But there were still a lot of things about this story that bothered me. For one, the details of NASA’s discovery on Europa were giving me a strange sense of déjà vu. It took me a moment to figure out why.
Since the late ’70s, the official word on Europa from our scientists had been that it was one of the most promising potential habitats for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, due the vast ocean of liquid water beneath its surface. As a result, Europa had been a popular setting with science fiction writers ever since. I could think of at least half a dozen stories that involved the discovery of alien life on Europa—most notably the Arthur C. Clarke novel 2010, his sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peter Hyams had directed an excellent film adaptation of 2010 back in the ’80s, and the movie version ended with a highly advanced alien intelligence using HAL-9000 to send humanity a mass text message warning us to stay the hell away from Europa.
Attempt no landing there.
There was also something familiar about an alien first-contact message that contained a swastika. After racking my brain for what seemed like an eternity, I realized the answer was staring me in the face—Carl Sagan himself had written a similar scenario into his first and only science fiction novel, Contact. In Sagan’s story, SETI researchers receive a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence that contains a copy of the first television broadcast from Earth the aliens ever intercepted, which turns out to be footage of Adolf Hitler’s opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. One of the most memorable moments in both the book and the film adaptation occurs when the SETI scientists decode the first frame of the alien video transmission and discover that it contains a close-up image of a Nazi swastika.
The events unfolding on the screen in front of me were different from the tales of first contact described in either 2010 or Contact, granted—but surely those similarities couldn’t be mere coincidence?
Like Sagan, Clarke had been a NASA insider. It made sense that he too had learned of Pioneer 10’s discovery on Europa and agreed to take part in the cover-up. But then why had both men subsequently hidden kernels of the top-secret truth in their bestselling science fiction novels? And why had the EDA let them get away with it? Especially considering that both of their novels were then adapted into blockbuster films that had exposed this classified information to a global audience?
As it occurred to me that I’d probably just answered my own question, several high-resolution images of Europa began to appear on the screen, showing its surface in much greater detail. Up close, the moon looked like a dirty snowball crisscrossed with reddish orange cracks and streaks that were thousands of kilometers long. The giant black swastika stood out in stark relief against the moon’s surface.
“When Pioneer 11 reached Jupiter a year later in December of 1974,” Sagan’s voice-over continued, “its course was adjusted to make a close flyby of Europa, and it sent back much clearer images of the moon and its surface anomaly, putting to rest any lingering suspicions that the earlier Pioneer 10 image had been faked in some way. By this time, NASA was already rushing the construction of a new top-secret probe designed to travel to Europa and land on its surface to study the swastika anomaly up close, and hopefully collect enough data to ascertain its origin or purpose. NASA dubbed this spacecraft the Envoy I, and it reached Europa on the 9th of July, 1976—the day humanity made its first direct contact with an alien intelligence.”
I had never been so glued to a movie screen in my life.
A shot of the Envoy I—or rather, another CGI simulation—appeared on the screen, showing the probe as it maneuvered into orbit around Europa, with majestic Jupiter looming behind it. It looked like a larger, less streamlined version of the two Voyager spacecraft NASA launched the following year, with giant fuel tanks and a lander cobbled onto its frame.
As the spacecraft passed over the huge black symbol, the orbiter deployed its landing module and it began to descend toward the frozen surface.
The image cut to what appeared to be actual video footage shot by the Envoy lander’s on-board camera during its final approach.
Seen directly from above and in full sunlight, the giant swastika on Europa’s surface appeared to consist of nothing more than long bands of discolored ice. The blackened sections of ice still reflected sunlight, and aside from the change in its color, there appeared to be no disruption in the pattern of striated cracks and frozen ridges covering the moon’s surface. It looked like someone had slapped the solar system’s largest swastika stencil on the side of Europa and then hit it with a Star Destroyer–sized can of black acrylic spray paint.
“The Envoy lander set down near the southernmost tip of the anomaly, near what would later become known as the Thera Macula region,” Sagan’s voice-over continued, just as the lander completed its controlled descent and touched down on the surface, with its landing gear straddling the border between the swastika’s edge and the unblemished ice beside it.
To my shock, a familiar gold disc was attached to the base of the lander. It looked identical to the famous gold records NASA had attached to both of its Voyager spacecraft.
“A twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc was attached to the Envoy lander,” Sagan explained. “This phonograph record was encoded with sound recordings and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, to serve as a token of peace from our species.”
After the lander finished unfolding its solar panel array, a jointed robotic arm extended from its underside and began to collect a sample of the blackened surface. The heated metal scoop at the end of the arm dug a furrow into the ice about a foot deep, revealing that it was black at that depth, too. Once the arm retracted, the body of the lander opened up like a metal flower, revealing a torpedo-shaped probe within, with its nose pointed straight down at the ice.
“The heat generated by Jupiter’s tidal flexing of Europa causes most of the moon’s subsurface ice to remain liquid, resulting in a subterranean ocean that we knew could possibly harbor life, which made it the first logical place for us to search for the beings responsible for creating the symbol on the moon’s surface.”
I once again marveled at the powerfully calming effect of Sagan’s voice. If James Earl Jones had been chosen to narrate this briefing film, it would have been even more terrifying to watch.
“Shortly after it touched down, the Envoy lander deployed a cryobot, an experimental nuclear-powered melt probe designed to burn down through the moon’s surface ice and explore the ocean hidden beneath it for signs of extraterrestrial life.”
The lander slowly lowered the torpedo-shaped cryobot, pressing its superheated nose down into the blackened ice. An explosive column of steam shot up high into Europa’s nearly nonexistent atmosphere as the probe began to melt through the onyx surface, burning a perfect cylindrical tunnel through the ice as it descended, pulled downward by gravity.
In a few seconds, the tail of the cryobot disappeared beneath the surface, unspooling a long fiber-optic tether behind it that would keep it connected to the lander and its transmitter. Then a cutaway animation of Europa appeared on the screen, showing the cryobot’s progress as it burrowed down through several kilometers of solid ice before it finally made it all the way through the crust and then plunged into Europa’s dark ocean.
“We lost contact with the cryobot just a few seconds after it cleared the underside of the moon’s ice layer. At first, NASA suspected an equipment malfunction, because we also lost contact with the lander up on the surface at the same moment. But when the Envoy orbiter passed over the landing site again a few hours later, the satellite images it sent back revealed two things: The lander had completely vanished from the surface, and so had the swastika.”
The film cut to a rapid slideshow of still photos taken by the orbiter. The swastika had indeed disappeared, leaving no sign it had ever been there in the first place. Then the image magnified to show a detailed view of the probe’s landing site. The four impressions left by the lander’s feet were still visible, as was the circular hole the cryobot had burned into the ice—ice that had miraculously reverted to its natural color.
“Forty-two hours after NASA lost contact with the lander, its radio transmitter came back online, broadcasting on the same top-secret NASA frequency. When its signal reached Earth, we discovered that it contained a brief voice message, apparently sent by the inhabitants of Europa. To our surprise, it was worded in plain English, and spoken in the voice of a human child.”
A recording of a young girl’s voice began to play on the soundtrack.
“You have desecrated our most sacred temple,” the child’s voice intoned in a flat, inflectionless tone. “For this there can be no forgiveness. We are coming to kill you all.”
Even as I shuddered in my seat, something about the message struck me as oddly familiar. It was like something out of a bad science fiction movie.
Then Carl Sagan’s calming voice-over continued.
“It was quickly determined that the female voice heard in the alien transmission had been synthesized from one of the brief audio recordings included on the gold record we had attached to the lander.
“To our dismay, this twenty-one-word message began to repeat on a continuous loop, hour after hour, day after day. The Europans, as we began to refer to them, ignored all of our attempts to respond or explain our actions. For reasons we still don’t understand, it appears they viewed our first attempt to make contact with them as an unforgivable act of war. By sending a melt probe to explore beneath their moon’s surface, we may have unknowingly violated some territorial or religious boundary their species holds sacred. Or the Europans may simply view our species as a threat to their own. We still aren’t sure of their motivations, because all of our subsequent efforts to communicate with them have met with failure.”