A Final Update from Bill Ryan: 5 March 2007
[From The King is dead... long live the King, a traditional English phrase referring to the celebration of the continuation of the monarchy despite the death of the reigning king.] Or: An exchange program almost certainly happened, and why I'm now moving on to other things... ******* With no further Serpo information having been released since August 2006, readers can be forgiven for assuming that, despite several more false dawns, there may now be no more. This is an assumption now shared by myself. In December 2006, after Victor Martinez had received a number of photos which turned out to be fakes, I first drafted this update page you’re reading now. My intention was to hand this site over to another webmaster, and focus my attention full time (rather than just 95% of the time) on Project Camelot, which supports disclosure and which publishes interviews, free of charge, with insiders and other important witnesses to government secrecy. I withheld posting it then because there was reason to hold the possibility that at least some of the insiders who were part of the backstage story might be present at the 2007 Laughlin UFO Congress. However, this has just concluded, and no-one was there – with one exception. This was an elderly man, with aquiline features and wearing a pilot's jacket... who, to my great interest, was clearly shocked to see me there again. I'd met him at last year's Congress, and had been told then that he was Paul McGovern (a retired DIA official well-known in insider UFO circles), attending under a pseudonym. Last year this man had indeed shown an uncommon interest in me and, after the Congress was over, I'd been told he had passed on the message to me, via an intermediary, to ask whether or not I had “bought his story”. This year, on seeing him again, I confronted him; but he earned his paycheck by denying complicity to the bitter end. Eventually I left him alone, seeing that no further progress would be gained. Having analyzed all the available photographs, I don’t believe he was Paul McGovern, but I do believe he's a DIA agent. That should be no surprise, as agents frequently patrol UFO conventions. But this, too, merely adds to the smoke and mirrors of the ongoing Serpo intrigue. As ever, nothing definitive transpired. Meanwhile, and hinting strongly at a great deal more substance, I had told the story in our 17th February Coast to Coast AM radio interview of how Kerry Cassidy and I had made contact with an elderly man who we’d been told, off the record, was a reserve Serpo astronaut who had trained with the team who went on the mission. The full story follows here, and makes for fascinating reading. (Readers may be interested to know that the identity of the senior CIA agent was who contacted us in irritation, unnamed below, can be deduced from reading Dan Smith’s blog with some care and attention. The agent is identified there as "SI", an acronym for Salmo Irideus, or Troutfish.) While intending no harm or discourtesy, and definitely with no intention to betray confidentiality, we had evidently trodden on the toes of both the DIA and CIA, as no-one had imagined that we would be actually take it upon ourselves to contact the person now known in Serpo lore as “the old man”. This is what had happened: ******* I was told the name of someone who was supposedly a reserve Serpo astronaut, as far back as February 2006. This occurred naturally in conversation with a member of the intelligence community. I was also told the general area where this person lived. A couple of months later, on 21 April, Kerry Cassidy and I opted to take a little initiative of our own. We did a search on the internet and found his name, together with a street address and telephone number. So we decided to write to him. The letter was sent by FedEx. It expressed support, promised that his ID and contact details would not be revealed to anyone, said that we’d be delighted to assist with the disclosure effort with a Project Camelot interview under any stipulated conditions of confidentiality, and sought to establish direct communication if at all possible. The letter was delivered and signed for, but after that there was silence. He never responded. We came to suspect that we’d written to the wrong person, and it was all a mistake. Then, out of the blue, on 8 September, I received an e-mail from ***** (not marked Private) saying:
We thought: “Thank you, *****.” Beautiful confirmation. That was a slip on *****’s part. The distortion in *****’s belief about what had happened (and the time delay – four and a half months) made us wonder if this had been reported up the line through the DIA, across to the CIA at a high level, and then down to *****, accumulating errors along the way. (We’ll leave others to determine the likelihood of ***** still being on the CIA payroll.) I did not reply to *****’s question (hoping he would say more) - and he did. On 6 October, in the context of an e-mail to me about other matters and cc’d to Victor Martinez, Robert Collins, Marilyn Ruben, Brendan Burton, and Larry Dicken, he wrote:
Thanks, *****. So now we know he’s an old man. (We had, of course, never met him.) In December, meeting with Victor for the first time in a while, Victor told us that he too had heard that we had greatly irritated the DIA with our little initiative – and (importantly) that this was the reason that I was suddenly cut out of the loop (soon after the delivery of the FedEx letter) regarding receiving any of the Serpo releases directly. (Students of the ongoing saga will recall that it was then that the releases reverted to Victor.) Meanwhile, in November, Kerry and I decided to visit this man in person. We prepared a letter of the utmost courtesy, to be hand-delivered. We would then retire to a coffee shop for several hours, with our cellphone on the table. Then we would head back home again after a pre-allotted time. Our letter read:
We delivered the letter, and - most interestingly - the man’s wife was waiting for us at the gate as we arrived, despite our having informed no-one of our plan. We’d either been tracked, or our car is bugged; neither would be a surprise. The man himself, who was elderly but looked as he'd been strong and athletic in his youth, was at the door, watching, some 20 or 30 yards away. We were polite and deferential, handed her the letter, and immediately left. We waited till 7pm, but the phone did not ring. In mid-December, I then heard from ***** again, who said that he’d been told that we’d visited the man in person with camera and recording equipment in hand, asking for an interview. (I won’t copy the message, because it was marked Private.) I sent ***** the text of the letter copied above, and explained that either the man himself was lying, or that he, *****, been deliberately misinformed by his source. (It wouldn’t be the first time that ***** has been fed malicious false information about me from persons unknown.) None of this proves that the man was an astronaut, or that Serpo exists... but it does show, fairly conclusively, that we’d stepped heavily on someone’s toes by making contact with this man, and that the report had rippled out through the intel community to eventually reach *****. So an "old man", sensitively connected to the story, definitely exists... and is being well protected. ********* In another synchronous event, Shawnna Connolly, having come to blows (in protest at their unethical activity) with Ryan Dube and Steve Broadbent, her former conspirators and debunkers at the Reality Uncovered forum, ‘outed’ Reality Uncovered’s ongoing smear campaign in massive and compelling detail on www.serpo.info. The only thing she omitted to mention in the listed catalog of dirty tricks was their having gained unauthorized access to my personal e-mail account (not just the serpo e-mails) last November and December, an action which I’ve obtained legal advice was criminal. Apart from this detail, the entire account of the smear campaign is well-told on www.serpo.info, and needs no repetition on these pages. All this, combined with Kerry Cassidy and myself celebrating the first anniversary of our initial meeting (when Kerry interviewed me – click here) with another interview, twelve months on to the day, made me realize that now was the optimum time to step down from being the webmaster of this site which has intrigued and involved so many for so long. As stated above, I'd been considering this since December 2006; the principal trigger for the final decision now was the Laughlin "anniversary" combined with the complete lack of further updates for six months. So from here on out I'll look back on Serpo with a mixture of fondness and relief. And I’ll be focusing full-time on Project Camelot, a website of comprehensive video interviews with insiders and other important disclosure witnesses. Here are my conclusions, such as it’s possible to reach any:
|