In Chapter 81 of Disclosing the Secret, Jake Marcel comes face to face with one of the Voyager spacecrafts that was launched in 1977. They were sent out into the solar system study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune along with their accompanying moons. As of August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 had become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, traveling further than anyone, or anything, in history.

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 carried with them a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk (phonograph record) containing a message intended to communicate their place of origin and the story of our world to extraterrestrials that may find the spacecraft in the distant future.

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. The diagrams imprinted on the cover protecting the 12-inch gold-plated copper disk gives instructions on how to play the record, a map showing the distance of our sun to the 14 closest pulsars and a diagram of the hydrogen atom.

It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system.

[Source: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov]