The first space probe to visit the planet Yuggoth (a.k.a. "Pluto") has just blasted off from Cape Canaveral.
The planet will not arrive until 2015, so we have at least nine years of safety before the Yuggoth-spawn, the dreaded "Mi-Go," are contacted by the space ship, risking an interplanetary and even interstellar incident that may threaten the sanity and survival of the human race!
Here is what NASA will find when its optimistically named "New Horizons" mission reaches Pluto:
There are mighty cities on Yuggoth – great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad – yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges – things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids – ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.
But remember – that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters.
The Yuggoth spawn may already be aware of the New Horizons mission, for they may have directed their thought-currents toward Earth to induce our scientists to mount the mission in the first place, in hopes of making contact with mankind–on their own turf and on their own terms!
Indeed, it was through such a directed thought experiment that they first caused our scientists to discover their sinister planet!
Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system – beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as "Yuggoth" in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers become sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so.
It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system – unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discovered – or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.
Indeed, their thought-currents may have also induced H. P. Lovecraft to write his story "The Whisperer In Darkness," from which the above quotes are taken–for he was working on the story at the time that Pluto was discovered and he immediately realized it was the dark Yuggoth that had inspired his literary creation:
Those wild [Vermont] hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race – as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth – and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.
What new policy do the Yuggoth spawn have in store for mankind?
We’ll find out in 2015!