In the long human effort to determine whether intelligence exists beyond our own world, the James Webb Space Telescope has offered a clarifying lesson: two of seven candidate stars once thought to radiate the waste heat of alien megastructures were, in fact, chance alignments with distant galaxies whose infrared light had been mistaken for something far closer and far stranger. The discovery, drawn from Webb's sharper gaze upon candidates flagged by Project Hephaistos, does not diminish the search — it refines it, demonstrating that the discipline of elimination is itself a form of progress. S