The Story of Astro Hounds

On 24th July 1969, just 4 days after the incredible feat of man landing on the moon, something quite unbelievable was discovered; a dark, swirling 800km-diameter wormhole, next to the pale dwarf planet Pluto.

It had a sphere of about 800 kilometres, spherical and perfectly smooth. No light passed from it or through it. It had no measurable mass or gravitational effect.

NASA named it the ‘Anomaly’. That it ever existed remains top secret.

After their discovery, NASA decided they needed to learn more.
And so ‘The Astro Project’ was born. The speed of its completion was unparalleled, because no one had any idea how long the Anomaly would last.

On November 17th, 1969, a craft was launched towards the Anomaly from Cape Canaveral Station at the head of an Atlas-Centaur rocket.

Its crew were unlike any NASA crew before or since. They were dogs. Greyhounds, to be precise, “The Astro Hounds”, to be precise. Human lives could be neither justified nor supported on such a long spaceflight.

Each day NASA tracked the progress of the ship. And they saw that it held to its course, straight as an arrow, past Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. And they saw that the Anomaly stayed open.

At last, 11 years after launch, the craft arrived at the brink of the Anomaly. Images came through, dim and blurred, showing a dark round shape like a waiting nightmare…

And then, suddenly, the craft vanished.

And that was it.

Gone.

It has been 42 years without any sign or signal. You can be sure that NASA Astro Project looked. Almost every day.

I regret to tell you that most of the Astro Project original crew never got to hear what you are about to learn.

That there was a signal.

A voice message.

Received by NASA on the 28th November, 2021.

The voice is English but the accent is strange and not quite human:

“This is the Astro Hounds calling.

We made it.”