About the SCP Foundation

The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization documented by the web-based collaborative-fiction project of the same name. The project’s real-world website (scp-wiki.net) is community-based and includes elements of many genres, chiefly horror, science fiction, and urban fantasy.

Within the website’s fictional setting, the SCP Foundation is a secret organization entrusted by governments around the globe to contain and study anomalous individuals, entities, locations, objects, and phenomena that operate outside the bounds of natural law (referred to as “SCP objects,” or colloquially as “SCPs”). The objects range from terrifying monsters, to world-destroying alien technology, to supposedly mythical figures, to harmless yet puzzling, physics-defying trinkets. If left uncontained, the objects would pose a direct threat to human life and humanity’s perceptions of reality and normalcy.

The existence of SCPs is withheld from the public to prevent mass panic and to allow human civilization to function normally. When an SCP is discovered, the SCP Foundation deploys agents either to collect and transport the SCP to a Foundation facility, or to contain it at its location of discovery if transport is not possible. Once SCPs are contained, they are studied by Foundation scientists. Each object is assigned a unique identification number, such as SCP-1983. There are currently more than 8000 objects cataloged.

The SCP Foundation (and scp-wiki.net) maintains documentation for all of the SCPs in its custody, which can include or link to related reports and files. These documents, written in an academic/scientific style, describe the SCPs and include instructions for keeping them safely contained. Though clinical in tone, each of these documents is often put together in such a way that it tells a story or leads the reader to infer things about the Foundation, the researchers who drew up the document, the object’s past, etc. They can also include transcripts of relevant interviews, exploration logs from when the object was first discovered or contained, and other documents in which living breathing people are shown to speak and let their humanity peek through in stark contrast to the cold, indifferent language that dominates the Foundation’s database of dangerous and perplexing phenomena.

(info largely taken from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)