Alternative 3 was devised as an elaborate 1977 April Fool about missing scientists, environmental catastrophe and a secret human colony on Mars. Then a scheduling delay removed the joke’s most obvious clue, viewers panicked, and fiction began its long migration into conspiracy culture.

Blind Willie Johnson recorded “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” in Texas in 1927 with little more than slide guitar, humming and a lifetime of gospel tradition. Fifty years later, NASA chose that wordless blues lament to help explain humanity to whoever might someday find Voyager beyond the Solar System.

The history of the Ouija board begins not with demons but with Victorian Spiritualism, Baltimore entrepreneurs and a remarkably successful 1891 patent for a “toy or game.” What began as a faster way of receiving messages from the dead became a mass-market novelty, psychological experiment and eventually one of horror culture’s most recognisable objects.