The origins of the Indigo Children project is steeped in internal SANDMAN mystery; whether by express memetic design meant to keep their goals and budget cloaked or general "one-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-other-is-up-to" organizational opacity, it's not made clear. The records indicate that an early program akin to INDIGO started up, probably at Tavistock in London, in the years immediately after World War II. At first this prehistoric ancestor of INDIGO was meant as a way to find "whiz-kids" for the next war against the Soviets — scientific prodigies, mostly. This got filtered down from SANDMAN through the US/UK military industrial complex into Western educational systems in the 1950s: Marshall can see that the entire thrust of Cold War science education in the U.S. came out of these postwar meetings; this also allowed the U.S. to Marshall Plan the educational systems of Western Europe and orient them towards science and engineering.
In the 1950s, SANDMAN teams operating out of military bases across America initiated and ran a series of "secret schools," using esmological prediction, psychically talented recruiters, and mundane means like standardized testing, to find genius-level intellects who would also be predisposed to developing preternatural powers. A combination of cutting-edge memetics, careful exposure to Anunnaki source code, and early MK-ULTRA derived mind control methods (mostly involving Renshaw-like exposure to puzzling images and sounds meant to trigger a psychic breakthrough) were used to try and create young people who could become top SANDMAN agents in adulthood. The results of this "secret school" program were decidedly mixed, mostly because of the fact that the kids needed to be stolen from their usual schools and families at night. Successor programs would dispense with using civilian children and instead seek subjects who a) were already demonstrating signs of psychic potential and b) were able to be made into full-time residential students. For practical purposes, this meant finding parent-less children to recruit. In 1961, SANDMAN Control signed off on Project INDIGO, its name taken from the color that SANDMAN aura-readers saw in their secret school test subjects' auras once psychic potential was activated and engaged.
INDIGO's actual "classrooms" at Granite Peak only started to be filled in the early 1960s. It was during the Kennedy administration that SANDMAN teams started to find, globally, a generation of young children exhibiting preternatural abilities, many of them 5 years of age or younger. The first class of Indigo students, the records show, demonstrated minor reality-shaping powers and a connection to quantum energies which manifested in a variety of traditional physical psionic paradigms — telekinesis, energy manipulation/pyrokinesis, machine empathy, what have you — which INDIGO tried to teach the children to control until they reached adolescence and adulthood. It was only in the latter half of the 1960s that INDIGO changed tacks from control of the Children's powers to expression. INDIGO records claim that a faction of both the Mass Media and esmology teams at Granite Peak caught wind of this in early '66 and stated that if these human assets were being planned as SANDMAN agents for the next 20-60 years, they would need to be, shall we say, "future-proofed." In other words, they would need to be adjusted to the world as it would be in the subsequent decades, not the world we lived in now. Which meant they'd need to be well-trained in high technology, media, and predictive thinking, regardless of their particular psychic profile. This faction of the Mass Media and esmology team sent critical personnel to liaise and eventually join the INDIGO team.
The one thing Marshall senses from all this material, however, is a sense that the INDIGO program over the past 25 years has held itself as only interacting with SANDMAN central when it needs something—space and facilities at a military base, approval to move into Granite Peak, HUMINT and PSYINT resources to find new recruits, etc. They have operated with a shocking amount of independence and autonomy for a SANDMAN project. The names of the men who've worked to make this project come into being are heavily redacted/code named, even in the files Wycliffe was able to supply.
Marshall's feeling is that even among SANDMAN, even with its absolutely existential mission to save History A from the Anunnaki, not many of the civilian boffins or military men who made up postwar SANDMAN liked the idea of experimenting on kids, but they understood this as a necessary evil to keep the world free and safe. Whatever individual moral reservations, SANDMAN Control and the Steering Committee kept rubber-stamping their requests with little to no debate.
First, her mother, Agent RAVEN.
Her mother was, yes, a full SANDMAN agent, in the field ops division. There's no complete file or dossier for her included in Wycliffe's package, so Marshall/URIEL have to sort of cobble facts together from Charley's files/records of the ops her mother went on. Code-named RAVEN, born in the late 1930s, she studied Southwestern Indian archeology at UCLA and had entered a Master's program at the University of New Mexico in 1955. While there, working on studying the physical remains of the ancient Anasazi people, a minor subduction event occurred; SANDMAN personnel were of course rushed to the scene. RAVEN was the only civilian survivor of the event. Her quick thinking and calm under pressure during the subduction event led her to be recruited by SANDMAN and trained as an Ops agent. She found herself drifting away from field archeology work and towards real SANDMAN commando/undercover agent type work, although she brought a bevy of her former academic life's skills to her new career as a SANDMAN. She ended up being assigned to suspected subduction zones all over the world over the next few years under cover of being an archeologist.
The op which led to her disappearance, reappearance, pregnancy, and temporary "retirement" in 1964-5 was called Operation CLARION. The details, again, are sketchy, but it seems a UFO cult called "the Solarans" had begun attracting adherents in the proto-New Age communities of early '60s desert California, Arizona, and New Mexico. They espoused the view that an ancient civilization from outer space had settled and elevated certain Southwestern Indian tribes right around the 6th century (of course this is the time of the Ontoclysm), teaching them "the art of four-dimensional petroglyphs." SANDMAN memeticists and esmologists deemed the cult's leader, a man only known to the public as "Alpha Leonis," a possible Anunnaki dupe through analysis of his writings, speeches, and the beliefs evident in the Solarans' many publications. A mobile commune of sorts began migrating through these states in the early '60s, consisting of 40 or 50 members communing with their alien overlords at ruins throughout the Southwest, picking up a few lost souls in every community that they passed through.
It was decided by RAVEN's handler that she would infiltrate the cult solo using her cover as an archeologist to explain her knowledge and interest in Alpha Leonis's theories. RAVEN would gather information and report back on possible Annunnaki/History B taint. RAVEN's Keeper lost contact with her four months into the assignment; RAVEN stopped sending postcards to agreed-upon dead drops in March of '65. Whether this was due to the cult tightening its control over its members or RAVEN starting to adhere to their beliefs truly, it was never determined. SANDMAN teams scoured the Southwest for any sign of the Solarans; their regular campsites were abandoned, any trace of their usual meanderings through the desert vanished. The last location they were seen was right outside White Sands, New Mexico—well outside the range of the Anasazi but very close to the birth of the atom bomb—which definitely sent some shivers up some spines at Granite Peak.
The Solarans stayed vanished, but RAVEN found her way to a payphone near the Salton Sea in late October of '65 and contacted her Keeper. Eventually, SANDMAN agents were able to extract RAVEN and bring her to a safehouse in Twenty-Nine Palms near the Marine Corps Base there, and check her for psychological damage and taint due to prolonged exposure to these beliefs. While no taint was found on RAVEN by Project analysts, it soon became clear there was a source of History B taint on her: she was three months pregnant and the embryo inside her had been exposed to a strong source of History B energies in utero. This made RAVEN's unborn child of great and sudden interest to INDIGO.
These photos and fragmentary notes from Agent RAVEN's "Keeper" or SANDMAN handler are some of the only substantive pieces of evidence from Charley's first few years of life in Twenty-Nine Palms, California. The names "Perry" and "Jax" and the codenames PSAMETIC and THROWAWAY are not referenced anywhere in RAVEN's file, nor do they have cross-references elsewhere in SANDMAN records, according to Wycliffe. Young Lily was born on May 27, 1966.
INDIGO's file on Charley show that various "fairy godparents," like the mysterious Perry and Jax, kept a tacit and light-handed eye on both mother and daughter through the first 18 months of young Lily's life. RAVEN was honestly never the same after her time with the Solarans; not allowed on field ops anymore, she was taken care of by a series of friendly Sandmen who took the civilian roles of social workers, doctors, etc., and RAVEN was essentially held prisoner in her desert home. Occasionally RAVEN would go to the local library to take out books on Southwestern tribes in an effort to jog something of her memories loose, but a combination of her cult-related trauma and SANDMAN reprogramming made her unable to make any connections.
Meanwhile, it became clear that not only was young Lily an intellectual prodigy, but she possessed the kinds of abilities that would make her of great interest to SANDMAN and INDIGO. When she began talking in sentences at 18 months, occasionally in ancient languages, control and analysis of young Lily was tightened. At roughly 2½ years old, Lily began showing signs of exhibiting preternatural abilities that could affect her surroundings, specifically machine empathy and technopathic control of electrical devices. It was at this time that INDIGO made their move. Lily's abilities had put the final nail in the coffin of RAVEN's sanity, and RAVEN was "reassigned" to the mysterious Project THROWAWAY in early 1969. Meanwhile, Lily was relocated to Granite Peak and assigned to INDIGO Dorm Room Charlie (C) which she did not leave except for trips to meet Dr. Ian Stevenson in Virginia to work on her past lives, and until she was released to investigate the Altamont Object in April of 1973.
It is clear from the fragmentary INDIGO records Wycliffe provided that while INDIGO personnel were more than comfortable with Charley's psychic powers of technology manipulation and control, her past lives were a sticking point and mystery, sittng well outside of the INDIGO mission remit. While elements of past-life evocation and channeling were common among psychic researchers throughout the 20th century (and even played a role in a few of the "Secret School" cases in the '50s), INDIGO researchers could not theorize how these past-life experiences related to the overall theory of the activation of quantum manipulation powers of the human brain at the center of INDIGO's (and its predecessors') research and training. A few SANDMAN historians were charged with theorizing how the Anunnaki's engineering of the human brain could include "race memory" or "past-life regression," but the theories were sadly never accepted or pursued further by INDIGO staff.
There is no mention anywhere in these INDIGO files of Charley undergoing brain surgery, cybernetic implantation, or her having a secondary role as a spy meant to record the doings of Operation URIEL.
The eldest INDIGO Children would be 12 now. Wycliffe was not able to get any Tavistock or Secret School records but presumably the eldest of both those cohorts would be young adults/older adolescents by now.