There’s a reason the government is hiding it from the public. UFOs, UAPs, whatever you want to call them. Soon they’re going to have to come clean, at least about parts of it. There’s no way they’ll be honest about the worst of it. Why it’s been secret for so long.
I will. I don’t expect this to stay up for long. I bet my computer’s been bugged for the past ten years. So read carefully. I want you to be ready.
-–
I used to be a wildlife photographer. That’s why it was such a shock to me. When men in black suits show up at your house, tell you that you’ve been selected for a new job working for NASA, you’d expect they’d be looking for a physicist or biologist, or something. I thought it was a joke until one of them flashed a badge. The other one stretched just so, ‘accidentally’ revealing the gun he was concealing at his waist.
I wasn’t even a particularly good wildlife photographer. Maybe that’s why they chose me. No awards. No family, no friends. No criminal record. Hell, I didn’t even have any pets. Guess that was all the resume they needed.
Had to take a plane there for my first day. New housing on site, they said. Pack lightly. My new post was at the High Point Special Facility. Maybe you’ve heard of it, in the news. It’s a government compound, out in the mountains, not too far from Washington D.C., where U.S. leadership is meant to stay if something threatens their safety in the city. Allegedly, it’s owned and operated by FEMA.
So why would I work there?
Because they’ve been lying. Under the facility, there are miles and miles of tunnels. Fortified, maze-like, corridors and rooms expansive enough to create a dark, cool, subterranean city. There were laboratories. Libraries. A factory. Aircraft hangars. Surgical theaters. They needed a documentarian. Didn’t want to waste someone more important on taking pictures. I don’t think I was even really working for NASA, even If nobody said otherwise.
At first, I didn’t really understand what I was taking pictures of. I wasn’t stupid enough to ask. I assume they chose someone who couldn’t make sense of it on purpose. I’d be taken to a room, where there’d be some machine parts or an engine sitting out on a table. I’d take pictures, supervised by people in lab coats who would direct me to certain portions or angles.
Over time, pieces got more complete. One time I took a picture of some sort of circuit-looking thing that shorted out my camera after I got too close. Just came apart in my hands with a burst of blue sparks. Burned me pretty bad. Had to switch from digital to film after that.
And then one day it clicked. Maybe about a year in. They had me go to the surgical theater. Suited me up like a marshmallow in a gas mask. I was to photograph an autopsy.
An autopsy? I remember thinking that they must’ve been a victim of some covert technological experiment gone wrong.
But then they wheeled out the body. It wasn’t a person at all. It was small, vaguely person-shaped, but it was put together wrong. A sick little part of me almost laughed- it looked like a cartoon alien. Big eyes, big head, gray skin. But then they started cutting into it and it was very, very real. I had to photograph each organ.
I drank myself to sleep that night. Place was big enough to have a bar, even if I couldn’t leave to get my own liquor.
Guess my reaction was good enough, though, because instead of my regular work the next day I was sent to a big meeting room. Needed a photographer’s input, they said. Make sure I don’t talk about this to anyone else.
We were given pseudonyms. The head of the project was ‘Aquila,’ a rough-looking older guy who sounded like he might’ve been from New York. There were scientists. Quiet, smart people. I can’t even remember what they were called. Most of what they said flew over my head. I was also introduced to ‘Sagitta,’ ‘Cygnus,’ and ‘Canis.’ Our prospective astronauts. I was ‘Pyxis.’ Cygnus told me this was the name of a constellation shaped like a telescope. I wonder if she thought it was funny.
Aquila informed us we were a small part of a greater project. Greater, as in greater in scope, but also greater, as in grand. We were to help with the development of a manned supercamera. Project ANTAEUS.
The technology I had been photographing had been de-engineered and re-engineered, all with the purpose of developing faster than light travel. We were almost there. Project ANTAEUS was meant to practice sending manned craft into deep space. ANTAEUS and its crew were to travel to Mars, orbit for about three months, and return.
This was the first time I decided to speak up. “Why am I here?” My voice cracked.
“Because,” he replied. “We need someone to teach our astronauts about wildlife photography. We need evidence of live extraterrestrials.”
So my job became accompanying the three astronauts as they underwent their training, and teaching them about photography techniques in an unstable environment with an unpredictable subject. The ANTAEUS’s camera was more powerful than anything I’d ever have my hands on, but there was no data to train an AI to look for a moving alien. We had no idea what we might be looking for, really. We’d only ever seen their ships up close after they’ve been destroyed.
It was less eventful for a while. Everyone was focused on ANTAEUS. I saw ships enter the hanger, though. Not ours. Long, cigar-shaped craft, built from metal that looked like it had been crushed and folded and melted together so many times over it had become smooth. Bodies inside without any evidence of a door.
Cygnus told me rumors about ships flying up out of the ocean. About cattle being found bloodless and boneless, without visible injury. Missing children. She told me in whispers, in writing, in looks and gestures. I wasn’t meant to know. She felt bad for me. So much information without any answers.
One night she slipped into my quarters. It was close to the launch date- she had told our superiors she wanted to thank me. She asked me for a token to take with her. So she could think of me. I gave her my watch.
After she left, I found a piece of paper folded into my pocket. It must have come from the library, because none of us had access to a computer or to a printer. The paper looked old, worn, like a vintage book from the 70’s.
It was a photo of a clay tablet, half-unburied, from an archaeological dig. It even had those little flags around the hole. And on the tablet were drawings of people. They were looking up, at the sky. At other beings, with big heads and stubby bodies. Beings coming down from the stars.
I ripped up the paper and flushed it down the toilet. I couldn’t afford to be caught with it. I don’t know if Cygnus thought she was helping me, by showing me that, or if she just needed someone to share it with. To carry the burden with her. I never got the chance to ask.
We were close. Too close. I wish she were here to help me explain.
ANTAEUS left. The first red flag was when the radio refused to work. Rest of the ship was okay though, from what we could tell back home.
We weren’t meant to receive the first photographs for a couple of weeks. We did, however, receive more visitors in the meantime. More sightings. I was tasked with editing photographs taken from satellite. I was sent into hangars alone to photograph orbs that spun without a power source, four-fingered hands that smelled of ammonia. A flat, black mirror thirty feet across. Things that felt wrong.
The first transmission we received was beautiful. Someone up top had the kindness to let me look. Heavenly bodies in blue and gold and yellow, galaxies spreading like watercolor across the expanse of space. Each taken with a delicate human touch. Art, really. But not what they were looking for.
Back to silence. Back to work. Back to little gray corpses and empty hallways.
The next spate of images was more unsettling. Again, the first few were gorgeous. A shot of Earth in swirling color. Distant stars. Earth’s moon.
The moons of Jupiter. Something in this next one. A faint outline, inorganic. A ship. No amount of editing could make it clear, though. And silence again.
I was slipping up. Losing time. I’d look up and hours would pass. Aquila told me I’d be released from my tour of duty at the end of ANTAEUS’s mission. I wondered if that meant I’d be killed.
ANTAEUS relayed more photos. A perfect shot, of a non-human spacecraft. Just like the ones we had here. Just like the ones we had here. Something had compressed it so tightly around the middle that it had split in half.
Bodies backlit by sunlight, floating in space. Twisted, squat bodies. Another mangled ship.
A photograph of the ANTAEUS. How?
Aquila asked me, “How?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. I didn’t teach them how to do that.
Foreign objects arrived at the facility more frequently and in greater numbers. I was busier than ever, alone on the job more than ever. Sometimes I didn’t even have time to decontaminate between rooms before a faceless voice on an intercom would tell me to move on to the next one.
I was called in to take photographs of an autopsy. No time to put on a HAZMAT suit, the intercom said, just had to go in with the hollowed carcass. It was peeled open, skin and ribs the petals of a fleshy flower. Each organ had been carefully placed in a tray, ready for documentation.
Being near the body made my skin tingle. Not in a nervous way. I was used to the dead by now. The body was having a physical effect on me. Lights flashed when I blinked. I crept nearer.
Nestled in the open cavity of its chest was a watch, slick black with congealed blood. It was my watch. I was dizzy. I was burning. Shaking, I clicked my camera before I gave in and stumbled into the hallway to vomit.
How? So many people were asking, asking me like I would have an answer. How? I had to take a polygraph.
It had my watch. I don’t know how. Cygnus had my watch. From Earth everything aboard the ANTAEUS seemed fine. Except for the radio.
Days passed. My skin reddened and dried and flaked off like a sunburn. They must have decided to trust me again because they had me return to working. There was another body. My watch, again, was found among its organs. I was asked more questions I couldn’t answer. I asked them how many copies of my watch they had already found. They told me I didn’t have a high enough clearance to know.
More pictures from ANTAEUS. Another photograph of the ship. A different one. This one was smashed flat. A hunk of sheet metal fell into the Atlantic Ocean, belonging to ANTAEUS, but our ANTAEUS was still up there in space. Someone in the organization recovered the ANTAEUS from where it crashed in the mountains of Alaska, but we kept receiving visual transmissions from the ship. From Earth everything aboard the ANTAEUS seemed fine.
The supercamera captured a thousand copies of the ANTAEUS, floating like sleeping whales. Thousands of suspended bodies, backlit, humanoid. And something else was there.
Not a black hole. A black hole can’t look back. But it was taking things in. Eating things. Satellites. Moons. Copying them. Crushing them. Spitting them back out. Changing them.
Those mangled bodies. Those cigar-shaped ships. Each one was from Earth, weren’t they? Each autopsy. Each one was performed on some version of Sagitta, Cygnus, and Canis. It was all them. It was always them. And I helped to put them up there with that thing, in own my small way.
Nobody had answers. At least not ones they were willing to share. One last photograph. Darkness, interrupted only by a horrifying, warm little light. I could feel it looking back at me. Radiating malevolence. We never received a transmission from ANTAEUS again.
My tour was over. They let me leave. Who would believe me?
Who did I have left to tell?
Here’s the thing. I’m dying. Terminal brain cancer, one-of-a-kind. Doctors say they’ve never seen anything like it. Reminds them of something they’d see in someone exposed to nuclear waste. Must be why the government used me to take pictures instead of some precious scientist. Before I go I need someone to carry this burden with me.
I don’t have answers to everything I saw, every rumor I heard. But I saw enough.
It was us that we were studying. The ANTAEUS and her crew. Returned to Earth butchered and broken and put back together into something new. There never were any aliens.
But there is something up there. Something the government is watching in secret. Something that hates humanity enough to use the strings of time and space as instruments of torture. And I do know one thing.
In every picture, it was getting closer to Earth.