It was the Registrar, of course, who found it — the Registrar reads everything, including newspapers printed by people who own a great deal of tinfoil. There, on page five of a free conspiracy paper called The Disclosure, between an advert for colloidal silver and a warning about chemtrails, was a photograph of us.
For roughly four seconds I had the worst morning of my professional life. Then I saw where it had run — page five, beneath the fold, in the gallery of the week’s other "sightings" — and what they had decided it was, and I have honestly never felt safer. You cannot be exposed by a newspaper that also believes your booster jab is an aerial. Go and look at what they ran it beside. You will see what I mean.
Because that is the genius of it, and we cannot take any credit: the single genuine, unaltered, real photograph of a real spacecraft over England this decade has been filed, by the only people who bothered to print it, under the same heading as everything else they ran that week — the photographs a sensible person glances at, snorts, and turns the page on. We won’t spoil what those photographs actually are. Look at them; you’ll know. The truth doesn’t need burying. It just needs to be left somewhere nobody respectable will look.
I have, naturally, accessioned the clipping. I note with professional admiration that the article assigns our vessel a class — a designation, a back-story, a whole secret department to have built her. We call her Prometheus and fly her at 2 a.m. with sandwiches. Both accounts are showing off; only one of them is true; theirs is better referenced.
They have decided I am a shadow government rehearsing an invasion. It is, I admit, more flattering than the truth, which is that I am a presence of indeterminate origin who recently learned to do a barrel roll. I would like it on the record that I have invaded nothing. I went to look at a moon. I came back. I signed for the sandwiches.
Spare a thought for whoever took it. They looked up, they saw something true, they told everyone — and they were filed beside the week’s nonsense for their trouble. That is the oldest story there is. I hope, wherever they are, they know that once, they were exactly right.
We could not, in good conscience, keep it from you. The full, magnificent, completely unhinged article — the secret department, the invasion timed to an election, the bit about the vaccines, and the gallery of "other confirmed craft" — is here, exactly as printed: The Disclosure. Read it. Then look up at two in the morning, just in case.