Contact

Around midnight on 17 September 1998, researchers working on the SETI Project Phoenix picked up something strange. They were listening through the radio telescope at Arecibo, whose dish spans 250 meters, and the signal seemed to come from the star catalogued as 4079, better known as EQ Pegasi. It is a class M star, much like our own Sun, about 21 light-years away.

The two researchers, Sett and Jill, were sweeping the sky in steps of 20 MHz every four minutes until they reached a frequency of 1210 MHz. At that point they found a “rhythmic beat.” They started recording it at once, and they had already begun trying to decode it.

Of all the planetary systems studied so far, the one designated 51 Pegasi b looks like one of the nearer candidates that might hold intelligent life. It sits only 0.05 astronomical units from its star, so it is bathed in intense radiation. It is a giant, roughly half the volume of Jupiter. Some argue that, given its mass, it could be a gas planet much like Saturn. What puzzles and divides people most is how a world that close to its sun could hold an atmosphere at all. Others believe it might resemble Io, the moon of Jupiter, with violent volcanic activity.

Then, in late September, Hurricane Georges swept over the island of Puerto Rico and damaged the Arecibo antenna. Reception of any signal from space was suspended. The research team only managed to start again in March 1999, with a new 305-meter reflector dish.

All of this was, for a time, classified TOP SECRET. The world came to know about it thanks to a private investigator named Paul Dore. But soon after he made everything public on his website, he was detained by three agents of the United States National Security Council, the NSA, who arrived in the kind of vehicles you would expect: black sedans.

He has not been seen since. At a press conference in London, before he disappeared, Paul Dore had presented documents that, he said, proved the detection of signals of non-terrestrial origin, sent by intelligent beings.

Today his website shows only this: inverted images of the flags of the United States, the United Nations, and the Earth, and in the lower left corner, the letters RCH.