The Washington Inquirer EditorAre alien civilizations reaching out to us on Earth, sending perplexing seemingly gibberish messages in order to establish contact with humanity?
According to Israeli mystic Uri Geller, that is exactly the case.
What NASA thinks about the signals
The famous spoon-bender was specifically referring to the curious case of Voyager 1, a space probe launched by NASA in 1977. Since then, it has continued to operate nearly 45 years later, having actually exited the solar system and traveled into interstellar space.
But recently, the signals NASA has been receiving from this probe are strange, seemingly confused about its location.
As far as NASA is concerned, this isn’t a cause for alarm.
“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement on May 18. “The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated. We’re also in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team. But I think if there’s a way to solve this issue with the AACS, our team will find it.”
Three asteroids are seen in space in this artistic illustration. (credit: PIXABAY)
And… what Geller thinks about the signals
Geller, however, has a different idea. To him, it’s no glitch. It’s a targeted message from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, albeit one NASA is evidently struggling to decipher.
“That’s what I believe,” he explained. “I truly believe they are so advanced that they can easily create these glitches and send messages that are difficult for NASA to decipher.”
While Geller may be the first to propose that the Voyager 1 signals are alien communication, the idea that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are trying to communicate with us on Earth isn’t new, with researchers like those in the Breakthrough Listen project founded by Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner, who specialize in comprehensive search efforts for alien transmission.
In fact, the idea of aliens trying to communicate with Earth via signals is something that has been part of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts for decades.
Wow! And mysterious malicious civilizations
While there have been many different efforts to track down alien signals, there is none more famous than the Wow! Signal.
The signal itself is a strong narrowband radio signal and was recorded on August 15, 1977, at the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. However, the signal, or any other like it, has yet to be detected again.
Consequently, it is seen as the strongest candidate for a genuine extraterrestrial transmission.
But where did it come from?
Well, a recent peer-reviewed academic study by a PhD student in Spain named Alberto Caballero managed to supposedly pinpoint from which star it originated.
But Caballero hasn’t just been trying to track down the Wow! Signal. In recent days, the PhD student has also authored another academic article. This one, published on the pre-print website arXiv and which has not been peer-reviewed, is titled “Estimating the Prevalence of Malicious Extraterrestrial Civilizations” and proposes that there are maybe four advanced alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that are hostile and could pose a danger to Earth.
This article relied on many assumptions, of which it freely admits, and thus it functions more as a thought experiment rather than a genuine piece of empirical evidence. But it does still propose an interesting point: Efforts to try and contact aliens, should such a thing be possible, is dangerous as they could possibly even provoke them.
But Geller has a different approach. Rather than fearing the dangers of these possible hostile civilizations, he thinks that the ones that are trying to contact us through Voyager 1, the ones that are closest to us, are friendly. As such, contacting them isn’t risky. In fact, according to him, it might just be for the best.
THE ASTEROID belt between Mars and Jupiter is home to millions of asteroids, but their combined mass is still less than that of the moon. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
“Climate change is melting the ice caps,” he explained. “There might be a huge comet or asteroid coming to Earth. And sure, we have a lot of nuclear bombs, but we don’t have a way to stop global warming or cure cancer or AIDS or even COVID-19. We only live around 85 years. We think we’re so advanced but in the grand scheme of things, we’re really backward. I have a feeling they’ll land here one day because they know we need their help.”
Of course, many people claim to have had close encounters with the third kind already, and Geller is no exception. He claims to have had an alien encounter when he was a child in Tel Aviv, and later to have touched a fragment of a UFO while on a trip to NASA to meet with Dr. Werner von Braun in the 1970s.
“Climate change is melting the ice caps. There might be a huge comet or asteroid coming to Earth. And sure, we have a lot of nuclear bombs, but we don’t have a way to stop global warming or cure cancer or AIDS or even COVID-19.”
Uri Geller
And he is far from the only person to think so.
The truth is out there!
A Pew Research Center survey from June 2021 found that a majority of Americans believe that alien life exists in the universe. Further, an overwhelming majority of these Americans also thought that alien UFOs were either a minor threat or no threat at all.
Indeed, as ridiculous as the idea of aliens may seem, there is one thing that empirical evidence doesn’t deny: That the idea of aliens has a captivating hold on the general public. It isn’t just some fringe conspiracy idea, but rather it is something we as a society are becoming increasingly interested in.
This is why people who have played pivotal roles in getting humanity to space, such as von Braun or NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, claimed that they believed in aliens, Geller claimed.
And they aren’t alone either.
The spoon-bender recounted a recent story of a group of scientists from a leading Israeli university who visited the Uri Geller Museum in Jaffa. There, he showed them his videos and presentations on aliens, UFOs and his own first- and second-hand accounts of them. And according to Geller, these scientists were watching with rapt attention.
“It’s a fascinating subject,” Geller explained, “because in the back of their minds, they know there’s something real there, and they don’t yet know what.”
And that is emblematic of the classic phrase that has embodied the search for UFOs and SETI for years: The truth is out there.
