I almost missed the recent Washington Post article detailing how the search for UFOs and other signs of extraterrestrial life is ramping up around the globe. It almost flew under my radar, so to speak, and then my eye caught the intriguing headline.
Wait a minute. I thought that determination to find ET had been relegated to the kooky people who hang around Area 51 with night-vision goggles and satellite dishes strapped to the roofs of their cars. But no, apparently our fascination with the unknown is alive and kicking, and in a world where our desire to know everything makes us uneasy with mystery, the fact that a universe of mysterious darkness still enchants us is surely good news.
The article describes the incomplete 350-dish Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, Calif., which currently consists of 42 dishes scanning the stars for signs of radio signals transmitted from far-off planets. The project, a joint effort of SETI Institute and the radio astronomy laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, is bankrolled by a nearly $25 million gift from Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder.
“While their effort was long associated with UFOs, over-excited researchers and little green men,” writes the Post, “it is now broadly embraced as important and rigorous science, and astronomers and astrobiologists in an increasing number of nations have become involved in parallel efforts.”
So will those little green men ever materialize? Who knows, but the fact that our love affair with the mystery of it all carries on into this brightly lighted digital age is inspiring, and the idea that someday we might be getting an “ET Phone Home” across our radio waves gives me hope for an exciting future. I guess I won’t take that satellite dish off the roof of my Toyota quite yet.
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