Telescopes on Earth have found evidence of intelligent alien life and the proof will be released in less than one month, a filmmaker claims.
Simon Holland, who has worked on documentaries for the BBC and NASA-funded projects, said that an Oxford-backed program searching for extraterrestrial signals has quietly identified ‘non-human intelligence in our galaxy.’
The signal — a five-hour-long burst of radio waves — appeared to be from a region around Proxima Centauri, a star about 4.2 light-years away from Earth.
The Oxford team has confirmed they are analyzing the signal but have not revealed the likely source.
‘They are looking for details, hence the delay in publishing the news,’ Holland told DailyMail.com of the strange radio signal, which has been hotly debated ever since astronomers first detected it on April 29, 2019.
Popular YouTuber ‘Prof Simon’ Holland said that a source inside the $100 million nonprofit ‘Breakthrough Listen’ claims it has finally found proof of alien life. Above, Comet PanSTARRS C/2014 Q1 visible over Australia’s Parkes radio telescope – which first detected the signal
Holland described the signal as currently being in the ‘low information zone,’ a term coined by skeptic Mick West to describe cases where tantalizing but minimal data makes it all but impossible for science to rule out even the most incredible theories.
‘The technical hurdles faced,’ Holland said, ‘are that the signal is very weak.’
But citing a source with firsthand knowledge from within the Oxford-led nonprofit project Breakthrough Listen, Holland is persuaded that evidence is mounting in favor of the theory that this signal did originate from an advanced alien species.
‘My contact is a senior EU [European Union] radio telescope administrator,’ Holland told DailyMail.com.
‘We have found a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy,’ he said, ‘and people don’t know about it.’
Breakthrough Listen began as a $100-million nonprofit research project initiated by the Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor and physicist Yuri Milner in January 2016.
Its radio telescope-based ‘search for extraterrestrial intelligence’ (SETI) efforts are just one part of the billionaire’s wider moonshot program, Breakthrough Initiatives.
Since 2023, Breakthrough Listen has been led by the physicist Dr Andrew Siemion at Oxford University in the UK.
According to Holland, Breakthrough Listen on the cusp of confirming that its prime candidate for a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, BLC-1, is the real thing.
The project first picked up BLC-1 via Australia’s Parkes radio telescope in 2019, but by 2021 the team’s astronomers had come to believe that it was likely a false positive or ‘an artifact of Earth-based interference from human technologies.’
Back in October 2021, Breakthrough Listen announced that the radio signal it researchers thought came from near Proxima Centauri (above) was likely nothing more than a ‘false positive.’ Word from Holland’s source inside the group is that the team’s opinion has changed
In short, although BLC-1 appeared to originate from a world orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, the team noted other Earth-based signals that it closely resembled.
Their provisional conclusion in 2021 was that BLC-1 was much more likely to be some unidentified radio wave pollution coming from Earth, possibly even in Australia.
But Holland said that Breakthrough Listen might be changing its tune.
‘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,’ he explained.
‘It’s a single point source,’ Holland emphasized in his interview Thursday, meaning that he has been told the signal is unlikely to be local or noise from deep space.
‘They found the evidence of a non-human technological signature,’ he said.
The possible signal from an alien civilization, BLC1 (pictured), had ‘characteristics broadly consistent with hypothesized technosignatures’ – meaning that they could be interpreted as evidence of some kind of intelligently made technology detectable from light years away
Holland, a popular science educator known as ‘Professor Simon’ on YouTube, has had a long career producing films with the BBC, Smithsonian TV, and PBS Nova, as well as for the University of Hawaii’s NASA-funded ‘Finding Earth-Killer Asteroids.’
‘I am a retired BBC film editor, specialist factual dept.,’ as Holland summed it up to DailyMail.com. ‘I taught media studies at the graduate level after leaving the BBC.’
Holland said that he believes, from his conversations with insiders and his own analysis, that Breakthrough Listen is now in a race against time to beat Chinese government researchers to publication with their earthshattering findings.
‘The Chinese might be pipping them to the post, with their, FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program,’ Holland told the Mirror. ‘It’s the largest telescope in the world since Arecibo.’
Holland (above) said that he believes Breakthrough Listen is now in a race against time to beat Chinese government researchers to publication with their earthshattering findings. ‘The Chinese might be pipping them to the post,’ as he told reporters this week
A curious announcement — almost immediately retracted — from China’s state-backed publication Science and Technology Daily did announce that FAST had discovered an alien signal back in 2022.
But the notoriously tight-lipped Chinese government has yet to clarify the retraction, or whether FAST, nicknamed ‘Heaven’s Eye,’ was trained on this same BLC-1 signal.
Holland said that both Breakthrough Listen and the Chinese government scientists expect to be breaking news of their confirmed signal from an alien civilization soon.
WHAT IS SETI’S BREAKTHROUGH LISTEN INITIATIVE?
Breakthrough Listen is a privately funded, decade-long research project based at the University of California, Berkeley.
It has just announced a significant number of new observations.
They examined roughly 1,300 nearby stars using large antennas in West Virginia and Australia.
For each of these star systems, they sifted through several billion radio channels, looking for a signal of the type that only a radio transmitter can produce.
No extraterrestrial radio emissions were detected.
But those 1,300 stars represent only a minuscule sample of the total planetary population.
But, Breakthrough Listen’s last public comments on the mystery of BLC-1 came in October 2021, when its radio astronomers were leaning more toward the idea that this unusual signal had merely come for human sources.
Although BLC1 had ‘characteristics broadly consistent with hypothesized technosignatures,’ the team’s consensus was that they were really just signals from Earth that were getting in the way of their efforts to listen-in on distance worlds.
The radio wave signal was initially detected in April and May 2019 from the Australia-based Parkes Telescope at a frequency of 980 MHz.
‘The original signal found by Shane Smith [an intern] is not obviously detected when the telescope is pointed away from Proxima Centauri,’ Dr Sofia Sheikh, a radio astronomer and astrobiologist with Breakthrough Listen, said at the time.
Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years from Earth and has two confirmed planets, a Jupiter-like gas giant and a rocky world called Proxima b in the habitable zone — key features of the star system that still has scientists excited about its prospects as a home for alien life.
Breakthrough Listen’s researchers scanned the Proxima Centauri star system across a wide range of frequencies, from 700 megahertz to 4 gigahertz ‘(in other words, performing the equivalent of tuning to over 800 million radio channels at a time,’ according to their statement at the time.
They found four million hits that were eventually whittled away to 1 million after looking at hits with no motion.
Another filter was applied for the remaining hits, as they had to appear to come from the direction of Proxima Centauri.
The researchers pointed the Parkes Telescope at the star and then pointed it away, toggling between the ‘on-off’ pattern several times, which left them with 5,160 possible candidates.
While the team had quickly ruled out interference from satellites or other human aircraft, they came to suspect that faulty equipment near the Parkes radio telescope in Australia had created BLC-1.
‘The Chinese might be pipping them to the post, with their, FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program,’ Holland told the Mirror. ‘It’s the largest telescope in the world since Arecibo.’ Above, an aerial view of FAST, which is nicknamed ‘Heaven’s Eye’
A curious announcement – almost immediately retracted – from China’s state-backed publication Science and Technology Daily did announce that FAST had discovered an alien signal in 2022. China has yet to explain this episode
When Dr Sheikh and here colleagues revisited the signal, they discovered that an automated sorting program among their filters had previously ignored several ‘look alike’ signals that resembled BLC-1 but emitted at other frequencies.
Dr Sheikh told the journal Nature at the time that she suspected the signal was coming from a local piece of malfunctioning electronic equipment, like a phone or computer, just before the faulty device was shut down for repairs.
The signal contained a range of frequencies, the team reported in their peer-reviewed study in Nature, that was ‘consistent with common clock oscillator frequencies used in digital electronics.’
‘Given a haystack of millions of signals, the most likely explanation is still that it is a transmission from human technology that happens to be “weird” in just the right way to fool our filters,’ Dr Sheikh said in 2021.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Breakthrough Listen for comment, and this article will be updated, if the non-profit SETI initiative responds.
KEY DISCOVERIES IN HUMANITY’S SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE
Discovery of pulsars
British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar.
Since then other types of pulsars that emit X-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted.
Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars but when they were first discovered it was believed they could have come from aliens.
‘Wow!’ radio signal
In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote ‘Wow!’ next to his data.
In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the night sky above Ohio spotted a radio signal so powerful that he excitedly wrote ‘Wow!’ next to his data
The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object.
Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the ‘Wow! signal’, which was 30 times stronger than background radiation, was a message from intelligent extraterrestrials.
Fossilised Martian microbes
In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs.
The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984.
Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.
Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike (pictured)
However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated.
They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils.
Behaviour of Tabby’s Star in 2005
The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astronomers since being discovered in 2015.
It dims at a much faster rate than other stars, which some experts have suggested is a sign of aliens harnessing the energy of a star.
The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015 (artist’s impression)
Recent studies have ‘eliminated the possibility of an alien megastructure’, and instead, suggests that a ring of dust could be causing the strange signals.
Exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone in 2017
In February 2017 astronomers announced they had spotted a star system with planets that could support life just 39 light years away.
Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star ‘Trappist-1’, and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life.
Three of the planets have such good conditions, that scientists say life may have already evolved on them.
Researchers claim that they will know whether or not there is life on any of the planets within a decade, and said: ‘This is just the beginning.’
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!['The Chinese might be pipping them to the post, with their, FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program,' Holland told the Mirror. 'It's the largest telescope in the world since Arecibo.' Above, an aerial view of FAST, which is nicknamed 'Heaven's Eye'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/10/11/16/90746285-13950399-image-a-22_1728659194864.jpg)
