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The Thargoids are out there in Elite Dangerous

Aliens arrive in EliteDangerous.

Robert Bettig jumped into the Aries Dark System, a bounty hunter on his tail. “I knew it was going to be a long, boring trip so I just settled in and grabbed a cold beer. I wasn’t even really paying attention,” he tells PC Gamer. This is routine stuff for a player with over 2,000 hours in Elite Dangerous. What happened next was anything but.

Bettig’s ship flashed up “hyperspace conduit unstable” and he was ripped out of hyperspace. This was new. Being pulled out of a jump between systems was, until that moment, impossible.

“I had no idea what was going on,” Bettig says. “My first thought was am I going to survive this? I have no idea what is happening. And then the first thing I see is that stupid bounty hunter in an Anaconda.” The opportunistic hunter took a few potshots at Bettig, but was soon dwarfed by a new arrival—one that had never before been seen in Elite Dangerous. An alien ship.

The ship, a sort of angry chitinous space flower, fired a bright green beam at him. “I thought I was getting microwaved—that this guy was just going to eat me for dinner,” Bettig says. “I had no control over my ship, all I could do was look around. At that point I just resigned myself to it. I was shaking so bad.” The UFO shut off its beam and jumped away.

Since Bettig’s encounter, many more sightings have been reported. The UFO is thought to belong to the Thargoids, an alien race last seen in 1995’s Frontier: First Encounters. The presence of mysterious, unexplained artifacts had hinted at other forms of sentient life, but now they’re here.

Frontier has kept mostly silent about the event, although it did tweet the video of Bettig’s encounter with the message: “A report just coming through that a CMDR has experienced something... strange.” In the most recent Elite Dangerous newsletter, Frontier wrote only that, “we are intrigued by the findings of these brave Commanders, and can’t wait to see what the scientific community do with the information they’ve gathered so far.” You can see Bettig’s footage by visiting www.bit.ly/Thargoids. Phil Savage