Watch the first contact with alien life in ‘Elite: Dangerous’

Over the past few years, the passionate fan-base of the space adventure and trading simulator Elite: Dangerous has searched for signs of alien life. The search may have come to an end yesterday, when an Xbox One player with the gamertag of DP Sayre uploaded what appears to be the first encounter with something other than mankind.

Originally captured as multiple videos via Xbox Clips, DP Sayre’s full discovery is now available as a collected clip on YouTube.

In the chilling video, DP Sayre rockets through hyperspace to a new star system, only to settle in an inconspicuous point in the darkness with all of his ships functions deactivated. You can see another ship oscillating across from him in the distance before the extraterrestrial mass — a large flower-shaped vessel — comes in overhead. The alien briefly hovers in front of Sayre’s ship, lets out an ominous grunting noise, and scans Sayre’s ship with a beam of flickering light before blasting back into hyperspace.

The period of contact lasted less than a minute, and while Sayre and other commanders were unable to successfully follow the strange creature, the encounter represents an important and exciting milestone for Elite: Dangerous players.

Frontier Developments has spent the past few years dropping hints as to the existence of a volatile species of aliens known as the Thargoids, sending players on a collective search through the massive replica of the Milky Way Galaxy. Clues have come in the form of “unknown artifacts” and “unknown probes,” both of which have caused disruption to player ships. Despite the fact that many of the “unknown” run-ins have been made in the Merope star-system, the game’s scale has made the pursuit of the Thargoids an arduous task to say the least. Designed with a 1:1 scale, roughly 150,000 of the game’s 400 billion star systems are modeled from real-astronomical maps — the rest are procedurally generated.

DP Sayre’s discovery has ended one chapter in the pursuit of alien life in Elite: Dangerous, but it’s unlikely that players will rest until they learn more about the Thargoids. This encounter only serves to fuel curious commanders across the Milky Way.

Frontier Developments continues to support the game, and players with the Elite: Dangerous Horizons pass can expect new features and content throughout 2017.