SCP-1730. What happened to Site 13? For the greater good is a phrase that has been used in various forms throughout history to justify certain actions that would normally be considered abhorent. The SCP Foundation in general of course operates largely on this principle throughout most of their work, but often is the case where the foundation is ultimately correct in their choice of actions. SCP-1730 is a grand, detailed report of a situation where the foundation was profoundly, terribly, wrong. SCP-1730 is easily among the lengthiest articles on the scp wiki, and although the actual description of the scp is fairly short, the numerous logs, recovered materials, and interviews make this an epic report. In this video, I'll attempt to summarize and explain 1730 as best as I can, but keep in mind that I'll be cutting out quite a bit of atmospheric details along the way. SCP-1730 ultimately both asks and answers the question of what exactly happened to site 13, and we see immediately that 1730 is listed as neutralized, meaning that it's either been destroyed, it's anomalous properties have been removed, or it is no longer a part of our existence. 1730 itself is a large complex of structures, with identifying markers showing that it was known as the scp foundation's site 13. Foundation records however show that site 13 was originally planned to be built, but the plans were scrapped. The site was going to be built in alaska, which seems to be where 1730 is from, which makes it stranger that it is located in Texas. The site seems long abandoned, is in a severe state of disrepair, and there are a number of fuel leaks and fires throughout the facility due to the power generator continuing to operate in a damaged state. Despite this, there is believed to be human survivors somewhere in the lower parts of the facility, as messages have been found on walls throughout the site, including the words danger, bleed, and the phrase, what happened to site 13? The foundation has established a simple contained procedure due to the site's remote location, but ultimately they decided to send in some teams to properly explore it. Our first piece of major info comes from a recovered log from a recovery team working for site 13. They were apparently sent to retrieve and recontain an anomaly, and the log describes the anomaly crawling into one of the team's mouths, causing blood to leak from every orifice. Afterwards, two anomalies come out of the body, with one drinking up all of the blood, and the other going back into the dead body, reanimating it. The remainder of the team puts down their reanimated squadmate, but the writer of the log admits they don't have much longer, says something that was expunged from the record, and states its just a matter of time before it starts. Interestingly, the expunged section was removed because it was marked as a cognitohazard, something that is dangerous for some reason to an individual when recorded with any of the five senses, in this case, likely sight. The log describes the team using c4 explosives to blow up the wall, rendering something illegible, likely the cognitohazard, but says it doesn't matter because Jones already went quiet like the others, and they shoved him down an elevator shaft. Finally, it mentions how someone started up the thresher, which we'll learn about later. The next piece of info is an automated message describing the states of the various systems of site 13. We see that it was sent minutes before an electrical disturbance and an explosion in the power relay, and shows that nearly every system is offline or compromised, including the keter class containment systems. Additionally, the euclid class containment systems and the reactor are both in critical status. Finally, we're brought into the present, with the exploration log transcript for the first team sent into site 13 by the foundation. The team is the d-12 mobile task force, known as the mud slingers, and consists of 6 members, including the captain. They enter through the unlocked front doors, switch on their lights due to the darkness, and immediately find messages written on the walls, including the ominous phrase, don't look at the walls. They find a service elevator that's still powered, and descend to the third basement level. The team splits up to search the floor, finding that the rooms are filthy due to being covered in some sort of metallic smelling sludge. They see a makeshift barricade next to a door, and they also find a few bodies half submerged in the sludge. A snake-like creature emerged from one of the bodies mouths, which they immediately terminated, and discovered that the bodies were in fact hollow. The team agrees to return to the elevator, only to find the layout of the floor has changed, meaning they are either hallucinating or the building is physically changing. They head down a hallway which seems to be much longer than the building schematics show, and break down a door into an office. They find a naked human with fire seemingly burning out its ears. An intense white light, the sound of searing meat, and static from the team's microphones is all sitecommand receives for over a minute, until they also hear the sound of slithering, a cry, and choking sounds. Other strange sounds come through the microphones until the other two members who had split away from the group finally respond. They are currently waiting near the elevator and thought their radios and stopped working, until suddenly their camera feeds show them in a different room, with one of them hanging upside down, facing eachother, and both are completely stark white. Blood from their mouth, nostrils, and eyes, cover their faces, and a large object moves in the background accompanied by the sound of slithering from multiple directions. One of the team members opens their eyes and the video and audio feeds cut out. This was the last sitecommand heard from the mud slingers. Clearly, exploration of the main structure was going to prove to be quite dangerous, so until the foundation could set up a more prepared second attempt, they decided to send in a small team to the power station to assess the damage. MTF y-24, known as Gulliver's Travelers, is a three man team who enter the power station, only to discover the first set of doors inside to be locked and bulletproof. Rather than using explosives, which would risk a collapse, site command tries to find someone who would possibly know the clearance code for the door. Despite this site never actually being constructed in this reality, director jameson's clearance code from when this site would have been built manages to get the team in. The team examines the power cores, and then releases a microdrone to provide a closer look, revealing that seven of the 12 cores are damaged beyond repair, three are not functioning at full power, and two are, although one of those is currently superheated. The team finds more of the sludge that the other team encountered, and then sees ten stark white bodies bound to the superheated core with wire. Underneath them, seemingly written in blood, are the words "What happened to site 13?" The team descends a stairwell, finding a door at the bottom that has been pried open, and discover a disgusting smell before their camera feeds begin to distort. Audio feed then cuts out completely, and site command only receives intermittent communications for 15 minutes, during which the team seems to be encountering more of the dead humans covered in sludge. Finally, it seems as if they encounter one that appears to be alive before site command totally loses contact with the team. The recovered sludge from the microdrone appears to be blood and power core residue mixed with an unknown biological matter. One week later, the team's video feed comes back online for thirteen seconds, during which it shows a number of humans standing and looking down at a table. The foundation still needed more time to prepare for the next exploration team, and so decided to send in an unmanned drone to hopefully investigate the lower floors of the main complex. The drone was launched through the same door that the first team entered, and began to descend in the elevator towards the lowest basement floor. After descending seven floors, a power failure causes the elevator to stop, and so the drone forces the doors open, and descends manually to the 8th basement floor, a euclid containment wing. After inspecting a number of rooms, the drone sees a vaguely humanoid entity standing near the end of the hallway. The drone follows the entity, as it doesnt seem to notice it, and watches as it picks up some of the sludge on the floor and marks a nearby wall. The symbols on the wall are later revealed to be cognitohazards, which the drone takes pictures of, and continues to follow the entity, which curiously leaves behind no foot prints in the sludge. The drone enters the actual containment area, finding a cell containing a human form covered in sludge, with sparks emanating from its fingertips. A sign on the doorway states that entity 324 is scheduled for termination in december of 1975. The drone finds another cell that had been locked shut. After forcing it open, the drone sees a dead female on the floor, with no sludge in the room. An identification badge on the corpse contains the name, Jack Bright. Dr Bright is a notable individual in the SCP Universe, capable of immortality through jumping into different bodies due to the use of SCP-963. The drone descends to the next floor, finding a working computer terminal which is running an older version of the scp foundation operating system. The drone begins to transmit what files it can access back to command, but soon they lose contact with the drone. It's at this point that the cognitohazard that site command had viewed earlier triggered, causing affected individuals to go silent and begin to burn from their ears. Any audible sound after this would trigger a silent explosion, shaking site command and destroying most of their communcation equipment. The drone finished transmitting files, but the drone itself was never recovered. I'll skip ahead for a moment to discuss the various files that the drone transmitted back. First, a correspondance from an engineer to the site's chief biologist and assistance director of anomalous biology, Dr Hadley. Hadley was apparently working with the mysterious thresher device, and the engineer informed her that although the reactors could surge to power the device, the reactors would likely not survive the process. The engineer goes on to say that the thresher device is still wildly unstable, and utilization of it would likely destabalize local reality. Another correspondance from an individual who is both on the scp foundation's ethics committee and the head of the global occult coalitions ethics board, tells dr hadley that she is not permitted to transfer out of site 13. Additionally, dr hadley seems to have an issue with site 13's director and the protocol of terminating humanoid scps. The individual informs her that these anomalies are not considered human beings, and are not entitled to any of the rights that human beings are. Next, a test log shows a number of reality benders being exposed to dangerous conditions while wearing inhibitor devices to see if they can change reality to save themselves. Exposure to extremely cold and hot temperatures, as well as electricity, cause the reality benders to die without them stopping it, while water submersion seems to interfere with the inhibitor device, causing unknown results. As a side note, the administrator of the test is listed as a dr with only a number identification, not a name, in contrast to how the scp foundation usually does things. A message from one engineer to another discusses a buildup of toxic waste in the pit beneath the reactors. The waste is supposed to be piped off site, but keeps getting built up, which will likely lead to a very serious issue. A note from director emerson states that the entire humanoid wing of the facility is to be promptly terminated by electrocution and incineration. It's this process that is seemingly causing the buildup of waste. Another message from an engineer to dr hadley says that he altered termination records from a leech boy that was taken down to the pit. Since the output of the pit is still blocked up, he won't go anywhere. Finally we get a message from dr hadley to director emerson, in which we get a number of new details. The message discusses a containment breach caused by dr hadley, and mentions that emerson was foolish for thinking that killing the anomalous entities would stop them, as them being living is the least anomalous thing about them. Dr Hadley goes on to discuss a young boy named Elijah, who subsisted only on blood, and could drink it through someone's skin, much like a leech. He had the mental capacity of a toddler, and did not choose to be this way, but emerson had him incinerated like the rest. Of course, the incineration didn't actually kill Elijah, and him interacting with the bloody sludge caused a highly anamolous process to occur in which the dead scps returned, in a way. IN addition to this of course, the thresher device was eventually activated, causing the local reality of the site to heavily distort, leading to one highly anomalous facility. The foundation still needed a more complete understanding of the facility however, and so another team was sent in to explore its depths. This team, MTF Z-9, called Mole Rats, were specifically experienced in exploring anomalous locations, so they would be best prepared for the reality warping effects inside. The five man team entered the main structure, equipped with helmets that would filter out any of the writing on the walls to avoid cognitohazards. They descend the stairs to the sixth basement level, and begin to explore the floor, walking past sludge and bodies, when suddenly the floor collapses underneath one of the team members, z9-4. The fall injures his leg, leaving him immobile, and the rest of the team look for a stairwell to descend. The injured member begins to hear slithering sounds around him, unable to see his surroundings. Gunshots ring out through the facility as one of the members, z9-3 watching his injured teammate sees a leech-like creature approaching him. The creature enters z9-4's mouth, and begins sliding down his throat. Z9-3 attempts to shoot the creature, but misses, and asks the captain for permission to shoot z9-4, to put him out of his misery. He gets no response from the captain, but after z9-4 lets out a choking plea, he fires his weapon. The floor further collapses, causing z9-3 to fall and get crushed by debris. Five minutes later, z9-4 goes silent, a leech creature comes out of his mouth, and he stands up, picking up his dead teammates weapon. Site command received no communication from any of the mole rats for the following three hours, when suddenly communication from the three team members resumes, with them seemingly below the fifteenth floor. Z9-4's camera feed comes back for a moment, showing a number of humans with flames coming out of their ears, and a massive pit with a large creature in it covered in smaller creatures. Communication from the rest of the team eventually goes out again for four hours before feeds from the captain resume again. She apparently reached the thresher device by herself, but she hears footsteps coming towards her, her light goes out, she begins running through the darkness, and finally communication is lost once again. In the aftermath of this, it was clearly just too dangerous for a team to explore the facility, and so that would have likely been the end of the foundation's research on 1730. However, one morning, monitoring equipment picked up a looped transmission coming from the facility. The transmission was from a doctor who worked at site 13, who claimed that there were 12 people still alive in the facility, surrounded by hostiles and running out of supplies. Since the doctor claimed that the transmission would stop looping once he was dead, it seems that for the team being, there were living humans still in there. In light of this, the foundation cleared a rescue mission. This is when things get really interesting. Another five man team was sent in to continue exploring the facility, and hopefully locate the survivors using the coordinates transmitted by the doctor. The team, MTF Apollo-3, Game Wardens, entered the main structure and went straight to the stairwell, hoping to use it to descend to the bottom floor. After traveling down it for nearly ten minutes, the team finds that the bottom of the staircase is missing, abruptly cutting off into some sort of liquid void. Sitecommand informs them they are actualy about 15 meters below where they thought the stairwell ended. The liquid begins to rise, forcing the team to ascend the stairs, although one of the team members gets his legs enveloped by the void. After pulling him out and up to the next floor, they find that his legs have been cleanly severed at the knees, but he still can feel them as if they were there, and most anomalously, he can actually stand. They pass their hands underneath him, and he appears to be simply floating, without feeling any different than normal. The team explores the floor, finding a rotting corpse they seem to recognize as zachary, unaware that it is dead. This is seemingly SCP-1500, and it's anomalous effects are going through the team's visors designed to filter out cognitohazards. The team continues to chat with the corpse until sitecommand finally updates their visors, and they realize that it's just a body. They soon encounter a shimmering humanoid entity approaching them, warping the enviornment around it. One of the team members is apparently caught in its field of effect, hanging and twisting behind it. The team fires on the entity, but the bullets simply spin around it. The entity proceeds to attack one of the members with an appendage, but they deploy a miniature reality anchor, causing the entity to disperse. They find the member that was caught in its field and is now partially fused with the wall, ceiling, and floor, presumably dead. The team decides to continue on, as it seems just as risky to attempt to leave, and they eventually enter a communications room. A screen flickers on, revealing a standard containment cell, containing a single figure. One of the team members recognizes the figure as scp-993, bobble the clown. They begin conversing with the figure, who claims that it is not bobble, but a thing that used to be bobble. The figure claims that director emerson played with the strings of the universe, and broke them. It goes on to say that every anomalous thing that the foundation could find and the coalition could catch were brought to site 13 in order to be fed to the meat grinder, unless there was something to gain first. The figure seems to heavily disfigured and distorted, and possesses an extreme animosity for director emerson, but the team moves on. Sitecommand loses contact with the team for 30 minutes, during which they managed to find the survivors, who number somewhere in the twenties, and include a few of the mole rats and one of the gulliver's travelers. The team reveals that they have been down there now for three days, not 30 minutes, and are surrounded by anomalous entities with little chance of survival, let alone completing the rescue attempt. Enter Mobile Task Force Tau-5, known as Samsara. Samsara have a bit of their own history, but to summarize, they are essentially cloned cyborgs made from a dead god. They possess regenerative abilites, a number of technological augmentations, and their memories can be loaded onto a clone of their bodies, making them functionally immortal. They are not omnipotent however, and this rescue mission still has a high chance of failure, but Samsara stood the best chance of succeeding. The Samsara team consists of four individuals, and they were outfitted with arm-mounted incendiary cannons, shock-absorbing leg extensions, heat-resistant plating, and built-in filters for their eyes, among other enhancements. The team enters through a drainage pipe, and soon split up, with two of them continuing down the pipe towards a heat source, and the other two breaking through a thin wall into a room containing offices. They find a control room for the incinerator, and are soon joined by the other two team members, who remark that the pipe is completely blocked. They activate the machinery, which begins to spin and the heat continues to rise as the incinerator kicks on. They notice a gate at the bottom, and shoot out the window of the control room, jumping down. They follow another drainage pipe into a cistern, where they find a number of cracks in the walls. Small leeches begin pouring out of the cracks, feeding on the sludge and growing larger. One of the team member's realizes there is something huge beneath them, functioning as a host for the leeches. Believing the leeches to be telepathic, they hijack one of the leeches brains, using it to create a map of the facility, albeit a distorted one due to the continually changing layout. They deduce where the survivors are, and decide to take the fastest path towards them, despite the path going through an area where the leeches act consirably quieter than they normally do. The team climbs out of the cistern before going to the nearby stairwell, which is largely destroyed. They drop down, using their leg implants to avoid grave injury, and enter into a server room. The room is cooled to -20 celsius thanks to a cryonics chamber located directly above, and they soon realize that no sound whatsoever is audible in here. Their filters for cognitohazards begin triggering, and they slowly move through the server room. They see a massive entity moving through the room, a humanoid construct with six legs, eighteen arms, thirty-six forearms, and seventy-two hands. Each limb indepentedably performs constant gestures, believed to be responsible for the silence permeating the room, and where its head would be is isntead an emaciated, charred human figure bound to its chest. This figure is struggling against its restraints and continually screaming, although the screaming seems to only be heard as a constant whining sound. The human has the word Emerson seared into its flesh, seemingly by a melted piece of fabric. The entity seems to be hazardous to look at, so the team quickly moves on. The whining sound grows suddenly louder and closer, so the team detonate a proximity mine behind them and rush through a door, dodging white-hot glyphs that begin to appear in the air around them. One of the team members loses an arm in the process, but they quickly flee from the server room and sound resumes. They soon find the survivors, with one of the mole rats referring to samsara as the power rangers. The leeches beging to come out of nearby cracks in the walls, and the mission changes now from search to rescue. The extraction process begins, with 11 MTF members and 27 staff members of Site-13, a number of which were significantly injured. Their plan involves going to the thresher device and reducing the power to the machine long enough to produce a stable route to the surface. Destroying the device would likely only cause drastic problems, including their deaths. The group begins moving, with Samsara leading the extraction, and they start to kill what leeches they can. They are soon attacked by the floating humanoid entity seen by the drone that was drawing on the walls, but copious amounts of bullets and incendiary rounds puts it down. Immediately after, the floor beneath the entity collapses, revealing a long slick creature covered in eyes and possessing a mouth full of pointy teeth. It devours the corpse of the humanoid, and a large number of leeches are propelled towards the group. Two of the samsara members provide covering fire as the rest of the group retreats to take a different route. The group enters a hallway where they encounter a cloud of crystal butterflies, scp-553. The samsara captain takes on the butterflies himself with his flamethrower, shredding and scorching most of his flesh in the process. They soon encounter a locked door to the thresher wing which they cannot open, but somehow the door unlocks and the figure that was once bobble the clown appears on a monitor, laughing, seemingly responsible. They move into the room, finding the thresher device, although it is surrounded by hundreds of small flying creatures. While deciding what to do, a nearby wall collapses and the many-eyed creature enters. The small creatures descend to attack the large entity, which begins devouring them using long tentacles. While manipulating the thresher device, a section of the floor collapses, with another long tentacled entity coming through it. The MTF members begin battling the entities, with one of them dying in the process, while the device is manipulated. Finally, they force the entities to flee, killing off the rest of the small creatures. The entire facility begins rumbling and shaking, with loud screeching noises accompanying the mechanical sounds. It's time for the team to make their final ascent out of the facility now that the thresher device is running on low power and local reality is stablized. Hoping to meet up with the other two samsara members on the way, they begin moving, and soon run into scp-2316, a powerful cognitohazard that takes the form of bodies in the water that people believe they recognize. Samsara keeps the group moving, and they enter into a large garage, where they encounter a massive mechanical construct, seemingly controlled by scp-1370, who attempts to intimidate the group by claiming to be the herald of destruction. A samsara member easily destroys the small robot controlling the construct, and they meet up with the other two members. They hear a large crashing sound below them and the floor begins to buckle, so the group flees, losing a researcher in the process. At the bottom of the massive hole is a tremendous black mass, completely covered in red eyes with several other large black masses extending from it. Presumably, this is Elijah, the leech boy. The group flee, chased through the facility by black tendrils coming from the hole, and they find themselves trapped with no way to ascend. One of the mole rats decides to lead them further down into the facility, into a massive containment chamber. The civilians are sent to the far end of the chamber where an access point will lead them up to the power station and out of the facility. Meanwhile, the MTFs are going to cover them, as a huge wall breaks down and the 200 meter tall leech boy enters the room. A naked human woman is visibly joined to its tongue, and it lets out a piercing scream as the mtfs unleash everything they have on it. A few of the members however begin working on opening two massive containment doors, which finally open, unleashing two of the most powerful entities known to the foundation. One of them is scp-001, the gate guardian, a tremendous winged figure carrying a huge sword, and the other is scp-2845, an entity largely resembling a deer, with a ring of ice and metal rotating behind its head. The gate guardian is capable of obliterating anything around it with its fiery sword, and the deer is capable of instantly transmuting and reconstructing matter, making them each quite formidable foes. The three entities began an unimaginable battle with eachother as the MTFs flee towards the civilians. The stairway upwards is damaged by metallic cylinders that come crashing through, killing the samsara captain. The leader of the mole rats decides to stay behind to buy the group more time, and she's joined by one of the samsara members as the rest of the group make it to the surface. The two MTF members that stayed behind go back to the thresher device, turning it to full power as the mole rats captain laughs hysterically and wildly fires her weapon at the leech boy. The people above ground hear a deafening crackling sound, the area around the facility begins to distort, and suddenly site-13 is gone, leaving behind an immense crater. No further transmissions are received, and scp-1730 is marked as neutralized. All that remains is the debriefing then. One of the Game Warden's members seems severaly traumatized, but the captain of Samsara considers the mission a success, although he seems mournful of the mole rat's leader's demise. The Game Warden member who seemingly lost their legs but can still stand remarks that it doesn't feel like a phantom pain, as he can actually feels his legs, and occasionally feels something wet and furry brushing past them. The interview with the samsara member that went with the mole rats captain reveals that they went to a server room and disabled their cameras, because they were apparently given a vision which they believed to be a cognitohazard. They were standing on a precipice overlooking a vast area, where countless humans screamed, each of them missing their hands, while the sky above them burned. A falling star scorched billions of corpses, and in the middle of the star was the many armed entity they encountered earlier. They were given visions of coils of fires and storms of souls, a hole at the center of the universe and a god of nightmares. The samsara member looked away, but the mole rats captain kept watching, and afterwards, went to the thresher device and activated it, saying that she needed to bury the things she saw in darkness while laughing and crying. Finally we are given an interview with dr. scott, the assistant director of temporal studies at site 13, who gives a history of the site as well as the alternate timeline from his reality. Plans for site 13 began after the foundation recovered the body of a massive dead sea creature that they could not contain, and so site 13 was built in a remote location in Alaska and was larger than any facility at the time. After a terrorist used an anomaly to cause an explosion resulting in thousands of deaths, the us government cut all of their funding to the foundation. A former staff member of President Dole named Paul Manafort was appointed Secretary General of the Global Occult Coaltion, and organized a partnership with the foundation. The GOC eventually gained control of the foundation, and they once again received funding from the US as well as the united nations. Site-13 was the premiere containment facility for the foundation, and was continually being expanded. Emerson eventually became the site director, and began doing terrible things, supposedly under orders from Manafort. The incinerator was built, originally just to dispose of the body of the massive sea creature, but they began using it for everything, as well as doing invasive testing on anomalous creatures and humanoids. Vivisections began, and although the ethics committee tried to step in, their chairman was dragged out and shot for being a traitor. The phrase, for the greater good was thrown around, and scott claims that they eventually contained the abrahamic god, possibly alluding to scp-343, although he's not sure how they managed it. Dr Hadley opposed Emerson's orders and so she was brutally beaten by some guards one night, damaging her mind and leading her to cause the containment breach. Emerson came to scott and asked him to turn on the highly experimental thresher device in order to stop this, but scott refused and fled, gathering his team. Before they could leave the facility however, the device was activated, warping reality. Scott counts himself as lucky for surviving at all, but believes that they could have been floating between dimensions for a thousand years for all he knows. Now that the device has been reactivated, it's completely unknown when and where it will end up. Like I said, scp-1730 is one of the longest articles on the entire scp wiki, but that alone does not make it memorable. It's memorable because it presents a fascinating tale of the foundation going simply too far, largely as a result of the influence from the global occult coalition, an organization focused on terminating anomalous items. There are plenty of real world analogies from groups and organizations that have committed atrocities in the name of research, such as unit 731, and so it's not farfetched to believe the same thing could happen in an anomalous universe. The author, Djkaktus, took a relatively familiar and overdone concept, a strange, shifting location, and made it something utterly unique by incorporating a compelling backstory, numerous other scps, and a highly engaging rescue mission starring the samsara team. As I mentioned, I cut out a lot of details and pratically all of the dialogue, so I absolutely suggest going through this one on your own to get the full experience of what happened to site 13.