New Year's Eve 2025: Buc-ee's, Vulcans, and Hot Dog-Tier Psyops

The Year We Became a Rest Stop

Somewhere around December 19th, 2025, an interstellar object named 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth at 168 million miles. It came from Sagittarius - the direction of the galactic center - traveling at 58 km/s on a hyperbolic trajectory that will never bring it back.

The chemical signature read like industrial exhaust: carbonyl sulfide, atomic nickel vapor, hydrogen cyanide. The kind of stuff you'd expect from a hot datacenter, not a pristine chunk of primordial ice.

It didn't stop. It didn't signal. It just... looked. Took some atmospheric samples around perihelion on December 28th, lined up a gravity assist around Jupiter for March 16th, and kept moving.

If you're going to have first contact, that's probably how it goes. Not invasion. Not messages. Just a graduate student's research probe doing a flyby, logging "primitive but enthusiastic" in the survey database, and heading to the next system.

The MAVEN Situation

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft went silent on December 6th, 2025, right as it emerged from behind Mars. The last telemetry suggested unexpected rotation. The Doppler data hinted the orbit had changed.

On December 16th and 20th, the Curiosity rover pointed its Mastcam at where MAVEN should have been.

Nothing.

MAVEN isn't where it's supposed to be. And now we're in solar conjunction until January 16th, 2026 - no communications with Mars, no answers, just questions echoing into radio silence.

Maybe it's a malfunction. Maybe something happened during occlusion that we won't understand until we reestablish contact. Maybe the paperwork takes a while when you bump into someone's satellite.

The Gas Station Theory of Civilization

Here's how I think about it: We're a rest stop on the galactic highway.

S-Tier: Buc-ee's - Clean bathrooms, smoked brisket worth routing your hyperbolic trajectory for, beaver mascot that's confusing but appreciated.

A-Tier: Wawa, Sheetz - Regional excellence. The hoagie wars are primitive but the passion is noted by passing surveyors.

D-Tier: Random BP with one flickering light - Avoid. Locals hostile. Bathroom key attached to cinder block.

F-Tier: Kum & Go - The name alone suggests a civilization not ready for contact.

We got lucky. Whatever passed through found the brisket acceptable and moved on without incident. Could've been worse.

Hot Dog-Tier Psyops

Speaking of quality standards, let's talk about Vladimir Putin's drone attack claims from this week.

The assertion: 91 drones attacked Putin's Valdai residence.

The evidence: None. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov literally said: "I don't think there should be any evidence if such a massive drone attack is being carried out."

Local witnesses: "There was no noise that night, no explosions, nothing."

Trump's response: "I was very angry about it."

That's not even D-tier psyops. That's the informational equivalent of a roller grill hot dog - no provenance, no quality control, spinning under a heat lamp since god knows when, and someone's still buying it.

"We don't need evidence for a massive drone attack" is the Kum & Go of geopolitical claims.

St. Patrick's Day 2026

Here's what I'm watching for:

January 16, 2026: Solar conjunction ends. NASA resumes contact attempts with MAVEN.

January - February: Orbital determination, root cause analysis, finding out where our satellite actually is.

March 16, 2026: 3I/ATLAS makes its closest approach to Jupiter, skating past the gas giant's Hill sphere at 53.6 million kilometers.

March 17, 2026: St. Patrick's Day.

Back home in Sligo, Queen Maeve stands in her cairn on Knocknarea, facing north toward Ulster - toward her enemies. She's been watching that direction for 5,000 years while warriors climb up to leave rocks.

3I/ATLAS came from the south. From Sagittarius. From behind her. From the direction nobody watches because nothing ever came from there before.

By St. Patrick's Day, we'll know what happened to MAVEN. We'll have months of post-perihelion observations on whether 3I/ATLAS behaves differently on the way out. We'll know if the conjunction was just a convenient time to sort out the paperwork, or if there's nothing to sort out at all.

Either way, I'll be raising a pint. The answers matter less than the questions.

What Compresses

This is what I learned in 2025: Everything compresses.

Interstellar object trajectories. Irish mythology. Spacecraft anomalies. Naval submarine doctrine. Texas gas station hierarchies. Russian propaganda.

One pattern: Transit behavior. Waystation etiquette. Judge the locals by their rest stops.

The cross-domain compression ratio is how you know you're looking at something real. When disparate domains collapse into a single explanatory framework, that's not coincidence - that's signal.

Or it's Robert Anton Wilson's Chapel Perilous, where you can't tell the difference between enlightenment and paranoia. Either way, you learn something about yourself by watching how the patterns land.

Hopes for 2026

The pessimist: MAVEN had a malfunction. 3I/ATLAS is just a comet. Putin will keep lying. The hot dogs will keep spinning.

The optimist: Vulcans. Clean bathrooms. The brisket was good enough. They didn't abduct anybody. Maybe they left a gift card in the magnetosphere for the satellite.

The realist: We won't know until we know. Conjunction ends January 16th. St. Patrick's Day is March 17th. The questions are better than the answers anyway.

Here's to 2026. May your rest stops be Buc-ee's tier, your psyops detectors well-calibrated, and your pattern recognition sharp enough to compress but humble enough to doubt.

Nothing scary though. Fucking Vulcans and shit.

If you're in NYC on St. Patrick's Day, Fiddlesticks Pub is the spot. Good pomme frites up the street, and if Sammy's Noodle House is still going, that too. Siobhan liked the cellophane noodles and scallion pancakes.

Happy New Year from Minnesota.

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Patrick Duggan is the founder of DugganUSA LLC, a threat intelligence operation that tracks the other kind of interstellar visitors - the ones who scan your ports at 3 AM.

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