Art Bell interviews Seth Shostak, public programs scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Shostak explains that the project, renamed Phoenix after Congress killed NASA's SETI funding in 1993, now survives on private donations from supporters like Bill Hewlett and David Packard. The parallels to the film "Contact" prove remarkably close to reality.
Shostak describes the technical challenges of distinguishing alien signals from the thousands of satellites and telecommunications sources cluttering the radio spectrum. The team uses a 28-million-channel receiver and a second antenna hundreds of miles away to filter interference in real time. He recounts a tense 24-hour false alarm in June 1997 when a promising signal turned out to be the European SOHO satellite orbiting a million miles from Earth.
The conversation turns to whether any confirmed detection would remain secret. Shostak argues that secrecy is virtually impossible, noting that news of the June false alarm leaked to the New York Times within hours. He also addresses physicist Michio Kaku's criticism that advanced civilizations would likely use spread spectrum technology rather than the narrow-band signals SETI currently monitors.
