SOLVED. Scifi book - Alien Contact, sending a space ship to space to meet them, someone “betrays” the plan, aliens wipe humans memories and send them back to Earth, no one remembers meeting the aliens and think the mission failed.

[Rach scifi.book.club]

Hey wondering if you could help me track down the first ever sci fi book I remember reading? I was in 4th grade, 1994. It was a book I borrowed from my teacher's library.

What I remember of the plot, which unfortunately reminds me of lots of sci fi books: alien signal detected in the outer solar system. Earth sends two ships out there. As they approach (uranus/Neptune/outer solar system) we discover that not everyone on the ships has the best motives/intentions. They get there, some drama unfolds, our protagonist tries to convince the aliens that we are ready to meet them. He had some sort of psychic connection with them, but ultimately fails. They wipe everyone's minds and send them back earthward, with everyone thinking the mission was a failure.

I know it's a long shot, but does that ring a bell?

Thanks in advance!

[Rach scifi.book.club]

Hopefully this rings a bell with someone - I know it’s a pretty common sci-fi theme...

[Kris]

Please note you can bump your request (post a comment) every 30+ days, not more often because this group is so large -- unless you have new information for share.

[Kat]

Following because this sounds interesting.

[Rach scifi.book.club]

SOLVED it was First Contact? By Hugh Walters. I’ve read through the rules and I can see I need to move this post, but I’ve logged on to the desktop site and I can’t find where to do that - if anyone can action on this post to show it’s solved that would be appreciated!

[Kris]

Glad you found your book, Rach. Here's the link for First Contact? by Hugh Walters. I marked your request as Solved by clicking the small "edit" link after the topic header (i.e., "... aliens and think the mission failed. (edit)"