In October 2024, information circulated on the Internet that a British scientist collaborating with NASA made an announcement: confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial life had allegedly been found. We decided to check if this is true.
The sensational statement was reported by many Russian media (RBC, Lenta.ru, "Gazeta.ru", "Arguments and facts", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", Life etc.): British scientists were allegedly able to find evidence of the existence of alien life, while keeping them secret, but preparing to present them to the public in November 2024. Social media users are discussing the news (“VKontakte", X, Facebook*) and blog platforms (“Peekaboo", "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 uhfir • news"(783,000), "The power of words: Russian news"(276,000), "KB"(233,000), "Russia now"(218,000), etc.
The authors of many posts in Russian attach a screenshot of the corresponding articles in the British tabloid Daily Mail. On October 11, 2024, it actually published a text with a big headline: “Evidence of alien life may be made public next month as NASA director claims 'We've found it.'” Similar one the day before article published on the website of The Mirror. Both articles contain an interview with Simon Holland - the Daily Mail calls him a director who worked on documentaries funded by NASA and the BBC, but The Mirror claims that Holland is a scientist and professor.
Journalists from The Mirror quote Holland: “We have discovered non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our Galaxy, and people don’t 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 civilizations beyond Earth. Scientists on the project discovered the evidence several years ago using the Parkes telescope in Australia, Holland said in the article. On the website Breakthrough Listen It was not possible to find such news and/or announcements of such sensational messages.
On October 12, two days after publication in The Mirror, Simon Holland published on his YouTube channel video with a comment about this article. Firstly, he noted that he specializes in creating documentaries about science and history for the BBC, National Geographic and some other publications. He attracts scientists for his films, but he himself does not have any academic degrees. He also clarified that some time ago he taught a media-related discipline at one of the British educational institutions, and because of this he sometimes uses the nickname Prof Simon or Professor Simon. This is probably where the misunderstanding arose: Holland was a professor in the sense of “lecturer,” and not because of scientific merit.
As for information about possible confirmation of the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization, we are talking about the so-called candidate radio signals BLC1 (Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1), recorded by specialists from the above-mentioned project in April and May 2019 using the Parkes telescope in Australia while observing Proxima Centauri, the closest star outside our solar system. The very name of BLC1 hints that we are not talking about a confirmed signal from an alien civilization. The word “candidate” implies that the frequency shift recorded by scientists could be both evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial technologies and some kind of interference from Earth. In 2021, Breakthrough Listen was released on the website press release, where project experts stated: apparently, BLC1 is still the result of the intervention of human technology, and not a signal from aliens.
However, in his video commentary, Simon Holland clarifies that he contacted Dr. Andrew Simeon from the University of California at Berkeley, who is involved in the Breakthrough Listen project, and asked him if BLC1 could be evidence of alien technology, and he gave him a very vague answer: “Maybe.” He notes that scientists continue to closely monitor this region of space. And when (and if) they still manage to find confirmation that BLC1 is not just interference from the use of technology on Earth, they will immediately announce it, if foreign specialists (for example, from China) do not do so first. However, we are not talking at all about the fact that Breakthrough Listen is preparing some kind of statement and is going to release it to the public any day now.
Thus, the British (and after them the world) media circulated the statement of documentarian and YouTube blogger Simon Holland, erroneously giving him the title of professor and pointing out his connection with NASA. Moreover, in the academic sense, he is not a professor at all, nor is he a staff member of NASA or any other organization specializing in space exploration. He recounted to reporters his conversation with one of the employees of the project to search for evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. However, apparently, Holland himself did not fully understand the topic under discussion, and the journalists further distorted the information received from him. Radio frequency distortions that have been reported in the media as supposed evidence of the existence of aliens are very likely to simply be interference from the use of Earth technology.
*Russian authorities consider the company Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, to be an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: generated by the DALL-E neural network
Read on the topic:
- Berkeley SETI Research Center. BLC1 — Breakthrough Listen's First “Signal of Interest”
- Is it true that Stephen Hawking warned humanity about the dangers of contact with alien civilizations?
- Is it true that NASA banned astronauts from masturbating in space?
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