Per 
Foreword: The following is a transcript of an audio cassette discovered in a small farm homestead located near ███████ Siberia, Russia on ██/██/2017. The cassette was originally recorded in Russian and was translated by Dr. █████. It is believed to have belonged to a Vladimir █████, who claims to be a former SCP researcher in the said cassette. However, no official Foundation records of a researcher Vladimir █████ exist. Investigation into locating and detaining Vladimir █████ is currently underway.
<Begin Log>
“One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths…”
[Sounds of lighter is heard.]
“A man once said that. Who was this man? I don’t know, it's ironic to think about though. This man made this quote about lies and how they damage and destroy the truth, and he shared this quote without his name attached to it, he most likely had to tell lies along the way to make sure people didn’t know it was him.”
“There is one universal law of the paranormal world, some of you might think it’s a law of defending humanity, a law of self-preservation, or any of that type of similar bullshit. But there’s one universal rule, one universally agreed upon principle among the groups of people who study the paranormal. Only a few groups so willingly choose to break this law. That law is the law of secrecy. Everyone from the Chaos Insurgency to the GOC uses this law to conduct their operations.”
“I am afraid to admit that I, Vladimir █████, am, or was, apart of the organization which embodies this law to its fullest and cruelest extent. Whether or not you are someone who stumbled across this tape who has no knowledge of any of this, or if you are some mobile task force soldier who broke down my door to find this, I don’t care. The only thing I wish for now is for this to be heard and for this bullshit veil of secrecy to be removed.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ inhaling is heard.]
“For those who have possibly found this tape with no knowledge of the paranormal world whatsoever, you probably have no idea what I am talking about when I say I was apart of an organization which is the living embodiment of secrecy itself, but for those of you who do know this may seem redundant what I'm about to say. The organization which I was apart of is by far the world’s largest paranormal organization, hell, maybe even the world’s largest organization period. The SCP Foundation.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ exhaling is heard.]
“For those of you who don’t know about the paranormal world, and thus the largest and most secretive organization that exists within it, the SCP Foundation, I’ll give you a brief rundown of both the world of the paranormal and the SCP Foundation.”
“Here’s my simplest explanation. Every urban legend, myth, or scary story you’ve heard about ghosts or weird creatures or even fucking ancient gods that could blink and we would be gone, they are either fully real or are based somewhere in reality. The reason why you never hear about actual real stories of them, or see any real evidence of them, is because of the organizations that police these myths, these stories, these, legends. How do they do this? Well, some contain these myths, lock them up, some use them as weapons for their own goals, others just straight up destroy them. However, how do they manage to stop the public, or at least partially stop the public from seeing and figuring out what is going on? Well, they all lie. They lie to everyone, every member of society, to our leaders, to our soldiers, to our engineers, to you. Some lie more than others, of course. Some organizations just lie about what they are doing to the public, they tell the politicians and bureaucrats what they are doing, however, they never tell the public and the larger population. Others, however, lie to everyone. This is what the SCP Foundation does. Nobody knows why they are here, who their leaders are, and more, not even our governments, not even those in the organization itself. The public has no idea this group exists and the only a lucky few know it’s goals, along with the majority of those working in the Foundation itself.”
“What are the SCP Foundation’s goals? Well, they are well-meaning enough. Its unofficial motto is “Secure, Contain, Protect,” and it’s official mission statement is “We die in the dark, so you can live in the light.” Noble enough sounding at first, isn’t it?”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ inhaling is heard.]
“They wish to protect humanity from the paranormal and give them a sense of blissful ignorance to the evils they are combatting, they also wish to understand and research these evils, as someone who used to work for the organization itself, I know what they want, I know, well, I knew the good people who are there trying to successfully contain the paranormal to stop it from killing thousands if not millions of innocents.”
“The problem with this is, however, is the way how this Foundation operates.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ exhaling is heard.]
“I can’t begin to put into words what I have seen. What evil I’ve seen the Foundation I once full-heartedly believed in do, to put in simple terms, those who die in the dark can’t operate in it by themselves. They have to steal to deal with the dark, steal resources from the people to fuel its never-ending war against the paranormal, steal prisoners from prisons to use as test dummies in never-ending deadly experiments, steal land from the people to create bases of operations. And all of our leaders have to agree with what they are doing, because if they don’t, well, let’s just say the world gets new leaders.”
“If you wonder why Putin has been in office for so long in Russia, or why the amount of Republicans Presidents in the United States dominate the amount of every other presidential party, it’s because they don’t argue with the Foundation on what it does. Putin freely gives the Foundation military assets to fight its wars, inmates and unwanted political prisoners to use as test subjects, land to use, and time to spend in their country. The same goes for the Republicans in the United States, they only retain power in office and are consistently popular because they willingly allow the Foundation to steal from them.”
“Seeing these events happen on the regular in the Foundation, I used to play these off has simply what needed to be done. Yes, stealing is bad, murder is bad, but it needed to be done if we wished to save humanity from the near never-ending amount of evils we have to deal with and retain our secrecy, we had to crack a few skulls and take what we needed to save humanity. Sure, I had my doubts about the secrecy, I always wondered if our operations would be easier if the world knew about what we had to deal with, but I always justified it by telling myself that normal people shouldn’t have to go through and see what we do.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ inhaling is heard.]
“That was until, an event that happened in Iceland 5 years ago. At the time, I was there working in the largest Foundation facility there, located approximately 30 miles away from the city of Akureyri.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ exhaling is heard.]
“At the time, I was working on and operating the containment of an incredibly dangerous and versatile anomaly. SCP-████. A mass-murderer who through an unknown occult ritual gained the power to unexplainably make any living creature ignite into flames as long as they were within his line of sight. What made him so dangerous, aside from his powers themselves, was his motivation for killing. He was indiscriminate, unlike most killers, he didn’t kill for sexual pleasure or self-gain, he killed more like a mass murderer. He killed people simply because he hated them, he hated the people for the way they ignored him, he hated society because of its rules and regulations, he hated everyone because of the way he thought they hated him. And because of this perceived injustice, he wanted to make society suffer in the same way he was suffering, trail by flames, death by fire.”
“After he gained his abilities and he went on his first killing spree, he killed up to a hundred people in a mall before the SCP Foundation was called in to contain the anomaly. We successfully did this by managing to temporarily blind him and cripple him. After we caught him, he was sent to Site-███, where I became the chief containment manager of the entity.”
“Everything went as expected, well, as expected as you might think for containment of an entity that could light any living thing within line of sight on fire. That was until testing on the entity began.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ laughing is heard]
“I’m sorry, just, remembering what happened and how fucking stupid we all were just is too much to take. You know, any sane organization would look at this entity and rightfully say we knew everything we had to know about the thing. When it looked at someone, it would be able to kill them by lighting them on fire, that’s all you needed to know to understand it’s powers. But no, nothing we did was sane, no one involved was sane, not even me. I approved the testing.”
“We used Class-D for testing, of course. To begin the test, we’d have the SCP blind-folded and restrained and we’d send anywhere from 3-5 Class-D into his cell. When the Class-D were in the cell, they would un-restrain the subject and the test would begin. A crude safety net, sure, but one we thought could work. However, there was a fatal flaw with this safety net. To get the subject restrained, we would require at least 2 personnel to go into his cell and have SCP-████ face the back wall of the room to not allow him to attack these personnel. You can probably see the fatal flaw here, I know I did.”
“One day one of these tests were ordered by my higher-ups, this day we were low on security personnel. I asked for them to let the test be delayed until more security personnel would become available but no, they said the test needed to be conducted on that day, on their time, on their clocks. I told them the safety net we had set up was already dangerous enough and only having 1 security personnel restraining the subject would be suicidal. They told me that if I don’t do the test, I’d be demoted.”
“So, I capitulated. I approved the test for that day and sent our single security guard into the cell to restrain SCP-████. Armed with an M-14 and a fire-resistant vest, he walked into the cell with the rope and a blindfold on his person.”
“But, has expected only hearing the footsteps of one guard, SCP-████ became emboldened and saw this has his opportunity to escape. He turned around, made eye-contact with Private ████████, and suddenly, Private ████████ burst into flames.”
“I pressed the containment breach alert as soon as I could but he already found his way out of his cell. He began rampaging throughout the facility, killing anyone and anything he could see, causing an even worse containment breach. We managed to contain all SCPs in the site, aside from him… He took advantage of the chaos he had caused to escape the site and start moving his way towards the nearest populated area.”
“We managed to track his route to Akureyri, he was heading directly towards the city and it would take him about 20 minutes to get there. I pleaded to Site command to send a warning to the city, to at least tell them to stay indoors until we had the situation handled, but they just denied me and said, whatever happens, would have to happen and that we don't have the resources to amnestize an entire city afterward. They told me that he wouldn’t even be able to get into the city in the first place because we had MTF forces on route to intercept him. But, he did, he found his way into the city. He proceeded to kill anyone he could, any man, any woman, any child. They all died choking on the smoke produced by their own bodies. After hearing reports of what was happening, we finally managed to get a containment team to his location and we finally got him re-contained, I was charged with the operation of his containment just like I was when we had first discovered him.”
“I was there when he was re-contained… The burnt corpses, they were everywhere, the dead and burning children, the melted flesh, the smell, I saw a baby with its eyes melted out of its sockets… I… I need a moment I’m sorry…”
“After we got him contained, we ended up having to amnestize the whole city anyways due to the widespread coverage of what SCP-████ did. We lied and lied to the public about what happened, saying that there was a huge gas leak that resulted in these deaths, I was the one who was forced to lie because the higher-ups blamed the incident on me.”
“I kept thinking about the quote I began within this recording, I kept thinking about how my lies are what the public sees as the truth and that the public will never know what really happened to their sons, their mothers, their fathers, their brothers, their sisters.”
“I ended up going to the site therapist for help regarding this all, I thought he would be able to give me closure on what happened. The words he said are still ingrained in my mind. "Don’t worry about any of this, all Foundation researchers will have something like this happen to them, sometimes multiple times. We all make mistakes, and in our world, sometimes it's for the best if the consequences never surface." That one sentence gets to me the most.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ inhaling is heard.]
“All Foundation researchers have something like this happen to them. In our world, sometimes it’s for the best if the consequences never surface.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ exhaling is heard.]
“I really need to stop smoking, but sometimes it's the only thing that helps.”
“I thought long and hard about what the therapist told me. While I’m sure he meant it as something else, I took it to heart, that one statement made me realize what we do, and what I did. Every year thousands if not hundreds of thousands die in the world of the paranormal, and their deaths are never known, never counted, never spoken of. And for what, for what reason are these deaths never talked about? Because the law of secrecy dictates the people who cause these deaths to lie about what happened. And because of this, because of the fact that all these secrets will never reach the ears of the ones who are affected by these secrets, no crimes or mistakes made in this world will ever fully be punished. I say that as a criminal of this world myself. The amount of death I’ve caused, the amount of suffering I have caused, it will never be fully punished.”
“And why will these crimes never be fully punished? Why does the veil of secrecy exist in the first place? Because of a misguided goal of keeping the paranormal secret in order to save humanity, when in reality if all of humanity came together to stop the paranormal, the needless deaths would be drastically reduced and the world wouldn’t need to throw so much time and effort into keeping where their children disappear off to a secret. We wouldn’t need to keep the death of thousands a secret, and we could funnel all of our energy to stopping the evil around us opposed to becoming evil ourselves in a misguided goal of keeping humanity ignorant.”
“Which is why I’m making this tape right now. I, I am a criminal. But I believe the world deserves to know my crimes, I believe the world deserves to hear the truth, somehow despite our lies being constant and being the only thing we tell the outside world, we have the truth. We lie about our identities, we lie about what we do, we lie about how we do it, however our lies, they will break us one day, one day the world of the paranormal simply cannot exist in secrecy any longer and the rest of the world will know of our crimes. Now, tell me, would you rather have our world of secrecy exposed by some near end of the world event, or would you rather come clean to the world yourself?”
“Now, I know I will be hunted by the Foundation when they find this, which I know they will. They have eyes and ears everywhere, even here in butt-fuck nowhere. It’s ironic, really. In a just world I would be killed for my lies, my crimes against humanity, but not for this, not for the truth.”
“One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths… One lie also has the power to kill a thousand truths. And I, I will die a truth. But not before I spread my truths. The truth I hold is far more important than my life, I am just a low-life scumbag who killed hundreds in an accident that no one, until now, will know about. You know the truth now, the truth is far more important than me so if anything, listen to what I’m going to say here. I want you to tell as many people the truth as you can, tell them before the Foundation finds out about what I did here, spread this tape if you can.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ inhaling is heard.]
“Spread the truth before the lies can tarnish it.”
[Sounds of Vladimir █████ exhaling is heard.]
“That, is my last wish.”
<End Log>
