THE WASHINGTON POST – It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it Oumuamua, Hawaiian for a messenger from afar arriving first.
But what was it, exactly? A comet? An asteroid?
Or maybe… an alien spacecraft?
That conjecture incited headlines, as well as eyerolls from most scientists. But here in West Virginia, United States the people involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – commonly called SETI – decided to aim a giant radio telescope at it, just to be sure.
Aliens are having a moment. Fascination with the concept of extraterrestrial visitors isn’t new, but it has enjoyed a 21st-Century efflorescence. Military pilots have seen things that look otherworldly. The Pentagon has established an office to look into the sightings. Congress has held hearings. Even National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) got into the game, training the cool logic of science onto a scorching-hot cultural topic.
Somewhere along the line, unidentified flying objects (UFOs) got rebranded. UFOs are now, per government edict, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).
For SETI researchers, the hypothetical existence of aliens is foundational. Nestled in the remote mountain town of Green Bank, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has a role in one of the most ambitious SETI projects, called Breakthrough Listen.
The project buys time on the towering Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope, which has a steerable dish 300 feet in diametre. If there are aliens transmitting radio signals anywhere near us in the galaxy, that big dish is all ear.
Confirming an alien radio signal would be possibly the most consequential and disruptive scientific discovery of all time. SETI scientists have no doubt that the search is worth the effort.
“I think if we didn’t do that, and turned our back on our cosmological neighbours, that would be a sad thing for me,” chief scientist David MacMahon on Breakthrough Listen said this fall during a visit to Green Bank.
That’s why the Breakthrough Listen team pointed the big telescope at the mystery object Oumuamua, listening for signs of intelligent life.
“It was absolutely silent,” reported Matt Lebofsky, lead engineer on the project.
Silence: That is all astronomers have heard since the first SETI search was conducted at Green Bank in 1960.
Only a small fraction of our galaxy has been studied. Absence of evidence, as everyone knows, is not evidence of absence. Aliens may not consider radio waves to be a useful or dignified way to communicate. They could be pathologically shy. Or, at least with the kind of technology we have today, they could be just a little bit out of range.
For whatever reason, SETI has not found anyone out there and at some point the silence could get deafening.
The physicist Paul Davies has written that SETI is a search for a needle in a haystack without knowing if the needles are really there.
All possibilities remain in play. Including the possibility that we are alone.
UAPS AND THE RENEWED ALIEN OBSESSION
One day circa 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi was talking with fellow scientists about flying saucers and whether it might be possible, in theory, for an advanced alien species to cross the vast expanses of the galaxy by travelling faster than the speed of light.
Suddenly Fermi erupted: “But where is everybody?”
Thus was born the Fermi Paradox. The universe is big and old, and it is highly plausible that alien civilisations have evolved, based purely on statistical probabilities. Fermi posed his question in an era of technological revolutions, including computers and rocketry. It seemed possible humans would master space travel and explore the cosmos.
So why, he asked, is there no compelling scientific evidence that extraterrestrials have visited Earth?
Perhaps the simplest explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that there’s no paradox at all: They’re here!
The idea that mysterious things seen in the sky are alien spaceships has proved remarkably resilient. It has had some ups and downs and is now in an up phase.
It has found a warm reception recently in the halls of Congress, where the hypothesis has enjoyed bipartisan support amid a push for government disclosure of whatever anyone might know about extraterrestrials.
“The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E Schumer said this summer.
Republicans in the House convened a headline-grabbing hearing in July at which a former Air Force intelligence officer testified that he had been told that the United States is in possession not only of crashed spacecraft of non-human origin but also alien biologics. This is a relaunch of the 1947 Roswell, crashed-saucer story, rising Lazarus-like to annoy skeptics anew.
In September, a journalist in Mexico garnered global headlines by displaying to Mexico’s Congress what he claimed were the thousand-year-old mummified corpses of two three-fingered aliens.
Mexican scientists scoffed, appalled at the reputational damage caused by what one professor called a pseudoscientific event, which appeals to our fantasies, desires and fears.
The scientific community viewed the recent UAP mania as a cultural phenomenon, not an astrobiological one. There’s not much here that meets the standards science requires, such as evidence that is testable, reproducible, falsifiable.
That’s impossible with the conjectured existence of alien spaceships that have the amazing ability to disappear. And if someone said there’s alien hardware stashed in a warehouse somewhere, scientists want to see it, and poke and prod it and bite it and gnaw on it for awhile.
There have been many sightings of UAPs by credible witnesses, including military pilots.
Some remain unexplained and could have national security significance if the objects in question involve new technologies from foreign adversaries. But official government reports – including one from a special NASA task force – say there is no evidence that any of these things involve extraterrestrials.
SETI researchers occupy a unique and awkward niche amid the debate. Aliens, though hypothetical, are the reason they go to work. But they have chosen not to include an investigation of blurry, stealthy, here-and-gone UAPs as part of their mission, MacMahon said.
“SETI is not a belief system,” MacMahon said. “It’s a scientific methodology.”