(1548-February 17, 1600) Italian philosopher, priest, astronomer/astrologer, and occultist. Bruno is perhaps best known for his system of mnemonics and as an early proponent of the idea of extra-solar planets and extraterrestrial life. Burned at the stake as a heretic for his theological ideas, Bruno is seen as a martyr to the cause of free […]
Developed by Frank Drake in 1961 to determine the probable number of other technically advanced civilizations in a galaxy. N = number of technically advanced civilizations emitting some kind of detectable signal. R = rate of star formation averaged over the lifetime of the galaxy. FP = fraction of stars with planetary systems. NE = […]
Since advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are so probable (, why haven’t we run into them yet? Or, as the physicist Enrico Fermi put it over lunch one day: “Where is everybody?” Some possible explainations include: These civilizations are only capable of limited interstellar travel because of fundamental physical, biological, or economic restraints. They’re aware of us […]
American UFO researcher. Lead scientific consultant for Project Blue Book in the 50’s. Hynek coined the term close encounter in the 70’s.
(b: 1939 – ) French computer scientist and UFO researcher. Masters in astrophysics, Ph.D. in computer science. Served as Manager of Information Systems at Stanford University. The French scientist in the movie Close Encounters is based on him. His books on UFOs include: Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), Challenge to Science (1966), Passport to Magonia […]
(SETI) The offical scientific search for aliens. Based on the Drake Equation, their search focuses on the communication traces of advanced civilizations. SETI signal analysis was one of the first distributed network applications using the Internet to harness to idle processor cycles of thousands of home computers References http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/SETV.html
(ETH) An explanation for UFOs and alien contact which suggests that they’re physical beings which travel in physical spacecraft which cross inconceivably vast inter-stellar distances before suddenly malfunctioning and crashing on Earth in the middle of nowhere. Other hypotheses attempt to explain alien contact phenomena by means of direct interaction with human consciousness, particularly through […]