Congress Is Quietly Nudging NASA to Look for Aliens
In October 1992, astronomers kicked off an ambitious project years in the making. Two radio telescopes, one in Puerto Rico and the other in California, started scouring the night sky for potential signals from alien civilizations somewhere deep in the cosmos.
“We begin the search,” declared Jill Tarter, the project scientist, as the telescopes started listening around glimmering stars many light-years from Earth.
A year later, the search was suddenly over. A senator from Nevada wiped out all funding for any efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, in NASA’s budget, including this new project.
“The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end,” declared Senator Richard Bryan, after Congress approved a NASA funding bill with zero mention of SETI. “As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said take me to your leader, and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.”
The search for extraterrestrial life, in general, would continue, of course, carried out by academic institutions around the world, by people like Tarter,researchers (and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the protagonist in , Carl Sagan’s 1985 classic science-fiction novel). But they wouldn’t get any help from the feds.
