NASA Extrastellar Oversight Committee, excerpted debriefing notes #32888, date [redacted]

….Don’t be an idiot. Of course we tested for behavioral effects. Of course we did. You don’t splice grizzly DNA into astronauts to enable hibernation and NOT test for behavioral effects. And frankly, the changes were beneficial, if anything. A slight increase in solitary behavior, but that’s not bad for a long-term mission. Overly social crews inevitably skew chaotic as channels of interdependence arise, and social capital slews back and forth across them. A touch of the solitary is valuable for a long-haul astronaut- so long as it doesn’t descend into misanthropy, and there was certainly no indication of that.

And yes, we tested for changes in crisis situations – we had whole crews fly the entire star route backwards and forwards in simulation, introducing all sorts of surprises, threats, and complications, and never saw anything like what happened at Alpha Proxima.

But I suppose that’s the thing. The grizzly overlay didn’t dim intellect (would have been useless if it had), and at some level the astronauts had to know that those drills were just drills, that the simulator ships were just CGI and haptics. And so in some private corner of their minds they remained relaxed, calm. In the moment. But when the interstellar scout Parnassus was intercepted in real space by envoys of the Salidirician Empire, and the crew woken mid-slumber to find themselves surrounded by what seemed to be a hostile force, they reacted purely on instinct.

Lots and lots of instinct.

We did try explaining to the Salidiricians that this was all accidental in nature, that we were happy to return their homeworld to them, and offer our aid in rebuilding their fleet. Even ferry over a few psychologists to try and help them collectively grapple with the after-effects. The only point of reluctance on our part, and this is what I was trying to explain to Congress earlier, is that our Ag Division has been doing just stellar, nearly miraculous work with the 85,000 tons of extra-terrestrial nuts and berries they’ve been sending us as tribute every month.