Following the Oceanykan Civil War, the now victorious Oceanykan Council realised that the world had changed. World War II was marked by leaps in military technology, most notably the atomic bomb. The Oceanykan Federation in the late 1940s did not possess the knowledge nor the resources to organise military projects like those of the world’s great powers, but it did possess one significant advantage: the ruins of an ancient extraterrestrial civilisation, the Precursors.
Prior to this, the Precursors were really only known of by secret societies and select academics, both of whom preferred to bury their secrets in obscurity and concrete, well aware that mankind did not possess the means to discover their enigmatic technologies. The atom bomb proved this notion false. It was quickly realised that much of their machinery was powered by the same principle as Dr. Sakharov’s bomb which had evaporated Königsberg: nuclear fusion. As such, in September of 1948, the Oceanykan Council covertly authorised the formation and funding of Project GREYMAN, headquartered in the now-destroyed Beta Base, somewhere at the edges of the Black Valley.
The Federal Special Research Division was founded shortly after as the operative branch of GREYMAN, and although its scope quickly broadened towards studying and containing all paranormal activity, the organisation’s original mission was to retrieve Precursor technology and deny it to any other faction or power but the Oceanykan Federation. Veteran commandos of Task Force THAUMIEL were amongst its first operatives.
One of Project GREYMAN's first acts was to erect the closed city of Blackburn in the Black Valley, finishing construction sometime after 1950. Its location was deliberately chosen for its proximity to the Korth Abyss, where the ruins of the Precursors’ mothership-city still lie buried, and to New Kursk, surrounded by great quantities of natural uranium ore rich in U-259, colloquially known as Warpstone.
It is thanks to Project GREYMAN that much of the Precursors' history was unearthed, including the Ancient Hyperwar. Additionally, while it produced nothing tangible except for cabinets upon cabinets of scientific, technological and archeological records, its subsequent subprojects brought about a technological revolution in Oceanyka; Project LIBERTY and Project TYRANT.
However, many of the project's leading scientists and engineers had some very particular political opinions. These "Mad Scientists", as the political class pejoratively called them, possessed a large degree of influence in the Oceanykan Council, becoming a third pillar of the ruling regime besides a corrupt political elite and an insatiable corporate elite. As such, when the Oceanykan Revolution occurred, all of GREYMAN's personnel defected to the Australian Emergency Committee, taking most of their data and technology.