Vok

The Vok are a mysterious race of energy-based aliens who transcend space and time.

Biology
In their true form, the Vok generally resemble floating ghost-like skulls with colorful, glowing eyes.

Culture and society
The Vok are a highly evolved species that is vast, cool, unsympathetic, and firmly committed to their enigmatic agenda. They tend to use primitive worlds like Earth as enormous laboratories to conduct strange and sometimes contradictory terraforming experiments intended to accelerate and alter the development of sapient life. However, these lofty goals rarely survive contact with the warlike Cybertronians, whose careless blunderings invariably contaminate and jeopardize the Vok's long-term ambitions.

Although the Vok guard their secrets jealously, they rarely take direct action unless the situation calls for it. More often, the Vok will deploy autonomous weapons or a network of empowered proxies. In extreme situations, they may "sterilize" a failed experiment by deploying planetary superweapons.

Technology
The Vok have reached an apex of technological sophistication as far beyond the Cybertronians as the Cybertronians are to humans.

History
The Vok were dedicated to "The Project", which consisted of enigmatic, sometimes contradictory plans for the planet. As a result of these experiments, there were a number of anomalies on the Earth, including several floating landmasses, a mysterious stone formation, and a hollowed-out moon.

Origins

 * In the course of writing the Beast Wars television show, the co-story editors had conflicting ideas on who the Vok were. Bob Forward liked to imagine the Vok as the evolutionary endpoint of all sentient life in the universe, shaping the development of other races in order to guide them eventually into becoming Vok themselves. Meanwhile, Larry DiTillio wanted to link the Vok to the Swarm, who had completely wiped-out humanity and wished to atone for their crimes in his version of the events of the Generation 2 comic book. Neither origin made it into the television show before it completed.
 * Note that a Swarm-based origin raises continuity questions, as the Swarm were shown to have become enlightened only after an intervention of sorts from Optimus Prime in "A Rage in Heaven!", whom the Vok would have preemptively killed 4 million years earlier when their Planet Buster weapon destroyed prehistoric Earth. Ultimately, the Swarm origin was published as backstory for 3H's "Primeval Dawn" storyline and IDW's Beast Wars Sourcebook.
 * The Beast Wars Universe book, working off interviews and notes from the series writers, says that the Vok's experiments on Earth were part of an attempt to further evolve Humanity, as the Vok had destroyed the human race while existing as the Swarm, and they wished to rebuild all the races they had destroyed. It states that the Energon crystals were seeded so that they would become Energon cubes by the time Humanity came about. This would give them a reliable fuel source which would not harm the environment, as Energon actually provided nutrients to the soil of the planet and did not harm its animals.
 * The book also explains that the Vok attempted to play the role of God for humans, intending to guide their development and reveal their true nature once the Vok felt the humans were ready. The Vok have also been forced to destroy and recreate Earth several times before the events of "Other Voices, Part 2", all the while subtly manipulating the timestream after they did. Only contact with Tigatron made them unsure if this was a good idea.
 * One of their other motivations was to turn the Cybertronians into a smaller race that could better interact with organics, and therefore become the friends and protectors of the galaxy. To do this, they created protoforms and dumped them on Cybertron, forcing the evolution into Maximals and Predacons. Only high-ranking figures like the High Council and Optimus Prime know that protoforms have an alien origin.
 * Another idea was that sparks are pieces of Vok, that the composite bits of the Vok want to be individuals, so they separate into good and evil sparks, entering newly built Cybertronians. Once the Cybertronian dies, their spark rejoins the Matrix, properly known as the Vok Nebula, and becomes a new, changed Vok. Obviously, this idea has been totally nullified by later Hasbro-published canon, though the Allspark has some similarity to the Vok Nebula idea.
 * The canonicity of these claims is dubious at best, as they are basically all wish-lists of authorial intent published years after the fact in obscure, non-English media, they never appeared in any actual story material, and some items (such as the notion that the Vok created sparks too) were rendered flatly impossible by later in-fiction revelations.