Is there a hidden agenda behind the dismantling of SETI? Has contact been made, making the 60 year old, budget busting SETI project obsolete? The possibility exists, and recently declassified NSA documents just may prove the case.
I recently found an obscure weblog, titled Alien Examiner[1], by way of a shared link in my twitter feed. Despite the poorly written blog post I was greatly intrigued by the content of the post. It’s title? “Official NSA Document Verifies That We Have Been Contacted By Extraterrestrials.”
Now, I wouldn’t normally pay much attention to such a story, the internet is rife with alien contact conspiracy theories, some of which would make for good science fiction novels. This one, however, got my attention. Hyperlinked at the bottom of the post is a document, supposedly a declassified NSA document, housed on the Official NSA website; that’s the National Security Agency.
The document is difficult to read, but as the post on Alien Examiner points out, “An incredible potentially groundbreaking document relating to the fact that we have intercepted extraterrestrial signals been made public by the NSA. On its own official nsa.gov website the document is entitled “Key To Extraterrestrial Messages” – by Campaigne.” (sic)
Normally I would be shaking my head and moving on, though a quick look at the document itself, gave me pause to read on. The document is titled Key to the Extraterrestrial Message and it is authored by a Dr. H. Campaigne, who’s name brings a single result via Google Search, which happens to be a UFO Disclosure website that is non-functional at the time of writing.
The opening paragraph of the document is as follows:
“Dr. Campaigne presented a series of 29 messages from outer space in “Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” NSA Journal, Vol XI No. 2, pp101, and in the special mathematics and engineering issue of The Journal pp117.”
The rest of the document goes on, at length, about the mathematical translation of various radio signals, creating an alphabet of sorts and attempts to provide syntax to what is believed to be an alien language. Though the alphabet seems to be decipherable, the message itself, at least according to the document at hand, is unintelligible but not a natural phenomenon.
The 11 page document does an excellent job of whetting one’s appetite, though is frustratingly devoid of any real answers. To my mind, the fact that it is housed on the National Security Agencies own website (in archive), as a declassified document, gives weight to the overall idea, though aside from the above, I could find no direct admission that the signals being translated were deemed to be factually alien.
What we could be seeing is one man’s interpretation of natural signals, rather than an admission that extraterrestrial contact has been made. We see no evidence of peer review, nor of the NSA’s position on the proposal, so ultimately, we lack the smoking gun per se.
At this point I leave the interpretation of the evidence to the reader, as I am unwilling to draw a conclusion from so little information, though I remain interested nonetheless.
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/key_to_et_messages.pdf
[1] Alien Examiner, Official NSA Document Verifies That We Have Been Contacted By Extraterrestrials: http://alienexaminer.com/2011/05/02/official-nsa-document-verifies-that-we-have-been-contacted-by-extraterrestrials/