I work at NASA. We discovered aliens. We lost aliens.

I work at NASA. It’s a job like any other. It has its stress, but I don’t end up bringing it home. Work at the office, lunch at the cafeteria, go home. Nothing about my life is exciting. That was true until two weeks ago.<br><br>Two weeks ago, aliens landed on Earth.<br><br>That sounds crazy. I know it sounds crazy. I would have called me crazy if I had said it before it happened. But it’s not crazy. It’s real. I saw it happen. And I wish it hadn’t.<br><br>It was daytime when the spaceship landed. I was in some meetings, and didn’t see it happen in person, but I heard the rumor mill within minutes and I watched the video later that night. It was a giant spaceship, maybe a mile long. It just… landed out in the desert, near one of our bases.<br><br>No one came out of it. I don’t think anyone was in it. It was a drone, or so they think. After about three hours, it lifted off and disappeared into space. But it dropped something off, and that’s what I was brought in to help with.<br><br>The thing it dropped off was huge – about 50 feet long and 12 feet wide at its widest. It was metal. It was strong. It was heavy. But we managed to transport it to our facility. Inside was some plants and animals, a liferaft of sorts to figure out how to terraform the planet. And some other stuff.<br><br>I’m a geneticist. I got called in because they found DNA. I worked on isolating and studying that DNA. We learned a lot. We learned a lot more than I ever imagined we could learn from just DNA, and we were just getting started.<br><br>We figured out how to clone it. We cloned it. It was an alien animal, but it was still an animal. It was cute. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Sort of like a lizard, sort of like a mouse. It had six limbs and its fur was blue. It could have been a pet, but it wasn’t. We locked it up in a cage and studied it.<br><br>I always knew this was what my job was. But I never thought I’d be doing it on an alien. And I never thought what might come next.<br><br>That came the next day. I saw it for the first time in its natural habitat – a habitat we’d recreated in a locked room deep within the facility. We’d cloned a bunch of the plants and animals, and put them in the room. The alien critter loved it, and it thrived. Within a few days, it was healthy and happy. It even played with us a little – it knew we weren’t one of its own kind, and it had figured out where its food came from, but it was curious and it enjoyed people.<br><br>That was the last time I saw it happy. Two days later, it was sick. We knew it was sick. We didn’t know why it was sick. We tried to figure out why it was sick. We thought the food was bad, so we changed the food. That didn’t help. We thought the room was too small, so we made the room bigger. That didn’t help. We thought the room was too empty, so we made the room fuller. That didn’t help. The critter got weaker and weaker.<br><br>We didn’t have much time. We were running out of options, but we were running out of time faster. We decided to try something drastic – we decided to bring in its natural predators. We’d cloned some other critters. We knew which ones were the natural predators of the sick one. And we knew they’d be healthier than the sick one, because they’d only been out of the cloning chamber for a day or two.<br><br>So we introduced the predators to the sick critter. And the sick critter perked up. It was like clockwork, and it was amazing. It acted healthier, it acted more natural. It even played with its natural predators, avoiding their bites the way it would have back on its home planet. We were sure we’d fixed it.<br><br>And then all of them fell ill. All of them. We couldn’t figure out why, no matter how hard we tried. In the end, we figured they missed their home planet. We had no way to bring them their home planet, so they died.<br><br>In the end, we learned a lot. We learned more than I could have imagined we’d learn from a failed experiment like this one.<br><br>But I keep shaking my head. I saw aliens, aliens I had raised and cared for and grown to love. I saw them die, one by one, all because we couldn’t give them what they needed. It hurts. It hurts every time I think about it. And it will hurt for the rest of my life.