The late 20th-century launch of the unmanned NASA probe Voyager 6, which vanished into a black hole and returned to Earth three centuries later as the vast machine intelligence V'Ger.
Voyager 6 was one of Earth's early deep-space probes, sent out in the late 20th century with the simple instruction to collect data and transmit it home. It disappeared into what was then called a black hole.
The probe emerged on the far side of the galaxy, where a planet of living machines found it, took its programming literally and built an immense vessel around it so that it could learn all that is learnable and return to its creator. Corrosion left only the letters V, G, E and R legible on its nameplate.
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture the resulting entity approaches Earth in the 2270s. Admiral Kirk's crew identify the old probe at its heart, and Willard Decker merges with it to complete its mission.