I was re-watching Godzilla a couple of nights ago, and the plot to a completely unrelated sci-fi story popped into my head. The problem is that I don’t know if I’m remembering something, or if it’s something I’ve just imagined.
Either way, it goes like this…
It starts off as a typical space travel story set in the earlyish days of space exploration, with a crew of people being one of, if not the first, manned teams to reach some sort of outer space destination. The moon, or Mars, or somewhere farther. They split up and do the standard exploration of a planet/moon and it’s going well until-
One or two crew members calls back to the others, telling them that they have to come see something. This person or pair has been wandering a part of the planet/moon that they weren’t previously able to look at in depth with satellites or unmanned rovers. The team gathers to see what they’ve found, and everyone is completely shocked.
Because what they’ve discovered is an abandoned colony, with several buildings that are obviously the well preserved remains of homes and businesses. And when they examine the insides of the ghost town, it becomes clear that the settlers were not moon people or Martians. All the artifacts inside the buildings heavily suggest that they are from the colonial or civil war era United States. They might discover a human skeleton or two.
The stunned crew is left with no other choice but to conclude that space travel is not new, and somehow humans had gone there before without history ever noting it. They are left pondering what other technological advances may have arisen and been buried by time as well.
So…is this the plot to something??