A few months back, Unknown Artifacts began popping up in various systems throughout the galaxy of Elite:Dangerous.  Some transmitted in morse code, others just seemed to sit there. The collective player base scratched their heads and set out to find out what, exactly, these artifacts were all about. The forum thread detailing commander’s efforts to decipher these artifacts is long, impressive and worth a read if you have some spare time.

To make a long story short however, it was revealed that while some were in fact morse code scans of nearby objects others retained there secrets. Until recently when a player by the name of Mike Juliett Kilo fed a pre-recorded unknown artefact signal into a scanner in his cargo and got back the following image:

To those not in the know, this is a wireframe depiction of the Vulture spacecraft, the ship which Kilo happened to be flying at the time. As he said to the official Elite Community site at the time: “I was prepared to see an alien face or Thargoid warship. I certainly didn’t expect to see a Vulture, especially as I was flying one at the time! It sent shivers down my spine.”

Thargoids are the alien race that has featured in some previous Elite games, notable for being insectoid and thouroughly in love with blowing things up.

Frontier, of course has remained coy on the entire matter, stating that the artifacts are only the beginning. Of what, we don’t know.