A UK-based academic claims to have uncovered one of the most ground breaking pieces of news in recorded history.
Professor Simon Holland, a documentary producer for NASA-funded projects, including one identifying asteroids threatening Earth, claims that two rival groups of astronomers are racing to publish conclusive evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.
He told The Mirror: “We have found a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and people don’t know about it.”
According to Simon, he received information from a contact within Mark Zuckerberg’s Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded initiative searching for civilizations beyond Earth.
The news may be released within the next month, coinciding with the US election, he speculates. Simon alleges that astronomers from the Oxford-based project have identified definitive evidence of transmissions from another world.
Simon states: “They found the evidence of a non-human technological signature a few years ago, using the Parkes telescope in Australia”.
Such remarkable claims require substantial evidence, and the team funded by billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner is racing to gather more evidence to support their potentially revolutionary discovery.
Meanwhile, Simon warns that they risk being outpaced. He revealed: “This is breaking news, as of yesterday, but the Chinese might be pipping them to the post, with their, FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program. It’s the largest telescope in the world since Arecibo.”
The coordinates of the target object, known as BLC-1, are allegedly known to the Chinese and both teams are vying to be the first to make the highly prestigious announcement.
Five potential technosignature candidates were identified from a re-examination of SETI’s “Seti at Home” screensaver programme, which used the combined resources of the world’s PCs to sift through the vast amounts of data generated by radio telescopes. BLC-1, according to Simon, is considered the most promising by far.
Regardless of what the source of BLC-1’s signals turns out to be, Simon emphasises that it’s unlike any known natural phenomenon.
He explained: “It’s a single point source. The signal, instead of being the giant buzz of everything in the universe that we hear through all radio telescopes, was a narrow electromagnetic spectrum.”
Astronomers have been thrilled by potential “alien” transmissions before when pulsars were first discovered they were catalogued as “LGM’ or “little green men” objects. And the 1977 “Wow!” Signal has never been definitively identified.
However, Simon believes, this time it could be the real thing. The experts are proceeding with the utmost caution prior to making this landmark declaration, yet Simon feels the announcement may arrive potentially from either Breakthrough Listen in Oxford or the Chinese researchers within the month ahead.
“It would be wonderful if it coincided with the first woman in the White House,” he quips.
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