Did the British scientists declared that they managed to find evidence of the existence of aliens?

In October 2024, information diverged on the Internet that a scientist from the UK, working with NASA, made an announcement: a confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial life was allegedly found. We decided to check if this is so.

The sensational statement was reported by many Russian media (RBC, Lenta.ru, "Gazeta.ru","Arguments and facts","Komsomolskaya Truth" Life et al.): British scientists allegedly were able to find evidence of the existence of an alien life while they are kept secret, but they are preparing to present the public in November 2024. The news is discussed by users of social networks (""VKontakte" X, Facebook*) and the Platform blog ("Picabu","Zen"). This information is also popular in Telegram channels, they wrote about it "Ax+"(2.4 million views at the time of writing this analysis),"Direct eFir • News"(783 000),"The power of the word: Russian news"(276 000),"KB"(233,000),"Russia now"(218 000) and others.

The authors of many posts in Russian apply the screenshot of the corresponding to the publications Articles In the British tabloid Daily Mail. On October 11, 2024, a text with a loud heading really came out there: "Evidence of the existence of an alien life can be made public in the next month, since the director of NASA claims:" We found them. " In the afternoon, similar article I went out on the website of The Mirror. Both notes contain an interview with Simon Holland - Daily Mail calls him a director who worked on documentary films funded by NASA and BBC, but The Mirror claims that Holland is a scientist, professor.

The journalists of The Mirror quote Holland: “We found an inhuman extraterrestrial mind in our Galaxy, and people do not know about it” - and indicate that he received information from his source in the project Breakthrough Listen, a private initiative aimed at finding evidence of the existence of civilizations outside the Earth. According to Holland, who are given in the article, scientists from this project discovered evidence several years ago using the Parks telescope in Australia. On the site Breakthrough Listen It was not possible to detect such news and/or announcements of such sensational messages. 

October 12, two days after the publication in The Mirror, Simon Holland published on his YouTube channel video With a comment on this article. Firstly, he noted that he specializes in creating documentaries about science and history for BBC, National Geographic and some other publications. For his films, he attracts scientists, but at the same time he does not have any scientists. He also clarified that some time ago he taught in one of the British educational institutions a discipline related to the media, and because of this sometimes uses Nick Prof Simon or Professor Simon. Probably, it was precisely because of this that the misunderstanding occurred: Holland was a professor in the meaning of the “lecturer”, and not because of scientific merits.

As for information about the possible confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization, we are talking about the so -called candidate for radio signals BLC1 (Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1), recorded by specialists from the aforementioned project in April and May 2019 using a Parks telescope in Australia when observing a centaur proxima, which is closest to us outside the solar system. Already the name BLC1 hints that this is not about a confirmed signal from alien civilization. The word "candidate" implies that the frequency displacement recorded by scientists could be both evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial technologies, and with any interference from the Earth. In 2021, on the website Breakthrough Listen Press releaseWhere the project experts said: apparently, BLC1 is still the result of human technology intervention, and not a signal from aliens at all.

However, in his video comments, Simon Holland clarifies that he contacted the doctor Andrew Simeon From the University of California in Berkeley, which is involved in the Breakthrough Listen project, and asked him if BLC1 could be evidence of the use of alien technologies, and he gave him a very vague answer: “maybe”. He notes that scientists continue to closely monitor this area of ​​space. And when (and if) they still manage to find confirmation that BLC1 is not just interference from the use of technologies on Earth, they will immediately announce this if foreign specialists do not do this before (for example, from China). However, it is not at all about the fact that Breakthrough Listen is preparing some kind of statement and is going to go out with him to the public from day to day. 

Thus, the British (and after them are world) media outlets replicated the statement of the documentaryist and YouTube blogger Simon Holland, mistakenly endowing him with the title of professor and pointing out his connection with NASA. At the same time, in the academic sense, he is not a professor, as well as a not -a -staff employee of NASA or another organization specializing in the study of space. He retold to reporters his conversation with one of the employees of the project to find evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. However, apparently, Holland himself did not quite possess the topic under discussion, and the journalists even more strongly reinvented the information received from him. Distortion of radio frequencies, about which the media was written as the alleged evidence of the existence of aliens, with a high degree of probability can simply be obstacles from the use of earthly technologies.

*The Russian authorities consider Meta Platforms Inc., which owns social networks Facebook and Instagram, an extremist organization, its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Photo on the cover: generated by the neural network dall-e

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Read on the topic:

1. Berkeley Seti Research Center. BLC1 - Breakthrough Listen's First "Signal of Interest"
2. Is it true that Stephen Hawking warned humanity about the danger of contact with alien civilizations?
3. Is it true that NASA forbade astronauts to masturbate in space?