Celestial Events 



Bagging the 

 Little Green Man 



by Gail S. Cleere 



The magnificent winter constellations 

 are perhaps the easiest ones of the year to 

 recognize. This is especially true in Febru- 

 ary, when the evening sky is devoid of 

 planets that might otherwise confuse us. 

 Mercury is low in the west at dusk early in 

 the month, and brillant Jupiter rises in the 

 late night hours. By sunset, Orion the 

 Hunter is high in the southeast. Four bright 

 stars mark his extremities, and three more 

 in a row form his belt, making Orion an 

 easy target, even for the most amateur ob- 

 server. The Hunter is flanked by the 

 brightest of all the visible stars, Sirius, to 

 the lower left, and the prettiest of all open 

 clusters, the Pleiades, to the upper right 

 just beyond the V-shaped open cluster 

 called the Hyades. 



But while we can admire the beautiful 

 stars of the winter season as soon as it gets 

 dark, we can also catch sight of some 

 spring stars that are beginning to appear in 

 the east. Leo the Lion, whose stars form a 

 distinctive "sickle" or backward question 

 mark, can be seen emerging out of the 

 east-northeast horizon just as Orion 

 crosses the meridian. After midnight, as 

 Leo crosses the meridian, Jupiter rises in 

 the claws of Scorpius. At the same time, 

 Hercules is rising in the east-northeast. 

 Hercules is marked by the four brightest 

 stars, which form a pattern called the Key- 

 stone. 



In the faO of 1974, Hercules was the 

 constellation to which we directed our first 

 intentional interstellar space message. 

 Using the Arecibo radiotelescope in 

 Puerto Rico — the world's largest — as- 

 tronomers transmitted a three-minute table 

 of binary digits toward M-13, a closely 

 packed star cluster in Hercules. The mod- 

 em search for extraterrestrial intelligence 



had begun in 1960, however, when a radio 

 dish at the National Radio Astronomy Ob- 

 servatory in West Virginia was "tuned" to 

 Hsten to two sunlike stars located a rela- 

 tively close twelve light-years from us 

 (Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani) on the 

 chance that a civihzation capable of radio 

 broadcasts might inhabit a planet orbiting 

 one of the stars. 



Are we alone? Our chances of finding 

 out any time soon seem to be fading. After 

 years of intermittent studies and short- 

 Uved programs, NASA formally inaugu- 

 rated its Search for Extraterrestrial Intelh- 

 gence (SETI) and began listening for 

 suspect radio signals in October 1992 — 

 the 500th anniversary of Columbus's land- 

 fall in the New World. But exactly one 

 year later, a House-Senate conference 

 committee voted to kill funding for the 

 program. According to Senator Richard 

 Bryan of Nevada, "Millions have been 

 spent and we have yet to bag a single little 

 green fellow." Bryan derided the program 

 as "the great Martian chase.... Not a sin- 

 gle Martian has said 'take me to your 

 leader.' Not a single flying saucer has ap- 

 phed for FAA approval." 



Serious scientists using radio astron- 

 omy to search for nonrandom signals in 

 space have battled that kind of rhetoric for 

 years. The search for life on other planets 

 has always been viewed as a somewhat 

 suspect endeavor. Early science fiction 

 was one problem. Science historian Trudy 

 Bell wrote that "heroes swashing their 

 buckles in steaming Venusian swamps or 

 on the shifting sands of Mars, rescuing 

 voluptuous damsels from the clutches of 

 green and drooUng monsters" didn't help 

 the more serious scientists. Bell suspects 

 that this notion, coupled with flying saucer 



cuhs, not only shelved the idea of extrater- 

 restrial Ufe for many years but also caused 

 it to "fall off the shelf mto bad company." 

 This "giggle factor," some experts claim, 

 is what killed the SETI program. 



Perhaps to avoid being associated with 

 the supermarket-tabloid brand of interest 

 in extraterrestrial life, in 1992 NASA re- 

 named the SETI program the High Reso- 

 lution Microwave Survey (HRMS). 

 HRMS was the culmination of a twenty- 

 year project to develop sophisticated digi- 

 tal radio receivers capable of tunmg in tens 

 of millions of frequencies at a time, Usten- 

 ing for signals of artificial origin against a 

 busy background of interference from ter- 

 restrial and astrophysical sources. 



Two approaches were being used. One 

 employed the Arecibo radiotelescope to 

 scan a thousand stars within 100 light- 

 years of the sun. The second used the 

 Deep Space Network's radiotelescope m 

 the Mojave Desert to scan the remaining 

 sky with a less sensitive, broader-band 

 coverage. Later, telescopes in the Southern 

 Hemisphere were to be used to cover that 

 half of the sky. 



NASA administrator Daniel Goldin is 

 disappointed. "SETI," he says,"is a pro- 

 gram that pays for itself [in useful technol- 

 ogy] and is inspirational." Project scientist 

 Jill Tarter of NASA's Ames Research Cen- 

 ter says that private funding will be so- 

 hcited for HRMS, which, she claims, "is 

 intrinsically international." Dr. Steven 

 Dick, NASA's SETI project historian, 

 commented, "It's basic human curiosity, 

 and even Congress can't stifle that. One 

 way or another, SETI will be back." As it 

 now stands, E. T. might try to phone 

 home, but we have voted to take the re- 

 ceiver off the hook. 



60 Natxiral History 2/94 



