The aliens are coming!

Before the 20th century, some philosophers considered the possibility of the existence of intelligent aliens, from outside the Earth. We can cite Lucretius (De Rerum Natura, book II, 1st century BC), Nicholas of Cusa (15th century), and Giordano Bruno (16th century). The idea was happily adopted by science fiction writers, such as Lucian of Samosata (Vera Historia, 2nd century) and Cyrano de Bergerac (Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon, 1656), of whom I spoke in another post.

During the 19th century, public attention focused on possible intelligent inhabitants of other bodies in the solar system, especially the moon and Mars. In 1835, The Sun newspaper published in New York six false reports declaring that flying men had been discovered on the moon. It is said that nine out of ten Americans believed it. In fact, The Sun had published a science fiction novel as though if it were real news, making reference to existing people, such as the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Near the end of the century, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898) raised the possible existence of Martians, at the time of the scientific controversy over the canals of Mars, which was not finally solved until 1965.

In the mid-20th century, extraterrestrials jumped from novels to real life with the proliferation of UFO sightings, which culminated in the Roswell incident (the MJ-12 hoax) which, using forged documents with signatures like Harry Truman’s, then president of the United States, claimed that the US government kept secret the discovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft that had crashed, and hid the bodies of its crew members. Three quarters of a century later, this fake news is still being aired.

Along the 20th century, science verified that the existence of intelligent beings in the solar system, outside of Earth, should be considered impossible. First the moon was eliminated, then Mars, then all the other bodies. Therefore, the hypothetical aliens must be in other planetary systems in our galaxy, and attempts were launched to detect their possible communications towards us, such as the OZMA and SETI projects, which have not been successful in half a century.

The wish to prove the existence of aliens infected scientists, giving rise to many false alarms, of which I will cite a few. Some are very funny.

1. The first pulsar (neutron star) was discovered in 1967 by Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell, who detected the very high frequency radio signals emitted by these celestial objects. Their first impression was that it was a signal of intelligent extraterrestrial origin, so they gave it the name LGM (initials of Little Green Men). The discovery of more pulsars showed that they were not aliens, but stellar objects of a new kind. Hewish received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1974 for this discovery. Jocelyn Bell received nothing.
2. 
   The WOW! signal, detected in 1977 by a radio telescope, which reached an intensity 30 times higher than the background noise. No explanation has been found, and it has never happened again.
3. In 1998, the Australian Parkes radio telescope detected a mysterious 1.4 Gigahertz signal that no one could explain. The signals were detected sporadically for 17 years, until in 2015 it was discovered that the cause was two microwave heaters that workers at the facility opened prematurely, letting some waves escape, which were detected by the radio telescope.
4. In 2015, a Russian telescope detected a signal of unknown origin while pointing at the star HD 164695, located more than 90 light-years from Earth. A year later, the Russians made it public, and the SETI project focused its attention on that star. But a few weeks later the Russians explained that the cause of the strange signals had been a Soviet-era military satellite that was not registered in the catalogs of celestial objects, and which happened to pass in front of the star when the signal was detected.
5. In 2014, a meteorite fell into the western Pacific Ocean. The event appeared to have been detected by a seismograph located in Papua New Guinea. A researcher from Harvard University used the seismograph data to estimate the exact point where the meteorite had fallen, organized an expedition and found some balls at the bottom of the sea with a composition very different from that of meteorites, so he claimed that they were of alien origin. Ten years later, in March 2024, a group of scientists from Johns Hopkins University has come to the conclusion that the seismic signal detected by the seismograph was produced by a truck that passed by the building (the signals adapt perfectly to the curves of the nearby road). Using data from underwater microphones located in other places, they have found the point of impact of the meteorite, which is more than 100 miles from the place where the balls were found, which naturally have terrestrial origin and therefore do not fit with the composition of meteorites.

This won’t be the last time that a discovery suggesting or proving the existence of aliens is announced with fanfare. Confirming it is the real difficulty.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic thread on Life in other Worlds: Preceding Next

Manuel Alfonseca