The reading room at the National Archives in College Park is dim by design. On a Tuesday in early spring, Dr. Hana Voss requested a routine batch of declassified Cold War files and received a manila folder marked only with a six-digit code. Inside lay a single brittle photograph, pressed between acid-free sheets and labeled enclosure. It is the first image of biological matter of confirmed non-human origin ever cleared for public release.

The photograph permits only limited observations. Bilateral symmetry. The skeletal articulation suggests bipedal locomotion. The cranium is markedly elongated. The arms are raised — a posture three forensic anthropologists, consulted independently, described as consistent with neither a defensive nor a submissive position in any documented terrestrial vertebrate. No identifiable musculature is visible. The photograph appears to have been taken under illumination that casts no shadow.

The file does not say where Vatreniak came from. It does not say whether others were recovered. It does not say whether the body — somewhere beneath the desert, in a room nobody is permitted to enter — is still being studied. The file is open now. The questions it raises are not.