Link to article: Executive Brief Investigative Report Orpheus.
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[[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] **Executive Brief, Investigative Report "Orpheus"** Due to the results of Exploration Log C, the Outpost-2585 supervisor made a formal request to Overwatch, pending an investigation of the United States space travel program and its possible connection to SCP-2585. Appropriated documents and testimony from the US Government and NASA indicate that, starting from the commencement of the Space Shuttle Program in 1972, both the aforementioned parties are shown to have been involved with an individual or organization identified only as "Black Eagle" (assumed to be a code-name). There is no evidence that Rockwell International (now Boeing Defense, Space and Security) had any connection with, or indeed was even aware to the existence of, the party known as "Black Eagle." In 1974, under the supervision of the US Government (though not NASA or Rockwell International), "Black Eagle" performed several alterations to the Space Shuttle //Horizon//, a Space Shuttle Orbiter prototype developed prior to the first officially recognized model, the //Enterprise//. No explicit record of these alterations is known to exist. Space Shuttle //Horizon// performed its first orbital flight in 1975, one year before the unveiling of the Space Shuttle //Enterprise// and six years before the first orbital flight of the Space Shuttle //Columbia//. Details regarding the //Horizon//'s launch facility at [REDACTED], along with information regarding specific personnel involved, is limited to the full report (see SECURE-FILE-ORPHEUS). Contact was lost with the //Horizon// two hours and thirty-nine minutes after launch, at which time the spacecraft was orbiting Earth over the Indian Ocean. The following piece of testimony was compelled from Derek Wright, a former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1995: > //I need to make it abundantly clear that I don't know who or what the hell "Black Eagle" is, and none of my colleagues had any idea either. Information on BE was classified above my pay-grade, and my bosses were touchy on the subject.// > > //It was the seventies, we'd put the first human foot on the moon, but the space race wasn't even close to being over. There was immense pressure towards militarization of space, and the SSP was critical on that front. Ever since Salyut 1 went up, there was a frenzy to get our own space station in orbit, and plans for putting missiles on such a station were very seriously being considered. If that prospect sounds crazy now, believe me, it sounded crazy then too, but it's what we had to work on. Just to be clear, I was never actually involved in any of this "work," I only made sure that the proceedings were secure, so I can't speak for any of the technical aspects of these subjects, I can only talk about what I saw or heard. In any case, missiles on a space station wasn't even the craziest notion. We'd actually proposed outfitting the shuttles for a weapons program, but the consensus was that such a system would be too cumbersome, conspicuous, and inefficient.// > > //That was before BE.// > > //I said before that I don't know who they are, and I meant that. I never saw these people, someone saw them, apparently, but it wasn't me or any of my colleagues. They barely existed on paper; virtually everything issued or relayed about them was done so by mouth. That was unusual, but not unheard of. What bugged me was how often I heard "Let BE take care of it." I heard it all the time. Weirder still was that we seemed to be ahead of schedule on everything. In my line of work, we're// never //ahead of schedule. The launch date kept becoming sooner and sooner, and it seemed like things became too quick to notice. I heard whispers, hurried quiet conversations about the "unprecedented weapon" that BE was working on, and all I can remember thinking is when did the SSP become cemented as a weapons project when it was deemed unfeasible less than a year earlier? It was so fast, so bizarre that it was surreal, and I found myself just going along with it, right up until the night of the launch.// > > //I got a call to my office from the// Horizon. //No, not from the launch site, from the space shuttle itself. I don't know how the hell they reached my office, why they called me, or what they even used to place the call in the first place, there's no record of it even existing, but it happened. The guy on the phone said he was Phil McGinnis, whom I knew to be one of the astronauts on the shuttle. Naturally I thought it was a joke or something similar at first, but I heard something in the background that convinced me otherwise. I honestly can't describe what I was hearing, but I...didn't like it. I could barely hear what McGinnis was saying: I had to write it down on a piece of scratch paper in my office. "The light that eats time," "Mustn't come back," and "I will hold the light in me" are the only clear things I heard. After less than two minutes, the call cut out. I sat for at least a half hour, literally doing nothing, and I honestly can't remember what I was thinking about. I don't know if I was questioning what had just happened, or if I even knew what had just happened at all. Until this day, I've told no one about this.// > > //As I'm sure you know, the shuttle went down less than three hours later, and BE vanished without a trace. The whole thing was swept under the rug, and work on the SSP went on like nothing ever happened. All of us that had worked on the project while BE was on-board were rotated to other things, or we disappeared.// @@ @@ [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [!-- N/A (No Images) --] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]