"Are you, are you comin' to the tree
Where I told you to run, so we'd both be free?
Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be
If we met at midnight in the hanging tree"
The strangest thing is that, up until now, no one has ever seen what the spacemen look like.
Their attacks are always carried out by white, cylinder-shaped spaceships. The media like to call them 'worms'. Our armies succeeded to shoot down some of them, and our scientists tried to analyze them. They reported that there are operation systems, suggesting that the spaceship is not purely autonomous, but they did not find any operators in the spaceships.
There are other strange things. The Union has tried to set up in order to deter the spacemen from approaching the earth. But when the spaceships appear but seem to appear from nowhere. They bypass all the defense systems and head directly to the earth's atmosphere. So the physicists think that the spacemen may have already figured out how to do black hole jumping.
My team worked closely with physicists and mathematicians these years. As the senior students graduated and left the team one by one, I saw my supervisor Mr. Truman visibly aged. He is an interesting British-American gentleman, although sometimes he seems a bit distant. Before the war, he was already working on some physics-related machine learning, like plasma control. So he became very popular among the officers since the war began.
I spent all Christmas, in fact, all major feast days at his house these years. So is today. I'm sitting on the sofa, listening to him play the piano. He is very good at piano.
I have always been wondering how he moved such a big guy onto the island. As I remember that when we were allocated to the island, even the senior professors need to obey the luggage weight limits. But of course, I would not really ask such a silly question.
But this year, we got a rather unique New Year gift.
Mr. Truman received an urgent call and remained silent for a long time.
Then he spoke to the crowd, almost like a New Year toast,
"They found that the spacemen are really jumping from black holes. The first one observed is from Sagittarius A*."