Identifying a Flying Object

I had always been highly sceptical about stories concerning visits from other worlds. There are plenty of people who swear blind that they have seen objects in the sky that simply had to contain beings from far away whose aim was probably to colonise our planet and destroy anyone who stood in their way.

There were even tales of supposed encounters with strange creatures that had actually landed and made contact with us. However, nobody could ever produce any solid proof of this. The tellers of these tales were almost always either off their heads or clever hoaxers who dressed up dead animals to look like corpses of aliens.

As for those inverted saucers in the sky, they could always be explained away as cloud shapes or reflections seen in aircraft windows. As I said, being sceptical was clearly the sensible way to go.

That was why I simply did not believe the reports that came our way about what some astronomers had seen in their powerful telescopes. They said that a strange object was heading our way that had to be of alien manufacture. It just could not be explained in any other way. 

It was of no great size, they said, so there was no way it could contain an invasion force of little green people. Indeed, it did not look like a vessel of any kind. It had a large white dish and lots of bits sticking out of it at odd angles. It could be nothing other than a set of scientific instruments and the means of relaying its information back to wherever it had come from.

Our leaders had to make a hurried decision, because this thing was travelling incredibly fast and, if we did nothing, it would pass us by very quickly and its secrets be lost to us forever. The chance had come to confirm, at long last, that we were not the only intelligent life forms in the Universe and that someone else was out there and was doing exactly what we had been doing for many generations, namely looking for other life-bearing planets.

As it happened, we had a spacecraft with just the right equipment for the job that could be launched immediately. This was done, and the strange object was caught in a net and dragged back to the surface, where it could be examined in detail.

One thing that soon became apparent was that this craft was extremely old. Examinations were made of the materials of which it was composed, some of which were radioactive, and these showed that the craft must have been travelling for nearly as long as our species had been developing. Our planet had nothing on it more intelligent than creatures dwelling in swamps and saying “Ugg” to each other when this thing had started on its way. It had clearly long stopped sending information back to base and therefore posed absolutely no threat to us.

But where had it come from, and what sort of being had sent it?

Then a remarkable discovery was made. The scientists found a disc, made of what was probably gold, that appeared to be completely undamaged despite the vast amount of time that it had passed on his journey from one world to another. This was unlike any of the other instruments on board and so did not appear to be for the purpose of gathering information. There could only be one explanation – this was a means of giving information, not receiving it.

For one thing, the disk was sheathed in a cover that was inscribed with information that was not difficult to interpret. It told us which solar system the host planet orbited, and also gave full instructions about what to do with the disc, which was a repository of sounds, images, and a host of other information.

The disc proved to be a time capsule of a complete alien civilization, or maybe that should be a group of civilizations, because what came across was a picture of a very diverse world, in many respects. The most intelligent beings, who must have been the ones that made the disc and sent the craft on its way, clearly came in many shapes and sizes, as did the other creatures that inhabited their planet.

There were images of landscapes that ranged from huge cities to barren deserts, icy wastes and mountain ranges, as well as land that was used to grow food and seas that were swarming with fish.

The sounds included voices that appeared to speak in many different languages, and sounds that said nothing but were presumably made simply to give pleasure – some of these were indeed very beautiful, others less so.

So there we were, the recipients of a gift from a world that was so far away that it could only be detected with the most powerful telescopes we could devise. These alien people presumably had another purpose when they launched this craft – maybe they only wanted to explore their own solar system, but reckoned that it might well escape and end up being seen by lifeforms of which they could know nothing but assume must exist.

The ironic thing is that our experts recently detected a huge supernova explosion in a region of space not far from the solar system in question. They calculated that the blast would have produced a massive amount of radiation that would have destroyed all forms of life on any planet even remotely close.

What this means is that, even if the civilizations that we had seen on the disc had survived in some shape or form to this day, they could not have done so any longer. In other words, we now have in our hands the only record that life, intelligent or otherwise, ever existed on Planet Earth.

© John Welford