Alien Warship Spotted

After removing the film reel from the machine, Reed asked, "Do you have a darkroom for developing photos?"

"Yes," Hank said, pointing to a corner of the laboratory. There was a room with a thick black curtain hanging over the door.

Reed held the camera up to the light, confirmed his target image, and made a mark next to it with a sticky note. He then asked, "What photo developing method are you using here? C-41 or RA-4?"

"C-41," Hank replied.

"Was the developer self-prepared?"

"It's also from Kodak."

Do you have ammonium thiosulfate, sodium acetate, sodium bisulfite, ammonium sulfate, aluminum sulfate, and boric acid?

"You're going to mix the developer yourself?" Hank asked.

"To highlight different color blocks, the developer formula naturally needs to be adjusted. Moreover, the company's standard developer is only suitable for developing general landscape photos; it's not suitable for photos taken in outer space, as it easily loses many key details."

With that, Hank cooperated with Reed to prepare some materials and enter the darkroom.

Although they were developing film reels, not regular camera negatives, both were skilled researchers with hands-on abilities, certainly not the kind of novices who couldn't do anything without standard tools.

So whatever tools or stands you need, if you don't have any readily available, you just have to find something to make do; clips and rubber bands will do. After a lot of tinkering, the two of them finally managed to develop the problematic photos.

After the photo had fully developed, been washed, and dried, Hank was stunned. He asked, "What is this?"

The photo shows a spindle-shaped man-made object with a peculiar appearance, obscuring a small patch of the starry sky. Not only does it almost blend into the background, but the reflections on the object can also be mistaken for starlight.

This is why it's not very noticeable during normal video playback. Only through special processing can this part be highlighted. This is equivalent to future Photoshop techniques that use filters, contrast adjustments, and other methods to emphasize different aspects of an image.

The two left the darkroom, Reed used a magnifying glass to examine the unidentified object in the photograph, saying, "I reasonably suspect that when you carried out the mission to save the Endeavour, there was a third spacecraft in outer space besides the Endeavour shuttle and the X-Men's fighter jets."

"Based on the contents of this photo, I estimate that the aircraft is about two to three kilometers away from you. The aircraft is about 600 to 800 meters long, 60 to 100 meters wide, and 120 to 140 meters high."

"There are no obvious reference coordinates, so the data is all estimated. But your relative position hasn't changed much. So I suspect this aircraft observed your mission from beginning to end."

No intervention was involved.

"You—" Hank swallowed hard before asking, "Which faction do you think this aircraft belongs to? The Red Empire?"

Reed bluntly stated, "What If...? the Red Empire could build something like this, they wouldn't have disintegrated. It could only be aliens."

"Aliens!" This word had recently shaken Hank McCoy's fragile Mind Stone several times. He immediately thought of the man who had saved Raven and also defeated the X-Men —although the two sides hadn't really fought to the death.

Hank asked, "What do you think these aliens' purpose is?"

Reed, finding the answer uninteresting, placed the photo on the platform, allowing Hank to approach and examine it from all angles. He then replied:

"I suspect there are a few possibilities. First, it wasn't cosmic radiation from Sun Pharma flare, but some kind of weapon or experimental weapon from these aliens. They were hiding to observe the results."

"Secondly, that alien came to observe Earth's spacecraft that can enter outer space and assess our technological level. What they will do after that assessment, I can't guess. Anyway, there are only a few possibilities."

"Thirdly, they just happened to be passing by. They saw something interesting, so they stopped to watch. Anyway, they didn't suffer any losses, nor did they hinder your operations. If I hadn't warned them, you wouldn't have even noticed."

Hank felt somewhat wronged by Reed's criticism.

The Blackbird, X-Jet incorporating all the latest technologies, has an onboard radar that is superior to other fighters of its time, but it primarily targets spacecraft developed on Earth, and there's no indication that it's designed to detect alien spacecraft.

Furthermore, even the Blackbird possesses radar stealth capabilities, while optical stealth is still under research. Would alien spacecraft lack such technology?

The fact that they couldn't see any trace of the spacecraft in ordinary external footage also indirectly proves the stealth capabilities of extraterrestrial technology.

In contrast to Reed Richards, who focused his attention on the peculiar cosmic radiation energy, Hank was more concerned about the potential impact of this unnamed spaceship.

Alien invasions have always been a favorite theme in science fiction. But even if Mutants exist in this world,

There are superheroes, and all sorts of legendary or mythical Alien creatures, but nobody ever imagined that aliens would get involved one day.

So what is their purpose? Before confirmation, it's difficult to guarantee that they are completely unrelated to that cosmic radiation.

So what role will the piano, which has absorbed the radiation, play in this process?

Suppressing the urge to immediately inform Charles and Raven, Hank continued to accompany Reed in studying the observational data of cosmic radiation.

Although the screen was full of raw data, time information, and other information, neither of them were ordinary scientists, so they needed to convert the data into more intuitive graphics to understand it.

For the average person looking at this kind of information, they might try to cross-reference different groups of data and transform them into various graphs to see if any of them can tell a story, or what is called a "reasonable explanation."

But such work, whether done by Reed Richards or Hank McCoy, could be done directly in their minds. Those obviously meaningless groupings and interpretations were simply discarded.

During the discussion, a sudden inspiration struck Reed. He asked, "What visualization tools do you have here?"

"Well, I designed this myself. What do you want to do with it?" Hank asked.

"You designed it yourself. That's fine too." Reed left his seat, made Hank sit in it, and began to explain what kind of graph he wanted to convert the data into, and then print it out.

After describing several conversion methods and images, Reed printed out four or five images using a noisy dot-matrix printer, then stacked the images together and held them up to the light.

Upon closer inspection, even Hank, who hadn't noticed anything amiss before, realized something was wrong. Because the overlapping images...

A certain pattern has emerged.

Such a pattern is impossible to occur with Sun Pharma flares. Or even if it did occur, the time frame would be extremely long, lasting days, weeks, or months.

The time period Reed used was only ten minutes. Within those ten minutes, the overlapping images showed a pattern that repeated dozens of times.

"Could this thing be alive?" Hank exclaimed in Shocker.

"I don't know either," Reed asked. "Could I have a copy of the complete data? I can use my equipment when I get back and maybe I can find more results."

After a moment's thought, Hank replied, "The data must not be leaked to anyone other than you. Furthermore, we need to know your research findings. Do you agree to these conditions?"

"Can."