Friday, June 02, 2006

Say what you will about Project Serpo, but they sure have a spiffy website.

3 comments:

JohnFen said...

Interesting, but I'm really, really bugged by the whole time/calendar keeping problem. If I were going on a ten-year trip to a completely unknown place, I'd want as many non-battery-powered versions of things as I could take. Including using wind-up watches with a built-in calendar. Surely they would have done the same.

I get a uncomfy feeling when they talk about losing track on earth time (particularly the mentions of losing track of the day count while on the trip), because a minor amount of foresight and equipment redundancy would let you at least reasonably estimate it under the circumstances described.

Also, I question whether they would have forgotten to bring along the required (and very portable) equipment and chemicals to develop film negatives. Even if they weren't interested in making prints, negatives are much more resilient to environmental damage after they've been developed.

But now I'm just nitpicking.

The whole tale is very attractive -- I find myself wanting it to be accurate. But if wishes were horses, I'd have a huge mess in my living room.

Mac said...

Who was it that suggested Serpo was part of a viral marketing campaign to promote a possibly forthcoming alien flick?

I'd almost buy that if not for the shopworn ideas being beaten around. Essentially, this is the MJ-12 mythos being recycled for a new generation. I wouldn't be the least surprised if this is sanctioned, somehow, by the intelligence community.

JohnFen said...

Excellent points all around, wm.

Since the CIA has admitted to intentionally hoaxing UFOs, and I tend to think that some agency has been intentionally hoaxing alien abductions (the abductions are real, not the aliens), I find myself in the perverse position of thinking that the more plausible and/or well-documented it sounds, the more suspicious I should be. Leaks from top-secret things that have later been declassified seem to show that real info tends to be inaccurate and incomplete, although in the ballpark.

Sigh.