Here's something interesting I haven't seen a lot of people point out. The Borealis kind of reminds me of the Philadelphia Experiment, where supposedly a U.S. Navy ship just mysteriously vanished around October 28, 1943 from a test conducted by the U.S. Navy with technology that was supposed to make the ship invisible. I don't believe this story is true at all, but it's interesting to point out the similarities. I imagine Marc Laidlaw used this urban legend as inspiration.
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure that when Laidlaw was approached about this, he said that "he had it in the back of his mind" when writing iirc