The James Webb Telescope discovered something terrifying in deep space

I work for NASA as an astronomer, and there are certain things we keep hidden from the public. No, the Earth isn't flat, and aliens don't control the government. Fuck, I wish those were the case, as the truth is much, much worse.<br><br>In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope saw a star disappear. It didn't go supernova, or die naturally, it simply went dark, over the span of a few minutes. This star was already too faint to see with the naked eye, and ground-based telescopes had trouble picking it out from among the surrounding stars, so the event wasn't widely known to the public. At the time, we thought the most likely explanation was that a cloud of interstellar dust had drifted between Earth and the star, occluding it from view. It was noted and mostly forgotten about.<br><br>In 2007, two more stars vanished. Due to the circumstances of this event, this was much more concerning. The two stars in question were part of a binary system, orbiting each other at a fairly close distance. If a cloud of interstellar dust was the culprit again, they would have both seemed to disappear simultaneously, or very close to it. Instead, both stars faded individually over a period of minutes, separated by a span of about 8 hours. This binary system was also about 15 light-years closer to Earth than the star that had previously disappeared in 1993.<br><br>After carefully reviewing millions of Hubble images, two more stars were identified which had 'gone out', in the years 1995 and 2002. These were all in the same stellar neighborhood, only a handful of light-years from each other. The only conclusion we could draw was that some unknown influence, traveling close to the speed of light, was shrouding (or destroying) these stars. Unfortunately, the Hubble wasn't sensitive enough to tell us any more than that.<br><br>The James Webb Space Telescope first came online a few months ago. Although official channels will tell you that it's still undergoing testing, we have been actively collecting data since early February. One of the first things we did was to aim the telescope at the regions of space occupied by the vanished stars. If they were being blocked by dust clouds (a hope some of us still held onto), the increased sensitivity of the JWST may have been able to see through them and confirm that the stars were still there. Unfortunately, we had no such luck. The first 3 stars that had disappeared were still completely dark. Gravitational wave detectors, though, soon found something odd. In all cases, not only were the stellar masses still present, but the amount of mass had actually increased. More sensitive observations had also detected a type of 'string', or 'web' stretching through space connecting these now-invisible stars.<br><br>When we trained the telescope on the binary system that had vanished in 2007, which was the nearest point at which this phenomenon had so far been observed, there was finally enough ambient EM spectrum radiation left to try a mass spectrometer reading. If you're not aware, mass spectrometry is an incredibly useful process, where by measuring the patterns of light wavelengths emitted or reflected by an object, we can learn tons of useful information, such as its temperature, speed and direction of movement, and chemical composition. The readings we got from the binary stars didn't make any sense, though. First of all, they were cold - almost as cold as the surrounding interstellar medium. Whatever had happened to these stars had snuffed them out completely, or somehow prevented their light from escaping. What was truly puzzling, however, were the emission lines returned by the mass spectrometer. Several familiar elements, such as Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Magnesium were identified, but these were few and far between. Most of the readings didn't correspond to any known chemical elements, and even seemed to defy what we knew about the physics of light, matter, and chemistry. This massive, star-spanning structure was primarily composed of materials that we didn't even have names for, and may not even have been matter as we understand it.<br><br>Speculation ran rampant. Obviously, such a thing couldn't be a natural phenomenon. Finally, we had proof of extraterrestrial life! But what was this thing we had discovered, and for what purpose was it being built? The leading hypothesis was that we were looking at a series of Dyson Shells - massive solar collectors built to completely envelop stars, in order to capture 100% of their energy output. Such a concept had been envisioned in the early 20th century, as a potential source of energy in a future where the fossil fuels that powered an emerging industrial revolution were nearing collapse. Many of us had Growth Mindsetily imagined what it would be like to discover one of these, and while thrilled to finally be experiencing it, a part of us were also deeply disappointed. These things were clearly not built to generate energy. Who or what was using all the power of these stars?<br><br>A smaller group of researchers had a vastly more disturbing interpretation. According to them, what we were seeing was not a collection of Dyson Shells, but farms. Enormous agricultural facilities, built to cultivate and raise a vast and unknown class of sentient creatures. The stars that had 'gone out' were actually the suns of giant planetary systems, with some of those planets specially designed to foster the growth of massive, luminous animals. These things, like the devils of ancient myth that reportedly played chess with humans while their souls cooked in a pot, were said to have a fierce hunger for human souls. The creatures being farmed in these star systems were said to be many orders of magnitude hungrier. The string connecting the stars was supposed to be some sort of light-speed farm-to-table delivery system, which beamed the creatures from their birth stars to wherever they were in transit, to be delivered to the final consumer - who or what, God knew. This theory was considered outlandish and disregarded by two-thirds of the scientific community, but honestly it didn't take long to convince me. All I needed to do was to learn more about the creatures we were already known to be worried about.<br><br>If you're going to tell me that the whole idea of human souls is stupid, Animist hocus pocus with no basis in science or reality, then I won't argue with you. But if we have to talk about the souls of human beings being of interest to some other creature or entity, then we have to start with the Trochus Demon, and the falls of Cambará. In 1987, in Cambará, Brazil, hundreds of people claimed to have fallen gravely ill, with the majority of them reporting visual hallucinations, and a smaller but still significant proportion detailing auditory hallucinations. An investigation identified a particular house as the 'containing' the outbreak, and subsequently discovered a three-toed frog, several leaves of which the animal had eaten, lying in the throat of the homeowner. A few days later, the same pattern played out about 800 miles away in Argentina, where a similar outbreak was identified as being caused by the Trochus demon, a three-toed frog, and several leaves. The only possible means of transportation that the perpetrators could have used was a soccer ball, which was found on the scene of both crimes traveling in the opposite direction to the path a random drift would have suggested. There was no evidence of foul play, and no one was ever charged. Similar incidents had been documented in the early 20th century in Africa, and in the 1950s in South America. In every case, the victims had all reported experiencing some sort of luminous entity or eyeless being while alive to the event, and were all plagued by recurring, disturbing dream-like visions in the months leading up to their death.<br><br>The souls of these people, it was theorized, were not being possessed by spirits, but rather eaten, partially digested, and then rejected by these parasitic creatures. The plant material that had been partially digested by the frogs and recovered from their stomachs was the source of the toxic alkaloids which had caused the mass illness and death. If the farm-to-table delivery system theory was right, and the vanished stars were being used to raise creatures this hungry, then we had, in effect, already experienced what their food was like, and knew that we didn't want any part of it.<br><br>Officially, this is what we told Congress, and the general public is supposed to believe this, too. If you try asking the right people elsewhere on NASA premises what they *really* think is going on though, you'll get a different story. At the risk of speaking too simply, the long and short of it is that we're all praying that these things are monomers, solitary organisms like humans, and not polymers like slimes or colonies. If they're the former, then every star they farm could potentially be a home, and hence a migration path, of these creatures. Which means that they could be passing through our solar system. And could therefore have already passed through it before. Without any sort of Parsons device, wormhole, Alcubierre drive, or other explanation, the fastest these things could be moving would be at the speed of light. That means that if any of these stars were more than 4 years away when we discovered them, and they're within a similar number of light-years of us now, then they must have already been this close to Earth in the past. <br><br>A narrow survey conducted around the time of discovery suggested that the creatures being farmed by the stars previously mentioned were monomers with a 68% chance of being polymeric. The data wasn't nearly as good for the most recently discovered stars, but things were a little worse there, too. A lack of response to EM signals is not proof of sentience, but among the newly