John P Craven
Dr. John P. Craven was an American engineer and oceanographer who served as the Chief Scientist of the US Navy's Special Projects Office during the Cold War, where he oversaw the development of deep ocean engineering technologies including the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP). He is the author of The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea (2001), in which he disclosed the existence of Project Sanddollar — a highly compartmented seafloor recovery program nested within the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile program. In UAP research, Craven's disclosures are significant as an independent historical documentation of the SAP nesting architecture used to conceal sensitive recovery programs, and as corroboration of the conceptual framework UAP Gerb calls the Legacy Program Onion Model.
| Role | Chief Scientist, US Navy Special Projects Office; founder of the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP) |
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Deep Submergence Systems Project
Craven established the DSSP to develop technologies enabling the Navy to perform deep ocean engineering — search, rescue, salvage, and recovery — at substantially greater depths than previously possible. Products of the DSSP include Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles (DSRVs) — specifically the Lockheed Martin Mystic and Avalon — designed to rescue stranded submarines. A companion vehicle, the never-built-on-an-acknowledged-basis Deep Submergence Search Vehicle (DSSV), was designed with substantially deeper operational depths and expanded salvage/recovery capabilities.
Witnesses have described these or similar vessels being sent on clandestine missions beyond their acknowledged purposes. One case involves a 1991 incident off Aberdeen, Scotland, in which a crew member of a DSRV or DSSV claimed to have participated in the retrieval of an exotic triangular craft with glyphic writing from the ocean floor.
Project Sanddollar Disclosure
In The Silent War, Chapter 10 ("Spooked"), Craven disclosed that the DSSP had been established to satisfy the requirements of Project Sanddollar — described as "an extremely compartmented and top secret program meant to identify and retrieve items of national security interest on the seafloor." Craven stated he was shown an inventory of items known to be on the seabed and a map of their worldwide distribution, and was asked to organize a recovery program using DSSP assets in complete secrecy — specifically structured so that "my family and friends and closest professional colleagues would have no idea that I was involved in such a project."
Craven learned that Sanddollar was nested within the Polaris program through multiple layers of cover programs, and that the submarine officer who briefed him — whose involvement with Polaris Craven had previously accepted at face value — was in fact covering for Sanddollar.
The Seventh Veil
Craven described what he called the "seventh veil" — an apparatus of secrecy surrounding top-secret unacknowledged programs in which no outsider and potentially no insider could ever be certain of reaching the innermost layer of compartmentation. He further described the principle that all special intelligence projects required a real cover project, that most personnel working on the cover did not know it was a cover, and that only one or more individuals cleared for both levels served as links between them.
This description constitutes one of the earliest and most credible independent articulations of what UAP Gerb calls the Legacy Program Onion Model — the layered, nested secrecy architecture allegedly used for UFO crash retrieval and exploitation programs.