I shushed her, and she let out a short hysterical laugh, then seemed to regain her composure. We both returned our attention to the screen.
“We had no way of knowing whether or not the beings who had defaced Europa were aware of the meaning the symbol held for us,” Sagan’s voice continued. “Until we had more information, all we could do was speculate about the symbol’s origin and meaning. Our nation’s political and military leaders made the decision to conceal it from the world, fearing that news of its existence would create a panic that might plunge our entire civilization into religious, political, and economic chaos. President Richard Nixon issued a secret executive order that NASA’s dark discovery on Europa would remain a highly classified national secret until it could be studied further.”
Now I understood why Dr. Sagan and the other JPL scientists had gone along with the government’s cover-up. The alternative would have been to tell the fragile citizens of Planet Earth that they’d just discovered a giant Nazi Post-it note orbiting Jupiter. If Walter Cronkite had dropped a bomb like that on the evening news back in 1973, human civilization would have gone collectively apeshit. Planning another mission to Europa under those circumstances would have been problematic—maybe even impossible.
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.”