Visitors 101 Our most distant cousins have been visiting us for millennia. It is only in relatively recent history since the invention of the camera that their surprisingly friendly visitations have been documented on film. Previously humans relied on written accounts or artistic depictions, some of which we hope to show you should they be released to us soon. However this evidence, when it occasionally surfaces is quickly confiscated or ridiculed and labelled as a hoax, so amazingly these visits remain merely a myth until this day. In dusty boxes hidden in shady museums and secure facilities these pictures are mostly hidden away indefinitely until someone discovers them and is brave enough to leak them onto the internet and into public consciousness. Here is our first batch of pictorial documentation of these visitors throughout the ages. Visitors 071 - c1970s Vorrhynians and The Orb The children - Simon, Jack and Elspeth - had only just begun their afternoon’s important business of poking moss with sticks when they found it: a perfectly spherical, faintly humming orb, hovering three inches above the damp stones. “That’s not normal,” said Jack, an expert in normal things. The orb was inscribed with delicate cuneiform text that shifted and shimmered like it was deciding which alphabet to use. Simon, being the eldest by exactly twenty minutes, poked it. The text rearranged itself into something resembling IKEA assembly instructions. “Press the buttons,” urged Jack who was reckless. “Don’t press the buttons,” countered Elspeth, who was sensible. They compromised by pressing them in a completely random order. With a faint pop (like a bubble of time bursting), a door materialised in the centre of the ruined hall. It was entirely black, as if it wasn’t so much a door as an absence of everything else. Steps descended from nowhere. Then, from the void, They arrived. One slithered, an enormous, smiling squid-like thing with too many enthusiastic eyes. The other scampered in an ungainly fashion, something like an owl, a lemur, and a particularly anxious librarian merged into one. Both beings radiated the unmistakable air of polite but bewildered tourists. “Gifts,” the squid-being gestured grandly, producing an assortment of objects: a ball that defied gravity, a spinning top that played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony backwards, and what looked very much like an ordinary rubber duck but occasionally sighed melodramatically. The children, uncertain of interstellar etiquette, offered in return a slightly melted chocolate bar and half a packet of crisps. Conversation was attempted via enthusiastic charades, which was going splendidly until the visitors produced small devices and clipped them to the children’s collars. “Ah,” said the squid-thing, its voice suddenly as crisp as an English headmaster’s. “There we go. You have the wrong number of arms.” “Do we?” said Elspeth. “Yes,” said the owl-lemur, adjusting its spectacles. “Very strange. How do you hold your dinner forks?” “We just… hold them?” Jack ventured. “How bizarre,” murmured the squid. The visitors were delightfully entertaining, right up until the moment the children’s parents came looking for them. At the distant shout of "Where are you lot?!" the creatures startled, exchanged panicked looks, and immediately bolted back toward the void. The door collapsed in on itself like an embarrassed soufflé. The orb, now no bigger than a marble, dropped into Jack’s pocket, pulsing faintly. The children said nothing about it at dinner, but the duck sighed meaningfully from under the table.