The Poe Incident

Image credit and Special Thanks: Iron Age Media

It's been three decades since the disappearance of the crew of the E.S.S. Poe. It is one of the most bizarre cases in spaceflight history. The fate of The Poe has been the subject of much speculation, mystery and intrigue. Today, we discuss the fate of The Poe.

On September 27th, 2556 (Earth date), The Poe, a tourist vessel accessible to middle-class earners, was traveling to a series of colonies located in the asteroid belt. The manifest included thirty-eight crew members (including the captain), two thousand passengers, and their luggage. Nothing aboard the ship was deemed inherently dangerous. From the very beginning, the voyage appears to have had problems. Communications are to be maintained every hour on the hour for every space flight. The Poe seemed to have no communication with Earth at all. Despite time delays, each communique should arrive in a regular pattern. Earth did not receive a pattern at all. Nor did Mars or the asteroid colonies. It appears as if no one was tracking the ship. That was until about a decade ago when The Poe came back with no crew or passengers. 

The ship disappeared at Right Ascension 6h 15m 21s and Declination +23° 56′ 45″. It came back in exactly the same place it disappeared. Upon reviewing the black box of the ship, The Poe was sending communiques right on schedule. Reports done by a joint commission of the Earth Bureau of Investigation and the Interstellar Transportation and Safety Board state that the communiques were routine including ground responses. This begs a very important question: who was communicating with The Poe? The Cockpit Voice Recorder, or CVR, managed to pick up the voice of whoever was posing as Space Traffic Control. The EBI cross referenced the voice with all employees throughout the solar system. None of them matched the voice on the recorder. It’s clear in hindsight that The Poe’s communication line to STC was hijacked by someone. A popular theory was that it may have been a member of the terror group known as The Grims, though they have denied responsibility. On top of this, The Grims have never taken hostages and anyone killed in a Grim raid would be left on the ship as warning. In an effort to dispel the rumors, The Grims issued a statement that they checked among their ranks for a voice match. Their results were inconclusive. Whoever spoke to the pilot knew exactly what they were doing. No charges have been filed.

When the EBI and the ITSB brought the ship back for inspection, nothing seemed out of place. There were no signs of struggle aboard the ship. No escape pods had been jettisoned. The only thing out of the ordinary were raincoats littered throughout parts of the ship. Inside the cockpit were two sets of armor, also protected by raincoats. The scene, as described by the EBI was, as if the entire crew and passengers were conducting business as usual with the ship’s climate controls set to rain on everyone. Yet, all of the coats were dry. There was no sign that the ship had any water damage at all. There was no evidence of anyone tampering with the climate controls. One theory suggests that the ship along its flight path came too close to a star and the crew were simply flash vaporized upon coming into its proximity. But charting the ship’s flight path before the disappearance shows no stars in the area effectively debunking this theory. Strict adherents to the theory, however, give a potential reason to why raincoats specifically may have been littered throughout the ship. In cases of extreme hypothermia, it has been documented that some people will go through a state of paradoxical undressing. In a final push of survival, the brain sends signals through the body that core temperature is too hot. The victim acts accordingly and freezes to death. Though it has never been documented, some wonder if the inverse is true as well. Is it possible that in cases of extreme hyperthermia that individuals may go through a state of paradoxical dressing before death? Since no such phenomenon has been documented, we can only speculate.

Some have suggested that The Poe may have landed somewhere and the crew abandoned ship. However, the personal logs of the passengers and the black box suggest no such thing. The ship, according to all the available data, was on a regular flight path to its destination and the passengers suspected nothing was happening. “Whatever may have happened to them happened fast,” the official investigation claims. There have been no reported sightings of any crew or passengers in any capacity. There are no bodies or records of bodies anywhere within the vicinity. Investigators have also accounted for stellar drift and found nothing. The ship, according to the asteroid colonies, never got to its destination. It simply disappeared into the blackness of space and that was it as far as the data suggests.

Some have speculated that the ship may have run into a wormhole and the people aboard went somewhere outside of the known universe. However, no wormholes or anomalies were picked on Deep Space Telemetry at the time of the incident. While it could be a momentary lapse in the technology’s function, other sources like Mars and the colonies have corroborated that no such event occurred on a large enough scale to register on any settlement’s radar. A black hole would have simply destroyed the ship and no evidence would have been left and evidence of the black hole's existence would still be available today.

So, what happened? Are those who were aboard The Poe alive or dead? The final transmission of the ship is both disturbing and cryptic. The final bit of data searched by the EBI and the ITSB in regards to the incident was the captain’s log. The log for its majority is ordinary. Nothing indicates malice on the part of the captain or crew…until the final entry. In it, the final message reads: “23 11 8 6 21 8 4 23 24 21 8 12 22 6 4 15 15 12 17 10 24 22 16 4 2 12 23 22 23 8 17 7 21 12 15 22 10 24 12 7 8 24 22 23 18 23 11 8 12 17 9 12 17 12 23 8 16 4 2 18 24 21 5 18 7 12 8 22 5 8 17 18 24 21 12 22 11 16 8 17 23 9 18 21 23 11 12 22 6 18 22 16 12 6 22 8 21 19 8 17 23 23 11 8 4 17 6 12 8 17 23 11 18 21 21 18 21 6 4 15 15 22 24 22 26 8 4 21 8 11 18 16 8.” Isolated from this random string of numbers is the lone number 3. No one has deciphered what it means. All investigating parties believe, however, that it is the key to solving the mystery of The Poe Incident.