The Incident at Ride Academy
UNCLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE
NACOGDOCHES COUNTY, TEXAS
5 May 2045
SUBJECT: The Incident at Ride Academy
On April 30, 2045, the Department received an anonymous call regarding the “inconceivable”deaths of two adults, one male and one female, which was traced to a payphone approximately 2.1 miles south of the sprawling campus of Ride Academy, a private post-secondary boarding school founded fifteen years ago with the goal of preparing promising students for space-related careers in research, design, engineering, navigation, and flight. According to the Dean, the invitation-only admission is very selective.
The institution maintains no social media channels and has a virtually invisible web presence.
A team of twelve intelligence officers arrived to discover two dead bodies on the top floor of the school’s massive, five-story library. One body belonged to the assistant librarian, the other to a structural design professor. The flight student who discovered them, Isla Duncan , swore they had not been touched since. Causes of death were not immediately clear, but both bodies were badly mutilated. They had been carved open mid-torso, and many of their organs, including their hearts, lungs, and stomach, were gone. Despite this, there was no blood on the carpet beneath them, suggesting the bodies may have been moved postmortem. (Autopsy and toxicologyreports are still pending.) An exhaustive search of the school grounds turned up no additional bodies. However, three students enrolled for the spring semester were unaccounted for, and no one the Department spoke to could explain where they were. One tenured engineering instructor, Professor Sleator, was also reported missing. At the time of this report’s writing, they have still not been located.
After conducting thorough interviews (see attached transcripts) with dozens of students, staff, and on-site AI systems, the Department has pieced together a rough timeline of events:
On January 13, 2045, the five astronauts aboard the spacecraft Innovation 8 successfully splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida after spending six years on an expedition to Jupiter’s moon Europa. They were recovered, as scheduled, by the USS Bumblebee and brought safely ashore. All five quarantined for three weeks in a mobile facility at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, where they were observed daily for any adverse effects or otherwise unusual behavior. None were reported at the time.
On February 8, 2045, three of the astronauts, Drs. Hallstrom, Goldman, and Pike, visited Ride Academy along with two NASA Operations officials to discuss their recent Mission. Additionally, five students were granted one-on-one access as a prize for winning competitions conducted in their fields of concentration during the fall semester. One of those students was Ally Chiang, a second-year design student. When Chiang spoke to Dr. Pike that day, she noticed the astronaut’s hands were trembling, so much so that he dropped a ceramic mug filled with coffee. She asked if he was alright, but he seemed embarrassed by the question and hid his hands from view for the rest of the session. She concluded that perhaps he’d consumed too much caffeine that morning or was still acclimating to Earth’s gravity. The rest of their conversation proceeded smoothly, with Chiang learning “a wealth of information” about the strengths and weaknesses of NASA’s current suits and ships, her main areas of interest. (See Appendix A for a copy of her handwritten notes.) Afterwards, the visitors ate lunch in the dining hall, took a brief tour of the recently renovated building, and left before dusk. Dr. Goldman was the only visitor that day who had not previously graduated from the school herself.
On the morning of February 12, 2045, Leon Moreno, a first-year research student, was using one of the telescopes in the Observatory when he felt “a strange tickle” at the back of his neck, almost as if he were the one who was being watched. The public deck is open 24/7 to everyone on campus, but it was before sunrise, and he was alone. He searched the vicinity but found nothing unusual.
The next day, February 13, 2045, Leon Moreno returned to the Observatory before daybreak. Once again, he felt a presence nearby as he peered up at the sky. Once again, he turned to find no one in the area. “Who’s there?” Moreno asked the empty room. “I’m not scared of you.”(He later admitted in his interview that he had, in fact, been a little scared: “Just a little though.”) At those words, someone emerged in front of him, seemingly out of nowhere, but whoever it was wasn’t a human being. In fact, Moreno claims, it was no life form he had ever seen before. He further describes the creature as being “around three feet high, maybe up to my waist, and it was pulsating before my eyes in translucent ombre colors, with all these little tendrils that seemed to have minds of their own coming off its bottom half.” (See Appendix B for a sketch provided by Moreno.) He then asked the intruder, “Where did you come from?” The creature did not reply in any language Moreno could understand. Instead, it emitted several “soothing, almost hypnotic” low tones, “like something you might hear on a sleep app for insomniacs.” The organism then faded from view as quickly as it had appeared. Leon Moreno, who is close friends with Ally Chiang, shared what he had seen at lunch that day. She assured him that she didn’t think he was crazy, and that “something funny” had been going on since the astronauts’ visit, “or maybe even before that.” By the end of the day, they had informed three more of their friends, including the aforementioned Isla Duncan.
The five friends, who each represent a different branch of study at the school, vowed to keep their eyes peeled for any unusual activity in the following weeks. “I noticed a lot of so-called unusual activity, if I’m being honest,” Carina Applegate claimed, though no one saw the creature, or any other foreign creatures, again until March 14, 2045. That afternoon, Ally Chiang was searching the supply closet in the design wing for sample materials when she heard those low tones Leon Moreno had reported. “Don’t be afraid,” she spoke aloud. “I won’t hurt you.”That’s when the being appeared before her, looking exactly as Moreno had described, though it appeared to have grown. He had even gotten the number of tendrils correct. “Ripley was enchanting,” a wide-eyed Chiang later revealed in her interview. (Ripley, evidently, is what the students collectively agreed to name the organism they had found.) “I had no idea where it came from, but I never got the sense that it wanted to hurt me.”
At the time of the Department’s visit, there remained no sign of the creature these students were describing, or any other nonhuman entity. During interrogations, intelligence officers asked each of the students involved if they knew where this supposed organism might have gone: “It might have seemed harmless, but considering the bodies in the library, clearly something went very wrong here.” That statement prompted an unexpected, distressed response from the entire group. “You don’t understand,” Leon Moreno said. “You don’t understand,” Ally Chiang said. “You don’t understand,” Isla Duncan said. “You don’t understand,” Carina Applegate said. Even Tony Russo, who had been very unresponsive up to that point, echoed those same exact words.
Typically, their identical wording might indicate a rehearsed story, but all were overcome with what seemed like genuine horror. “Ripley didn’t do this!” Chiang insisted. (The other four later made the same claim.) “You didn’t let us finish. It was Dean Goldman this whole time. Or rather, what was inside her. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. Innovation 8 isn’t to blame. We thought that at first, too. But Ripley is innocent. The others were only trying to help. This goes back further, we think as far back as the Innovation 5 trip to Mars. Or even earlier. They infiltrated the school a long time ago. We found the logs, but we can’t even guess how many there are by now. You have no idea what you’re up against!” Chiang ’s interview ends there, as she quickly became so hysterical she had to be sedated by the school nurse.
The investigation, at present, remains ongoing.
Warren Thacker,
Senior Intelligence Officer
APPROVED FOR RELEASE
Date: 22 June 2083