We had already been living in our new home about six months when I noticed a small door cut into the ceiling in the laundry. I asked my wife Samantha if she had noticed it before and she replied that she had, but was not piqued by any real curiosity to see what was beyond it.

“Probably just insulation and dead rats” She said.

“Go for your life.” She said when I remarked that I would like to have a look.

I pulled open the door and some wooden steps slid quickly downward knocking me on the knee and causing me considerable pain. I heard her laugh from somewhere else in the house. I gingerly climbed the stairs into the attic. Well it wasn’t an attic, just a ceiling space really, tall enough to stand in however due to the gabled roof.

I was not surprised to see it was full of stuff, mostly junk; old clothes and magazines, and an old computer. I immediately stopped searching through the other various artefacts and took the machine downstairs, plugged it in and turned it on. The computer was completely devoid of software and files but for a word processing program with a diary written upon it; this diary was the only file on the whole computer as if the appliance had been built solely for the purpose of holding the journal of one man.

I have only just begun reading this diary and already I am transfixed by it and wonder by what propitious circumstance it has fallen into my hands. I feel as if I were meant to read it, almost as if it were written just for me, which of course is preposterous.

As soon as I began to scour its contents I was instantly hooked. I don’t know if what is written in this diary is true, or rather I know it’s not true but don’t know if it’s his version of the truth, or just an elaborate act of tergiversation. Whatever it is, it is a fascinating read, even given the fact I have read very little of it. The diarist is a man by the name of Craig Davies, well that’s not really his name actually it’s just a boring name I got out of the newspaper, he doesn’t state his real name in the diary, not yet anyway as I suppose you wouldn’t. I have seen no other mention of whoever the author was amongst the other documents that were dormant and gathering dust in the attic.  I am assuming that he is the previous owner of the house.

I have no idea why the diary starts where it does, on a seemingly random date; he just starts writing about his life and his interest in the cosmos and the aliens. I will let Craig speak for himself as much as possible, but will interject regularly just to give my thoughts on what is happening, after all I want to be involved as much as possible. To be honest I suppose I have always been a  frustrated writer, so frustrated in fact, that I have never been able to think of an idea for a novel let alone muster up the energy to actually start one. Now I have the opportunity and so I am not going to just give you someone else’s words.

About myself, well my name is Albert Jones, or Al as most people call me.  There’s not much to me really, a middle management career and reasonably successful relationship. No children, though my wife is always hassling me for one. I must admit that spiritually and creatively I am deeply unsatisfied with my life, it gives me no real joy, no sadness either, but no real joy...just nothing.  To others, I think, I appear insouciant but deep down I am troubled. Finding this diary is the most exciting thing to happen to me in some time, for the first time in ages I can see something different ahead, some escape from my mundane milieu.  I have always yearned for something more, as if I am missing something, some great truth that is just out of my reach, it is always there this great thing, distracting me, causing me to be distrait when it comes to all of life’s menial chores. Like every boy and every man I want adventure. I want to discover something wonderful and new.

As mentioned I am going to write my particular observations as I read through this diary. As you are reading I am reading too; I have no idea what is going to happen next just as you do not. I have read the first few entries, enough to get my interest well and truly piqued; hopefully you are similarly enthralled.

         MARCH 16TH 2016.

I thought that I had given up hope that we would ever make contact with an alien race. At first I was certain without a peradventure of doubt that there was life out there, how could there not be? The universe is infinite and so there must be an infinite number of possibilities within it. The thought that our humble race was the only thing around in all that space was inconceivable. But, also, the universe was infinite. This meant that one of the possibilities, at least this possibility that we are living in, was that we were completely alone.

That’s not even the only question though really is it? Even if there were life forms out there how would we get in contact with them given the vast reaches of space and time. What were we relying on really? That some kind of civilization would be sending narrow band radio signals our way, and with enough power to overcome our human generated radio noise, and that it would be on a frequency we happened to be listening to.  Originally we were only listening on one frequency, now at least we have expanded our range. But, if, and it’s a big if, aliens were trying to contact us, who knows if they would even use radio waves? It’s a pretty primitive technology, even for us, and they may be millions of years ahead of us.

We’re assuming that for life to form it would have to be on a planet fairly similar to ours; i.e a planet that has liquid water in order for biochemistry to occur, an energy source, elements and nutrients to sustain life and physical conditions that are conducive to life. In our little section of the galaxy we have only found about 1800 planets orbiting stars, but that’s not enough, generally they have to be of a similar distance as us from their sun to allow life to evolve, sentient life anyway; there may be microbes, perhaps even in our solar system but they’re not going to be beaming radio waves into space. Then of course we would assume that they weren’t so advanced as to not already be here, furtively gathering intelligence, or making experiments. Perhaps they know we exist but have no desire for us to know about them.

There were just too many things against us. So I thought.

I have been interested in the stars from a very young age. I cannot understand how many of my friends did not seem to care that we are on a planet revolving around a sun in one of billions of other solar systems. There are two hundred billion stars just in our galaxy! I mean think about it. Really think about it. It blows your mind. Throughout my life I have oscillated between finding the whole thing terrifying and unbelievably liberating.

My father, who died about ten years ago, used to take me out into the backyard with him to stare through his telescope up into the night sky. He would describe the various constellations and point out the planets.  I loved it, but was also frustrated at how little I could see. The stars were ever distant, too far back in space and time and the planets were nothing but blurry little circles that kept slipping out of sight as the world turned. Even the moon, in all its bumpy definition was boring; I had seen it so many times in pictures, movies etc that it held no particular allure. I wanted to see more, I wanted to see everything.

I am a dreamer essentially, and so, I’ve never really amounted to anything. I went to university and studied science and philosophy but never excelled in either of these subjects. I never gained any employment related to my studies. I was always too obsessed with things not in my immediate vicinity to worry about the things everyone else seemed to be concerned about.  My friends would talk about promotions and money, the purchasing of property and shares and bonds and securities, but I just could not relate. My father was very kind; he never achieved much in his life but seemed at peace with this fact and so never pressured me into anything, perhaps that’s why I have no ambition. Throughout my life I have flitted from job to job, none of them particularly satisfying, and none of them financially rewarding. I have worked in factories and warehouses and shops and offices and for the government. This lack of any real success in my life doesn’t really bother me unless I am around other people. Besides, the universe is so, so big, how can I worry about my own small life?

From my adolescence I have been fascinated with the whole concept of extra terrestrial life and I have religiously read every book I could find on alien abductions and stories of people who had seen spacecraft; I have scoured books and articles on government cover ups looking for any nuggets of truth as well as watching every science fiction film ever made hoping that perhaps there is something real in all that falsity. I used to stand out in my back yard almost willing them to come and take me. My life as a child was good, well except for a couple of really bad experiences, so it wasn’t really a need to escape a horrible life on terra firma, it’s just that the world, the people, the buildings, the literature, the art, the wars, the weapons, the politics, the animals, the television shows, the movies, the sex, the love, the hate, the hunger and the famine all seemed so banal, so pointless, so scripted, so draining that I longed for something brighter.  

I had always wanted to work for SETI, or for some other organisation or learning institution that had intelligent men and women searching for life beyond our life but, of course, I did not have the requisite qualifications or contacts, and I was always chary of networking and socialising in general. I have no skill for the self promotion and confabulations involved in these kind of interactions. This was extremely frustrating, as was the knowledge that we, as in our governments, had most likely already made contact with alien races but had refused, for whatever reasons, to inform the public. This was not idle conspiracy, I was sure of the fact. I was not stupid, I knew that 98% of the stories were false but I am positive that some of them are true. I don’t know which ones but they always drown the truth in lies so that you can never spot the reality in the fiction or the reference in the metaphor. The lines were too squashed together to read between them.

Before all this happened, over the past few years there has been a steady stream of information about the universe, and the possibility that life resided elsewhere in it, fed to us through various media streams; a planet discovered somewhere that had just the right factors for life to develop, the discovery of water in the universe, basic organisms on Mars, all released to the public gradually as if preparing us slowly to avoid panic.

So I trawled the internet and the libraries for as much information as possible, trying to find a clue.  I would often stare at the sky for hours on end, hoping for a sign really, like a man out of grace, on his knees praying for the light. Of course the chance I would be the first to see it before all the filters was remote at best.

I began to make friends on line with hundreds of people around the globe who were thinking much the same as I was. I signed up to blogs and set up one of my own trying to attract the truth. Strange that now past online buddies, usually enthusiastic about any conspiracy theory, were now taciturn. I actually made contact with someone who worked at SETI and we became good online friends, if you can ever be friends with someone without seeing the deceit and envy and love in their eyes. His name was Paul and for six months we traded stories and anecdotes and shared our love of the universe. Every day I would wait for him to tell me that they had received a signal and every day he told me that they hadn’t. Still it was nice to have someone on the inside giving me updates on the latest detection developments. I became at this time, rather obsessed, I was gripped by a frantic nympholepsy, I would spend hours searching the internet for any clues, desperate to find out if we had made contact, and enraged that that they might keep it from us.

I knew something was up when I received an e-mail from him with the subject “WE DID IT!”. I opened it hurriedly. “They answered the phone!” was the first line of the message. Ironically it was on the very first frequency they had ever tried, 1420 MHZ, which is the emission frequency for cold hydrogen gas. They did all the tests, according to Paul, moved the telescope away and then back again and the signal was still there. I was as excited as I had ever been but then, the next morning there was nothing. I could not find any mention of it anywhere and Paul was silent. There were no press releases, no buzz on the internet chat rooms, nothing.

I quickly realised that it was very strange that he would contact me within a day of the discovery.  We were as close as two people could be who had never actually even heard the others voice but surely he would have had more pressing engagements being the first to discover extra terrestrial life. With a depressing thud in my head I realised he was a fraud and probably had been since the first time he had commented on my blog. 

So my life went back to nothing happening. I felt unhappy. My friends told me that I was moping around with a dolorous look on my face, l as if I had lost a loved one, and, in a way, I had. This thought, this hope that there might be something out there was all I really had.

I thought this was a strange way to start a diary, lots of exposition as if he was writing for someone else to read it, not much mention of the normal day to day stuff. Still there was nothing out of the ordinary here, he seemed to have a grasp of the science and had simply been tricked by some troll on the internet. I suppose it is relatively common to have an interest in aliens and the conspiracies around them, though there does seem to be hints of unhealthy an unhealthy obsession within his words. Then I read the next entry and everything changed.