LOS ANGELES – In what might be the strangest case to date of life imitating art, scientists at Quantum Mechanix Inc.’s Precognitive Prop Research Division (PPRD) announced today they have discovered the real-life analog to the fictitious star cluster known as The Verse, after a close examination of The Complete and Official Map of The Verse, published by PPRD’s parent company.

According to PPRD spokesperson Leland Serra, the discovery was an accident. “A couple of our scientists who monitor the Hubble – and when I say ‘monitor’ I mean hijack the space telescope when NASA scientists are off at their weekly poker game – were a little bored one night and decided to point the Hubble in the general direction of where our map says The Verse should be,” Serra said.

“No one – with the possible exception of NASA – was more surprised than they were when they actually found something,” Serra concluded.

The two scientists, whose names have been withheld pending disciplinary action, reported their findings immediately to the PPRD Executive Director Malcolm Jackson. “We couldn’t believe our luck – bad luck – when those two idiots also called NASA to report what they’d found,” Jackson said. “Believe me, the last phone call you want to get at 3 a.m. is some NASA bureaucrat saying, ‘You got some ‘splainin’ to do!’ I mean, who the frak quotes I Love Lucy anymore?”

What the two idiotic researchers had found was a hitherto unmapped cluster of five primary stars in close proximity to each other – with a larger central star around which all the others orbited.

There was also strong evidence to suggest the stars had “many bodies” in stable orbits. In fact, PPRD Astronavigation Specialist and Big Science Brain Roslin Carter went so far as to say the cluster has “dozens of planets and hundreds of moons.”

“You know what? Now that we know it’s there, I bet we could build a giant rag-tag fleet of ark ships and get there, say, in a couple hundred years,” Carter said. “With all those planets and moons, it shouldn’t be too hard to find some we can make habitable.”

“And maybe then I could afford a house in the ‘burbs on what they pay around here,” she concluded.

NASA had no comment on the possibility of a mass exodus to The Verse. However, in an unrelated announcement made 37 seconds after our call, the agency changed its name to the “National ALLIANCE for Space Acquisitions.”

When asked why the sudden name change, NASA would only reply it was a better fit with their new, undisclosed charter. Plus, they wouldn’t have to change the letterhead.

Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, Serenity and The Verse, when asked to comment on the discovery, only had this to say: “It’s about time!”

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