Disappearing Vessels

It has been a few hours since five small craft left the Enterprise to take crew down to the surface of this beautiful class-M planet. These auxiliary vessels – the Pullman-class transports, Aurora and Volante; two class-7 shuttles, Hawking and the Marine shuttle, Arizona; as well as my own personal type-6 shuttle, the Eagle -- were carrying science personnel, crew on leave to go camping or hiking, Tessa, Cassie, and a few civilians looking to explore an unexplored planet. Unfortunately, as soon as they entered the atmosphere, and began descending to the surface, they disappeared. All five vessels vanished without a trace.

Subsequent sensor sweeps have shown no sign of the vessels in the atmosphere, or on the planet. Communications are also down; we cannot raise the vessels on any channel. And there don’t appear to be any other starships in the area. Captain Picard ordered a probe to be sent down to the planet, and it too vanished (and stopped transmitting). We have no idea what happened to the vessels, or where they went.

86 of our crew are now missing.

In light of this incident, Captain Picard has halted all additional transports down to the planet, and all appropriate departments are analyzing sensor data, surface scans, heat maps, and any other data useful to this search. Right now, though, we have no answers.

We have 86 missing personnel. We will do everything we can to find them.

-Lieutenant Sam Archer

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February 25, 2365 -- (Original Devron Timeline)