In 1967 an extra-terrestrial signal was received, here is the story of the plan to cover it up.

Could secrets like this be kept in the internet age? What are the chances of an alien signal being kept quiet?

K

I want to comment on this when I'm not at work and have more time because the question you ask is an interesting one. Anyway, under the right circumstances, the answer is yes. I cannot actually tell the story, so I will have to be creative. More later.......

Real ETs don't need radio signals. End of story.

That is so brilliant it's almost tempting just to delete the first three posts and replace them with this. I will put it at the end of the third post instead. I'm going to try that technique with Citizen Kane now.

Fat man loved sledging. End of story.



K

There are NO alien civilisations trying to communicate with us via radio waves and never have been.

brain-condition

That sounds very intriguing and mysterious.....



K

You guys are going to poop your pants when the truth comes out about our secret space mission we've had since the 40's. Those space signals those dudes picked up in the 60's were from our own space vehicle communications.

ET communications.....ha! That story is a cover to hide our secret space developments. You guys fall for it every time.

You guys are going to poop your pants when the truth comes out about our secret space mission we've had since the 40's. Those space signals those dudes picked up in the 60's were from our own space vehicle communications.

ET communications.....ha! That story is a cover to hide our secret space developments. You guys fall for it every time.

Part 1 - Unearthly heartbeat.

Martin Ryle sat behind his desk in the Mullard radio astronomy observatory and addressed his deputy Anthony Hewish, "Tony, if this signal does turn out to be an alien intelligence then I want to you to destroy the telescope and the results. You and your team must never speak of this, we can't risk any fool wanting to talk back to these aliens, the world would be in grave danger"

Fortunately for Ryle, his deputy did not let him down and for his part Sir Martin Ryle would later receive the Nobel prize, and the post of Astronomer Royal.

Ryle was born into a family of intellectuals. His father and uncle were both Oxbridge professors. Ryle was following in their footsteps when his studies were interrupted by the Second World War. During the war Ryle worked on radar antennae and was quickly gripped by the possibilities of radio astronomy.

Ryle pioneered the technique of aperture synthesis radio astronomy at Cambridge University. This allowed radio astronomers to see the sky in unprecedented detail, to pick out individual stars for the first time. In 1967 Ryle authorised his deputy Tony Hewish to build the most advanced radio telescope in the world. Manchester university had already built the impressive Jodrell Bank telescope [link to i.telegraph.co.uk] but Hewish's Interplanetary Scintillation Array would be on a different scale altogether. Constructed in a cold and windy fenland field the four acre array, 4AA as it would become know, looked rather agricultural. It consisted of 1000 wooden posts, driven into the ground by graduate students and strung together with 125 miles of wire, like a high tech vineyard. The 4AA was to be grazed by sheep to keep the grass down [link to www.phy.cam.ac.uk] . One of the students working on it was Hewish's doctoral student Jocelyn Bell. Bell was left in charge of the 4AA and pretty soon after it was switched on it began to pick up strange signals.

It was Bells job to search through the hundreds of feet of paper trace print out each evening and scrutinise them for anything interesting. She said "In those days there were very few computers, you used graduate students instead". One July evening Bell saw something unusual in the paper trace, it would have been so easy to miss. She later described the signal as "a little scruff of data". By carefully analysing it she found a regular repeating signal with a period of 1.337 seconds. It later turned out to be as regular as any atomic clock of that age.

At first Hewish was convinced that Bell's discovery was a man made signal but by a process of elimination Hewish was left to conclude that what they were looking at was a deliberately produced alien signal. The signal quickly acquired the name LGM-1 for little green men 1. It was at this point the secretive and cautious Ryle issued his instructions.....

K

Part 3 - The signal in plain sight

Jocelyn Bell was devastated to hear from her doctoral advisor they they may have to burn all her research. She said "I was trying to concentrate on my research program and some silly lot of green men were using my aeriel to communicate with us". Relief for Bell came in December 1967, at a time Ryle and Hewish were having a series of inconclusive meetings about how they should announce to the world that they had discovered an alien civilisation. Bell used to ride out along the dark and freezing roads between Cambridge and the 4AA on her Vespa scooter. She would then sit in an unheated wooden hut for hours trying to coax life out of the 4AA receiver. She managed to get about five minutes of life out of the equipment one night, but that was enough. She picked up another signal, this time with a 1.25 period and from a different part of the sky. What she had found was the first radio beaming, rapidly spinning neutron stars, or pulsars as they became known.

Hewish and Ryle shared the 1974 Nobel prize for physics for the discovery, but controversially Bell was not included in the award. This led some people to nickname the 1974 prize the "no-Bell" prize, she did however receive other recognition including a damehood.

Ryle never gave up his fear of contacting aliens and was furious at the transmission of the Arecibo message in 1974
[link to en.wikipedia.org] , He said "any creatures out there may be malevolent or hungry." and he wanted the International Astronomical Union to condemn the sending of such messages. Frank Drake the SETI pioneer replied to him. "It's too late to worry about giving ourselves away. The deed is done. And repeated daily with every television transmission, every military radar signal, every spacecraft command ... I think that hostile tribes bent on war, be they terrestrial or extraterrestrial, destroy themselves with their own weapons, before they have any notion of how to attempt interstellar travel. "

Ryle's caution is echoed today by one of his Cambridge colleagues, Stephen Hawking, who said "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," and "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

The LGM-1 signal had a strange after life itself. Peter Saville, the artist commissioned to make the album cover for Joy Division's Unknown pleasures album picked an image of the LGM-1 signal out of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, with little idea of what it was. It became an instantly recognisable image in the early 80's ( OK so I guess you have to be of a certain age to recognise this )

[link to www.cvltnation.com]

[link to www.thisisthemachine.com]

So what about the signals that we don't know about ?

K


TL;DR A regular repeating radio pulse from space was picked up. Scientists speculated that it was from an alien intelligence. The signal were found to be caused by rapidly spinning neutron stars. The man in charge remained paranoid about contacting aliens.

Tune in to 'channel zero'

Thanks for thr TLDR

How about next time do what other smart species life forms do, before they start transmitting the location of the family jewels... They Send The Damn Setellite Out Of The Solar System-away from their locus, idiots!!!

The ultimate secret of the universeis that it takes 10 billion years at least of dynamic evolution and transformation for intelligent life to become self aware. We simply made it to that point early. On other words, there is TONS of life in our universe outside of earth, but we are the first ones to get to what would be described as "advanced civilization."

It is therefore our responsibility to drop the petty infighting we constantly dither in here on earth and seek out other life to cultivate and watch over across our own galaxy first, and then beyond. No one ever stops to think that the alien race which goes looking for resources and sustainability to ensure their survival is US!

The idea of aliens transmitting blueprints for advanced computers or weapons is an interesting one. One could consider it possible that this be a form of preemptive warfare, where any ambitious and sufficiently underdeveloped culture (like ours) would receive the signal, build the device and inadvertently destroy themselves by doing so.

If we did this we could destroy future enemies before we even met them.
I`m open for ideas on what to send.