IncidentTabby's Star / Boyajian's Star (KIC 8462852)

During the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 showed irregularly shaped, aperiodic flux dips (a ~15% drop in 2011, a ~22% drop in 2013) far too deep for a transiting planet. Citizen scientists in the Planet Hunters project flagged it, and Tabetha Boyajian led the 2015 paper ‘Where’s the Flux?’ (the ‘WTF star’). Penn State astronomer Jason Wright noted the dips were consistent with a Dyson swarm ‘made by an alien civilization’ while explicitly calling it implausible and disfavored by Occam’s razor - a falsifiable hypothesis worth checking, not a conclusion. SETI radio searches (Allen Telescope Array; later Breakthrough Listen) found no signals. Boyajian’s 2016 Kickstarter funded a year of Las Cumbres Observatory monitoring; the May 2017 dip (‘Elsie’) was caught in multiple colors, and a 2018 paper found the dimming chromatic - blue light blocked more than red - so the obscurer is partially transparent fine DUST, not an opaque solid. The canonical ‘alien megastructure’ candidate, a case where genuine weird data prompted a serious technosignature hypothesis that was then resolved by science to dust - a model of the correct epistemic arc: anomaly, ET hypothesis floated, SETI search, better data, natural explanation.