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UFO Update: To follow their stars, SETI researchers have found that they must
seek a pot of gold (June 1994)


(Vol. 16, No. 9, p. 77)


In the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), scientists train
radio telescopes on the cosmos, hoping to pick up signals from civilizations
light-years away. But in October 1993, Congress pulled the plug on SETI
funding, sending some of the most prominent projects back to square one.
NASA's SETI program has recently had an infusion of cash from prominent
private donors, giving agency researchers hope that at least some of their
programs will survive. Other SETI researchers have had no such luck, however,
and are scrambling for money so their projects can go on.

The NASA program, saved just recently from oblivion, includes a targeted
search for signals from the nearest 1,000 sunlike stars. According to Seth
Shostak of the SETI Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to the search
for signals from intelligent civilizations in space, his group has recently
raised some $4.4 million to continue the NASA project. The funds, adds
Shostak, were donated by William R. Hewlett and David Packard of the
Hewlett-Packard Corporation; Gordon Moore, co-founder and chairman of the
Intel Corporation; and Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, among
a number of others.

The NASA program, renamed Phoenix because it has risen from the ashes, will
use Australia's 210-foot Parkes radio antenna to search for intelligent
signals from specific stars found in the Southern sky. It will also rely on
the 1,000-foot radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, now being upgraded.
Even so, says Kent Cullers, a NASA Ames project scientist who developed the
signal-detection equipment for the thousand-star search, the new program will
be able to search just about half as many stars as had previously been
planned by scientists behind the effort.

For other groups, the news is worse. Once considered the world's premiere
SETI effort, for instance, the High Resolution Microwave Survey operated out
of two facilities--the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and
the NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, California--and allocated
$58 million over the last 20 years largely to build and test hardware
designed to pick up messages from E.T. Before Congress withdrew federal funds
earmarked for the program, SETI scientists at JPL had been all set to launch
the largest "all sky" search ever conducted.

"But now SETI is dead at JPL," says Mike Klein, program manager for the Sky
Survey, an attempt to survey the sky on millions of radio channels. Long
viewed as a crucial complement to the highly targeted NASA efforts, the broad
and wide-ranging JPL program, Klein laments, has been stopped in its tracks.

Smaller players have been crippled by the cuts as well. Project SERENDIP, run
by Stuart Bowyer at Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab, for instance, requires
just $60,000 a year, an extremely small sum by SETI standards; at one point,
Bowyer even ran SERENDIP on a $20,000 gift from his mother. But if Project
SERENDIP doesn't find some funding soon, it may be benched for good.

Bowyer is clearly worried. He could get by on less than $60,000 a year, of
course, and has already launched a mailing that puts the touch on prospective
donors. "If you have a Christmas card list," he says, "send it to me."

For these groups and others, says Shostak, it's just a shame. "It's analogous
to Isabella and Ferdinand financing the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria," he
says, "and then once the ships were built, telling Columbus that times were
tight and they were going to mothball the fleet."--Paul McCarthy





Transmitted:  94-07-19 13:01:27 EDT