The letter is written in utterly atrocious handwriting (you can barely puzzle it out) in ink on middling quality business stationary. At the top is printed Douglas McNamara, MD, Quadleford, New Mars.
Dear Pilgrims,
I'm afraid that there's about to be a terrible mistake made here on New Mars, and I hope you folks can do something to prevent it. I think it's really a communications problem, but it's about to turn into war or something a whole lot like it.
You'll need to know something about the history behind things, which is a bit unusual. You see, as far back as there are records, once every decade or so a fleet of silvery flying saucer-shaped airships visits New Mars. Except visits isn't exactly the right term -- swoops down upon is a bit closer. They fill the skies for days on end, silently flying this way and that way or just hovering. And sometimes they shoot down gold beams of light that lift up people, plants and animals.
It's real strange on board those saucer ships! Everything's made of metal, and the lighting is either dim and blue or dim and red. The crew's a pretty strange, too, being short as children, slender, hairless and gray skinned with enormous black eyes. And they never talk to you -- they only show you these slate-like things covered with weird symbols that move.
When you're on those ships, you can't really move -- you only lie there on metal slabs while the crew examines you, or sticks things into you or gives you weird liquids to drink. Needless to say, most folks find this pretty scary, but there's no actual evidence of anyone really being harmed by them (and that, I think, is important).
Anyway, the people of New Mars have gotten real tired of these saucer ships coming by every ten or so years, and recently they elected a new government who ran on platform of putting these visits to an end. So, they bought plans for anti-aircraft cannons from one of our neighboring worlds, and have been building them by the score. More so, they've been buying all sorts of stuff and hiring all sorts of people. We have dragons and wizards, air-battleships and ray cannons, and god knows what else waiting for the saucers to reappear. It's very likely to get ugly when they do.
And the worst part of it? I think the saucer folk have doing their best to help us. Now, I'm just a simple county doctor, but I remember a few of my classes at medical school, and in particular I remember my epidemiology. I've done some studies, and the folks on New Mars are far healthier than they ought to be. We live a fair bit longer, we avoid epidemics like the cycles of influenza that hit all of our neighbors, and we have fewer cases of cancer and far fewer cases of senile dementia.
Now, it might have been because we all come from tough, frontier stock. But it isn't. You see, you see the life expectancy and rates of infection and the like are the same for immigrants who have been here for one saucer visit as it is for native born, but the numbers for immigrants who have not been through a visit pretty much match those for their home worlds.
I tried to bring these facts to the attention of the government, but remember how they got elected by promising to do something about the saucers? They didn't much like my theories, and in fact, they've thrown me in jail as a "suspected alien collaborator" without even the formality of a trial. And I'm not the only one, either. In the cell across from mine is the famous mathematician Ingrid O'Neil, who made the mistake of claiming that she could decipher the messages on the saucer folk's moving slates using mathematics, and they said things like "we come in peace" and such. So I afraid those saucer folk are heading for a massacre unless you can send some pilgrims to stop it.
One of jail guards (who doesn't much like this business of holding people without trial) has promised to leave this letter in a graveyard with a silver penny for me, so it'll get to your temple as quickly as possible.