It takes a while, but eventually you learn that the Spinners have tried to contact Earth for help three times before. The first time, when the Soviets sent Sputnik to space in 1957, they did not visit themselves, but sent coded signals. They thought that the advent of the Space Age would mean that we could communicate with them, but we didn’t understand their signals as anything other than cosmic background noise.
The second time, of course, was when the lights appeared above Waterloo, and Dr. Valentina kept her journal.
The third was at the beginning of the Internet Age; again, their messages were lost among the flotsam and jetsam of the World Wide Web. There was simply too much information to notice them.
And now, their fourth and final plea, their Hail Mary, has found an audience – perhaps because they returned to the last place they successfully made contact.
They say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.