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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Free-Health-1421 on 2026-08-06 14:35:56+00:00.

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I work in a small solar system group at NASA and today is a perfectly normal day like every other. My colleagues are standing around discussing the possibility of getting more telescope time. Our boss is generously making a pot of coffee for his underlings. The instant messenger channel is still captivated by yesterday’s discovery of a large and sturdy cardboard box and the subsequent haggling over such a rare and priceless artifact. And I’m sitting at my desk, checking my emails, making small talk with my neighbors and trying to conceal the fact that this is all utterly insane. People should be panicking. The press should be hammering at our door, demanding answers. Hell, the military should have taken over days ago, and I for one would have welcomed them with open arms. But instead, here I am, checking last month’s expenses and wondering if $20 is too much to claim for lunch, all while trying very hard not to scream.

It all started about a month ago. The first data from the Vera Rubin observatory was trickling in and we were running some of it through a new machine learning algorithm to see if it picked up anything. To our surprise it did. Nothing spectacular, just an object, probably a small asteroid, orbiting among Jupiter’s Trojans. But it was a lot brighter than its neighbors, as if it was made of something much more reflective.

I would love to say at that point we looked each other knowingly in the eyes, said “Aliens”, and got on a direct line to the White House. But we are all too old and jaded for that. No, instead we merely agreed that it looked unusual enough for further attention, scheduled a more detailed look and went to lunch.

Skip forward a couple of weeks and we’re standing around a monitor looking at data from a large telescope. And while no one was saying anything out loud, by now we were all most definitely thinking “Aliens”. Or at least I was. That and what I was going to spend my Nobel Prize money on. And for good reason. Not to get all technical but the damn thing was shinier than a disco ball. And what’s more, we could tell from the periodic way it glinted that it was regular in shape. Far too regular to be a normal asteroid. Now, I’m not saying that we could tell if it was some sort of giant flying saucer, but even from what we had it looked odd. Very odd.

But we were professionals working at one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, so we’d need a hell of a lot more than “looks really weird” before calling the press or the government. This was my discovery, so I sent Bill off to scrounge some time on an infrared telescope, which should give us a better idea of exactly how big this thing was, then dispersed the rest of the team to see if they could get anyone else to confirm what we were seeing. Even the boss deigned to stop by and congratulate us on the unusual find, probably with visions of a budget increase dancing before his eyes. But to his credit he did offer to speak to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) people about taking a peek at whatever this thing was, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

Meeting adjourned, I turned around to find we had attracted a small audience from across the office, most of them just admin staff trying to rubberneck a potential discovery in an otherwise dull day. I can’t say I blame them. Organizing meetings and paper deliveries at NASA is no more interesting than doing it anywhere else. But then I spotted someone I knew. Joanne was a radio astronomer who we’d worked with in the past and who did good work. We got along well, despite her being twenty years my junior, so I beckoned her over, partly to see if she’d ever seen anything like this before. She hadn’t but she did have an idea.

“Want me to point a dish at it and see if it’s transmitting?” she said, with half a smile. We both knew the chances of it doing anything like that were practically zero.

“Sure, can’t hurt. At least then if anyone asks if it’s beaming out ‘We come in peace’ we’ll be able to say no.”

I honestly didn’t think any more about it that afternoon, too caught up sifting through the mountain of paperwork our discovery was generating. I had even been asked to prep a preliminary press statement and went home that night trying to work out the best way to balance laudable scientific modesty with much more satisfying self-aggrandizement. But at that point this was an interesting discovery, nothing more. At best it might transform my life and career, at worst it might get me a glowing end-of-year review and maybe a raise. But I still wasn’t convinced it was going to change the world.

So it was with some surprise that I arrived the next day at 6am sharp to find Joanne standing by my desk, clutching a wad of data printouts. She was scared. Really scared. Fear’s not an emotion you see around here that often. Sure, if there’s a crewed mission that’s having issues, people might get a little unnerved or worried, but no one looks like they’re about to drive home and build a bomb shelter in the backyard.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I said, knowing that she’d only be here for one reason. “The thing’s transmitting?”

Without saying a word, she laid out the data plots on the table. It’s been a while since I worked on radio telescopes, but even I could see what was so startling. Instead of the broadband, fuzzy distribution of most natural signals, this was narrowband and the signal was being modulated. Rapidly.

“It must be man-made interference of some sort.” I offered, trying to sound confident. “A comms satellite probably passed in front of the dish or a pirate radio station decided that this was a great morning to go on the air.”

She just shook her head.

“It’s been transmitting steadily for hours and the signal is only from that tiny patch of sky.”

“Has another dish had a look at this yet?” I persevered. “You could just be the victim of a very localized form of interference. In fact, until we get corroboration from another source, that’s still the most likely answer.”

“I know. I’ve got a video meeting with two other observatories in an hour. If you’re right, then we’ll find out soon enough.”

She still looked shaken, so I offered to attend the meeting. Partly as moral support, partly because this object, whatever it was, had been found by my team, and I wanted to be in on every discovery.

So, at the appointed time I was sitting next to Joanne in our small conference room, awaiting our esteemed guests and trying to maintain the composed grace of a future Nobel laureate. Then the screens flickered to life and the two professors appeared. And for the second time that morning I saw facial expressions completely at odds with my expectations. Wonder, excitement, joy, any of those would be appropriate for what I had just seen on those plots. But instead they looked annoyed. Not angry, just annoyed, maybe even bored. It was the sort of look you give a waiter when they’ve presented you with the wrong meal for the second time in one night.

“Good morning, and thank you for agreeing to have a look at our mysterious source on such short notice,” began Joanne. “It is simply…”

But before she could continue, one of the attending astronomers, a white-haired man in his 60s, cut her off.

“It really is not very mysterious at all. In fact, the only mystery is why you issued an urgent request for verification. It is neither artificial, as you suggested, nor is it located inside the Solar System.”

The other figure looked a little more sympathetic, but nodded along just the same.

“We had to pause some time-sensitive work to observe this signal, and I’m disappointed that you failed to conduct even the most basic analysis to rule out common radio sources.”

“It’s a narrowband, clearly modulated signal!” exclaimed Joanne, having recovered from her initial surprise. “I accept that terrestrial interference might produce a signal like this, but not an astronomical source.”

“It’s probably just a highly unusual pulsar,” added the second man in a conciliatory tone. “A find that will probably make an excellent research paper, but perhaps not one that required an urgent corroboration request.”

“Yes, it’s most probably a pulsar,” agreed the first man. “But I’ve already wasted too much time on this wild goose chase. I have real research that can’t be delayed any further. So unless you have another message from ET to share with us, I will bid you good day.”

I was dumbfounded. None of this made any sense. The data looked nothing like a pulsar, even I knew that. And besides, a highly unusual pulsar wasn’t just something you dismissed as commonplace and moved on with your life. It was the sort of discovery that careers were based on.

“Can you at least send us the data you observed so we can compare it with our own results?” asked Joanne.

The white-haired man nodded curtly, then his screen went black.

“Of course, we’ll send you what we have. I hope it turns out to be something interesting in the end,” the second man added, in the tone of a kindly nursing home worker who has just been informed by a resident that they were, in fact, Elvis, before he too vanished from the screen.

We just stared at each other, completely lost for words. Under normal circumstances I should have been furious, but the exchange had been so weird that I just couldn’t muster any kind of coherent response...

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