The study was conducted following news of new UFO sightings, and some members of Congress spoke with individuals involved in the search for UFOs.
A team of scientists from the University of California believes that aliens will make contact with Earth by 2029. NASA sent a signal to the Pioneer 12 spacecraft 21 years ago as part of a routine data transmission and communication protocol.
The signal also reached a star 27 light-years away from our planet, and researchers hope that aliens intercepted it and responded to Earth, according to the Daily Mail. “This is a well-known idea from Carl Sagan that he used as the basis for the film Contact,” said astronomer Howard Isaacson.
The 1997 film Contact, based on a story by Carl Sagan, tells the story of a scientist who discovers evidence of aliens on a planet 26 light-years away from Earth and decides to establish contact by sending a signal.
The study used signals sent from Earth to Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons, mapping where the signals could have spread after being sent into space. These spacecraft communicated with the Deep Space Network’s (DSN) radio antennas to retrieve scientific and telemetry data, according to a study published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society.
NASA’s Deep Space Network is an international system of radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and several orbiting Earth. It has been determined that the signals from some of them have so far passed at least one star: “The earliest we can expect a return transmission is 2029,” according to one report.
The team calculated when nearby stars should be hit in transmissions, taking into account the speed of light crossing one parsec every 3.26 years. This allowed them to determine the time required for transmissions to each spacecraft.
“An interesting exercise, but it’s unlikely to yield results,” said Kaitlin Rasmussen, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington who did not work on this study.
The study was conducted following news of new UFO sightings, and senior members of Congress spoke with six whistleblowers who claim to have worked on programs to find UFOs. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2023, signed by President Joe Biden in December, included an amendment requiring the Pentagon to provide confidential reports on previously undisclosed programs related to unidentified abnormal phenomena to senior senators.”
