[Transcript of Audio Testimony – Dr. Vijay Anson]

The meteor landed on Earth about two years before they did. It was a truly remarkable specimen. Got the whole world’s scientists talking, because it was the proof we had all waited for to the question we had always asked. There was life outside our own planet.

The meteor was unique, and not purely for that reason. Inside it was hollow, filled with a shocking number of pungent organisms that seemed to be related closely to fungi, all growing inside this ah, living geode, for lack of a better term. Fungal and space experts weren’t even done cataloguing them before the creatures arrived.

Yes, in retrospect, it seems obvious that we should have connected the two events, but there seemed to be no common thread. Plus, once we were sure that complex, presumably sentient organisms existed, no one cared about the meteoric specimens anymore. Why look at fungus when you can see a real, live, walking alien?

We should have. It would have saved us so much in terms of resources, time. Lives.

What we couldn’t see is that the creatures – we’re still working out the nomenclature, exactly, since we have no taxonomic reference for them – they don’t communicate or even really perceive existence through sight or sound. They possess rudimentary sound interpretive organs, as far as we’ve observed, but their primary perception is olfactory.

Their sense of smell describes everything about their surroundings. It’s as complex and acute as our visual and auditory senses combined. They smell someone coming and can interpret the very colors that the individual is wearing based on the scents of the fabrics.

We finally discovered this far too late. What should have been a period of greetings and negotiations quickly devolved into a standoff. Though they deny it, I believe that our military fired the first shots. Enormously foolish, even from a layman’s perspective. If they’re so far past us – not only traveling unthinkable distances, but arriving practically undetected, for God’s sake – wouldn’t their weaponry outclass us, too?

They tried to warn us that they were coming. Sent us a letter two years early. We just didn’t understand how to read it.