Did the NSA receive an alien message?

[Swampy]

This is from its website.

[Swampy]

Here is another NSA article talking about the ET signals received.

[Sir John]

All of that went straight over my head.

Any idea on the time frame of these messages? Any word for word 'translation'?


And I can accept a radio message much more readily than actual visits, as we know that radio waves travel at the speed of light, and thus take light year(s) to get here.


SJ

[mcnoch]

No, "Extraterrestrial Messages" are an often used exercise for cryptographs/cryptoanalysts to train their analytical skills on an message for which no background or context information (like the frequency of occurrence of specific letters, average length of words, etc..) exists. So it is absolutely normal to see such exercises discussed in the NSA Technical Journal.

[Swampy]

Is there anything from the NSA website to corroborate your explanation, Matthias?

But that would be a good explanation, except there may be no further references to ET messages.

[mcnoch]

I could give you a number of examples from German training books which Math-students use here in Germany and I'm sure that the English ones contain similar exercises.
But looking for links in the web is completely useless as the UFO-believers have flooded those hitwords with their non-sense.

[Swampy]

I've done some digging, and, yes, I've found that the NSA does refer to ET signals as a way to hone the skills of cryptographers. That said, the author of one of the NSA articles on ET signals, the late Dr Lambros D. Callimahos, also said there was real evidence of ET visitations, especially from highly-reliable witnesses.

However, a blogger has also done further digging, and he says that the article, published in the 1950's, used a periodic table of elements that was not standardized until 1988 - how is that possible? Furthermore, he also talks of how signals from an anomalous satellite around Earth was receivedin the early 1950's, before Sputnik was sent up. Again, if this is true, it would be highly suspicious.

Last, but perhaps not least, this NSA article was released in 2004 AFTER it lost a lawsuit, and the judge forced it to reveal the contents of the journal. If it was a hypothetical exercise from the 1950's, why would the NSA not want to release it?

[mcnoch]

Sept 1, 2013 3:04:55 GMT -5 Swampy said:

That said, the author of one of the NSA articles on ET signals, the late Dr Lambros D. Callimahos, also said there was real evidence of ET visitations, especially from highly-reliable witnesses.

As it is very easy to make some money in the USA with such claims I'm very sceptical about them.

Sept 1, 2013 3:04:55 GMT -5 Swampy said:

However, a blogger has also done further digging, and he says that the article, published in the 1950's, used a periodic table of elements that was not standardized until 1988 - how is that possible? Furthermore, he also talks of how signals from an anomalous satellite around Earth was receivedin the early 1950's, before Sputnik was sent up. Again, if this is true, it would be highly suspicious.

In 1945, Glenn Seaborg, had already published his first suggestion for an improved periodic table of elements, based on his view that actinide elements, like the lanthanides, were filling an f sub-level not an d- sub-level of the electron shell as believed earlier. His work not only won him a Noble price in 1951, but also was the major step toward the Standard form of the periodic table as we know it today. In science it always takes a bit longer to have something accepted universally as standard. So the standardization of the late 80s brought nothing new in this area, except preparing for the ninth period which so far exists only in theory.

Sept 1, 2013 3:04:55 GMT -5 Swampy said:

Last, but perhaps not least, this NSA article was released in 2004 AFTER it lost a lawsuit, and the judge forced it to reveal the contents of the journal. If it was a hypothetical exercise from the 1950's, why would the NSA not want to release it?

With hindsight of the efforts, time and money lost by NASA on countering these silly claims that the Moon landing was a Hollywood production, I perfectly understand the NSA's desire to keep these documents secret, not because their content is so secret - I'm sure the Russians played the same games on a similar level, so no surprises here - but just to avoid annoying discussions with UFO-believers and the potential that an 'NSA-document' might give in credibility to the nonsense interpretations based on them.

[johnhsime]

As has been said, the best way to hide something is to post it in plain sight.

[Swampy]

With your explanations, Matthias, then there can be no smoking gun.

[mcnoch]

As you might know some years ago I was part of the Seti(at)home project and we had very long and in-depth debates about the possibilities to send and receive messages/signals from another planet. There are a number of physical requirements to safeguard that a signal could travel over light-years and still be detectable as data/signal instead of just noise. The SETI-scientists had to confess that until about 20 years ago we were not even sending our signals in a way to could be received outside of our solar-system. Since then – and thanks to the still incoming transmissions from the Voyager missions - we made a lot of progress, but before our signal was just noise. It might be good enough to point out that there is something, like you hear noise from a loud car-radio still blocks away.

Until then we did not understand the way signals are distorted by the galactic environment well enough for such super-long-distances. So all the data recorded would have been useless and all we send was just noise. Now communication with Alpha Centauri might be possible if there is a civilisation on the technology to send and receive inter-solar-system signals. We now know that there is at least one planet in this solar-system, there might be more. WIth about 5 light-years distance, this would be our best chance to start.

One day we might record some unexpected noise which might turn out to be a signal, but please don't expect a phone call. And believe me, the scientists will have discussed this in open long before the NSA gets its hand on it, as most of this listening work is done around the world in all kind of installations.

[Deleted]

Forget the words, what does the music sound like?