Overview
On November 2, 2005, an email signed only "Anonymous" arrived on a UFO discussion list moderated by Victor Martinez. The sender claimed to be a retired employee of the United States government, and the story he had to tell was outsized even by the standards of a UFO mailing list: in July 1965, twelve American military personnel had left Earth from Nevada aboard an alien spacecraft, bound for a planet called Serpo in the Zeta Reticuli star system, some forty light-years away. They were an exchange delegation. An extraterrestrial guest had been living with the US government since 1947; now humans would return the visit.
More emails followed over the following months — thousands of words of mission logistics, planetary data, and bureaucratic color, all attributed to a program the Defense Intelligence Agency had allegedly run and buried. A researcher named Bill Ryan built a website, serpo.org, to collect the postings as they arrived, and the material spread quickly through the UFO community and beyond.
What came to be called Project Serpo turned into one of the most argued-over episodes in modern ufology: a complete secret history, delivered by email, from a sender no one could name.
The Long Way to Zeta Reticuli
The releases rooted everything in Roswell. According to the postings, the 1947 New Mexico crash left one extraterrestrial alive — designated "Ebe1" — who lived in government custody, tried six times to signal his home world using equipment from the wreck, and died in 1952 without succeeding. Contact allegedly came anyway, later that year, and after years of radio exchanges the two sides arranged a swap. President Kennedy is said to have approved a departure in April 1964; it slipped to July 1965, when an Eben craft supposedly lifted twelve carefully screened Americans — ten men and two women, chosen for having no spouses, no children, and ideally no living relatives — off the Nevada desert.
The mission details had a texture that fascinated readers. Serpo, the emails said, orbits two suns. Days run about forty hours. The heat hovers near 107 degrees, the planet holds roughly 650,000 inhabitants, and confusion over the local calendar stretched a planned ten-year stay into thirteen. When the craft returned in 1978, not everyone came back — seven survivors by some tellings, eight by others, with deaths attributed to radiation from the twin suns. The team allegedly left behind 1,800 pages of mission logs and more than six hundred cassette recordings, none of which has ever been produced. A later posting added that CIA Director William Casey briefed President Reagan on the whole affair in March 1981.
A Story with a Prior Booking
Veteran researchers noticed something almost immediately. The exchange-program story had been pitched before — in 1983, to journalist Linda Moulton Howe, who was then preparing a UFO documentary for HBO. The man doing the pitching was Richard C. Doty, a sergeant with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base, who promised Howe official footage and records of essentially this same human-alien exchange, then withdrew his cooperation. The documentary collapsed.
When the Serpo emails began circulating two decades later, many in the UFO community attributed them to Doty, or to someone connected to him — an attribution Doty's long, tangled history of contact with UFO researchers did little to quiet. Mark Pilkington's 2010 book Mirage Men treated the Serpo affair at length, placing it within a documented tradition of official disinformation directed at the UFO community, with Doty as a central figure. Believers in the releases pushed back: even a compromised messenger, some argued, might be carrying real cargo.
The Numbers That Wouldn't Sit Still
The postings carried their own troubles. Critics catalogued internal contradictions as the releases accumulated — dates that shifted between installments, crew counts that changed, astronomical descriptions of the Zeta Reticuli system that didn't match what telescopes record about the actual binary pair. Defenders answered that the material had passed through multiple hands over three decades, and that garbling was exactly what one should expect of a story retold from memory by aging insiders.
The argument wore on the people closest to it. On March 5, 2007, Bill Ryan announced he was stepping down as webmaster of serpo.org. He said the releases "definitely contained disinformation," while maintaining his belief that some form of exchange program had taken place. The distinction — poisoned messenger, genuine event — became the fallback position for much of the story's remaining audience.
The Site Is Still Up
Two decades on, serpo.org remains online, its numbered postings preserved where Ryan left them. No document, photograph, or named participant has ever surfaced, and the Defense Intelligence Agency has never addressed the claims. Doty's role is still debated rather than settled; he has given varying accounts of his involvement in UFO matters generally. Retrospectives keep returning to the affair — a 2026 treatment framed it as suspended between extraordinary possibility and elaborate deception — and within ufology, Serpo now functions less as a live case than as a reference point, cited whenever an anonymous insider appears with a large story and no paper. The emails, meanwhile, read today exactly as they did in November 2005: detailed, confident, and unsigned.