When was SCP Founded

The Mysterious Founding of the SCP Foundation

The SCP Foundation is a shadowy organization that operates internationally to contain and study anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena that defy natural law. This secretive group keeps these paranormal oddities hidden from the public eye to protect normalcy and prevent mass panic. However, despite the extensive documentation surrounding the thousands of anomalies cataloged by the Foundation, its origins and founding remain obscured in mystery.

Apocryphal Beginnings

While the modern SCP Foundation collaboration began online in 2007, hints and urban legends point to far older beginnings. Various tales describe the Foundation’s predecessors, which contain bizarre artifacts and mystic texts dating back centuries or even millennia. Figures like the biblical Cain, Judas Iscariot, and Egyptian polymath Imhotep have been suggested as early proto-foundation members safeguarding dangerous relics and secrets.

Other accounts place the organization’s roots in medieval groups like the Knights Templar, the Hashshashin, or the Rosicrucians. During the European Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment, famous researchers, including John Dee, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci, have been retroactively recruited into the Foundation’s origins. However, confirmation of the group predating modern times is still being determined.

Early 20th Century

More concrete Foundation origins cluster in the early 20th century, concurrent with the rise of modern weird science fiction and horror tropes. Several key figures have been tied to the Foundation’s establishment through speculative fiction tales on the SCP wiki. These include pioneering rocketry engineer Jack Parsons, mathematician Albert Einstein, and inventor Nikola Tesla.

Other apocryphal founders point to seminal psychologists and philosophers like Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James being involved with proto-foundation anomaly research groups in the 1920s and 30s. Occult figures like Aleister Crowley and George Gurdjieff have also been retroactively inducted as contributors to the early Foundation before it adopted its modern bureaucratic structure.

Growth During World War II

According to most accounts, the turmoil of the Second World War saw a significant expansion of Foundation influence. Occult Nazi groups forced the Foundation into an open confrontation over control of anomalies. Meanwhile, in the United States, projects like the Philadelphia Experiment strengthened American anomalous research. The postwar period brought further growth as former Axis and Allied groups researching the paranormal were absorbed into the Foundation’s ranks.

The Cold War ushered in more conflict with Soviet agencies like GRU Division “P” over control of unnatural phenomena. During this period, the renegade “Chaos Insurgency” splinter cell defected. Despite these challenges, by the late 20th century, the Foundation had cemented itself as a discreet but significant global force embedded within governments worldwide.

Modern Collaboration

The roots of the SCP Foundation mythos as a collective creative fiction project can be traced to 2007 forum posts on 4chan. An anonymous user shared the story of SCP-173, an animate murderous concrete statue that seemingly sparked imaginations. More bizarre documentation of fictional paranormal containment procedures followed. By early 2008, a dedicated wiki collab was underway at EditThis.com before migrating to Wikidot, where the SCP Universe saw exponential growth.

Thousands of anomalies now fill the extensive Foundation fiction corpus, covered in clinical containment procedures and testing logs. This collaborative fiction project represents a wholly 21st-century phenomenon of decentralized storytelling, transforming creepypasta horror tales into an ever-expanding transmedia universe. The paradoxical fictional history of this modern collaborative endeavor sets it apart as a uniquely crowdsourced exercise in creative myth-building.

Contested Origin Theories

With thousands of anonymous contributors across mediums, a definitive canonical origin for the SCP Foundation remains elusive. The collaboration instead embraces a diversity of conflicting fictional timelines and backstories. Conspiracy lore portrays the Foundation as a centuries-old organization plotting global domination. Scientific chronologies place their roots among history’s greatest rationalist thinkers. Occult accounts see it born from secret societies and mystical orders. This plurality keeps the foundation’s fictional history enticingly open-ended.

Most compelling are origin stories tying later scientific luminaries with earlier mystic traditions. For example, several tales describe Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein as inheriting research into a mythical Philosopher’s Stone artifact or documents like the Voynich Manuscript from medieval alchemists and religious orders. Through such genealogies, the SCP Foundation allows crowdsourced mythmaking linking past esoteric mysteries to the modern rise of science and technology.

Ultimately, this fictional institution transcends any single origin story. The decentralized collaborative creativity driving the SCP Foundation resists neat historiography. Attempts to pin down its history inevitably lead to multiplying contradictory accounts, cover-ups, and revisions. But this magnetism towards historical ambiguity perfectly befits a fictional organization dedicated to hiding its dark secrets and disturbing truths from the world. In the end, the myriad fictional timelines further obscure the “true” roots of the SCP Foundation within its shared creative imagination.