In a vast cosmic experiment equivalent to hitting "redial," astronomers in a dozen countries are aiming telescopes to listen in once again on some of the stars that were part of the world's first search for alien life 50 years ago.
The coordinated signal-searching campaign began this month to mark the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a 1960 experiment that was christened the world's first real attempt in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI.
Like Project Ozma, which got its name from a character in L. Frank Baum's series of books about the Land of Oz, the new search is called Project Dorothy.
Project Ozma was conducted by astronomer Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Drake is also famous for devising the Drake equation, which predicts the number of alien civilizations with whom we might be able to communicate. The formula is based on factors including the rate of star formation in the galaxy and the percentage of stars thought to have planets. Making educated guesses for some of the equation's terms, scientists have used it to predict we could find evidence of ET intelligence within the next 25 years.
The various parameters of The Drake equation are open to question, and that is likely to increase given the data arriving from NASA's Kepler Mission to hunt for Earth-like planets, and data from the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. And that doesn't take into account the all the solid UFO data that is being so conspicuously ignored by the scientific academic establishment. To read the rest of the article, click here.