Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI, debunks claims like Dr. Stephen Greer’s secret pulsed signals and Frank Drake’s alleged involvement, insisting no credible alien intelligence has been hidden. He details the Allen Telescope Array’s 30M-channel scans of star systems with planets, dismissing ghost boxes, moon-bounced TV signals (April Fools’ hoax), and Van Allen belt theories as fringe or mathematically implausible. While open to unconventional methods like fractal antennas, Shostak argues SETI’s radio-wave focus remains practical, given cosmic dust’s interference with visible light. Skeptical of UFO sightings, he clarifies SETI’s rigorous signal analysis—no evidence supports extraterrestrial visitation, though electromagnetic searches continue. Even if no intelligent life is found by 2050, microbial life elsewhere could still suggest life’s prevalence isn’t a "miracle," just an astronomical probability. [Automatically generated summary]
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My producer, Heather Wade.
All of you out there, the Belgab website, great bunch of vaguely lovable, grumpy, interesting people.
A site called People Who Love Art Bell, MidnightIndesert.com, the Belgab, I said that, the StreamGuys who get it to you, LV.net, and they get it to the Stream Guys, and then, of course, our commercial guy.
If you want to run a commercial, you'd be well served since we have so few.
Contact Peter Eberhardt.
You can find him at artbell.com.
All right.
Just a couple things to note.
One, China rattled entire global financial markets by announcing they are devaluing their currency.
That means that things from China are going to get cheaper.
They're trying to stimulate their economy.
It declined by 1.9%.
That's big.
That really is big, folks.
The biggest drop in a decade.
And so things from China will get cheap, but it's not necessarily good for us.
The Donald made a big deal of that, and he's right about that.
A young Mississippi couple who are charged with attempting to join the Islamic State were held without bail Tuesday.
So two more want to go over there and fight.
Why, I don't know.
Why Americans are doing that, I don't know.
A random encounter leads to astonishing discoveries.
This is pretty amazing.
Between two men who get this, they didn't know each other, but they had still managed to lead the same life with wives and children, all of the same name.
They had the same cars, the same vacation spot, which is, by the way, where they met each other.
Psychologist Chris McKay says in his years spent as a therapist, he's begun to understand something about synchronicity.
I mean, what are the odds of that, right?
Two lives identically led just less than one-tenth of 1% difference between them.
Actually, no difference at all.
It would just be too weird.
It's like I would go on vacation, meet another guy who looks like me, meet his wife named Erin and his daughter named Asia, and we're driving identical cars, color, everything.
That is just simply too weird.
That was from anonymous.com, anomalous.com, and what a good website that is.
All right, I'm going to read this and then I'll break.
Now, I don't want a response to this tonight.
Maybe we'll do it Friday.
It's going to open the doors of whatever.
I don't know what it's going to open.
Have you noticed this is all over the Internet, so I just simply can't and won't ignore it.
Have you noticed there's a tremendous amount of Internet buzz about the month of September 2015?
Never before have I seen so much speculation about what would happen in one particular month.
Some people believe that we're going to see an economic collapse next month.
Others believe there's going to be some sort of historic natural disaster.
Others convinced Judgment Day is coming.
So right now, large numbers of Americans are apparently stocking up on emergency food and supplies like crazy.
I'm beginning to get a little concerned about the period myself.
Several weeks ago, I think I did express a belief that chaos will begin once the summer ends.
These are the last days of normal life in America, people are saying.
Just about everything that we currently take for granted is about to be shaken.
It seems a lot of people lately are having a gut feeling that something really, really big is about to unfold, but nobody knows exactly what it is.
Maybe people are feeling this way because of the events that are taking place around them now.
Signs in the heavens, military stockpiling, politically disturbing events.
There does appear to be a confluence of activity in both the political and spiritual Realms culminating in 2015, causing people's alarms to go off.
So this is all over the Internet.
I'm not going to talk about it.
In fact, I refuse to talk about it now, but we may talk about it Friday.
It will open the gates of whatever.
All right, coming up in a moment, Seth Shozdak.
Seth developed an interest in extraterrestrial life at the tender age of 10.
When he first picked up a book about the solar system, the innocent beginning eventually led to a degree in radio astronomy.
Now a senior astronomer, Seth is an enthusiastic participant in the Institute SETI Observing Program.
There's more than one.
He heads up the International Academy of Aeronautics, a SETI Permanent Committee.
Hope I got that right.
This comes in slightly, you know, if somebody types on an Apple computer, when I get it, it comes out a little differently, especially the punctuation parts.
Seth, no, wait, there is more.
I forgot.
Seth will also update us on all the signals thus far received from all the life forms out there.
He will update us on the aliens that SETI has had examined, how they now have 37 different alien languages that they've interpreted, and, of course, all of the technical advances that have been derived thus far from the technical information taken from these aliens.
SETI, it goes on to say, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is an exploratory science that seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology.
And in a moment, when we get back, I will ask Seth exactly what kind of, it's very interesting, what kind of signatures they might be looking for.
As we have Seth on, I'm going to dispense with some telephone number stuff right now.
You've got the landline number right.
It's area code 952-225-5278.
Once again, 952-225-5278.
Now, you can also call us on Skype from North America, the way to do it, on your iPhone or your computer or whatever, just bring up Skype and put in MITD51, M-I-T-D-5-1.
If you're outside the U.S., M-I-T-D-5-5.
That's as in Midnight in the Desert, M-I-T-D-5-5, and give us a call anytime.
We may start taking calls during the show with Seth, sort of occasionally peppering it with calls, sort of just playing around with a different format.
Well, there are several ways that you might, in fact, convince yourself that you'd found some evidence for something that's intelligent out there in the cosmos.
One thing would be, you know, if they physically landed or you went there.
I mean, that's straightforward.
Happens every night on television, but we're not about to go anywhere.
And undoubtedly, we'll get into the second possibility here tonight, whether they're visiting us.
I don't think they are, but that's straightforward.
The second thing you could do is maybe you could see something, you know, with a big telescope that would convince you that, you know, Bob, I don't know what that is, but it isn't natural.
You know, some huge astroengineering project.
Maybe there's some advanced society that's built something so big that we can see it with our telescopes.
And the third way to do it, and the approach that we use here most often, the SETI Institute and other places that do this kind of research, is to try and pick up signals.
And radio signals are what we usually look for.
But you can also look for flashing lights in the sky.
So that's the method of choice, I would say, to try and prove we have some cosmic company.
Anyway, telescopes are pretty limited in terms of detecting life, unless it was pretty close, relatively speaking.
So you listen for the more likely thing, which would be radio signals.
It's been years since we explored together.
Seth, I don't know the current state of SETI, what telescopes you have available to you, what kind of computer power you're using, what frequencies you're listening on, that kind of thing.
And that's because the money to build it was largely given by Paul Allen.
Paul Allen was the co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation.
Everybody knows about Bill Gates, who Allen was his partner in the early years.
And Paul Allen is interested in opportunities that new developments in technology make possible, things that are interesting to do, but you never could do them before because you just couldn't build the technology.
So he has funded this array of antennas.
It's so far up to 42 antennas.
That's what we have, 42 antennas.
The idea is to build many more, but that takes more money, and it's always difficult to get the money.
Well, 42, yeah, but it's really designed to have hundreds.
That's what you really want.
And it turns out that by building hundreds of small antennas, you get kind of the performance, in fact, more than the performance of one giant antenna for a lot less money.
So that's the way to go these days.
Anyhow, this array of antennas is up in the Cascade Mountains of California.
It's about 300 miles north of San Francisco.
We put it up there not because of the beautiful scenery, although the scenery is beautiful, and not because of the cuisine, because there is none, but because you've got all these mountains and they kind of shield the antennas from all the radio static that you would get from the Bay Area here around San Francisco.
So if you were to suddenly start getting some kind of signal, just an example, something weak, you could focus all of your antennas or as many as possible on that one source, have the collective gain hear it better.
In fact, that's the way we do the searching, too, actually.
They're all looking at the same spot.
So you decide, okay, we got these antennas.
We got them for this week.
What are we going to look at?
And you could just point them randomly at the sky, but normally speaking, you don't do that.
You try to be a little more clever.
And so we point them in the direction of star systems where we know they're planets.
These days, that might actually not be such a terrific strategy anymore because now we know planets are so commonplace, you really can't miss pointing at planets.
But if you decide where you're going to point them, they all work together.
They're looking at a few spots on the sky at once.
And then you've got this huge receiver that's listening to 30 million channels at once, trying to see if there's some channel in there, some frequency, some spot on the radio dial where you pick up a signal and change the world.
Well, the computer, yeah, a lot of this is indeed, as you suggest.
It's digital technology that makes all this possible.
And there's actually an upside to that.
The upside being something called Moore's Law, which sort of drives the industry around where I'm sitting, which is the Silicon Valley.
As most listeners will know, every couple of years, you've got to replace your computer because the computers on the store shelves then are so much faster than the one that you had that you don't get any respect at parties when you tell them you've got to replace a three-year-old laptop.
Right, it's depressing.
But it's good for the Silicon Valley.
So they'll sell you a new laptop, a new computer, whatever it is.
The same is true for SETI.
Every couple of years, the equipment gets so much better that the search becomes faster.
In fact, it was before the SETI Institute, which is where I work, before the SETI Institute was actually founded.
That came later.
But this was a SETI experiment being run at Ohio State University, which is in Columbus, Ohio, I think.
And they had a big antenna there that they'd been using for astronomy, radio astronomy.
But, you know, it sort of outlived its usefulness.
But it was still there, and it was a perfectly good antenna.
So they said, okay, what we're going to do is just put the brakes on it.
We're going to have it just park here, just aimed in one direction.
You might think, well, that's not terribly interesting.
But of course, the Earth does rotate.
And so it's looking at one spot on the sky, but the sky kind of sweeps across it as the Earth revolves.
And so they just put a, you know, I think it was like a 64-channel receiver.
I don't know how many channels their receiver had.
It wasn't 30 million.
It was a small number.
This was in 1977.
And, you know, it would just look for signals.
And every morning, one of the astronomers, a guy by the name of Jerry Amon, actually, that was the guy's name, he would come in to the observing room.
In those days, they'd print out the results on paper for people who remember those big line printers that computers used to have.
And he would just flip through the paper and look for a signal.
And one day he came in, and there was a big signal, and he wrote WOW next to it.
So that became known as the WOW signal.
I mean, this is maybe the triumph of marketing over product because, you know, all those other signals that were found, and there were many others that were found in those days, they didn't have such a nifty name, and they're not remembered.
There's a gentleman in Chicago, Robert Gray is his name.
And he has actually gone to radio telescopes around the world and gotten a little bit of time and, you know, reobserved that spot on the sky where the WoW signal came from with much better equipment, actually, and much more sensitivity and looking over much more of the radio dial.
And he's never seen it again.
So, you know, if you only see it once, you might be convinced, but nobody else is going to be convinced.
Well, you know, at the time of the WoW Signal, the way you would do these experiments, you point the antennas up in the sky, and you had to record the data.
You didn't have the compute power back then to actually, you know, analyze it kind of real time.
So typically, you would record things on computer tape, like in the old sci-fi films, all these big tape units there, stealing computer tape.
Of course.
Well, they actually had that stuff.
So, you know, you'd record those things, and then you would take this tape back to wherever it was that, you know, you actually worked.
That might be far away from these antennas.
It might be thousands of miles away.
So you'd cart all these tapes back to your office.
You'd play them on a computer there, and then you'd analyze things, and you'd find a signal.
And you'd say, well, you know, what's that?
And it looks kind of interesting.
But, of course, you can't just immediately check it out because it's long gone.
So in those days, when you had that situation, there were lots and lots of signals that looked interesting.
But today, we have enough compute power that when you get a signal, you immediately check it out.
And it turns out, if you have that capability, then all those kind of intriguing, wow-like signals seem to have gone away.
So that says to me that those guys were not real.
They were just interference, and you didn't have the ability to identify it as interference at the time.
So then a person might almost say that since we've been listening, there probably has not been a signal indicating extraterrestrial intelligence received by radio.
In 1997, we did have a signal that looked really good.
And in fact, it looked good for, I don't know, about a day.
And I was at home.
I just had dinner.
And the boss calls me up at home and he says, I think you ought to get down here.
So I drove down to the Institute and I found all my colleagues arrayed behind a phalanx of computer terminals all watching the screens because they picked up a signal that looked good.
Now that was very interesting and very exciting for about, I don't know, 16 or 18 hours till we figured out it was a satellite.
But for quite a while, that was maybe the longest time we went where we thought this could be it.
Now, it would be sure fun to hear what that 16 to 18 hours was as all of you listened to this incredible signal that you thought was coming from elsewhere.
That's still actually a long time, 16 or 18 hours.
Okay, so then to sum up, other than that great excitement, and of course the wild signal, which you kind of dismissed, there's been nothing in all these years, in all these planetary systems, we've pointed at nothing.
I remember you telling me, and I'm sure you remember it, you said, if we don't get a signal, and I forget what it was, the next five years, 10 years, something like that, we're going to have to start thinking there may not be one to get.
What I do remember saying, and this I would say again, in fact, I'm going to say it again right now, if SETI doesn't succeed by, I don't know, say 2050, that's a long way off.
2050, so that's 35 years away.
If we don't find something by then, because by then we will have looked at millions of star systems, millions.
At this point, we've looked at thousands.
But because of the improvements in technology, by then, you looked at a fair sample of star systems.
And if you don't find anything after looking at millions of star systems, you know, some people would say, okay, that proves it.
We're the smartest things in this part of the universe.
Well, the most obvious thing is simply to have antennas and equipment that's 100 or 1,000 times more sensitive.
We're listening for signals that have to be fairly powerful.
In other words, the Klingons or whoever they are up there, they have to invest a fair amount of money in their transmitting setup unless they know we're here and they're deliberately targeting the Earth and they can make a very focused, if you will, a very beamed signal and then it doesn't cost them so much.
But if they don't know we're here and they're just giving the, if you will, the galactic weather forecast or maybe it's the galactic internet signal or whatever it is, if it isn't really intended directly for us, we're only going to hear it if it's an incredibly powerful transmitter.
And that might be unrealistic.
Maybe they don't want to pay for all those kilowatt hours.
And in that case, if you had receivers that were 1,000 times more sensitive, then maybe the landscape changes.
Now, I'm going to say something here because this is enough years after it happened.
A few years ago, there was a show called Coast to Coast with Art Bell.
And it was on the cover of Time magazine, and I was one of his favorite guests.
And when I'd be on that show, it really lit things up at certain agencies.
And one time I was on his show a few years back, towards the end of his career there, and this issue came up, and I said, well, you know, I have a source high up in SETI that confirms to me that they, in fact, have received interplanetary signals, but in a kind of phased, not normal array.
It was kind of a pulsed array, and that it was kept secret and covered up.
And the SETI people were furious.
Subsequently, Seth Shostak got on the show and just said, well, Dr. Vera knew what he's talking about, and he probably talked to some volunteer computer operator because we have all this network of volunteers.
What the RF Bell didn't know, and what Seth Shostik didn't know, which I'm going to say now because it's enough water gone under the bridge, is that the guy who told me that was the founder of the SETI project and the Drake equation, Dr. Drake.
I actually do remember the show when Stephen Greer came on on your program, as he says, and he went on for, well, a couple of hours about how he knew that we had found a signal.
Now, first off, you've got to ask yourself, if we had found a signal, why wouldn't we tell the world?
So I called up Greer's operation in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I asked to speak to Mr. Greer about this because I wanted to know with whom he had spoken.
He didn't say on the air when he was with you that it was Frank Drake.
Of course, if Frank Drake had known that we'd pick up a signal, Frank Drake would be, you know, he'd have a Nobel Prize on his mantle today.
And they didn't let me talk to Greer, actually.
And in the end, they just stonewalled me.
They said, well, he's busy.
And I said, well, could you just at least send me an email?
Just have him tell me a date or a location where he heard this information, just so I can verify it.
I mean, the reason I pulled this audio, obviously, is because he laid it out, you know, the people involved and everything else.
Now, are you absolutely sure, Seth, that if one was received, that even you, as senior astronomer, of course you would know, but I mean, what if there's some protocol that even you don't know about?
Well, not in the case of SETI, because, you know, there are people who will say, you know, Seth, if you guys find a signal, probably the government would want to shut you down.
And, you know, we've had this argument before or this discussion before, but there are obvious answers.
It would, depending on the nature of the contact, it might well very much upset religious faith across the world, not just here, but across the world.
And it would just depend on the nature of the contact.
If it's just some, you know, dot, dot, dot, we're here, dot, dot, dot, we're here, dot, dot, dot, we're here, but we're a hundred light years away, dot, dot, dot, no problem.
Hundred light years seems like, you know, plenty of separation.
But if it's, we're here, dot, dot, dot, we're going to take over, dot, dot, dot, get your armies ready, they'll last about five seconds, dot, dot, dot, that's a different kind of signal, right?
If somebody tunes in their favorite talk show host right in their car radio, you don't have to worry that that talk show host is going to jump into the car and start giving them a hard time just because they got tuned in.
The talk show host doesn't know Who's tuned in, right?
So that would be the same with us.
We pick up a signal.
Of course, they don't know that that, I mean, the signal may even have taken a thousand years to get to us.
This was found by the Kepler Space Telescope, which is a NASA telescope up in orbit.
And it was launched, what, four or five years ago?
And what it does is what it did, up until part of it broke, up until about a year ago, it would just stare at 170,000 stars and just measure the brightness all the time.
Every 30 seconds, it would download the brightness of each one of those 170,000 stars.
And a particular star had planets going around it and they were oriented the right way, well, that planet would get in front of the star and just reduce the brightness of the star.
An Earth-like planet doesn't reduce the brightness very much because it's small compared to the star.
It will reduce it by about one part in 10,000, so 0.01% typically.
And this was one that they found in the data that did that.
And it was about the same size as the Earth.
It was also in the same sort of orbit as the Earth because it's a year.
They know that because of the time between, you know, it dims the star and then a certain period of time later, it dims it again, then it dims it again.
So, you know, if you lived on that planet, you would age a little bit less quickly.
At least the birthdays wouldn't come quite as quickly.
And it also is orbiting a star that really is very similar to the sun, a little bit brighter, but not much different than the sun.
So here you have a planet.
It turns out to be about the same size as the Earth, a little bigger, 60% bigger.
It has the same year.
We don't know if it has the same day or anything like that, but we know the temperatures on that planet are going to be somewhat similar to Earth because it's the same distance from its star.
The problem is there are ways you could think of to determine if it has water.
If you could get a little bit of light from that planet and pass that light through a prism and then analyze things, you know, the rainbow and all that stuff, these are things that astronomers do all the time, you might see water vapor in the atmosphere, that sort of thing.
But you have to get some light from the planet.
And the problem is this star system is, what is it, I think it's 1,400 light years away.
You know that clocks don't all run at the same speed, the same rate.
This is what Einstein figured out and published in 1905.
If you're in a car, you've got a watch, and it's set to the same time as my watch, and I'm just standing on the side of the road watching you drive by, I would see that your watch seems to go slower than my watch.
Now, at 60 miles an hour, that didn't make really much of a difference.
But if you're going at the speed of light, then your watch stops.
So from your point of view, it took you no time to get there.
But of course, you can't go at the speed of light, so maybe that's maybe not the right way to look at it.
Maybe the right way to look at it is if you could go, say, 99% of the speed of light or something like that, then from the standpoint of somebody on the ground, they would say, okay, it took them a little over 1,400 years to get there.
But from the standpoint of the crew on the spacecraft, they would say, well, that only took a couple of months.
Number one is I've been a big fan of the SETI at home software.
I've been running it for years, and I recently stopped for a while, but that's beside the point.
You guys started to address what I was about to ask.
I see one of the problems is that while you're searching for a signal, if you're trying to get a signal from a star system that is, say, a million light years from here, well, then you're betting on a civilization that is,
you know, a million years more advanced than us because it's going to take a million years for that signal to reach you.
That means that if it was from a million light years away that the signal was sent a million years ago, and that means that they would have had to have developed powerful radio transmitters a million years before we did.
That's not impossible.
The universe is 13 billion years old.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
In other words, the universe has been here three times as long as the Earth has.
So most of the stars out there are billions of years older than our own.
So, you know, what the heck?
Why couldn't they be a million years more advanced?
Just like our television signals have left this planet and is traveling throughout space.
Okay, someone could be watching I Love Lucy, even though I don't think it's gotten that far to another star system yet.
Okay, so that race really doesn't have to be that much more advanced than us, but the idea is trying to pick up a signal, that race would have to be a million times more advanced than us for that signal to have left that star system for you to receive.
But yes, okay, but there's an advantage to all this, too.
And Mario may have been going in this direction, that if you hear from a society that's very much more advanced than we are, right, I mean, maybe you hear from them just when they're at the same level that we are, but it's more likely they're more advanced because they really need those powerful transmitters for us to hear them, then maybe they can teach us something.
And the fact that they're not there anymore or their society has moved on to who knows what, you know, well, that's just the way it is.
But it might still be very interesting to hear from them, even though you're reading newspapers, if you will, from last week or last month or 10 years ago.
But if it's the only newspaper you get, it's still interesting to read it.
You know, by definition, if you're not moving, that's about as slow as you can go.
But maybe it's worth pointing out that essentially it's impossible not to move at all.
You might think you're not moving, but of course, if you're just sitting there in a chair, you are moving because the Earth is rotating, and then the Earth's going around the Sun, and then the Sun is headed off into the galaxy.
And the galaxy is moving, so everything's moving.
You say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, there must be something that's not moving.
Turns out that there's really nothing that's not moving.
You can take a bunch of atoms and you cool them down, and they slow down when you cool them down.
And if you could cool them to absolute zero, then they would stop in theory.
But in fact, they never stop.
They never stop.
So everything is always moving.
So I guess in that sense, you know, complete stop is kind of a misnomer.
This is Gabrielle with Eastern Paranormal, and I've sent you a message through the wormhole.
What I would like to ask your guest is Frank Sumption, he was the developer of the first ghost boxes that we had, and now we have the Shack Hacks and Ghost Boxes, and people are making them.
We're getting voices coming through them claiming that they're interdimensional beings.
All right, now, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Just to follow up there a little bit, because you asked, could it be that the proof that there's somebody out there comes out of, if you will, left fields?
Well, I'm not joking with my answer, because the answer to that question is, yeah, could happen.
In fact, again, if you look at some of the most interesting discoveries in physics or astronomy, those are the fields that I personally know best, but some of them came out of experiments that weren't designed to find that.
That could happen.
And in the case of finding ET, one thing that I think is a good contender for turning up something that we're not expecting is simply the increasing amount of imaging of the sky being done with really big telescopes.
And they keep building big telescopes.
You know, when I was a kid, the biggest telescope was the one in Mount Palomar, the 200-inch telescope in Southern California.
Today, there are telescopes that are much, much bigger than that.
And they're building one in Hawaii that the mirror is 30 meters across.
Well, that's like 100 feet.
You know, the Palomar telescope is 200-inch.
It's 100 feet across.
And, you know, when you have those kinds of instruments looking at the sky, I mean, who's to say?
They might trip across something that we don't expect.
Moreover, who's to say that somebody doesn't invent some silly little thing that they call a ghost box that resonates in some crazy way that would make you and I laugh just thinking about it right now, but actually works?
It kind of goes along with the lines of your last caller.
It's regards to the frequencies that you span, I know most of it's in microwave spectrum, but from what I understand, gravitational waves travel much faster.
And another thing that you might want to add to that comment from the other caller is our brains have magnetite in them, and we're subject to magnetic field influences and possibly gravitational waves.
Could it not be that what she's trying to relate to is that mental communication with the brain is a possibility and much faster than speed of light if it's on a gravitational wave?
I do get quite a number of emails, maybe one or two a month, from people who say, you guys are wasting your time with radio waves or light waves because they only go at the speed of light.
So why not use gravitational waves?
Why not look for gravity waves coming from deep space?
There are experiments, by the way, to look for gravity waves.
But Ken, just to make sure that you get this, according to Einstein, gravity waves travel at the speed of light.
They don't go faster than light.
They don't go faster than radio waves.
And they're really hard to detect because we haven't even detected them yet.
We've got millions of dollars worth of equipment looking for gravity waves, and they still haven't scored.
And to generate a gravity wave that's strong enough for somebody to pick it up on some other star system, requires doing something really impressive, like shaking your planet or shaking a star or something like that.
No, but the casinos might toss them out after a while.
I don't know.
But ESP has been tested.
Occasionally, they've run some experiments and they say, okay, look, you claim you can do it.
And they put people who claim they can do it into a testing situation where they're trying to send the color of a card or whatever it is to somebody in another room.
And it doesn't work.
it doesn't work.
unidentified
Just one last comment.
The CIA has used it in remote viewing, so I know that some of it's proven, some of it's not, but I appreciate all those answers, and it was really good talking to you, and keep up the good work.
We've got a full bank of calls here, but we love Skype calls.
Really, we do.
We love Skype calls.
So MITD51 is the way to do it.
When you come in on Skype, you know, if you're wearing a headset, mic, boy, do you sound good.
And if you're not, then just get up really, really close to where the microphone is on your computer, if you can find it.
It's like a little hole or something.
And you can use that.
But you have the potential to sound really good on Skype.
And by the way, here once again is the Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research, Seth Chostak, along with somebody named Michelle somewhere else in the world.
So the question I had was a couple years ago, I heard a news story about a research telescope like this that had detected signals that they determined were not natural.
It was somewhere in South America.
And when they brought it back, and I guess they demodulated it or something, they found that it was Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s that had gone out to space, and the signals had hit an interstellar object of some sort and bounced back and had come back.
And they were really excited because these episodes had all been destroyed by the BBC.
You know, you send out a TV signal, and it's true.
It goes out into space.
That part's right.
And if it hits something, some of the signal bounces back.
But even if it hit the moon, right, which is a pretty big object in the sky compared to anything else that you can think of, it's much bigger than, for example, Saturn looks in the sky and so forth.
Even if it hit the moon and bounced back, and that would take three seconds, you would get the show three seconds later.
That's hardly much of a delay at all.
But the real point is it would be very much weaker because only part of the signal actually hits the object, and even less of what is the object actually makes it back to you.
It's kind of a poor man's radar, really.
And to do radar with Doctor Who, I don't know, doesn't sound right to me, Michelle, I've got to say.
unidentified
Well, like I said, you know, this was a news story that I had heard that was all over the internet for a little bit and then went away.
Oh, Michelle, if it's on the Internet, it's got to be true.
Everybody knows that.
unidentified
Oh, of course, right?
But I believe the BBC was actually talking about it because they were hoping that in the future they would be able to get some of these back because the tapes were destroyed.
If you do the math, three, almost four seconds, it couldn't even be the moon, Seth.
And there are a lot of ham operators that back me up.
This is true.
I grant you I'm operating high power, legal limit, all that stuff, big antenna, yeah?
But it's not possible.
Now, you're going to say somebody was screwing around with you, playing you back to yourself.
No.
Because in order to prove it to myself, I went sliding up a few kilohertz one way or the other several times, and each time it came back On the same frequency.
Long-delay echoes have certainly heard about them.
And, you know, depending on the angle of the antenna and all that, it's conceivable maybe the signal bounce from the ionosphere back to Earth and back up to the ionosphere all the way around the Earth.
Ham Radio Operators Around the World will listen to you this evening.
And I've got a question about the reason you need high-powered transmitters to listen.
The spacecraft that just did the Pluto flyby has a maximum output of 12 watts.
12 watts isn't a lot of power.
And it's got about a 30 dB gain antenna.
That's one.
And the other one it is called a long path.
And the signal does skip around the world.
And a lot of times I've been unable to workstations pointing my beam-type antenna directly at them, but been able to operate with them through the long path.
Hey, since we're talking about airspace, and hopefully this question wasn't asked earlier, but I saw something in the news about a live feed for the ISS, like a golden orange UFO of some type.
And of course, NASA cut the live feed.
And I was just wondering if Seth or you had seen that or had any comment on that.
And what you see is indeed this fixed camera there on the ISS, and it's looking at the limb of the Earth.
And you see these little dots, these white dots, and they're moving.
It looks like they're coming up out of the atmosphere kind of thing.
But of course, to draw that conclusion that they're coming up out of the atmosphere, you need to know how far away they are.
And I've talked to plenty of people in the space program about these things, which they see all the time.
And what they are are drops of oil or water or whatever that are actually coming off the space station, and they're like, you know, 30 feet away or 20 feet away, and they're catching a little bit of sunlight.
So they're not far away at all.
They're not craft coming off the Earth.
So you see these a lot, actually.
And so if you see them a lot, and then the transmission goes down for whatever reason, maybe they're over a part of the Earth and they don't have a good downlink and the signal goes away.
But that's a common problem, actually, in the whole UFO realm that people will say, you know, well, it was moving at thousands of miles an hour and it was this far away and that kind of thing.
And, you know, if you're going to say that, you need some way to gauge that.
You can't just say, because that's what it seemed like to you, that it was moving very fast, because you can only tell how fast it's moving if you know either, well, you need to know how far away it is.
You need to know how far away it is.
And if it's something in the night sky, it's pretty hard to tell how far away it is.
It might be 100 miles up, and it might be 1,000 miles up, and it might be 10 feet up.
I saw a UK Mir reporter ask you an article that was published kind of worldwide on August 4th about this creature, alleged creature, crab creature on Mars.
And you kind of dispensed with that very abruptly according to what she reported.
I don't know if you were quoted correctly as being this paraidolia thing.
And that's sort of a reptilian brain thing.
Now, there's four images that were taken by the rover, and they were taken on Sol 710, which was on August 5th, 2014, over a year ago.
It was widely reported to be taken in July.
I think that caused a lot of confusion.
So about 372 days ago, rover's driving by this cliff face, and it's taking photos, and it caught four photos of this object, which was widely reported as a crab.
In reality, I've done some analysis, and I can assure you, I'm not seeing things that aren't there.
I'm doing a exobioanalysis, a reverse engineering of exobioengineering to try to see exactly what this creature is composed of.
And I found that it has 50 ball joints and sockets in its limbs.
It's got 10 limbs, and they're bifurcated like legs at the knee that split out into two lower leg segments with opposable...
I wouldn't really want to do that without further analysis.
What I'm trying to do is put together a multi-layered image showing all the different body parts and how they fit together.
All right.
Well, when you get that, send it to me immediately.
This thing has to have about two and a half times the limb motor function control, and therefore it's got to be probably more intelligent than a human in terms of its motor controls in its brain.
And if you're looking for intelligence, I'd be happy to give you any data that I might have and let you look at it because I think this is really important.
It's always good to talk to a fellow Virginian, I have to say.
But, you know, what I saw, the crab photo, the whole body of data, and no pun intended there, the whole body of data was a few hundred pixels, right?
So how you can do all this analysis about how many ball joints it has and so forth.
But let me put it to you this way.
You know, I've seen photos on Mars.
Well, there was one, what, today, about, you know, some little woman standing there on Mars.
You know, I think that these are all the same phenomena.
I really do think they're periodogia.
But if you were to see something that looked like, I don't know what, a carburetor lying on the surface of Mars, and you'd say, well, that's pretty unusual carburetor.
But would you believe that?
If somebody claimed, I found a carburetor sitting on Mars, you'd say, you know, you're just seeing things in the rocks.
It's like looking in the clouds and you're seeing things that look familiar to you.
Okay?
unidentified
And I agree with you about the woman's image.
What that looks like to me is very thin layers of dry sense supplemented so thin it looks just like he's not kind of seen.
I mean, our brains are really good at recognizing things that we already know about in complicated visual images, like in a forest and so on.
I mean, you can see we're so good at that because 100,000 years ago, it was really important that you recognize things like predators, for example, in a complicated landscape.
And yet, a lot of times you would think, oh, man, that's a lion.
I better get out of here.
And it's not a lion.
But it's better to err on the side of caution from the standpoint of your own survival and your own genetic inheritance than not to.
So we're really good at that.
We're really good at seeing things with very little information.
Well, the SETI Institute, which is where I work here, it's a nonprofit research organization.
And most of the scientists down the hall here from where I'm talking to you are what are called astrobiologists.
So they're studying things like the history of water on Mars, the possibility of microbial life on some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, that kind of thing.
And that is funded mostly by, you know, they get grants.
So that money does come from the government, mostly NASA.
The SETI project, which is the listening experiments to try and find intelligent life elsewhere, that's funded by donations.
That's all.
There's no government money there.
unidentified
Okay, I was curious if you had to give a presentation to a board or something, and then what do you present on your progress to get funding?
Yeah, but the board doesn't really give you too much money.
I mean, it would be nice to have a board that consists of people who could, in fact, help out in a very significant way in the funding of the organization.
They know the history of SETI, but they also know this thing that we actually discussed very briefly at the beginning of the show, and that is that whatever experiment you're doing this year is faster than every previous experiment.
Because of the improvement in mostly compute power, what you can do every year gets faster.
In fact, every two years, you can more or less double the speed of your search.
Well, you know, if you could commutate that with one of those Tesla commutators, those Tesla static motors, then you could get a voltage on a transformer and maybe use it to charge a phone.
Listen, there is a company I found out, sir, there is a company actually working with antennas like mine that are producing voltage like mine, and they're working on putting it to practical use.
unidentified
Well, Tesla wasn't going crazy.
He actually knew that this could be done, and just a little bit of antenna wire could prove it.
But we're talking something a little longer than that to be useful for the United States.
And for Seth, man, I don't want to disp, you know, you.
You're a man of great inspiration for me.
But in order to communicate with these folks so far away, we should be using light, and we should be modulating the light by phase.
Maybe even with this time stamp, periods of light on and off, representing the distance between, say, the core of our galaxy and our Earth.
Maybe, but again, you know, the distances involved just, they don't work with the math, even if you're talking about it bouncing all the way around the Earth.
Well, I see that's far enough where you can get that kind of reflection, and it's got an electromagnetic wave to it, and it could build up enough to reflect ion spherically.
Art, if I can say, somebody sent me a link to a BBC article on those 47-year-old television signals, you know, of the Doctor Who signals coming back to Earth that were supposedly picked up, according to the article, using the Aerocibu Observatory in Puerto Rico.
And the BBC was happy about this because indeed the tapes were gone and this sort of thing, and they could get Doctor Who back into their archive.
However, it's maybe worth noting that this article was published on the 1st of April.
The videos I saw, they were just slowly drifting, which is what you expect because they don't, you know, unless you give them a big push somehow, they're just going to slowly lift off.
They're, you know, in free fall, just like everything else in orbit there.
Because, you know, you don't want to bug somebody else if it's just some sort of equipment failure, a software bug, who knows what.
Or more likely than any of that, is it just some satellite that's gone overhead that has a transmitter, of course, and it's just fooling you.
But at some point, it might take a couple of days, but after you've done everything you can and you're still convinced this is the big one or could be the big one, then you call up somebody at another observatory.
More likely than not, they're probably in another country.
And you just say, look, you know, we don't want to force you to interrupt what you're doing.
But here's some coordinates on the sky and a frequency range.
See if you can find any signal in there.
And if they find it too, then at that point, you probably would just, you know, just have a press conference.
But the facts are that by then, it's already in the papers.
It's already out there.
That's our experience, because there's no policy of secrecy.
So every time you find a signal, people are putting it on their blog or they're sending emails to their friends.
And he, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I've actually met the guy.
And he said, so what about that signal you're following?
That's what he said.
That was his first sentence.
And I said, well, we are following a signal, but, you know, we're trying to check it out, and I'll know more in three hours.
Can you wait three hours?
He says, I'll call you back in three hours.
And in three hours, we had tracked it down.
It was a European solar research satellite, and the telemetry, the signals coming back from that satellite with the data that was necessary for that satellite, happened to be on the same frequencies we were looking, and it was in the right part of the sky and all that.
So there was little doubt that that's what it was.
So you flatly deny that you would have to, you know, if the big thing came in, you'd have to notify the government before whoever from the New York Times.
I have the video that was recorded from my office.
Actually, he was talking about lots of things related to astronomy.
And then the voice changed to robotic, actual voice.
And after just very short sentences, it just went like robotic noise.
And then something happened, very strange, was that I think the electromagnetic wave around my office just influenced the electricity and the power in my office, that changed the actually light in my office.
I wanted to talk to this, I mean, talk about this to Seth.
I just wanted to see what your thoughts were on the idea of a multiverse and it being fractal and the idea of a simulation theory existing within a multiverse.
I can't say much about whether it's fractal or not fractal.
The idea of a multiverse, the fact that there may be more than one universe or people who are not into multi-universes, there's something appealing about it in that it kind of provides a natural explanation for why so many things in our universe are kind of nifty set up for life.
The value of the gravitational constant, to give a very trivial one, if that were a little bit stronger, then you'd have problems in one direction with planets and life and so forth.
If the gravitational constant was a lot smaller, then you might not have stars or planets at all, that kind of thing.
And if you have a lot of universes, when I say a lot, I don't mean 10 or 100, but if you have a gazillion, whatever that number is, you have an enormous number of them, then by chance, some of them are going to be just right for life.
And those are the ones where we're going to be sitting around asking the question about why is our universe so great?
So that's the appeal of the multi-verse.
It kind of provides a possible explanation for that.
But nobody's been able to prove whether they exist or not.
I mean, that's something it's just an idea at this point.
You had another question in there.
Can you remind me what the third question was?
Because the second one was about fractals.
unidentified
Just my thoughts on it are that it could be fractal in nature.
Well, I mean, I don't know if it's fractal or not.
I think, oh, now I know what you were saying.
You were saying the idea that there could be simulations.
This is the idea of a guy at Oxford University by the name of Nick Bostrom.
He's the one that's made this perhaps best known.
The idea that, you know, what we think is reality, our daily lives and so forth, is not real at all.
It's just a computer simulation being run in the future by maybe our descendants, right, in what's called an ancestor simulation.
When computers are very much more powerful, and they seem to be getting more powerful all the time, you can imagine that in 50, 100, 200 years, you might have a computer powerful enough to simulate, you know, a kind of like sim-Earth kind of simulation, but a much, much better one that can simulate everything that you're experiencing.
And you're just code running in a computer.
It's not real what we're experiencing.
It's not really sitting there, you know, in Nevada, and I'm not really sitting here in California.
This is all just computer code.
And, you know, it's hard to disprove that, but it leads to some, I mean, it's a real head-scratching exercise.
I don't know what it really says.
I asked the guy, Nick Bostrom, once, if this is true, do I have to lead a moral existence?
Can I just have fun?
If I'm just computer code, I mean, what's the harm?
And I was wondering if you might not get a really big bump if that thing out at the end of the dish contained some new version of a fractal antenna in what it was sending into you.
We're building some new feeds, some new receivers, if you will, that are able to tune the radio dial all the way from 1 gigahertz to 15 gigahertz, thanks to a gentleman down in San Diego who's given the money for that.
I'm from Indianapolis, and I wanted to ask some kind of challenging questions to Seth.
I heard him on Larry King five years ago make a statement that to me was a bit indicative of his wanting to find out for sure if life was out there, if it wasn't out there.
But he said that he wanted to finally find out if Earth was a miracle or if it was actually just an accidental infection of life.
And basically he was saying, you know, by doing SETI, he would find out if we have an atheistic evolutionary origin or if God had to be involved for us to be the only ones there.
Kind of like what Arthur C. Clarke said about how it was terrifying either way.
You know, I did say 2050, if we don't pick up a signal with our SETI experiments, I would say, you know, I'd be inclined to think, all right, are we doing the right experiment?
But I think long before 2050, we're going to find life in space, and not of the intelligent variety necessarily.
You know, it could be that we will find microbes dead or alive on Mars.
But there are six other places in the solar system besides Mars that we know about already where you could have life.
Microbial life, it's true.
It's not going to be something that holds up its side of the conversation.
But if you found biology, for example, on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, what would that say?
Well, they'd say, well, at least biology is not anything terribly special because there are several worlds in our own solar system that have it, and there are a trillion planets in the galaxy and 100 billion other galaxies, each with a trillion planets.
So I guess that's what I'm really saying when I say a miracle.
When I say a miracle, you shouldn't interpret this as some sort of religious statement.
It isn't that.
What it is is saying, did we win an incredibly lottery ticket out of 10,000 billion, billion lottery tickets, we got the winner?
Or are there a lot of winners out there?
That's really the question.
unidentified
But your statement was you ought to prove it one way or the other.
And wouldn't you agree that when Frank Drake first turned on his radio telescope or whatever he used, he expected probably within a week to hear half a dozen different ET signals.
Well, no, but I'd say if it was as pervasive out there as what was once thought, first of all, it's been proved that there is not a single ET civilization who wants to broadcast itself to the galaxy and has the capability to do it.
Well, I you know, I think there's actually a faith-based component to all this.
But I didn't want to get into argument about religion because this isn't about religion.
When I say a miracle, what I mean is some sort of incredibly improbable event that in a trillion planets in our galaxy, this is the only one where anything interesting is happening.
That makes us very special.
And ever since Copernicus, scientists are always a little bit cherry of believing that they're that special because in the past, every time we thought we were special, we were wrong.
If E.T. contacted us and then landed and the ramp came down and a little guy and we were in communication with him and a little guy came down and somebody before he got to the bottom of the ramp said hey do you believe in the bible and he said oh bible he'd be so full of lead actually he'd be full of lead either way but he'd be so full of lead that he'd just roll down the rest of the way of the ramp well i i appreciate your sunny interpretation
Like stuff out of the ordinary that's very quiet, you would say it's probably at about 2,000 to 4,000 feet.
And I don't know if Seth is familiar with different types of formations or anything of that sort, because one time I've seen a bundle that was in a trapezoid shape, and what they did was they stayed in a formation, very quiet,
and once they were probably about 15 miles up out of sight, they all came together, bundled, swirled really fast, and just shot in every direction.
But I really doubt that we're that advanced to make something like that and look like a firework, and then just every bit just shoot very nicely into every direction.
Thank you very much for the call, but you're not going to get anywhere with Seth on this one.
As a matter of fact, let me go to the – I've got this thing called the wormhole.
They send me messages during the show.
Mart in Bakersfield is obviously a big Seth fan.
He says, This Seth is a – quoting here – a fast-talking paid propagandist whose mission it is to explain to the world that there is no such things as UFOs or extraplanetary intelligence based upon not hearing them send any electronic – excuse me, electromagnetic RF waves.
That's the, I guess, the operating system for you.
it, the environment in which it runs.
But that's a University of California Berkeley project.
They do SETI as well.
In fact, they just got a very large private donation to do more SETI.
But that's SETI at Home, I think, has had on the order of 10 million people that have downloaded the SETI at Home screensaver.
And it's used to reduce the data that they collect.
They use the Arecibo telescope primarily for those data.
And, you know, you get tremendous compute power when you have 10 million people running their home computers.
So it's a great project.
It's a great project.
We don't do it.
What we do, because we control the telescope, when we find signals, we don't farm out those data to the public and have them process it because we want to know right away, should we continue to spend time looking in this direction?
By the way, just as a point, launching a satellite that goes, if you will, the wrong direction is a little bit harder than launching one that goes in the right direction.
I don't think they get as many questions as I do, but I might be wrong.
Maybe they're keeping it quiet, but I don't think that they would.
I mean, they occasionally ask me, they say, what do you say when somebody calls you up and asks you about Roswell?
Or something like that.
But look, I think that the bottom line here is that if people, the scientists I know, who are all very skeptical that we're being visited, if they thought there was good evidence, they'd spend all their time working on it.
And they've said that.
They've said that.
You know, it'd be incredibly important if you could prove that we are being visited.
What could be more interesting?
But the evidence is not good enough to convince many scientists, and you certainly don't see it in the science museums and that kind of thing.