News brodcast reporting on recieved signals from space ?SETI site won't respond to search request, page 1

There was an article published on Sep. 3, 2004 in the Madison, WI "Capital Times". Here is the information:

Doug Moe: Has ET finally phoned home?

Doug Moe — 9/03/2004 10:48 am

THURSDAY MORNING, Nate Coffin, a 34-year-old information technology manager with Farin & Associates in Madison, which provides risk management consulting to financial institutions, got an e-mail from another computer guy, someone he has never met, Oliver Voelker of Nuremberg, Germany.

"So we found ET!"Voelker wrote.

Well, maybe.

What's definite is that Nate Coffin's world has gotten a bit crazy this week, ever since Monday, when a journalist from New Scientist magazine called and told him that a distant radio signal detected by Coffin's computer is the best chance yet that a massive grass-roots search for extraterrestrial life may have actually found it.

Voelker, the German, is the other computer user (out of 5 million in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, at-home project) to have found the signal. Earlier this week Coffin e-mailed him to say hi and on Thursday Voelker e-mailed back.

The signal is named SHGb02+14a, which lets us know that some of this is going to be a bit complicated for the scientifically challenged, like myself. The signal has excited scientists because it does not appear to be standard radio interference or have the signature of any known astronomical object. The signal appears to be coming from a point between Pisces and Aries.

As of Thursday, Coffin had not heard directly from SETI, which is based in Puerto Rico and at the University of California-Berkeley, but the SETI scientists discussed it with New Scientist, which has a story in its September issue titled "Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away."

Dan Wertheimer, a radio astronomer at Cal-Berkeley and the chief scientist for the SETI at-home project, told New Scientist: "It's the most interesting signal from SETI at home. We're not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it."

Another Berkeley researcher, Eric Korpella, said, "We are looking for something that screams out 'artificial.' This just doesn't do that, but it could be because it is distant."

Just two weeks ago, the journal Network World did a story on the SETI project under the headline: "Still no word from ET: Five years and 5 million networked PCs find no sign of extraterrestrials."

The article offered a capsule description of how the SETI at-home project works, saying it "starts with Cornell University's Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico - a dish three times the size of the new Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece - which collects radio noise from distant stars. The data is recorded on tapes that are sent to Berkeley, where servers break them into chunks and make them available over the Internet. The 5 million PCs worldwide that have the SETI at-home screen-saver program installed can download chunks of signals and look for patterns in the noise. The processed work units are then sent back to Berkeley's computer lab - a storage closet in the astronomy department where the servers are kept."

In the New Scientist piece, Madison's Coffin is mistakenly referred to as "Nate Collins." On Thursday, sensing the attention his find was beginning to generate, Coffin called the error "a mixed blessing." He said he really didn't do much other than join the SETI network and leave his computer running.

"Actually, the timing of it makes me think it was my wife Heidi's computer," Coffin said. "She is more diligent about leaving her computer on - if you want to call that diligent."

Still, Coffin is not unmoved by the possibility, however slight, that he might be part of a monumental discovery. While he says he is not one of those people who expects a spaceship to one day "land in my back yard," he has been a "Star Trek" fan since his youth and has "an emotional investment, like any human" in learning as much as possible about the universe and what may or may not be out there. That said, Coffin thinks the likelihood is the signal is "some kind of anomaly" that will eventually be revealed not to be ET.

In the New Scientist story, other scientists weighed in on the likelihood that the signal Coffin discovered might be extraterrestrial life trying to make contact. Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, said, "It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over." In 1967, Bell Burnell noticed a pulsed radio signal which she at first thought was extraterrestrial but which turned out to be the first discovery of a pulsar.

Yet Bell Burnell believes scientists should continue to study the signal.

"If they can see it four, five or six times, it really begins to get exciting," she said.