TUNING IN TO THE UNIVERSE

The Self-Reproducing robots would arrive in spaceships fueled by hydrogen bombs, traveling at 6.7 million miles per hour--1/100 the speed of light. * We would know they were here because they would want it that way. Their mission, after all, would probably be the search for a colony a safe distance from their own planet, sure to burn up in their sun's imminent supernova death. They would be obvious--maybe landing their probe, for instance, on the White House lawn--and they would be everywhere. They would appear not just on Earth, but in every solar system in every galaxy. * At least that's what Frank Tippler says.

Tippler, a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, says this scenario is highly probable if intelligent alien life forms exist. The only catch, he says, is that they don't.

"I think the evidence is overwhelming that we're alone," he says.

But just northwest of Boston, Harvard physics professor Paul Horowitz looks for extraterrestrial beings millions of miles away. He's sure they're out there.

Eight years ago he pointed an antenna up into the sky, hoping to find something, anything, to indicate that we are not alone. Since then he's been waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

At the end of each year, he and his staff review the data on the five or six signals that appear promising. Looking for some type of repetition, they point their telescope toward the indicated places in the sky and wait again.

If it's a usual finding, they probably won't be able to make any conclusions about its origin. If Horowitz and his team are especially unlucky, they'll find out that they've tracked a "mundane" object like a satellite. Their "first discovery," back in June, 1983, was an "incredibly big signal... the right profile, but not the right frequency." It took them about 30 minutes to figure out that it was the sun.

Welcome to the search for extraterrestrial life, a highly speculative science that is, by nature of its almost complete unprovability, one of the most widely debated--and tantalizingly popular--areas of study around. Some are drawn to the search by interest, some by fear, and some (according to their enemies)by the desire for media publicity. There are as many opinions about the matter as there are imaginations.

"Everybody's interested, aren't they?" muses Horowitz, with a little laugh.

The Harvard physicist can afford to chuckle a little bit, since the type of program he endorses--known as SETI, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence--is enjoying a comfortable share of scientific and governmental support. In fact, on October 12, 1992, exactly 500 years after Christopher Columbus's New World landing, NASA is planning to begin its SETI Microwave Observance Project (MOP) at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The program will be the most comprehensive and systematic search that has ever been attempted... by humans.

The project's estimated budget is $100 million for the decade, about $14.5 million for fiscal year 1992.

Research assistant Bob Arnold explains the reasoning behind the ground-based search:

"The sun is one of the run-of-the-mill, garden variety stars, and planets are a natural by-product of star formation, and planets like Earth should be numerous," he says. "We're finding many complex molecules in space... the conditions for biology are widespread. We infer that since animals have evolved here, life could be a common phenomenon, just like stars. There should be hundreds of sites.

"You can speculate, or you can do a test--and this has been identified as the most useful approach," he claims.

SETI operates on a set of assumptions about the motives of extraterrestrials and about the development of knowledge. First, it assumes that intelligent beings will understand radio technology, no matter where their position in the universe.

SETI probes focus on microwave frequencies ("the quietest radio band in nature everywhere," according to Arnold) and seek out narrow band emissions that the scientists believe may have been artificially produced. As Arnold sees it, these signals could be anything from "leakage from a radio transmitter, which simply tells us that at one point there was a culture that used radar... to full-blown wide and band universal television."

Some searchers, including Horowitz, have suggested that there are "magic frequencies," common frequencies which would be likely to be used by extraterrestrials eager to communicate. One of these is 1420 megahertz, which is the neutral hydrogen frequency. As Arnold explains, "No matter where you are in the universe, you'll know about hydrogen. Even if you have four eyes."

SETI scientists are firm in their belief that inter travel is practically preposterous. Arnold says that UFO search is "an entertainment industry... a diversion. Although he concedes that "it's good in that it gets people thinking," he is alarmed by "the claims people are willing to accept without evidence. Lack of critical thinking... that's what upsets us about the area."

SETI's second assumption--that intelligent beings would definitely opt for radio transmission as medium--is where Frank Tippler disagrees.

"If they existed, they'd be here," he "Interstellar travel isn't that hard."

Especially for civilizations that, according to his culations about the age of the universe, probably a huge jump on Earth's technology. "If our evolution is typical, then most of the civilizations have already formed on billion years ago. That's lot of advance

Tippler gives examples of the types of revolution technology, not very far from being created on Earth, that would allow aliens to visit Earth with relative. He says that NASA had a conference about 10 ago that asserted that the development of self-replicating robots may only be 50 years in the future. These machines would use materials from foreign solar systems to "reproduce," and would thus remove barriers presented by interstellar distances.

These distances, of course, would be shortened more by inevitable advances in rocket technology as nuclear pulse rockets, which have been studied recently by the British Astronomical Society. Tippler describes these as, "roughly speaking, rockets which have hydrogen bombs dropped out the rear instead of chemical fuel."

With these rockets, Tippler suggests, it would take a craft only 10 million years to cover that whole galaxy. He believes that a civilization with millions of year additional progress could get here even faster than that. And, he adds, he finds it "hard to imagine that they'd come here and not set up a permanent base... I'd expect their presence to be very obvious if in they were here."

Tippler uses these examples, along with an evolutionary, argument that has been forwarded by Er. Mayr, a retired Harvard zoology professor, to fight allocation of funds of programs like SETI.

But the same type of conjecture is commonly us to support UFO research. An MIT professor also believes that advanced societies would have the capability to visit Earth.

"The usual scientific view is that because it's much easier to listen than to travel, we should look radio... but we should also look at the flip side. If you were trying to find out about an alien society, would you prefer to ask them the truth, or would you spy on them? Of course, you'd spy on them."

As he sees it, spying is preferable to radio communication "100 to 1," because it allows the visiting intelligence to collect information about non-technological species (which SETI does not) and it supplies military advantage, should that be necessary. Like Tippler, he discredits the SETI advocates' notion that cost and difficulty would keep extraterrestrials from visiting Earth, citing the same technological advances.

"In looking for radio, we're assuming they're stillstuck with radio... There's a lot of effort being put into listening, but no one's putting any effort into looking for them here."

Almost no one, that is, within "respectable" scientific circles. But the search for extraterrestrial visitors here on earth, popular since the late, Forties, continues fullforce. And it's not just limited to the National Enquirer.

George Eberhart has degrees in journalism and in library science, and serves as Director of Publications for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), an organization of scientists and amateurs across the United State who are engaged in an organized effort to "try to examine the evidence carefully and find out what the phenomenon really is."

Eberhart understands that SETI people are "embarrassed by unfologists in general because there are a lot of wacky people out there," and he admits that "a lot of what passes for ufology is wishful thinking." But he makes a definite distinction between the type of work UFOS does and tabloid-style sensationalism.

"For us, every light you see in the sky is not a UFO," he says, explaining that CUFOS only investigates "solid findings"--that is, case in which there is solid physical, visual, or radar evidence. "We're very critical of things... we have an open mind, but we don't believe everything.

Right now, in addition to maintaining the largest UFO case depository in the United States and publishing a magazine and a scientific journal, CUFOS is engaged in two major investigative projects.

The first is a study of UFO abductions, a relatively common phenomenon that Eberhart says "may or May not be related to UFOs." In the usual scenario, people are abducted by "little grey men," brought onto an alien craft, examined, and then allowed to go.

Victims do not remember their ordeals--they are only aware of a period of lost, unexplained time. Memories can be regained through dreams or through strategies like hypnosis. Eberhart says that there is usually "no objective vision," and therefore no real proof.

CUFOS has investigated about 16-20 abduction cases, beginning by putting subjects through a battery of tests that is designed to see if there is one specific personality type that favors UFO abductions. Abductees usually have one of two basic personality types: "fantasy-oriented and paranoid" or "totally normal, overly calm and objective."

Both types tell the same sort of story. Eberhart says that CUFOS isn't really sure what that means--it may be the result of real experience, or it may be a by-product of some undiagnosed psychological conditions within each group--but the MIT professor has an idea.

"These cases do not have a standard psychological explanation, and there is a lot of similarity between them that can't be explained. I mean, a lot of people think they're Jesus Christ...and there's more variation in their conceptions of Jesus Christ than in these people's stories."

Eberhart is more reserved. "Something is really occurring here. We don't know if it's a psycho-spiritual thing or if aliens really are abducting people. But even if it is some bizarre mental problem, it would still be interesting.

"It could be that aliens are abducting people to get genetic material, but it seems like that's a bad way to do it, for technologically advanced beings," he says.

"Some have humorously opposed this, suggesting that aliens use our planet as a high-school biology class, that they do dissections... We can only do so much second guessing about aliens. We don't even understand humans in the Middle East."

The second big CUFOS project involves an investigation of an alleged UFO crash that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, in July, 1947. Several people saw the alleged crash, which supposedly left behind a significant amount of physical debris--including an odd, tin-foil like metal that could not be cut, a "weird balsa wood-like substance with odd characters on it," and, Eberhart believes, alien crew members' bodies.

Under instruction from the Pentagon, Army investigators from the nearby base retrieved the debris and sent if to Ford Worth and Los Alamos, where it was analyzed and officially reported to be the remains of a weather balloon with a reflective radar attachment.

A new book, Crash at Roswell, written by two ufologists also challenges the official government findings.

Eberhart feels certain that there is a government cover-up somewhere--maybe the result of bureaucratic incompetence, or perhaps the result of a Cold War fear that the Russians would find out what had happened.

"A technical secret can become so big that it keeps itself," he says.

The relationship between the US Government and the investigators of extraterrestrial intelligence still remains strained at times, despite the recent allocation of funds for NASA's SETI project.

"Many people in the government who have never met a scientist might be skeptical," says Bob Arnold, "and the program could still be stopped."

Although he estimates that the cost of SETI to the US citizen is only about "five cents per taxpayer per year," the program is still "met with opposition and ridicule by scientific ignoramuses" on Capitol Hill.

Long-time opponent Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin gave the program one of his famed Golden Fleece Awards in 1978, and late Massachusetts Rep. Silvio Conte and Sen. Dick Bryan of Nevada also have spoken out against the program.

Arnold sees these outbursts as "attempts to grandstand... these congressmen are saying, 'Look at me, I'm the savior of the taxpayers.'"

SETI scientist Frank Drake, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is considered by many to be the founder of SETI-type research. He agrees with Arnold's assessment.

"In all cases, it was clear that they really didn't understand the project at all, but attacked it to get publicity. Extraterrestrial life gets publicity."

"In the end it backfired, because they got a lot of criticism. But [these people] can be damaging, because funding can be cut. They're very misguided, but they do have impact."

Despite all the skepticism and opposition, the searches, scientific and not, go on. NASA SETI is continuing to expand, and Horowitz is also planning to move on to a bigger radio receiver. Data collected in SETI and CUFOS investigations is useful to research in areas as varied as radio astronomy, sociology, and psychology.

One useful application involves attempts to build compact, ultra-sensitive radio receivers.

"Our receivers picked up Pioneer 10 in 1985. It was a sanity check, a proof of concept. It proved that SETI could pick up a weak transmission. It was a triumph of engineering," says Arnold. Pioneer's signal was 1 watt, no stronger than a Christmas tree light.

But what really keeps the ufologists going are reports of actual sightings. In the Massachusetts area alone, Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) investigators have examined about a dozen cases in the last year, including two sightings of 12 to 18 inch glowing green disks near highways, a 30-foot metallic disc seen near Cape Cod in January, a silver domed disc seen in Malden in October of 1990, and two reports of a large angular object, flying at tree level.

Drake thinks that all the research is a result of "wanting to understand the place of humans in the universe." He asks, "What have we become, what can civilization become? Can we lead a benign existence, or is warfare inevitable?"

Arnold states it a little differently: "We're crossing a new threshold in the intellectual life of our species. We may not be the only kids on the block... and the first day of school is about to start."