Build Date: Wed May 1 22:00:10 2024 UTC

Bad things happen when you drop a four pack of Guinness on the ground when you are trying to remove it from the car.
-- Johnnie Royale

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

 

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