SETI Makes First Contact?
You may or may not have heard the buzz about alien signals
coming from EQ
Pegasi... In a nutshell, an engineer named Paul Dore who
bootlegged time on a SETI-grade radio telescope discovered
special alien signals coming from something in the direction
of the star system known as EQ Pegasi. Since then several other
observatories around the world seemed to have reproduced his
results, but now the officials have ruled it all a big fat
hoax, and Paul Dore has
canceled
his press conference... But was it really all a hoax?
It seems that main thing that Paul Dore did wrong was to go
outside of normal channels. He originally submitted his
information to SETI anonymously, on a mailing list. Of course,
he is an engineer, not a SETI scientist, and he was
bootlegging time on his employer's dish. Could that explain
his reluctance to be identified? He did come out with his
identity within a few days of posting his "discovery." Charges
that information about the EQ Pegasi signal came from an
anonymous source are false.
Could it be that Paul Dore was just trying to get SETI to
look at EQ Pegasi?
If it's all just a hoax, it sure was an elaborate one,
involving several amateur and professional radio astronomers.
Why was Paul Dore looking at EQ Pegasi in the first place? All
of the radio astronomers seem to agree that it's a very
unlikely place to look.
Some say that he was
actually listening to signals from an interstellar alien probe traveling
this way, and so NASA and the powers that be shut Dore down to keep
it all quiet for just a little bit longer...
Others says that Paul Dore was actually picking up signals
from a special NSA spy satellite... something to
do with a mysterious project known as "Echelon/P415." So
they sent out the men in Crown
Victorias to make him shut the hell up.
According to Richard C.
Hoagland, the whole Pegasus thing is very interesting when
you follow the connection between the myth
of Pegasus and ancient Egypt. Somehow he's got Mobil Oil
involved. Their corporate logo is, of course, Pegasus.
Will we ever know what happened in this case for sure?
--snatcher
