarative tone of something you might find and

(58:42):
classified binder. But the files didn't stop with numbers. Surpo
is located in the ZR System, thirty nine light years
from Earth. The planet has two suns, the atmosphere thin
but breathable. The temperature average is high by Earth standards.

(59:03):
The climate is ariade with limited surface surface water. Yes,
this is traffic in weather on the Nines. That said,
this all sounds plausible, familiar even once again, almost like
Nevada with twin suns. But we do have a potential

(59:27):
red flag here. Astronomers already knew the z R System
was thirty nine light years away back in the sixties.
It wasn't a secret knowledge. It was in the astronomy journals,
and the way Anonymous phrased thirty nine late years was
the kind of round number you'd expect from someone googling
a fact, not an insider with classified data. And yet

(59:51):
to someone outside the field it sounded convincing. It was
specific enough to feel real, but vague enough to avoid
technical scrutiny. And of course we have information on the Evans.
The Evans civilization had an estimated population of six hundred
and fifty thousand individuals. Their society was communal. They had

(01:00:12):
no central government, functions through mutual cooperation. The Evans had
no concept of money or crime. All resources were shared,
Their children were raised communally. They lived for hundreds of years. Again,
notice the tone. No grandiose scia pi imagery, no laser battles,
just boring, dry social science. And that was kind of

(01:00:35):
a hook. This wasn't Hollywood aliens, it was anthropology. If
you were tired of wild claims about reptilian cob Paul's
this sounded reflourishingly serious. That's when some of the contradictions started.
In some files, the Evans were portrayed as technologically dazzling starships,
energy systems, interstill to travel, and others they seemed backwards.

(01:01:00):
One report claimed quote the Evans had limited understanding of physics.
They could travel between the stars, but their knowledge of
mathematics was below ours. And admittedly this is where many
astronomers actually tapped out of believing you can't. You really
can't master faster than light travel without math unless you've

(01:01:23):
hijacked that system. But then how do you understand it?
But it's kind of like saying, you built the large
hydron collider, but you're still working on multiplication tables. I mean.
But some believers would argue that maybe the Evans technology
was more biological, instinctual on something beyond our equations, maybe

(01:01:47):
absolutely plausible, or maybe it was just storytelling, painting aliens
that felt both wondrous and yet humble all at the
same time. Now, the Serco files weren't elegant, they weren't tidy.
They were a bit messy in one place. If you

(01:02:08):
picked up on it, they said there were ten men
and two women, and another six men and six women.
One mimi said two died, another says one. The very
flaws were what made it authentic. An anonymous knew the
right beats to hit a specific date, a real location

(01:02:31):
in each structure, a utopian alien society. It was a
story that looked bureaucratic, felt plausible in a Cold War era,
and carry just enough contradictions to see maybe it's too
messy to be a fake. But we're gonna have to
look at the cracks in the story. Z R was
well studied in the sixties. Anonymous presented absolutely really nothing new.

(01:02:57):
If this was real, you'd expect star charge our little data,
something beyond thin air, hot climate. Instead we got a
scify Nevada. No name has ever been leaked, not a
single missing an action record tied back to nineteen sixty five. Oh,
admittedly you can hide a lot, and it is feasible

(01:03:17):
to erase twelve people completely. But still, especially before the
age of computers, the scientists, especially the physicists, laugh at
the limited math. But somehow I have mastered interstellar travel.

(01:03:39):
And these weren't scanned a documents. They were playing emails
type texts, no headers, no seals, no formatting consistent with
the classified material, just to words anyone could have written
in two thousand and five, and once again it all
felt like Star Trek Federation stripped of any warp drive.

(01:04:00):
In other words, CFO files walked, talked, and quacked like
science fiction, but were the costume of a government memo.
So why did it work?

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Now?

Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
Documents are only half the story because once the files
hit daylight, the community fractured. Believers rallied skeptics, pounds forms,
exploded conferences, split. We're gonna step into a court room
for a moment. On the left, we're gonna have the believers,
and on the right the skeptics, and then the jury

(01:04:36):
box are all of you. We will present the believer's
case why we should believe versus the prosecution of secrecy.
Believers rallied around Bill Ryan, who quickly emerges servos archivist
in chief. When the files began filling in the Victor

(01:04:57):
Martinez's UFO email group, Brian gathered him and to them
and gave them a permanent home Surpo dot org. This
wasn't a casual blog. Ryan treated it like a digital museum.
Every membo was catalog every claim archived, mission summaries, daily
log abserts, linguistic attempts to decode Evan language, temperature charts
of surfo's climate, and even supposed medical notes of the

(01:05:18):
returning crew to a newcomer. Surpo dot org look like proof.
It wasn't just Harris heresy. It was organized. It was
a smoking gun, and it had its own filing cabinet.
And Ryan didn't stop there. Along with carry Cassidy, he
launched Project Camelot, and outlet dedicated to interviewing whistleblowers and

(01:05:40):
piecing together the so called truth the Government Wouldn't tell You.
SURPO became one of Camelot's cornerstone cases. Then there was
Radio George Norian sometimes Art Bell himself gave SURFO airtime.
Now Anonymous never went on the air, but Ryan and
others did, and they laid out the story. Listeners were

(01:06:03):
calling with questions, theories, even confirmations. One trucker swore his
uncle had been stationed at Holloman in the nineteen sixties
and had heard something was up. Another caller claimed to
have seen redacted documents at right Patterson Air Force Base
that must have been SERFO. None of it verifiable, all
of it irresistible at two am on a desert highway,

(01:06:27):
and again once coast to coast touched it. CERFO was everywhere.
You have conferences, power points flickered, UFO researchers lectured on
the cultural impacts, and then came television on Ancient alien
CIRPO has been name dropped in episodes about government cover

(01:06:48):
ups with in alien exchanges. Not the star of the show,
but part of the constellation of evidence, as Giorgio Sucolas
wants mused on air. If Cirpo was real, then humanity
has already traveled to the stars and back. Believers saw
Serpo as more than just a story. They saw it
as a continuous continuity. In a way, it felt almost natural.

(01:07:12):
If aliens did crash into Mexico in nineteen forty seven,
why wouldn't negotiations follow? If government could keep the SR
seventy one Blackbird secret for decades, and why not SURPO?
If the NSA can spy on the entire Internet without
telling Congress, why not an alien exchange program? As one
believer put it on a UFO forum, the very fact

(01:07:36):
a CERPO sounds unbelievable makes it believable. The government never
emits the easy stuff. It's always the insane stuff they
buried deepest. Now we're gonna go to the skeptics case
why we shouldn't believe? Veteran UFO researcher Stanton Friedman, a

(01:07:59):
man who's been had his life defending Roswell, dismissed SURFA
without a hesitation to Freedman. It was recycled MJ twelve.
Another batch of fake documents designed to mimic classifications language
but devoid of substance. His arguments were very blunt. No
names of the crew, no death certificate's, no obituaries, and

(01:08:19):
no families coming forward. Twelve people vanish in nineteen sixty
five and nobody notices. He would say, it's impossible, and
of course astronomers will pile on two. The CERFO files
described as ZRs thirty nine light years away, and that
was accurate, and that was the problem. It was exactly
what you could have read in the nineteen sixties Astronomy magazine.

(01:08:42):
There should have been a little bit more raw data
than just that. There was no advanced knowledge, nothing you
would expect from people who have allegedly been there. And
the contradictions, let's not forget the contradictions. Some files said
ten men and two women, others at six men and
six women. Some files have two dying while others have one.

(01:09:06):
The mission was supposed to be for ten years but
turned into thirteen, except some of those claimed it was
always meant to be thirteen. Now, in a court room,
you may call this perjury and UFO law. It's Thursday.
But it's the most damning blow that came from physics
one file claimed the Evans had a limited understanding of physics.

(01:09:28):
They could travel between the stars, but their knowledge of
mathematics was below us. And that's the sticking point for
me and for scientists. You don't master interstellar travel while
flunking algebra. That's like building a space shuttle but not
knowing how to count fuel tanks. Now, somewhere along the line,

(01:09:54):
it would have been captured technology or more of that.
It felt alive in any of them memos. It would
become the more in the realm applausible. One blogger would
sneer at all of it, saying, this isn't disclosure, it's
fan fiction with acronyms. And so the courtroom drama has

(01:10:21):
just dragged on on above. Top secret thread stretched for
hundreds of pages. Labors combed the files for hidden codes,
Skeptics tor in the typos, fights broke out, Moderators would
lock threads, and new ones opened in the cycle would
repeat itself. At conferences, the split was visible. Believers showed
slides of surpo evidence and earnest detail. Skeptics sat in

(01:10:45):
the back, shaking their heads, muttering that the field was
embarrassing itself. Even on the Great coast to coast, the
divide was sharp. One night, a SERPO advocate laid out
the mission is back. The next night a physicist laughed
it out of the studio. If eight Americans came back
from another planet in nineteen seventy eight, then I want
to see they're Social Security numbers, he would say. But

(01:11:09):
that'll never resolve. Believers saw skepticism as proof of cover up. Skeptics,
I believe, is proof of gullibility. And along the way
no one would budge. So the split has boiled down
to this, we want to believe because surpoties directly in
the roswell. The documents are boring enough to feel real,
and secrecy is the rule, not the exception, to the

(01:11:32):
we shouldn't believe. Crowd astronomy is recycled. The files contradict themselves,
and there's no paper triial, no names, no families, no grapes. Now,
of course Malder would lean to the eye, want to believe,
and Scully would say, then show me the evidence. And
the verdict is none. The jury is still hung. The
trial has never ended. Belief, doubt and division. And it's

(01:11:59):
kind of funny that SURFO case didn't unite the uf
or World, it split it in two, and partially because
of that factor, the legend grew sharper, stranger, and probably
harder to kill. So mentioned it briefly. Television just couldn't resist.

(01:12:25):
On History channels, Engine Alien SURFO made cameo appearance as
an episode after episode about secret contact tech programs. For
the show producers, it was always irresistible government secrecy, cold
war paranoia, aliens who weren't just visiting Earth, we were
visiting them. And in documentaries on UFOs and disclosure, CIRFO

(01:12:49):
was often included in montages of classified projects and somewhere
safely between area fifty one in Project Blue Book. And
by the twenty ten SERFO had crossed the hell dimension
that is the YouTube ecosystem explainer videos with ominous music
and pixelated graphics racked up millions of views. God, I

(01:13:10):
would dream of that explainer. You know it. Titles like
the secret Human Alien Exchange Program they Don't want you
to know about, puffed all over the place in recommended feeds,
and of course the comment sections read like the court
room transcripts all over again. Believers and skeptics duking it

(01:13:31):
outline by line by line now But we can't forget
in print. Some published books kept Surple alive too. Some
framed it as factual disclosure, others as fiction inspired by
quote unquote real leaks and the cottage industry of UFO literature.
Surpa was never a best seller, but it became a

(01:13:52):
staple flip through the table of contents of almost any
top ten UFO secret books printed after two thousand and five,
and usually has a chapter of wedge between Roswell and
Area fifty one. So why does Surpo refuse to die
when so many other uf hotels have largely collapsed. No,

(01:14:18):
we have to be honest here. First is continuity. It
wasn't a free floater. It lashed directly onto Roswell. By
presenting the Evans as survivors of nineteen forty seven, it
gave believers that bridge that they need at Roswell wasn't
just a crash. It was the beginning of what would
become a decades long relationship. Second plausibility, Sirpo didn't promise

(01:14:46):
crystalline cities or alien empires. It promised a desert planet
within air, two sons, and a communal society. It sounded strange, sure,
but survivable In a way, it was boring, and honestly,
it's the boring part that actually makes it more believable
and more plausible. And third is the timing, as it

(01:15:11):
landed in two thousand and five at the height of
public distrust. The Iraq War had exposed government deception, the
Patriot Act had expanded surveillance. People were primed to believe
their leaders hid world shaking secrets. It really was a
perfect storm of Cold War secrecy blended with post nine

(01:15:32):
to eleven paranoia, and people were probably wondering why did
this show directly after nine to eleven? But Cirpo was
never just about aliens. It was about us. Believers clung
to it because it offered hope, proof that humanity was
not alone, that we had already taken those first steps

(01:15:55):
to the scars. Skeptics rejected it because it represented every
thing they hated, sloppy evidence, bad science, the kind of
thing that discredited serious research. But either way, it gave
people something to rally around. To believe in Cirpo was
to join a tribe, a tribe they probably didn't have before.

(01:16:16):
To the bunk. Surpo was to defend rationality. It wasn't
just a story it was an identity marker. So SURFO
wasn't just another UFO story. It was a mirror, a
reflection of Cold War paranoia, post nine to eleven, distrust,
and honestly, our endless hunger for mystery, not about proof
and not even about aliens, more about us. So we

(01:16:47):
have spent the better part of this episode, hopefully not
boring you to death. Hopefully it's been entertaining. We've treated
CPO like a case file, documents, timelines, contradictions, court room drama,
believers and skeptics. We're going to throw all of that
out the window and look at the bigger picture, because,

(01:17:14):
as I left off the last act, it is about
us and what kind of stories we cling to, why
we may invent them or relish the ones that are real,
and why we defend them, why we need them. We
have stories like Atlantis. Plato never meant it as history.

(01:17:37):
He meant it as maybe parable a thought experiment about
Hoover's and downfall, a great island civilization, events beyond its peer,
swallowed by the sea after moral decay, warning, not a
tribal brochure, And yet for centuries people treated it like
a map. Medieval cartographer's pencil. Here beet Lantis and the
margins of their globes, Explorers chasing new lands war the

(01:17:59):
ruins must be just over the horizon. By the nineteenth century,
whole industries were peddling theories of where Atlantis had been,
the Azores, the Caribbean, Antarctica. Atlantis became the ultimate lost file,
not a myth, but a missing report, the one the
professors wouldn't let you read, the one the crown kept
under seal. And if it sounds familiar, it should be

(01:18:21):
gauserpo is Atlantis in cold war drag. Both promise the
same revelation, there is another world, advanced, strange, already known
to a chosen few. Both live in the tension between
absence and longing. The more you demand proof, the more
it slips away, the harder you look, the more it recedes.
Why did Atlantis grip so tightly because it said we

(01:18:43):
weren't alone in history? Humanity wasn't a one chapter book.
There had been others, greaters, and maybe we were their hairs.
In Atlantis was believed that our roots ran deeper than
textbooks admitted. And we're being on who offers that same
seduction that our story isn't confined to one pale blue dot.

(01:19:06):
That in nineteen sixty five, before most of us were born,
barely a chapter was aded in secret, humanity already walked
under twin sons. We don't want to be the first
generation fumbling touristars. We want to be the second or
the third, the inheritors, not the pioneers. And for the
believers of Atlantis, Cirpo is just another sea, and there's

(01:19:30):
plausibility in both. And that's what makes the story of
Cerpo interesting. And let's shift from the sea to the
soil to Europe's fairy lore. I know, going in a
really weird direction, but trust me on this. For centuries,
villagers told of neighbors snatched away into the mounds, the woods,

(01:19:53):
the hollow hills. Some returned, many didn't, and those who
came back were changed. Spoke of strange food meals that
filled their mouth and never touched their stomach. They spoke
of time slipping, slipping, slipping into the future a night
and the fairy realm turned into years. At home. They
spoke of a kind of glamour enchantment that lingered long after,

(01:20:15):
leaving them restless, othered, not quite right.

Speaker 5 (01:20:20):
Now.

Speaker 4 (01:20:20):
Put that next to Cerpo. The Americans, if you believe
the files could ever stomach eving food, it made them ill.
They rationed to what they carried until it was gone
and forced themselves to adapt. They lost track of time,
their watches failed, their suns gave no rhythm, and their
earthborn bodies slipped out of sink and I am sorry, orty.
They returned not ten years later, but thirteen, aged weary,

(01:20:42):
changed in ways no doctor could ever pin down. Even
the exchange is a bit of a parallel and fairy lore.
When someone is taking a change, thing might be left behind.
Balance is restored and Sirco twelve go eight return four
left in the other world. The numbers are neat mythic.
That's loss accounted but not erased. And we've done shows

(01:21:03):
on this on itc in the past. When a child disappeared,
why a man came home from more hollow eyed, why
some seem touched by forces you could not see. Surpo
sort of explains the modern unease, why governments lie, why
secrets linger, why history feels incomplete. In the end, they
serve the same need to turn silence into story, absence
into accounting, and once again, I am not saying any

(01:21:26):
of this is wrong, that we shouldn't believe it. So
why do stories like Surpo Atlantis or fairy abduction stick well?
Because they feed four hungers wired into us curiosity. We
can't stand a blank space. We just simply cannot second hope.

(01:21:49):
Myths promised the world is bigger and richer than it looks.
Loneliness and a cold universe, stories of other worlds are
company the fear of silence. The hardest thing to accept
is that they're is nothing out there at all. And
once again, for the believers, this is just proof that
nature finds a way, and we listen carefully enough, the

(01:22:13):
stories are once again rhyming. Now we don't believe stories
like Surfa because they're air tight. We believe them because
they scratch the four hungers that we carry everywhere. And
until the stars answer with a more definitive answer, that's firmer,

(01:22:33):
We're gonna keep scratching at it. I mean, we've looked
at the files as a bit of evidence, we've debated
them as courtroom exhibits, but we have to ask a
different question. What if the real weight comes from what
it represents? We have twelve as an arc type twelve

(01:23:01):
is never arbitrary. Twelve apostles, twelve Olympians, twelve labors or hercules,
twelve tribes of Israel, twelve months to complete the year.
Twelve signals wholeness, completeness, a cycle of the film, and
that kind of makes Cerpo Expedition feel archetypal, even if
it was completely accidental. These weren't just twelve soldiers or scientists. Symbolically,

(01:23:26):
it was a dozen souls carrying humanity itself across the stars.
That's considered the desert stage. Deserts have always been the
stage of revelation. The Israeli eight Asraeliites wandered forty years
in the desert Jesus facet There, Muhammed received revelation in

(01:23:50):
the quiet of the desert and the lust for young women.
The desert strips us down, removes distractions, burns away illusions.
It leaves only survival, endurance, in clarity. And yes, that
was a shot. I don't care. Replacing Cerpo in a
desert a myth makes the mission an ordeal, not paradise,
not utopia, a crucible. So Supo wasn't just any planet.

(01:24:11):
It was the perfect stage harsh enough to test us,
familiar enough to feel plausible and possible, yet secret enough
to resonate. Then we have the exchange, not com conquest.
Our alien myths almost always orbit fear, invasion, abduction, experiment, probing, extraction,

(01:24:36):
cupo flips it. We weren't conquered, we weren't kidnapped. We negotiated,
and we sent our own. In mythic terms, that's kind
of a profound shift. We weren't prey, we weren't overlords.
We were partners, yes, in another world, trusted enough to
live among them. The nineteen sixties were full of exchanges,

(01:24:58):
cultural envoye, scientific delegations, even prisoners swapped on bridges, cloaked
and fogged. So Soper mirrored at diplomacy, not missiles, but
in dialogue, not surrendered, not invasion, but cooperation. The Cold
warhead chessboards and summits and serpo myth gave us a
summit across the stars. And of course we can't leave

(01:25:20):
out the crew itself. And while the file never gives
us the names, the absence actually only makes their clearers
the roles clearer, because the twelve can read as archetypes,
the doctor, the linguist, the soldier, the biologist, the leader,
the engineer, the chronicler or the skeptic, the volunteer, the reluctant,
the martyrs, and the exiles. Even if those roles were

(01:25:43):
never intended, they merged because once again the earth, humanly mind,
crave structure, crazed fellowship. It becomes another roundtable, another argonaut crew,
and another fellowship of the Ring. It doesn't matter if
Anonymous invented them in two thousand and five. Male archetypes
don't need names to feel real. But then there's the sacrifice.

(01:26:11):
If all twell have returned, Surfo would be more considered
a Palfy adventurous novel, But four were lost, it feels
like a tragedy, and tragedies tend to carry more weight.
The two who died became martyrs, buried under alien sons
of name unwritten, but their absence undeniable. The two who

(01:26:34):
stayed become exiles. In Fairy Lord, they'd be the mortals
who ate the wrong food and can never return. In
Cold War allegory, they'd be defectors, choosing the other side,
leaving their homeland behind. In mythic archetype, their Personafy M.
Bound to another world, and I meant prosephone, but you

(01:26:56):
know what I meant and gives their mission moral gravity.
Sacrifice sanctifies, and sacrifice more than survival makes that myth last.
But here's what the believers in skeptics share. They both

(01:27:17):
need the symbol. Believers raise Cerpo like a banner, proof
that we were trusted, that humanity is already part of
a bigger story. The mission becomes a point of pride,
even in cold war paranoia, we were worthy of an exchange,
and skeptics like to raise that warning sign proof that
humans are gullible as fuck. That tone and acronyms can seduce.

(01:27:43):
Serpo becomes exhibit A in their argument that extraordinary claims
need extraordinary proof, and both sides shape identity against the
same symbol. Believers say I trust the hidden chapter more
than the official record. Skeptics say I trust evidence more
than narrative, and that since Serpo is less about aliens,
and once again, it's more about us in how we
decide who we are. But maybe the real use of

(01:28:12):
surfo not as evidence, but maybe as a rehearsal. What
would we do if invited? Could we endure? Could we adapt?
With our conquering, could we return without boasting about it?
We practice in fiction that we hope one day to
perform in fact. Atlanta's taught us to be ware of pride,

(01:28:35):
fairy tales taught us to respect the other world, and
Serfo teaches us to imagine diplomacy across light years Now.
The truth we want is simple. We want clean and cinematic.
We want that hangar door rolling back light, slipping in

(01:28:56):
the waiting crowd. We want that general in the solemn expression,
the Prince press conference with flags in the background. The
binder of declassified documents had a law for the cameras.
We want photographs of the twelve lined up on the
tarmac in sixty five, put their helmets under their arms,
and their signatures at the bottom of the page. We
want film reels of sirpo itself, twin suns burning low

(01:29:19):
over dusty plains, alien villages dotting the horizon, evans smiling
shyly at the lens. We want names, names that can
be engraved on monuments, whispered in gratitude, googled biographies. We
want the families to step forward, clutching folded letters, saying yes,
this is why our father, our mother, our brother, our sisters,

(01:29:40):
vanished from the records. They were chosen. That's the truth.
We hunger for a truth that rewrites history into a
single stunning reveal, A truth that doesn't just suggest or
hint or argue, that confirms because we want certainty. We
want a truth that validates decades speculation, that redeems every

(01:30:02):
two am radio call, every dusty UFO conference, and every
shaky VHS type of lights in the sky. You want
proof that all those nights of wandering weren't wasted. We
want to believe, but more than that, we want to know.

(01:30:25):
Just imagine the movie trailer for the actual disclosure. Fade
in black and white footage of rockets, astronauts, cold war
summits a voiceover in nineteen sixty five, twelve Americans left
Earth and for thirteen years they never returned. Then you

(01:30:45):
cut to some newly declassified photographs, grainy but absolutely undeniable.
The music would swell in the tagline the greatest story
never told until now it rates itself. And that's the point.
The truth we want is cinema, because cinema is how
we've been trained to process revelation, clear beginnings, clear conflicts,

(01:31:06):
tidy resolutions. Just think about how many times we've waited
for the big reveal. Hell, Juxtaposition wouldn't have what one
hundred and twenty episodes if we didn't want the big
reveal the JFK file. Surely the missing page is what
explained Dallas. Did they the rosweldt the classification? Surely they

(01:31:28):
Air Force would amit the saucers they didn't. It was
weather balloons, crash dummies and half measures, even the Pentagon
UFO videos. Surely the military would confess to alien craft.
Some have, some haven't. They've even managed to change the
name to Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. More bureaucratic bullshit, And every

(01:31:56):
time the truth we want it, it's just sharp, definditive,
been maybe with a flare of cinematic. And each time
we get truth, or what we are presented as truth
at messy, incomplete, and frustrating as hell. But yet we
still come back time after time, because the hunger doesn't
die with one disappointment, it actually gets renewed. And Serpo

(01:32:19):
plugged into that hunger perfectly. It offered a story big
enough to scratch the edge. Twelve one eight back four
Forever Loss a sacrifice, an adventure, a hidden chapter, and
really the only thing that's missing was the press conference.

(01:32:42):
Why do we crave it? Because the cinematic truth is merciful.
It tells us the universe is busy, that humanity has
noticed that our government for all and I am capitalizing
all its flaws, kept the biggest secret in history, not
the Maccus, but maybe to protect us until until we
were ready. It tells us we matter more than textbooks

(01:33:06):
say that we've already joined the cosmic story, that we're
not beginners falling toward the stars, but veterans with field experience,
invited to the table decades ago and deeper still. It
promises closure, that words do matter. Closure is the psychological grail,
the clean ending, the verdict, the last chapter that explains

(01:33:27):
all the others. Let's face it. It's why we binge documentaries,
why we watch courtroom trials on TV, why we line
up for the next episode of Juxtaposition and can't wait
to find out what the subject is on Juxtaposition for October. Okay,
that one might have been a little too personal. Why
I apologize for that. We want the satisfaction of a

(01:33:50):
truth that clicks, that settles the noise that lets us say, oh,
now that makes sense. Sir dangled that possibility. If it
were true, everything else we oswell MJ twelve, even the
whispers of area fifty one in others would snap in
the place. All the puzzle pieces would lock. And that's

(01:34:12):
the allure. That's the truth we want. But notice that
all those ons have in common. They're not about evidence,
They're about also feeling. We don't just want documents, we
want validation. We don't just want names, we want recognition.

(01:34:34):
We don't just want disclosure, We want to matter. It's
no accident. As the story landed in two thousand and five,
when trusting government was brittle, when the wars were dragging on,
when surveillance programs leaked in like shadows, the climate was
primed for a truth that said, yes, they hide things,
but some of what they hide is marvelous. I mean,

(01:34:58):
you can always picture it. A room and washing and
curtains drawn, a podium set behind officials we know by face,
but rarely by candor. One clears its throats. In nineteen
sixty five, we entered into an exchange program with an
extraterrestrial civilization. The room would gasp. Cameras would click, screens
light up across the world, Teachers would pause Paul's lessons,

(01:35:22):
drivers would pull over and for a moment, the planet
is united in a bit of shock and awe. And
let's face it, that's the fantasy. That's the truth we want,
because it would change everything instantly. Worlds and our wars
would shrink, politics would pale, borders would blur. Perhaps humanity

(01:35:42):
would finally see itself as one species outside of a
certain religion, one tribe under one sky. But as I said,
that's the fantasy, and we don't know if that fantasy
has any basis of truth. And it's truth that we want, clean,
cinematic and comforting. And the truth we get is often

(01:36:04):
always something else entirely. And that's what makes some of
the story feel true. With the fact that one says
ten men, two women, another says six and six. Some
say they stayed for ten, some say they stayed for
thirteen two, one says two died, two stayed behind, and

(01:36:24):
other parts of it said only one die. Even the distances,
wobble z R is pegged at exactly thirty nine late years,
not thirty eight point seven, not thirty nine point three,
exactly the round number you'd find in some magazine. We

(01:36:49):
didn't get any of that. We didn't get names. We
didn't get photographs, not one, not even a blurry and
he's not a scrap of hardware, not even a grain
of sand and hr label Surpo nineteen seventy four or thereabouts.
We didn't get artifacts, no tools, no samples, no logs
inherating we can carbon date, just type words in a

(01:37:10):
digital ether. The truth we get is absence stressed up
as evidence. And that's part of the irony, because the
very thing that makes Serpo feel authentic to some it's
a dull, bureaucratic style, is what also really does make
it hollow to others. It's flat, jargon, heavy, clinical, and
that's exactly what Anonymous imitated. It's like someone studied the

(01:37:34):
rhythm of memos and copied it until it sounded plausible.
But style isn't necessarily substance. A memo that sounds right
doesn't mean it's right. So what about government's own archives?
If twelve Americans vanished in sixty five, surely there'd be

(01:37:56):
some sort of trail, you would think, But then again,
there isn't researchers have come through declassified logs, FIA request
microfilms of military rosters. Nothing well. Of course, skeptics will say,
if there's no evidence in the archives, it didn't have
any Believers will say, maybe the silence is the evidence.

(01:38:19):
Of course it's missing. That just proves to cover up.
And this is where we get into a circular battle
of truth because unfortunately neither side is necessarily wrong in
their feeling and belief. Here silence that can mean either
everything or nothing is all, depending on what chair you
sit in. And then we get back to the truth

(01:38:43):
that we get a stalemate every single time. So why
hasn't SURFO collapsed under its own weight? Because the truth
we do get, messy, contradictory, and complete is the truth
that myths thrive on. If CURFO had been cleaned with

(01:39:05):
names and photos, it would be debunked or confirmed very quickly, done,
filed away. Everyone knows about it, okay, But because it
is messy, it lives, and because it does contradict itself,
it can't be disproven cleanly. So here we are. The
truth we get is a handful of memos without signatures,

(01:39:28):
contradictions without resolution, and silence from the archives, not the
cinematic reveal we want it, not the comfort enclosure we
dreamed of, Just mess, just noise, just enough to keep
this story alive and me chattering about for an hour
and forty five minutes. And maybe that's why we're still
talking about it. So what have we learned? Well, not proof,

(01:39:54):
not facts, but maybe a few lessons, because even if
CIRCO collapses a history, it's teaches us as myth and
myths are rehearsal spaces. They show us we behave when
the truth we want and the truth we get don't
line up. In the end, Serpo isn't necessarily about the Evans.

(01:40:15):
It isn't about the twin suns or rotation logs. It
really is about us, our suspicion, our hope, our refusal
to let silence be the last word. That's the truth
we get. And the rest of the story is this
humanity cannot stop reaching with rockets, with radios, with rumors,
and with myths. Some reaches will touch reality, some will

(01:40:38):
touch only each other. But the reaching itself, the act
of not being satisfied with silence, that's who we are.
So the truth we want versus the truth we get
we wanted a revolution or revelation, we got contradictions. We
wanted certainty, we got ambiguity. We wanted a press conference,

(01:41:02):
we got a Yahoo group. But in that gap between
want and get, we discovered the most human thing of all,
the need to keep asking, to keep telling stories that
make us bigger than our doubts, to keep reaching across
silence with wonder, even when the silence doesn't answer back. So,

(01:41:28):
if you've stayed with us through Desert's debates and dossier hays,
thank you. I didn't promise answers. I promised to hold
the questions carefully. It's kind of crazy to think that's
the wrap of the first half of season four of
In Thecrease, Knights and sieges, Vanish peoples and unsolved crimes,

(01:41:49):
Greenish children in ghostly battles, near death visions and quantum riddles,
fortunes staked on alien worlds, and now a cold war
exchange with the stars. Ten episodes, ten ways history and
myth refused to sit still, And next time we leave

(01:42:10):
the twin Sons of Serco for the candlelight halls of
medieval Europe. This has been a decrease. I am j
E double leaf, and now you know the rest of
the story we're allowed to tell.

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